Cost wise it only makes sense if you have photo-voltaic on the roof. In Germany there is more acceptance of paying more if there is a (possibly perceived) environmental benefit.
If it's a free market economy why would shorting be banned? When it comes to that, why would naked short selling be banned? Free market means the market would decide on whether they want it or not and regulations would be gone.
I had a read through this and I couldn't really tell if there was something novel here?
I understand that perturbations and generating new examples from labelled examples is a pretty normal park of the process when you only have a limited number of examples available.
just to offset a bit about scrum being bad: I have used SCRUM over 15 years to run teams and it worked. Most of the problems I am hearing on here are culture problems and no process can fix that. Regarding planning, a day per scrum is normal - sometimes longer, you have to use your judgement to determine when to move from design to implementation. Also, heavy use of spiking stories to learn enough to create the right design is important
what can be very bad is if the database provided api is really just a sql executor - binding you to the database without you realising it. Doing rest, but finding you just tied all your clients to your database representation
I wouldn't say any API. More like, there is a class of problems and a style of api design that models the resources very closely to how they are represented in the database - and you often find them in web apps. The style is quite common though.