If they wrote people, that suggests they succeeded in making artificial sapience. But they should also be charged with slavery.

Barring political considerations, they can't sell the fabs. Why? They'd have to give up the CHIPS funding. Not just "give up" but likely "pay back".

a) increased efficiency doesn't change capacity factor [maybe if they added cooling, but that increases expense and thus decreases profit]. It just increases nameplate capacity.
a.1) as noted by the other guy, tracking is a thing, but that increases capex costs and maintenance. That is a possible increase in capacity factor. It also doesn't change efficiency.
a.2) does agrivoltaics help with cooling?
a.3) arguably cooling changes efficiency [bringing efficiency closer to STC from NOCT], but that's not an improvement in the cells, but rather the installation methods.
a.3.1) the panels on my house, STC/nameplate is 380W/panel. NOCT is 285W/panel. STC only happens during spring or early morning on cooler days. Total panels: 60, total nameplate 22.8. But my inverters limit to 20kW. Typical summer peak is ~16kW.

b) the states/locations where it was installed to begin with would be where it was most optimal [because that's where the investments make the most sense], e.g. lower latitudes and less clouds. Later installs would be in states that are less optimal [best case, no worse].

c) more installs doesn't change capacity factor.

Just went to NetZero's website.
Their "HiSpeed Accelerated Dial-Up" says it is "$29.95* a month" or [and this isn't linked directly from their showAllServices.do page] their DSL is "as low as $39.95* a month".

Missouri v IBM
https://ago.mo.gov/attorney-ge...

Dill v IBM
https://aflegal.org/litigation...

Beard v IBM
https://www.thesandersfirmpc.c...

I think we've done enough R&D in prolonging elections as it is. The AP still hasn't declared California's District 13 [no relation to the dystopic movie District9 or Panem] as of 7:27AM PST Dec2, nearly a month after the election.

TuringPi2 + RK1 ?
TuringPi2 is just a carrier board.
RK1 is RK3588, so 4 A55 "efficiency" cores, 4 A76 "performance" cores. The Pi5 has the same, roughly, performance cores. Different clock rates no doubt.
The TuringPi2 holds 4 of them, and takes a standard ATX PSU or 12V+ATX adapter
a vendor PSU + carrier board + ITX case + 4xRK1-16GB RAM + shipping = ~1300USD

Possibilities also exist for the OdroidM2. Mostly the same CPU, albeit a bit stripped of IO, and a package that may be harder to cool [the RK3588 is metal, the RK3588S2 is plastic]. PSU is 12V, which in my experience is more stable than boards with high power draw on 5V. A bit too new probably to have non-vendor-supplied kernels.

Or maybe the NanoPC-T6. same RK3588 [no trailing letters or numbers]. This one has Armbian support. Also 12V PSU. 802.3bz 2.5GbE ethernet, if that's of value to you.

I must admit to owning none of the above, albeit I've had good luck with the NanoPC-T4 & OdroidM1, and had horrible luck with the NanoPiM4v2 [like the NanoPC, but 5V USB power and crashing a lot with my WD Blue SSD + fan].
I also have a Radxa Rock5B [with the RK3588], but I'm not stressing it at all, just using it for screen sessions + elinks + random other SSH sessions.

I lived on the border of Sunnyvale CA for ~5 years, near SR85/82/237. It was walkable... if all ou wanted was to go grocery shopping. That part was great.
It wasn't so walkable if you wanted to get to work. even with traffic as bad as it was, it took well under half the time to take a car vs take a bus [and/or the light rail, depending where you're going]. My flatmate at the time worked about 3 years of that time in Alviso, about a year at Google [hence the location we lived in], and about a year in Fremont. Fremont really wasn't an option to take the bus from where we lived. Alviso had a problem of being too small to actually have a bus stop at all. The only bus stop was about a half mile out of town at the Amtrak station.
Btw, at the time, Alviso was a very walkable city... and yes, an actual city, but a really tiny one.
If it matters, while living there, I worked in mid-south Santa Clara [nVidia campus now, I believe], then north Santa Clara [near Great America], then north Sunnyvale.
I appear to have a different objective than you. But I have actually lived a few places too. Both in and out of "cities". So to say I'm not being objective merely b/c I disagree with you?

Also, your definition of "city" is definitely an odd one. Tell that definition to Los Angeles [where thankfully I've never lived].

So first... "over the hill and through the woods" implies that either Grandma isn't in the city, even if the family is... or that she's in a different town. Some distance away.
That was my experience... albeit moreso for my mom's side. Different counties even. A few counties away.
There's also something about increased mobility in the US over the last 20 years. Families moving further away from each other, getting married to ppl who grew up further away.

Then there's your "15% outside of cities" figure. That needs some definitions. Because I think you're thinking medium & large cities, but the statistic includes small cities. My maternal great grandmother, 30 years ago, was in Grant MI. Last census 950 peeps. But legally a city.

Further, your q about 10k being worth it for 3x/year. Of course not. But I think you're forgetting that availability will likely cause people to use it. Some local [fwiw, nowhere near Grant MI] school districts are now saying they're cutting busing or rotating bus routes [they can't get enough drivers], so parents have to arrange their own transportation. Which probably wouldn't be an issue in NYC or Sunnyvale CA, but how many of the 85% live in BIG cities? half?

You want to change the world. I, with many others, just want to live in it. So I look at the world the way it is, burdened by what has been and what is.

Car rentals aren't magic.
a) there's already ppl renting them for holidays where they flew across the country to join their families.
b) the cost of a rental includes the capex for the vehicles, as well as other fixed costs including storage and licensing/registration.
If we assume that people who only own a car capable of their daily commute will need to rent for the 3x/year they go over the hill and through the woods to grandma's house... then the size of the rental fleet will have to increase.
But if a substantial portion of that fleet is only used 3x/year then the rental price will need to increase to cover the amortization. Eventually to the point where it's about the same cost as... owning a car. And when you do own the car it's easier to get groceries, and take the kid to the doctor or to their soccer practice [we want well-exercised and socialized children, right?].

Zigbee and ZWave cannot phone home. Further, I've never ran into such Zigbee or ZWave device that requires extra work to pair. Yes, Zigbee devices are hit or miss re complying with the standard clusters/attributes.

No reason to avoid "smart". Just avoid "cloud". OpenEVSE [or the EU equivalent EmonEVSE] is open source hardware [an ESP32 plus an Arduino, plus other components].
Has a WebUI and can feed MQTT to a broker, and/or read from MQTT to adjust charging rate.

does it have to be dumb? Or can it just have local control? I have an OpenEVSE. it has a local web portal. I don't need an app, I can just load the web page.
But it also has integrations available for many home automation platforms and it has control available via MQTT.

the "protocol" used is just a PWM signal that sets the amperage in integer units. It can't really be smooth, albeit you could just use a rotary encoder with a screen showing the setting.