Never said it'd be cheap. But let's be honest, how much longer do you think we can get away with pawning off tech manufacturing to other countries before they either raise prices or it bites us in the ass?

The bribery angle is possibly true, but are you really complaining about an administration finally recognizing that consumer routers are full of backdoors and at least playing at securing them? We've needed to address security vulnerabilities in consumer AND professional networking equipment for some time now.

Would-be newcomers that manufacture their equipment stateside can bypass restrictions entirely.

Depends on who is making the post and how many sockpuppet accounts they have to mod themselves up.

High-pressure CO2 is corrosive? That's . . . interesting. Sorta makes sense though.

Okay, so they can use an ablative layer for insertion. After that it's just the extreme heat and pressure.

Isn't the surface of Venus highly-acidic thanks to sulphuric acid rain?

It depends on the controlling authority for individual utilities what will be their policies. Most local utilities are government-controlled affairs that get caught up in whatever public/private boosterism prevails in the local political scene. "Pro-business" policies usually include some incentives for locating your business in a particular city or county. And part of that may be a sweetheart deal when it comes to utility hookups (which inevitably leads to costs being passed somewhere else). These policies typically were not enacted with datacentres in mind. Datacentres rarely employ many humans these days (at least not local to the datacentre itself), meaning that economic/wage growth doesn't necessarily follow their construction. And yet, local politicians are still greenlighting these things wherever they can, utilizing the same public/private mechanisms used for other types of businesses.

Yes, theoretically, local utilities could start charging more money to datacentres for hookups and/or capacity expansion. No, it's not likely to happen. At least not until politicians start representing their constituents.

Part of what gets the average ratepayer are the infrastructure costs. Datacentre buildouts require sometimes-massive grid connections. Those upgrades often fall on the general public.

At least according to the summary, it seems that the AI Zuck is just a standin for the meetings he would never attend otherwise.

Nor was dedicated misanthropy!

Hmm. Yeah doesn't look like anyone is going to paint a clear picture of what was intercepted (and/or how much).

How much abusive material did "big tech" firms find over the last few years while scanning private communications?

The posters and readers here aren't fixing the problem!

Nonsense. The wealthier the society, the fewer children people have. We had higher fertility rates when few people have indoor plumbing or electricity.