I'm not sure I understand where you are going with this? Are you suggesting that a new product cannot enter a market without a number of simultaneous competitors?

If I want to roll out fibre to an area that doesn't have it, can I? If I want to build a fresh-produce store in a town that doesn't have one, then I need to find someone else to compete with?

Lots and lots of businesses operate as quasi-monopolies if you look hard enough. Especially in smaller and rural environments. Lots and lots of places have one gas station, one mechanic, one vet, one doctor, one diner and so on.

Your use of the word "require" seems difficult to implement. What if no-one wants to compete with me? If Apple stops making Macs, does MS have to stop making Windows?

HN is filled with stories of exorbitant rates from AT&T and Comcast that get slashed 70%+, speeds doubled, as soon as a newcomer is ready to offer fiber.

In fact, there was even a story here of a community where they formed a company that could not have done it, or not without a huge effort, but just hinted that they were exploring offering fiber to a town - and just that hint was enough for Comcast to say "wait, wait, we did the math and you all have been overpaying for internet!"

And yes, China is aware of some slowing demand (although their exports are still impressive.) You can see this playing out in a couple ways.

Firstly they dominate production in key "future" technologies. Solar and EVs spring to mind as examples, but there are others.

Secondly they are investing in infrastructure (and goodwill) outside of China. Africa has a billion consumers-in-waiting.

While the US retreats from Africa (killing USAid, indulging racist theories about South Africa, etc), promoting isolationism (America First), activly alienating people via tarrifs, what is China doing?

China is quietly filling the void. They are building roads, ports, airports and other infrastructure. They are improving supply lines (Temu is expanding in Africa at a huge rate.) They are building cultural bridges, learning and teaching two very different cultures to work more easily together. In essence developing future customers, not antagonizing them.

It will be interesting to look back in 10, 20 or 30 years to see which strategy delivers better rewards.

In the 60s your argument would have applied to most of Asia. South Korea was an agrarian society. All of eastern Europe (and much of western Europe) was poor.

The question is less "where are markets now" and more "where will they be in 2050"?

"Losing money" (whatever that means at the national level) is not terribly relevant when it comes to global strategy. The US "loses money" on the military, because the US has chosen the military as a way to strategic dominance.

China instead has chosen "production" as a global strategy. One empire is voluntarily contracting. Another is expanding. The US is fighting the last war, with planes and bombs, while China builds infrastructure and makes friends.

That's a sure way to extend an unsustainable situation, while making it bigger. It doesn't usually lead to anything good on the long term, but I don't think they have been doing so much of it to break the world.

... and who knows? maybe this time it leads to democratization and growth all over the world, and they get somebody to export to. I don't think that's likely, but I can be wrong.

Western culture ties the value of people to their work. The unemployed are "lazy" (itself a pejorative). The first question you ask someone you meet is "what do you do?" A lawyer is naturally more valuable than a postal clerk. (Despite an obvious example to the contrary. )

A lot of western jobs now are menial, or worse, useless. Lots of office jobs are, frankly, meaningless. Endlessly generating reports that no-one needs, or reads, isn't a path to massive self-worth.

In the US no job means no income. No health care. Your worth as a human approaches zero. In Europe, post war, there are far more social supports for the unemployed. That's a fundamental cultural difference. Asia is also culturally different in ways which are hard for US folk to comprehend.

For example there are 3 major political viewpoints; US capitalism, European socialism, and Chinese communism. Each appears to function well, and yet the US vilifies the others, while barely being able to tell them apart.

So, to return to your hypothesis of what "humans need", it may be less of that and more of "my culture needs". Which is perhaps going to come into play when predicting a post-labor economy in other cultures.

I was brought up to "save energy ". Lights switched off when not in thevroom, that sort of thing.

Now I gave solar on the roof. There's an excess production capability, so now, during most days it doesn't matter if stuff is on or off. That especially applies to AC which I'll happily turn on on hot summer days. In effect I use more "because it's there to be used".

My EV is coming soon and given I can charge it on solar I plan to do a lot more day-trips-out over weekends etc.

So you're right, availability and affordability- but electrifying is great (for me) for both those things.

A) why?

B) they can't. Because XP is not like some notepad app someone wrote. Rather it is a collection of software, a lot of it owned by not-microsoft and licensed to them. And that's before we talk about the security implications to existing systems still running XP.

Thirdly, what possible benefit could they get for doing this? I can see plenty of down-sides, including some very large potential economic and legal downsides. But I can't think of an upside.

And subsequent systems still using some of that code

Assuming all the physics are completely solved tomorrow;

Private capital can easily get better returns, not to mention sooner returns, doing pretty much anything else.

Public capital requires a very long-term govt spend spanning multiple governments. China could do it, but hard to see a western govt doing it. Plus it would add a decade to the schedule and costs would spiral upwards.

All of which is a huge bet against improvements in grid-level storage.

I get that "parking" a ship this size is expensive, but is it more expensive than sailing?

My initial thought is that since fuel has become untenable its better to spend (much) more time just parked somewhere. The article mentions sailing less, but doesn't seem to quantify that, or discuss mooring costs.

Or perhaps there are other reasons (visa etc) which limit stop-overs?

When they are at sea they have to pay fuel (probably 100k€ per day), but they also have paying customers on board which is priced to be profitable. If cruise ships wouldn't earn money they would not exist. Without customers they don't have money.

Fuel costs are a deal breaker for ships, trucks, and RVs, too.

In some cases though the reply opens the door to a wider exploration. The poster may make a valid argument or might add nuance which is meaningful. I've found some dialogs offer me a different point of view and my position doesn't necessarily change, but understanding becomes deeper.

But yes, a lot of people's positions are tribal and buried too deep in psyche to be easily changed. Our positions on most things are not based on facts, or at best cherry-picking facts that support our view of the world.

A collection of things happened at the same time, including the weather, a lot of generating capacity offline for various reasons, lines to Ireland unavailable and so on. And yet despite all that, local blackouts (not a national system collapse) was averted.

But yes, anti-EV proponents will likely to to make hay from this.

Yes the incident occurred in the evening as demand increased, partly because demand increases in the evening snow partly because solar production (some part of which is invisible to the grid) goes offline in the evening.

Certainly there are lessons to be learned here. Better planning, more contingencies and so on. Removing solar isn't helpful (that would just move the problem to earlier in the day.)

Incidentally east-west transmission is a key factor in solving this problem. The extra power came from France where possibly evening demand had started to drop etc. Connections to the West would bring in solar still generating excess. Those countries with good east-west coverage will be least impacted but the evening demand issue.

East-west transmission wouldn't have helped here. France is less than an hour ahead, so the solar curve is going to look virtually identical. What really helped is that France had spare hydro capacity able to quickly compensate for the shortage. If anything, the UK's limited north-south transmission capacity making the use of Scotland's spare capacity impossible should be a bigger priority.

With the grid increasingly relying on decentralized solar and short-term battery storage, you just cannot operate it like you would with a bunch of on-demand essentially-unlimited fossil fuel plants. It is going to need a huge mentality shift from an operational perspective, and a large overhaul of the power trading market in general.

Not really! There were several systemic failures:

1. It happened due to forecasting errors. Nothing remarkable happened that day, there were no sudden station trips or natural disasters. The margin was gone mostly due to planned maintenances combined with incorrectly forecasting demand. Whether the root cause is decentralized PV or not, the core issue is that the lowest frequency ever recorded happened on a totally unremarkable day. That can't be said to be the system working correctly.

2. The UK had to suddenly cut exports that had already been agreed and paid for, outside of normal systems. That puts it in a bad situation in future where allies may now do the same in reverse. A sudden unannounced cut in exports can be absorbed by the European grid but might not be absorbed by the British grid, which is smaller.

3. There were no EMNs issued and in the aftermath whistleblowers inside NESO claimed control room staff had been forbidden from taking notes or letting people know what happened. Information about this came out via newspaper articles in a drip drip months after the event. We're talking about this now and not in June because of this. That lack of transparency can't be said to be the system working.

4. The French were able to ship power hundreds of kilometers across France and under the sea to the south of England, but the UK couldn't move power the much smaller difference from its own north to south. That's another form of planning failure.

> Removing solar isn't helpful (that would just move the problem to earlier in the day.)

That depends what you think the problem is. The root of the event was forecasting errors, and the root of those come from the apparent difficulty of predicting how decentralized solar behaves especially at a sub-region level. Removing solar, or simply having never built it at all, actually would fix that problem.

All of this was predicted decades ago by conservatives so it's no good to just despair that they will "make hay" from being right (nobody will benefit from a big UK blackout, it will be bad news for everyone). They warned repeatedly that putting too much solar/wind into the grid will destabilize it and create huge price increases. Both of those warnings have come true in Europe. Solar/wind aren't reliable and so need thermal/hydro that's staffed, warmed up and ready to spin at a moment's notice but government policy ignores this and the stresses are now showing - both engineering and political (the apparent need for whistleblowers shows this).

N.B. the root cause of the Iberian blackout was a solar farm malfunctioning and desynchronizing from the grid, and when the control room tried to bring gas generation back online to stabilize things they couldn't do it fast enough because the plant was cold. It had been taken offline in the morning to make way for solar.

Raising VC money makes VC the customer. Like any business you then need to know your customer, including their needs, wants and goals.

If you are looking to build a profitable business with some other kind of customer then VC is not for you. Rather you need to tailor your business to that customer.

Most disappointment comes from seeing the VC as a partner rather than a customer. That is not their model. Rather they are a customer looking for suppliers who will deliver a very specific product to them. Most of their suppliers (95%+) will go broke trying to supply them. But some will succeed. A few suppliers will get very rich.

Since you are starting a business you get to decide who your customers are and see if you want to take the risk providing what they want.