This is how empires die. Power and wealth accumulates at the top, until eventually a tipping point is reached, and those with power then use it to frantically loot the rest of the nation and skedaddle to foreign lands with their ill-gotten wealth as the empire balkanizes behind them.
In truth, the looting phase started with Reagan, but in recent times it's begun to accelerate, particularly when Trump is in office.
Not if the biggest players buy all their competition and use their multi-state revenue to lobby municipalities to make it illegal to compete with them.
It's important to recognize that this is how capitalism works if you try to apply it to natural monopolies such as physical infrastructure, along with anything else subject to inelastic demand, such as healthcare. It's exactly why it makes no sense to have entities that provide such infrastructure operate according to free markets, because either (1) there will be no competition and the "market" with one seller will abuse their position to maximize profit, or (2) you have competing systems side by side, using double the resources and space (or more) for half the efficiency (or less).
Too often people think of Capitalism as an efficiency maximizer, when in reality it is a capital concentrator. Infrastructure needs to be efficient in order to best serve the people that use it. We see time and again that energy corporations in the "free market" use their revenue to buy their competitors and lobby for looser restrictions that let them hike rates faster and higher until they've completely escaped any semblance of regulation.
You're right, I was thinking in Wh. I don't think it changes my overall point though, which was that if one's goal is to generate clean energy, most people don't live in the ideal conditions for this device and hence have much more cost-efficient means available. I've edited my post.
1500 kWh per year is ~~effectively nothing. That runs a midrange gaming PC for a few hours.~~ (Edit: I was thinking in Wh, oops) The company won't even tell you the price up front - the product page just has a link to their contact form - but word elsewhere on the web is that little turbine costs somewhere in the neighborhood of $5500. I don't know if that's the price of the off-grid system which includes a battery, or the on-grid system, but I can't be bothered to email them because it ultimately doesn't matter.
In 2023, the Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE) for both solar and wind power generation at grid scale were around $50 per Megawatt-hour. That means $5500 spent on one of those methods is expected to yield a total return of about 110 megawatt-hours. If we say the Liam lasts 20 years, never breaks down, is placed in the perfect location where it gets exactly the wind it needs to meet its rated power output (more on that below), you'll get 1.5 MWh per year or 30 MWh total. If your goal is to spend lots of money to feel like you're saving the planet, I suppose it's not a bad product, but if your goal is to actually save the planet, $5500 can go several times farther than this. For that price, I can find kits online rated for 3.28 kW, which even as far north as the state of Maine in the US, will generate about 4 MWh per year, a little over 1/3 the average US home's electricity consumption.
Per the graphs on the product page, their turbines also require a very narrow range of wind speeds to even come close to the claims about the power output: 12 m/s, which in 99.9% of the world is a significant gust, but it shuts off entirely at 14 m/s, and the output drops off very rapidly with wind speed. At half its maximum wind speed, it's outputting 1/8 of its maximum output.
Contrast these limitations with traditional large wind turbines, which cut-in at around 4 m/s of wind speed (same as the Liam), but can maintain full capacity along a much wider range of wind speeds, typically from around 10 m/s all the way up to 20 m/s. For these turbines, half their maximum windspeed is still maximum power output. It's a night and day difference in efficiency.
This mini-turbine is a product with a vanishingly small market. It's for people who live in very particular locations where solar + battery systems are either so inefficient as to not make financial sense, or their property is occluded for most of the day, yet they also have access to continuous high winds that don't fluctuate much and average right around this turbine's sweet spot but no higher. There might be 1000 people in the entire world that this product is well-suited for, and I wouldn't be surprised if the real number is far fewer. There's no justification for any article to so enthusiastically say it "destroys" solar panels.
Edit: Fixed my terrible math and expanded on the costs between this and the current market price of solar systems. My point remains that this is a product for a very niche market, and for most people is not a good value for clean energy generation.
Intellectual property as a concept ultimately stifles progress every time it's been tried. Information wants to be free, and we prosper far more when we accept that reality.
Everyone should read Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine. It's on David's website, Internet Archive, Anna's Archive, and various bookstores. Feel free to buy or print some copies and distribute them to your favorite people, libraries, bookstores, and congress critters~
I would recommend against pairing Battlemage with a low-spec CPU. As shown by Hardware Canucks, Hardware Unboxed, and others, Intel's Arc graphics driver overhead is currently much higher than competitors, which means they're disproportionately affected by having a weaker CPU. This causes the B580 to lose significantly more performance when paired with low-end CPUs than a roughly equivalent Nvidia or AMD card. At the very low end, the difference is especially stark. In some games, the B580 goes from neck-and-neck with a 4060 on a high-end CPU to losing half its performance with a low-end older CPU, while the 4060 only loses about 25%.
If you're really stuck with a lower-end CPU, it would be far better to get a used midrange AMD or Nvidia GPU from an older product generation for the same price and use that.
I agree, investing in a company is fine. It's when you have the ability to trade your investment without any consequence whatsoever that the madness begins. Investment is supposed to be risky for both the company and the investor! But we've managed to externalize that risk into a market in which no single actor can be held responsible when a company is looted and destroyed by greed. Publicly-traded shares are now an entirely tax-free substitute for money - but only for the rich who have turned this system into a game to enrich themselves.
3D-printed shoes could be a great idea given how different everyone's feet can be. It could save on transportation and logistical costs, and everyone could have shoes perfect for their feet, created much more locally than Vietnam.
However, the cynic in me says that's not what Nike is doing, or why - they're doing this because it lets them cut workers. Traditional shoe manufacturing involves human hands at many process steps, often with machine assistance or other tools. This lets them cut out all of those workers and all of that equipment in favor of one machine that makes an entire generic shoe for them to shove onto shelves next to all the other generic factory-made shoes. This is not the future.
This is an entire category of proteins known as Crystallins. Crystallins of one kind or another seem to be used when pretty much any living species needs to grow a lens. They aren't exclusive to lenses, either; many crystallins are found elsewhere in an organism's metabolic pathways, such as the nervous system.
I found this paper from 1996 titled "Lens Crystallins of Invertebrates" which I'd say is exactly what you're looking for. There wasn't much for arthropods, but it mentions Drosocrystallin for the Drosophila fruit fly's corneal lens, and antigen 3G6 as "present in the ommatidial crystallin cone and central nervous system of numerous arthropods".
I believe current understanding is that quantum shenanigans mean you can't truly make a perfect quantum duplicate of something without destroying the original at the same time, so what you're describing (destroying the original after making the copy) would only be possible for imperfect duplication - e.g. manufacturing a clone and syncing its memory with the original.
In general, Bazzite being immutable just means the core system isn't modular to the end user to the degree that Arch is. You of course can use flatpaks or appimages like any distro, and there are still several ways to install traditional rpm/deb/aur programs (the usual Fedora method doesn't work because dnf doesn't exist). If it's just an app that doesn't require significant integration with the OS, the recommendation is to install them into a distrobox container (where dnf does exist) and then distrobox-export [program] to make them visible to the host system. VPNs need a little more integration so those are installed by layering with rpm-ostree and then enabling the systemd service(s). Layering makes updates take longer to install so it should be avoided when possible.
One of the interesting things about Universal Blue's images like Bazzite is if you want the benefits of atomic while also having a more custom system than they offer without having to install a bunch of things in rpm-ostree, the process to build a custom image based on one of theirs is apparently quite easy to do and automate, though I haven't done it myself.
Download all the music you like, whether buying it on Bandcamp or Amazon or pirating it for literally any reason. If it's too much media to keep locally on your phone then host it on a computer in your house with one of any number of hosting solutions (Jellyfin, Plex, Subsonic, etc.) and VPN your phone's internet connection to your home network so you can stream them from anywhere without having to set up and secure another method of remotely streaming it. If you were on Android I'd recommend Symfonium, but I don't know anything about the iOS app ecosystem.