I'm going for "troll" although there are industries which are suffering from high energy costs - certain industrial processes require lots of power. You'll notice that AI computer centres are springing up in Germany, and if there's ever a business which should suffer from energy costs it is that one.

VW used to have a plant in Westmoreland PA, it was active from 1978 to 1987 and they closed it because it was losing too much money. There were two main reasons it was losing money:
1 - Ronald Reagan's administration raising interest rates to ridiculous levels, something which made the Dollar a very expensive currency.
2 - The main car built there was the Golf / Rabbit, and the US market prefers a different body shape - the Jetta (not sure what it was called tn the US).
Factor 1 was something VW had no control over, although interest rates were dropping when they made their decision (and a lot of US industry moved abroad at the same time for the same reason), factor 2 was stupidity on the part of VW's board. Even factor 1 had a stupidity component, although I have no idea how viable the plant would have been with the lower Dollar.

The last time I left a company, I had a high (but not unlimited) level of access there. On leaving, I had to return my access card, my tamagotchi (the device which gave me the 6-digit code I needed to log in, the code changed every 10 or 12 seconds) and my laptop. I did forward my emails and phone to my private account, partially so I could tell people who asked that I'd left and partially to see how long it took them to delete them (it was almost exactly 3 months).
Why did Coupang not have similar security in place, especially for high-access network specialists? This is not rocket science.

Sure, just as soon as the taxpayers stop subsidizing petroleum companies. I'm okay with that solution. Let's see what the market decides when the government isn't gifting free land in protected wildlife areas and cleaning up abandoned wells and waging wars to protect oil interests in the middle east. Let's go.

he starts using the metric system. Then all hell is gonna break loose!!!!!,

.... because the impotent USA isn't investigating said American tech firms, instead opting to accept bribes from them."

There FTFY

Google is an effective Privacy Rapist

There FTFY.

Zillow is an effective monopoly on internet real-estate listings, that is bad.

Google is an effective monopoly on anything internet search related that it decides to dip its fingers into, that is worse.

I used PayPal for a while 10 or 15 years ago, back then they were a bank - at least in the EU.

100%, glad we agree on that. :)

I wonder what will happen with their other BEV. By most accounts, it's a competent vehicle, and from my research, it's currently the most affordable used non-Tesla BEV. You can pick one up for around $25k Canadian. Not cheap, but half price? Will they keep it just to keep their toe in the water?

and when the other side opts for "leave it", the first side will claim it no longer has any obligations since the contract is now void (read: Verizon would claim it is no longer required to do any unlocks).

Obviously a win-win for Verizon only, thanks to spineless and fucking useless FCC (read story for more on that).

Another tool retired because they couldn't see a way to monetise it, obligatory xkcd reference.

A friend had it, but he's gone. He lived mostly in Germany, then rural France.
Someone I know in the US (Phoenix area, now somewhere between Kansas City and St Louis) has it really bad.
A family member has it, England.

See: "Old Western TV Show Predicts Trump"
Excerpts: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...
Full episode: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...
"A 1958 episode of the Western TV show "Trackdown" features a con man named Trump who comes to town and promises that he alone can save the townspeople from the end of the world. He is accused of being a fear-mongering snake oil salesman and they try to stop him, but Trump threatens to sue. Then the high priest of fraud promises to build a wall! The episode is called "The End of the World"."

Sounds a lot like what some AI company CEOs are also doing according to the article -- by using fear mongering to control the narrative and concentrate wealth? Of course, sometimes fears are well-founded, so it is a complex issue. AI could become a destructive force -- even as Alfie Kohn suggests more nuance and understanding "projection":
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.alfiekohn.org%2Fblog...
        "Another form of projection, also employed by groups rather than individuals, attributes certain features to the nonhuman realm. One example was offered recently by the science fiction writer Ted Chiang. He observed that tech titans sometimes warn us that AI could (a) eventually acquire intelligence that surpasses that of its creators and then (b) use that intelligence to dominate us, eventually leading to human extinction. But why do they assume that (a) would lead to (b)?
                "Who pursues their goals with monomaniacal focus, oblivious to the possibility of negative consequences?...When Silicon Valley tries to imagine superintelligence, what it comes up with is no-holds-barred capitalism.... Billionaires like Bill Gates and Elon Musk assume that a superintelligent AI will stop at nothing to achieve its goals because that's the attitude they adopted....The way they envision the world ending is through a form of unchecked capitalism, disguised as a superintelligent AI. They have unconsciously created a devil in their own image, a boogeyman whose excesses are precisely their own."
        The techno-doomsters, in other words, may think they're warning us about AI, but what they're actually doing is showing us an MRI scan of their own septic psyches."

That said, some of the Trump administration's ostensible initiatives or ideals make sense to me (e.g. questioning the H1-B visa, emphasizing re-shoring manufacturing, questioning a dysfunctional sick-care system, questioning the ~65 million aborted US Americans and more for kids they might have had in turn since Roe v. Wade -- even as there is legitimate debate about what to do about all these issues and whether Trump administration (and "Project 2025") policies might make ultimately make some of these concerns worse -- same as with AI as in this article).

Dialogue Mapping with IBIS (perhaps AI-assisted) is a way for small groups of people to productively visualize and explore the thought landscape of such "wicked problems" in a productive way. A talk I gave on that:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcognitive-science.info...

And Trump undoubtedly has been over the years a very smart, charismatic, and humorous guy -- even if his humor is sadly often of the harming variety instead of the healing variety. From:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.humorproject.com%2Fd...
      "Taking Humor Seriously
        By Joel Goodman
                "There are three things which are real:
                God, human folly, and laughter.
                The first two are beyond our comprehension.
                So we must do what we can with the third." (John F. Kennedy)" ...
        Although joke-telling is one way to transmit humor, it's not the only way. In fact, there are literally thousands of ways to invite smiles and laughter in addition to joke-telling. So, if joke-telling is not your forte or if it is inappropriate for you to become the stand-up comic on-the-job, then there are alternatives. Here are four tips to get you going: ... (2) Use humor as a tool rather than as a weapon. Laughing with others builds confidence, brings people together, and pokes fun at our common dilemmas. Laughing at others destroys confidence, ruptures teamwork, and singles out individuals or groups as the "butt". In the words of one fifth grade teacher, "You don't have to blow out my candle to make yours glow brighter." Humor is laughter made from pain, not pain inflicted by laughter. I subscribe to Susan RoAne's AT&T test- is the humor Appropriate, Timely, and Tasteful? If so, you can reach out and touch people positively with humor. ..."

Humor is often an antidote to excessive fear. We've had the potential to become a humor-powered post-scarcity society for decades or maybe even centuries or millennia, but politically-rooted scarcity fears have held humanity back (for good or bad).

Related is my ironic-humor-pivoting sig which applies to AI as well as many other technologies ranging from nuclear energy to just the humble transistor: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Although, as the book "Abundance" written "by liberals, for liberals" suggests, there are many aspects of the current US political order that impede effective solutions by emphasizing legalistic process over desirable results (and a different approach to making such decisions is one reason China is pulling way ahead of the USA in many areas). The book's authors suggest providing subsidies to people using systems unable to grow due to dysfunctional rules just results in essentially artificial scarcity and inflation (examples include housing, transportation, energy, and medical care):
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

So, there is some legitimate righteous anger at bureaucratic dysfunction which Trump has harnessed for political gain. The deep question is, as Mr. Fred Rodgers' sang, "What do you do with the mad that you feel?" Something similar could be sang about "fear". Trump is one answer to such a question, but there are presumably other possible answers...

Not the encore dump? Shame, shame!