It's incredibly useful. Open up The Wall Street Journal and look at oil futures or go for a drive and look at the price of gasoline. Watch a demand shock (like a pandemic) drive the price down. Watch a supply shock (war with Russia) drive it up. Or go over to the Federal Reserve website and look at the size of the money supply and how it's growing, and then go to the store and see this drive inflation, or go on vacation and do some foreign exchange.
Well yes, it was functioning as a health care plan featuring actual bona fide insurance, which means you paid for yourself, and you paid an amount commensurate with the risk that your health care needs might prove to be expensive. It was not designed as a wealth transfer to the needy any more than the auto insurance market.
We may need more wealth transfers to the needy so that they can pay for healthcare! You will note, however, that the recent approach to reforms, which tried to turn the vehicle of “insurance” itself into such a wealth transfer, has not exactly solved the problem!! Nor has it achieved its stated goal of making healthcare and health insurance more affordable to the general population, a mission always contradictory to its goal of being a wealth transfer!
Historical and tax reasons. It started back in the era of WWII wage controls. It continued to be an okay way to do group insurance without facing major problems with adverse selection. Being able to pay for it with a pre-tax payrolld eduction is the other big reason it thrived.
Given the mandates on insurance there are some reasons it should continue, but they are not really good reasons.
Forget cooling for a minute. Cooling dissipates energy but you need to collect the energy first and worry about powering the server. It’s going to be a solar-plus-battery system, which is heavy and expensive, with substantial launch costs.
You can’t just put an SSD or whatever in orbit and expect reasonable read latencies at all times. It’s in orbit. It moves. Half the time it’s on the wrong side of the planet.
Lots of the best extensions are basically "change this webpage when it loads to make it work better." You can't "disallow this behavior" without crippling them.
You are looking at a phenomenon that economics would describe as the Cost of Search. It is a situation in which a market inefficiency exists because searching for a product is difficult, or involves research and/or background knowledge.
Part of the value of the Apple brand is that people will pay some fraction of that cost to avoid that search while also being sure that their product actually works.
Be aware that there are existing markets for a whole set of appliances which are very, very "dumb" indeed. Take a look at Lehman's, based out of Ohio Amish country: https://www.lehmans.com/
It's hard to install spyware on something that doesn't run off electricity.
The real reason this is a less than ideal solution is that, even assuming it works perfectly, and even with other forms of cooling, increased atmospheric carbon concentrations still contribute to ocean acidification and other chemical effects.
But you're right that The Climate Change Movement™ dismisses these things out of hand. This is because it is only incidentally about combating climate change. It is primarily about giving more power to approved politicians and bureaucracies. This is also why we have made no almost progress on the underlying issues. We were never meant to.
> A number of logistical reasons prevents us from moving the machines to another location which might offer space/power for free, so let's not allow the conversation to go that way.
and there's no way that overcoming those logistical reasons would be cheaper than $20,000? at all? okay, well then, I guess that limits your options doesn't it.