I'm not seeing LCOE figures, which makes me think that the cost they're talking about is installation cost, not overall cost. Ongoing maintenance is probably where the downsides of this for homeowners comes in, because as it is this sounds too good to be true, and it probably is.

Grid level solar is affected as well, and communities can work together to install microgrids when it's too costly for most individuals in the consumers.

People too poor to install solar on their homes still benefit.

>Which is kind of a sobering thought really. That even if we sourced all our electricity from renewables, we are far from done...

Given that plans for carbon neutrality stretch out decades, not years, it'd be kind of shocking if we weren't still a good long ways from being done.

Digging a hole that has enough volume to store significant gravity based energy storage and won't collapse in on itself when the bottom reservoir is empty raises the price for it, both construction and maintenance. Presumably enough to make geothermal storage cost competitive.

That's pumped hydro storage, and it's already implemented in most of the places that have the geography for it. It's the most widely deployed power storage system at the moment.

Define consciousness, please.

Then prove that any sufficiently advanced AI will not have that property.

We kind of have to default to assuming that it does to avoid creating slaves instead of tools by accident.

But who am I kidding? We will 100% do so. See the backlash about AI art and the human chauvinism on display there.

Then most people will choose not to use it since money is more efficient and has vastly less overhead.

Either you force people into this system, or it will not destroy money which is the stated goal.

If you can't see how requiring all commerce to go through the system that's described without massive surveillance and punishments for people who decide to act outside it to prevent it from collapsing under it's own weight and massive inefficenencies, I'm not sure what to tell you.

It's an unstated implication of what he describes, even if the OP doesn't understand that to be the case.

At which point you are still paying the higher prices (probably even higher than if the government hadn't engaged in price fixing), and you have all the fun and games of dealing with criminals instead of a legal business.

Because if the price the person you are buying from has to pay goes up (because they are buying from outside the market with price fixing) to the point where it's more than he's legally allowed to sell to you + the expenses in selling it, he either "loses" it to the black market or just stops selling it altogether. Either way, you don't get to buy it for the price set, and all sorts of very bad knock on effects happen that make you immensely worse off.

Money exists because it is useful - far more useful than your system with it's massive overhead and requirement for a draconian police state to prevent people from engaging in economic activity outside of approved channels.

Using regulation to deal with the downsides of money will be orders of magnitude less harmful that what would be required to implement your insane little thought experiment.

So people are forbidden from ever talking to anyone else because they might collude, set up exchanges outside of THE SYSTEM, or generally engage in activity that is unapproved.

Right, as cyberpunk dystopias masquerading as purported utopias, this is certainly one of them.

I'm sure that there will be people like you who are holdouts. Just not many when a cultured steak is twice or more the price of an animal grown one.

Humans are messed up, my friend.

Then invest your life savings in a nuclear project.

What's that? You don't what to risk losing your money if the project goes bad, and don't want to or can't afford to wait for a decade plus to see any returns if it does come online?

Gee, wonder why other people aren't doing what you aren't willing to.