Modern wireless mice from logitech and microsoft last for a year or two on a pair of aa batteries. There is no point making them rechargeable any more. You can always use rechargeable aa nihms if you really want to, but personally I just have 50p of alkaline aa's and in two years I will have to change them again. Some things do get better :)
Equator, poorest countries with 12 hours of sun 365 days a year. If batteries really fall in price it may rapidly have the cheapest, cleanest energy on the planet. The future of energy intensive industries may be Africa, which would be nice, they could use a break. Not to mention the cheapest place to launch your rockets into orbit.
Weirdly themselves. Makes my head hurt but the central bank, the social security fund and some other bits of US government basically own most of the national debt. Then it's the Japanese, British, Chinese and Warren Buffet. But less than you would guess.
People leave out that when the wholesale electricity prices are above the Government guaranteed price the Government makes a profit on selling the wind electricity. So in this example when the grid is full to the brim with wind energy but there is still a demand for last resort gas backup generators the wholesale price of electricity must be high and the government is minting money from the wind turbines, even while paying some to turn off... This is not always the case. But it would be interesting to hear, taking into account the high electricity prices since the Ukraine energy crisis, how much the Government makes from selling the power at a profit and renting the sea floor to the turbines, minus the subsidies paid when prices are low or the wind turbines have to be turned off. It's hard to make a judgement on the economics of it all without knowing this. We may be paying far less for subsidised wind power than we think.
"The “pop” won’t be a single day like a stock market crash. It’ll be a gradual cooling as unrealistic promises fail, capital tightens, and only profitable or genuinely innovative players remain."
https://archive.ph/e0bZK
In low income neighborhoods they make it easy to turn money into bitcoin but with high transaction costs and hard to turn the bitcoin back into cash. It is not a perspective that had occurred to me before.
a closed-loop refrigerant system that uses water lines to the indoor coil/air handler
Sounds like an air to water monoblock heat pump. Common in Europe. But you can only get the water up to about 50C efficiently. Not as good as refrigerant. So you need a large radiator to get the heat out into the room. Using wet underfloor heating as a giant emmitter works well. But otherwise it makes them tricky.
Some people are trying for minisplits with propane in the lines which is not a greenhouse gas so they hope anyone will be able to install it without a licence.
Start of lockdown I ordered my brother an eBay $5 7m ethernet cable so he could run it down the hall from his WiFi router to desktop pc. He is in an urban apartment block and can literally see 50+ WiFi networks.... Greatly improved things. I had thought of powerline adaptors but last time I gave him a pair to self install he said they were too slow and on visiting I found he had managed to connect them to a flat three floors down through two electricity meters? An Ethernet cable was easier for him to self install
Whinge: but the term "Tap to Pay" winds me up. "Hover to Pay" maybe, or "Contactless" makes sense. But tap the card reader with your card and you disturb the touchscreen and cancel the payment. Don't tap it's a trick.
Cheapest Netflix country often. Must now be even better. UK scroungers often use a VPN to switch their payments to the Turkish Netflix while watching in the UK. Makes it half price.
As you said its production going to china. When its their headquarters and management moving they go to Singapore and the like. So I think your professors theory holds out.