With conveniently-streamed video evidence identifying the vandal / assailant!

Yeah we can always have an LLM discuss recycling based on the word soup it has ingested from the internet, maybe make a video defying all the laws of physics showing recycling of a mixed waste landfill, and consume a lot of electricity in the process.

That's the beauty of each state being allowed to have the governance model that its citizens want. Don't like it? You can exercise your freedom of speech and right to vote, or you can move to another state. In some states, like Ohio, governance is carved up into tiny pieces - State -> Counties -> Townships -> Cities / Villages.

You may have a village of 1,000 people, with its own tiny town hall for the mayor, its own fire department, 3 person police department, school system (that can pretty much make most all the education decisions they want), the ability for the residents to vote decide what tax rate they want levied against them to pay for their schools, on and on. It's often good, and sometimes bad, but it's about freedom and diversity and the ability to set up a system that the voters want.

Then you can go to another state where everything is hyper standardized (but still specific to that state). All of that is deeply ingrained into concepts of freedom and governance, checks and balances. Sure, it allows towns to do really stupid crap, and if citizens don't like it they can mobilize and vote people out, elect one of themselves to do things differently, etc. Happens ALL the time, and is happening in my small town right now actually, as a number of town council members are about to be shown to the exit in just a few months over some things they tried to pull that got the vast majority of citizens in an uproar.

Microsoft has done a pretty thorough job of locking companies in like this, particularly through authentication and authorization systems (Active Directory) and the locked-down IT management infrastructure around them.

Add to this that all of the applications I use on macOS or Windows are either open source or at least cross-platform anyway. As long as the apps don't change, neither does the way I work; not really.

The 4 GWh per year makes sense. The factory will produce 4 GWh of batteries every year. So if each battery is (pulling a number out of my butt) 10 KWh, the factory will build four million of them per year, or about 11,000 per day (assuming 365 days per year operation).

As for the translation to households... I can't make anything sensible out of that number. I'll note that you (inadvertently, I'm sure) multiplied the number of claimed households by a million, but if we drop that down to the claimed 4M households, that means each household gets 1 kWh of the capacity, which is enough to run the average house for about 45 minutes of average consumption... so that's not "overnight" storage for solar generation, but it's more than you need for grid stabilization. Dunno. My best guess is that they were going for how many houses you could run for a month on that much storage and just screwed up the arithmetic by three orders of magnitude (one SI scaling factor).

The $71M figure is to build a factory that manufactures sodium-ion batteries, 4 GWh of them per year.

Nah. It's just like every previous innovation-driven boom (railroads, oil, telecoms...) the growth and buildout phase generates incredible new wealth, highly concentrated (Vanderbilt, Stanford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, etc.), . Then there are several decades of adaptation and adoption, during which the benefits accrue to the population broadly. This doesn't decrease the wealth of those who got crazy rich during the boom, but their wealth stops growing rapidly and they just become the new "old money". Then the next innovation creates a new crop of winners and the cycle repeats.

We're really just completing the adoption and adaptation phase of the personal computer revolution, and maybe a third of the way through the adoption and adaptation of the Internet revolution (the dot-com boom).

This claim ignores the fact that each new boom creates an entirely new set of winners, nearly all of whom actually came from humble-to-moderate beginnings. The wealth isn't staying in one "ossified" caste, indeed it's the exact opposite of ossification. Of course, as I said above, the wealth of those winners doesn't decline during the adaptation phase, but the the wealth generated by the newly-realized productivity gains does accrue broadly -- and in fact those "winners" never actually had as much wealth as they appeared to, because their paper wealth was primarily composed of the market's projection of their slice of their company's slice of the broad future gains.

In the end, the tide does raise all boats. The US has been getting steadily wealthier -- at every quintile -- for decades. There have been some dips at each recession, but the trend line is clear. Look at the real median household income and the net worth of by the bottom 50%. Granted that inequality has risen... that's to be expected during and for the first decade or two after an innovation-driven economic boom, and we've had multiple, in quick succession. But the actual numbers show that the tide is lifting all boats -- though the boats of the big winners have rocket engines attached.

There is one very large caveat that we're dealing with right now, which is housing prices. Due to a combination of factors -- mostly dominated by increases in square footage per person and quality of amenities that we've become accustomed to accepting as the baseline, but also including excessive building restrictions and a minor real estate bubble caused by the pandemic and low interest rates, then compounded by rising interest rates needed to combat the post-pandemic inflation -- right now that increased income and wealth isn't enough for many to buy the homes they'd like. Wages continue rising and housing prices in much of the country are actually falling a little, so over the next few years that will likely equalize out, but right now it's painful for many. But that pain is generating a pessimistic view of the state of the economy and individual incomes that simply doesn't match reality.

There definitely is a risk right now that this could all go badly if the new winners are allowed to engage in extensive regulatory capture. That's how market-proof monopolies are built, by capturing and directing government power. If we can avoid that, though, and just let the market continue to work, the general wealth increase will continue.

Well, unless the AI singularity hits. It's impossible to know what things will look like on the other side of that.

Oh, you're a conspiracy theorist. Okay, have a nice day, I'm out.

What you say is true... but basically all of the other president have actually been pretty smart people. There are some who clearly aren't as smart as others, but I can't think of any who were as dumb as Trump.

Selection, not coincidence. He's the right kind of grifter, with the right kind of personality. He's really not very smart, though. If he were actually smart he wouldn't shoot himself in the foot with such regularity.

Probably LRO vs. Danuri

Yes, Donald Trump is stupid, and yes he knows exactly how to play to his base. These things are only incompatible if you think it requires intelligence and strategy to play to his base. It doesn't. He just does what he does and it happens to resonate with them, most of the time at least.

Meh. "Gambling" is such an amorphous term when it comes to betting on events that aren't carefully constructed to be the result of pure chance.

Virginia does not own Dominion Energy. They just regulate it (set rates, etc). They would regulate the resulting corporate entity after a merger, whatever that is, just the same as they do now, as is their right to do so as a state.

I suspect this will get shot down, as Virginia does not have the right to control this (it is interstate / federal level for one thing).