It's framed as US government giving $1.2b to German company not to build something (which is weird in its own right). But after drilling into it (correct me if I'm wrong):

RWE is a large German utility

It paid $1.2b for development rights and invested a bunch of money.

The US passed policies that made it impossible to develop the plan.

So it's essentially a negotiated unwind of government-issued property/development rights. US changed the rules, made the lease ineffective and compensated the leasee. But the deal was that instead of RWE just taking the money they agreed to other development projects related to natural gas (better in my opinion).

You might disagree with the policies that made these wind farms impossible or whether the buy out of federal leased land is fair to one party or another. But I wish articles actually cared enough to describe the situation clearly.

Questions I would like mentioned in the article in place of Trumps rhetoric about "big ugly windmills" is details about the actual restrictions that made it impossible, history of it, impact, etc.

The next Google won't be a search engine with 10 blue links. Why would anyone create slightly better legacy apps.

For instance, Claude is 100% a competitor to Salesforce and there are go to market companies like Clay that manage outreach of a salesforce. Small companies can easily spin out a simple system that can source people to reach out, track follow ups, help w copy and even coordinate email.

> I haven't seen any real competitor of YouTube, or Figma, or Google, or Instagram created solely with AI.

Is a ridiculous set of products to expect competitors for. First all but 1 rely heavily on network effects. YouTube is a low cost provider. Think about it, they provide unlimited high quality video storage for free. They process 500 hours of content every minute. Google and Instagram have a huge network all users benefit from. AI can't help you bootstrap this network.

The only one that's fair is Figma, and considering Figma is down 30% from IPO price (much lower from ending day close), it's fair to say there are competitors to Figma, including the LLMs themselves.

That begs the question: what is product? Is "an app for designers to change style and communicate with developers" the product? Or is the product "to make websites look pretty and well organized"? The former, Figma is great. But if the product is the latter, LLMs are a real threat. No one would bother building a "better Figma" today, why would they? They would just solve the problem Figma purports to solve

Teaching for instance you know exactly how much money you'll be making over the next 20 years. Add a masters (which may or may not contribute to you being a better teacher) get a bump.

Do you believe there is a direct correlation with how long someone was working there and how productive they are? Would you like to live in this rubric? What kind of people do you think are interested in this kind of rigid rubric? It works in some places that are commoditized. A toll collector does the job, and maybe there is some merit to rewarding someone for loyalty. But programming is not that kind of job.

The best people want to work in a place where they're valued (and paid) on merit. Why shouldn't a better engineer with less formal experience be promoted above someone who has been filling a desk for the last 20 years?

If you could transport yourself to the late 90s, would you try to convince people that the internet's impact on the economy would be no greater than that of the fax machine by 2005.

Or was it just some companies were overvalued?

But I am not Japanese. I have no ties in Tokyo and they have a sensible immigration policy that doesn't allow just anyone to come.

I'm American and want to make America a safer and better place for the 95% of people that want to live in an orderly society.

Of course there was less crime in NYC 10 years ago. Don't gas light me. Bootleg handbag sales were Chinatown only, there wasn't weed sales on every corner in midtown. Fentanyl zombies weren't a thing. Things weren't perfect, we still had subway dancers and pushy CD scammers, but it wasn't nearly as bad

This wasn't a thing 10 years ago and we weren't in a police state

The same works on the producer side. It typically costs them less than the market price to produce the product.

This is basic economics and kind of wild I have to explain.

Tax authorities don't need to do this. Investors will. Where will the money come from? If there's no future prospects, it will cease operations.

> If Starbucks UK is a loss-making venture, they should have some explaining to do when they're opening new branches.

I like how discussion of taxes turned everyone into a fierce defender of profit maximization. Nothing about adding back to the community, paying decent wages, etc.

Yes, any company can pay 0 taxes by taking all the money that they made and setting it on fire, in perpetuity.

If you begin selling in a different tax jurisdiction, that would be unfair that you have to start paying corporate taxes despite being unprofitable. It's not a brand new company and you're using the resources you built in the other country so royalty and licensing fee make sense. In other words, Starbucks brand name and operational efficiencies are assets that were developed in the US, so the US subsidiary should receive revenue from the service to the UK branch