Networks like visa and Mastercard don’t seem evil. If you’ve ever had to dispute a charge and got your money back easily or relied on the fact that even if their computers are down they’ll still take the risk and allow you to take money out of your account you’d find the fees they charge pretty minimal. Now the issuer bank… that’s where most of the fee and why most banks now have reward cards because the issuing bank can ask for whatever additional fees on top of what visa/mastercard does.
How does every form of evil have some sort of apologist on the internet. I was near certian that even before AI there were very active automated or low paid workers astroturfing for companies anytime malfeasance is brought to light. In the age of LLM's I now know for a fact that its happening. I guess I found one.
In older architectures you would expose services as libraries and everything ran in one UBER process… eg JBoss and ASP.. it also covered off on web server processing like cold fusion and php.
This is the beauty of sOps. Store the secrets in the code, but store the keys in AWS SM and have sOps do the work. Works great with Instance Profiles or IRSA.
High density batteries allows us to have dramatically cheaper electricity. Think of it like this, what happens when electricity is 1/10th the cost? Beyond what others have pointed out (electric airplanes, cars that drive thousands of miles), costs for everything would drop as energy is a core driver of it in every good you consume. If you can pull energy where it's very cheaply available and store/transport it anywhere the world millions of lives would be saved. For example;
If energy is cheaper than the price of water you can pull water out of thin air (dehumidifiers).
If energy is cheaper you can grow food in areas you normally couldn't.
When you can transport anything for cheap you can move food to areas that are vulnerable to food insecurity.
If you can store energy at large scale you can nearly eliminate grid failures, savings lives in the summer and winter.
Costs for transporting food would go down significantly, imagine groceries being 10-15% cheaper.
Assuming airlines have competitive pressure you could expect plane flight costs to drop 20-30% improving everyone's mobility.
Energy density doesn't matter for electricity since the storage batteries don't move and there is plenty of space for them. Cost per energy stored is what matters. Density is important for transportation especially planes.
Sodium ion batteries have worse energy density than lithium ion but they have potential to be cheaper and more reliable. Iron air batteries have poor round trip efficiency but could be even cheaper.
Batteries are not power sources, but storage. The energy still has to come from somewhere, and power generation won't magically become 10x cheaper overnight. No matter how cheap battery storage becomes.
But it IS crucial for removing bottlenecks & replace fossil fuels.
Imagine for a moment that batteries with decent shelf lives are free.
You build a power plant on a geothermal vent in Iceland. The electricity it produces is plentiful and cheap. You run it full tilt charging batteries.
You ship those batteries to wherever you need cheap power, and send them back empty. This works with hydro, wind, solar, ...
Batteries do drive down energy costs because even ignoring transmission lines, they let you move energy in both space and time, pushing all energy costs towards the cost of the cheapest means of generation on its best day.
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