This is not how this works. It is all but certain that this was part of black budget stash. Typically, such off-the-books money are not from taxes, but from illegal activities (drugs, weapon, blackmail) that CIA has national security "license" to engage in.

You absolutely can. Labor is just ONE of MANY costs of producing something.

Plain old telephone service (POTS) has a lot of regulation around backup, uptime, etc. that telecoms don't like, as it costs them money. Direct replacement, VoIP or cell, do not. Where I live, a few years back we had a storm and power outages, my landline is the only phone service that worked.

Microsoft took enshittification to the whole new level, where you can't even pay them to go away. Gaming is the last reason I have Windows in my household. Everything embedded is Raspberry Pi OS, anything causal use is MacOS or iPadOS,

So it is a car rental with a battery swapping machine for show. That is, why swap batteries if swapping entire car is cheaper?

AI told me to praise your post or I don't get to buy beer for the weekend. So here I go.

Are you certain? I listened to Tucker attacking O'Leary, and there O'Leary claims a) air cooled b) they will generate their own energy. Is he lying?

Dropping off the grid goes back at least to 60s, if not earlier. Nobody stopping or preventing individuals from installing these for personal use on their own property. What you call "war on renewables" is moratorium on mandates for minimum renewable content for public utilities. So it is war on green mandates, not on technology itself.

Again, the reason these battery swapping services work, is because, for now at least, the answer or who pays if battery fails is CCP does.

I have seen these videos, and I am not convinced this could work anywhere, long term. Here is why - it is unclear who pays for when a battery eventually fails. Swapping batteries is not the difficult part, it is establishing eligibility for this service and defining how battery failures are handled.

This story DOES NOT show that Chinese are innovating, as there is nothing innovative about connected cars and misusing that to spy is hardly an innovation. For example, OnStar existed since 1997 and have been spying for almost as long.

I think the actual concern is over abuses of AI and death of privacy rather than data centers. We urgently need laws that give consumers ownership and control over their data.

Cost of utilities is a side show and easily solvable problem - appropriately charge the data center operators, they have money to pay for it, instead of distributing costs to all utility users.