Last I looked (about a year ago,) IBM is 3 things: Software licensing, services and Big Iron. The companies' revenue is split roughly equally among these three areas.
An interesting perspective of IBM is its relative position. It's leveled off at about $60b/y, after a lengthy decline. It is far overmatched by many big tech companies today in terms of revenue.
It's a niche business, serving niche demands. I think IBM's moat is that most of its business is highly uninteresting: industrialized box ticking work, deeply entangled by contracts and a strong need for continuity by its customers.
I actually had a recent encounter with one of IBM's products. A commercial B2B REST API I created was analyzed by an IBM vulnerability scanning platform on behalf of a major US municipality. It didn't find anything actually critical, but there were some worthwhile points in the report, and working around a false positive was a frustration. The product, in this case, is diffusion of responsibility.
On the Big Iron end, IBM isn't really selling hardware. They selling an ecosystem: services, software, support, continuity (over decades,) etc. It pleases me that they chose to stick to Power: it's nice to know Itanium didn't kill off every enterprise RISC platform.
Maybe, one day, some major quantum computing breakthrough happens at IBM. As far as I can see, that's the only play they have that could change their trajectory. In the meantime, they have a large software portfolio and plenty of institutions that will keep signing contracts long after I'm gone.
They're one ~ 3 main companies in the US that will sell you quantum computers, and the only one offering a quantum PaaS.
They do a lot of stuff. Also own Hashicorp now, so they have things like: Ansible / RedHat Linux (already owned), Terraform, Consul, Nomad, Packer, etc. A lot of "let's build modern infra" tooling.
J6 is not a strong counterexample, IMHO. Part of the problem with Epstein is "proof beyond a reasonable doubt," for which evidence is needed--and, it appears, hard to come by. Whereas with J6, there were thousands of hours of footage showing the crimes being committed (and in many cases bragged about), which made prosecutions much easier.
>With J6, in the matter of 2 or so years the FBI has secured over 1000 convictions.
Again, large numbers, but no context. How many people did you think were at the riots? 10k? 50k?
Moreover, Jan 6th was an event that definitely happened. The same can't be said for whatever happened at Epstein's island. The island exists, Epstein's a convicted sex offender, and people flew there, but associating with sex offenders isn't a crime, no matter how despicable it might seem.
It's a pipedream. Yes it's cheap and efficient, but it requires the geography and the will to destroy a local ecosystem.
BESS is what will ultimately win. It's pretty energy dense and it can be deployed on pretty much any junk land location. The only fight you'll have is with the neighbors who don't like it.
My power company, Idaho power, is deploying a 200MWh BESS on a slice of land they've owned for decades near one of their substations. The hardest part has been the permitting (which is now done).
It should be noted that the research from this article acknowledges that official Chinese coal consumption figures are often unreliable or subject to massive retrospective revisions. To compensate, the author uses "apparent consumption" (production + imports - exports +/- inventory changes) and power generation data. This methodology assumes perfect reporting of coal production and inventory levels across thousands of mines and plants. Historically, "statistical discrepancies" in Chinese energy data have masked millions of tons of CO2. If local provinces underreport coal use to meet "Dual Control" energy targets, the "flat or falling" trend could be a reporting artifact rather than a physical reality.
The article also notes that solar and wind capacity grew significantly faster than actual generation, suggesting "unreported curtailment" (where clean energy is wasted because the grid can’t handle it). If curtailment is rising, it means the "clean energy boom" is hitting a hard infrastructure ceiling. The research assumes that if grid issues are resolved, emissions will fall further. However, if the grid cannot integrate this power fast enough, the 290GW of coal power currently under construction will be called upon to fill the gap, potentially leading to a sharp emissions rebound in 2026–2027.
Further, a major driver of the emissions drop is the 7% decline in cement and 3% decline in steel emissions, linked to the ongoing real estate slump. This is a cyclical economic event, not necessarily a green technological victory. If the Chinese government pivots to a new stimulus package (e.g. massive "New Infrastructure" or high-tech manufacturing zones) to save GDP growth, the demand for steel and cement could surge again. The research treats the real estate decline as a permanent plateau, but China’s history of state-led investment suggests that industrial emissions can be turned back on by policy shifts.
Further, the analysis focuses almost exclusively on CO2. China is the world's largest emitter of methane, primarily from coal mine leakages. Even if CO2 emissions from burning coal are flat, continued coal production to feed the coal-to-chemical industry (which grew 12% in this report) results in significant methane venting. If you account for the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of methane, the total greenhouse gas trend might look much less optimistic than the CO2-only trend.
Further, the report credits a 3% increase in hydropower for helping suppress coal. Hydropower in China is extremely volatile and dictated by weather patterns (e.g. the 2022–2023 droughts). A single dry year in the Sichuan or Yunnan provinces can force a massive, immediate pivot back to coal-fired power to prevent blackouts. The 21-month trend may be as much a result of favorable rainfall as it is of solar panels, making it fragile and reversible.
Further, the report highlights a 12% growth in emissions from the chemical industry, driven by coal-to-liquids and coal-to-gas projects. This suggests that China is not decarbonizing its economy so much as re-carbonizing its industrial feedstocks. As China seeks energy security to reduce its reliance on imported oil and gas, it is building a massive coal-based chemical infrastructure. These emissions are harder to abate than power sector emissions and could eventually offset the gains made by wind and solar.
Ultimately, China is still the largest polluter (in every sense of the word) by a large margin. It's nice to see them taking steps to curb this, but we should all remember that any environmental benefits are purely coincidental to their goals of energy independence. We should expect them to rely on a diverse mix of sources - including the 8+ "mega" coal power plants coming online every month.
- Peak coal usage is likely to be very soon in China (this year even according to some); after that coal usage flatten and start declining; all the way to a planned net zero in the 2060s.
The newer plants are designed to be more efficient, more flexible, and less polluting than the older ones. They are better at starting/stopping quickly/cheaply. Older coal plants used big boilers that had to heat up to build up steam before being able to generate power. This makes stopping and starting a plant slow and expensive. Because they consume a lot of fuel just to get the plant to the stage where it can actually generate power. The more often plants have to be stopped and started, the more wasteful this is. With the newer plants this is less costly and faster.
This makes them more suitable to be used in a non base load operational model where they can be spun up/down on a need to have basis. This is essential in a power grid that is dominated by the hundreds of GW of solar, wind, and battery.
What a lot of people also miss is that we’re in the age demographic bomb, where the global population is both aging rapidly and declining at the same time I.e. japanification
This means that global consumption will decline too which coincides with both factories and power plants shutting down
Their existing grid uses coal because they have coal, just like the US uses gas because it has gas. And obviously as old coal plants are retired they're going to build new ones. They don't use the new plants for additional capacity. As they add more solar and storage, which they're building a lot of, they're going to absolutely crush the coal burning too. It's literally a national security issue for them.
As other posters below you have pointed out, it's not as simple as you make it out. You can't just stop building power plants overnight. The population and demands of China are growing and those needs need to be met immediately. There is no simpler, more understood way of rolling out new energy than building coal & gas power plants.
But look at the data. They are building clean energy solutions at a faster rate than any other country on the planet - by a huge margin. Scaling clean energy solutions is what we need, and it has to be done alongside the gradual phase-out of coal and gas.
Lots of people who don't read the HN Guidelines, apparently:
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Supposedly they have been replacing old dirty coal plants with new cleaner ones alongside massive developments in renewables and nuclear. Getting air pollution controlled as fast as possible requires doing everything at once.
As other comments already point out, chinese coal power plants do not always operate under full load. They also decomission older more polluting ones.
Setting that aside, China has also dramatically pushed the electrification of their transportation sector like no one else. Considering BEVs and other electric modes of transport require less primary energy than fossil fuel equivalents, this checks out.
Coal is a lot cheaper and easier than modern energy sources when your goal is modernizing rural areas. Meanwhile, urban centers are decommissioning old emissive power plants and shifting to renewables. It's a fine way to do green transition and rural development.
By what measure? Coal hasn't been competitive for decades and the only way it had remained competitive in terms of cost per MWh even back then was if you burned it in huge (> 1GW) plants. 1GW plants are the very opposite of what you want to electrify rural areas - construction is slow and expensive, operating large plants requires considerable and qualified head-count, logistics is an issue and they require high capacity and expensive transmission systems.
And if your minimum unit size is 1GW then you lose the flexibility to roll out the tech incrementally - the average modern coal plant requires 3 to 5 weeks per year for scheduled downtime for maintenance - so your first 1GW coal plant requires a bunch of other generation sources to cover demand during these periods.
Solar and batteries are the obvious solution for rural electrification: scaleable, cheaper/simpler to deploy - no large scale civil engineering involved, trivial to "operate", effective without the support of big transmission systems and it's possible to buy everything off-the-shelf.
Coal requires transport and extraction which are both pretty expensive processes.
In my home town of ~300 people, there was just a couple of houses which used coal for heating. That's because sourcing and transporting coal was quiet expensive.
Electric heating was much more common. Even the old expensive baseboard resistive heaters.
When we talk about extreme rural areas, what you end up finding is solar and batteries end up being the most preferred energy sources. This has been true for decades. That higher upfront cost is offset by not having to transport fuel.
It's why you'll find a lot of cabins in pretty remote locations are ultimately solar powered. This is long before the precipitous price drop of solar.
How is coal cheaper and easier than buying and deploying solar panels and batteries. Both of which require basically zero additional infrastructure to deploy.
Last I checked mining and transporting coal required quite a lot of heavy industry equipment to do even vaguely economically.
If coal was cheaper and easier than other sources of energy, then the US would be building more coal power plants. But even with the Trump administration placing its weighty thumb on the scale to try and “save coal”. Coal plants are still being shutdown due to simple economics.
If existing plants can compete with renewables, to hard to understand how adding the cost of building new plants is going to change that.
It's a bad ruling. By it's logic, McDonald's can mail me a contact where they take my car if I eat at their restaurant and all disputes go to their arbitration court, and I agree to the terms by ordering food from them.
It's really no different. In fact, in some ways it's worse because McDonald's can send the contact via certified mail.
These courts just want to clear their dockets which is why they reversed.
It is a totally reasonable discussion of what assent entails, is clear that assent only exists when people actually read the notice, and placed the burden on the companies, etc.
One can disagree with the law at issue here, but the court was very carefully following it, and had a meaningful and thoughtful discussion of the issues involved.
Which you dismiss as just "trying to clear their dockets" because apparently you don't like the law as it is (which is cool, but not the courts job)
> These courts just want to clear their dockets which is why they reversed.
You have made no attempt to justify this claim, which, I suspect, you pulled out of thin air, though it amounts to a provocative accusation of significant ethical bankruptcy and judicial malpractice in "these courts" (whichever courts you may be referring to). Do better.
The 9th district court of appeals, something that's on the first page of the ruling. Did you read it? That was implicit in this comment thread.
And the justification is the fact that this is an unpublished ruling "This disposition is not appropriate for publication and is not precedent except as provided by Ninth Circuit Rule 36-3"
That alone is a good sign that these judges don't really think this is a great argument.
And, if you read the ruling (which lacks a dissent). It's extremely weak. California law requires that the end user makes an affirmative action to accept a TOS agreement in the form of checking a box or clicking a button. Something the court admits the defendant does not do.
They make a lot of hay around how wonderful the email was, but who cares? Just showing someone text does not count as accepting the TOS.
They had to construe the fact that the plaintiff used the app later as being an acceptance of the TOS. TOS which include moving the case of stalking out of the federal courts and into the arbitration courts which Tile picked. The fact that this reduces their case load is apparent because if they didn't force this into arbitration the court would end up dealing with all the appeals that Tile would invariably file.
Maybe you should do better and actually read the linked ruling before accusing others. My example is exactly the sort of behavior that this court would find acceptable for accepting a TOS change.
I'm assuming bad motivations because this is a garbage ruling. And the only reason why they'd make such a ruling is case load. That, in fact, is charitable to these judges.
"That alone is a good sign that these judges don't really think this is a great argument."
No, this is a totally normal thing, at least for the 9th circuit (and a few others). They do not publish all rulings, and they don't designate all opinions as precedential.
The rest is just disagreement with governing law, framed as if the court should have disregarded it and done what you wanted.
"California law requires that the end user makes an affirmative action to accept a TOS agreement in the form of checking a box or clicking a button. Something the court admits the defendant does not do."
This is only true as of July 1st, 2025. So was not in force at the time of this dispute.
"Just showing someone text does not count as accepting the TOS."
During the time, it did, as the court explains pretty well.
It is hilarious that you think this was about clearing a docket.
As a lawyer, I would guess this was literally the last thing they cared about here.
I also happen to think consumers get shafted and am quite happy with california's recent contract law changes, but ...
this ruling is quite clearly reasonable, if not totally correct based on the law as it existed at the time.
Well, unfortunately there's a herd of elephants in the room when it comes to American healthcare.
We spend the most on healthcare vs any other nation while getting results comparable to nations like Cuba (not hyperbole. Go look up infant mortality of Cuba vs US). I mean, no joke, the main thing that harms Cuban healthcare is the US embargo limiting medicine and medical supplies from going in.
> They say it’s reducing strain on hospitals and ambulances by diverting low-level patients to more appropriate care.
The only reason the city is doing this is because these ambulance contractors are sharks.
Ambulatory service is one of those things that should be ran by the city/state and not by some random private company. A private company in this case can only serve to make it much more expensive for the city and people needing emergency services while providing bad service and understaffing and underpaying their staff all at once. You'll get paramedics being paid $15/hr that charge $1500 for 10 minute ambulance ride where the contracting company pockets nearly everything.
I get it, cities don't like taxing people for ambulances, so that's why they try and contract it away to avoid that tax line item or savings needed to ultimately buy new medical equipment. That, however, kills people.
It's absurd that we can find it in our budgets to pay for fireman and police but for some reason anything related to medicine needs to be privately contracted out.
Some ambulance systems aren't tax supported and aren't even exactly contracted to the municipality. In our town the BLS EMT's are volunteers (paramedics are paid) who take a ton of training, a ton of ongoing training, they go on runs, and THEN they stand on corners with a boot to raise money. That's (a) dedication on their part and (b) abusive on the part of the community. And patients still pay $2k for the ride. IMO if you live and work somewhere, some of your taxes should go to 911 to make it work right.
That's how it worked in my hometown, but I don't think the bill was 2k as it was essentially ran by the county.
Everything was basically either payed for by donations from a local business or funded by fundraising. Primarily because the county didn't want to have a tax to run the system properly. Same thing happened with my hometown's fire department. Though in that case you could effectively buy fire insurance from the county (and of course, some people decided not to buy that insurance).
Both are a bad way to run critical services, especially since my hometown was surrounded by a lot of farm and state owned land where lightning strikes causing a fire wasn't uncommon. I don't have a big issue with the volunteer portion of it, it was a small town which the county would otherwise not want to service. But the funding portion was just bad. Fire, famously, spreads. And giving people the ability to opt out is dumb because it makes a big problem if a fire starts on their property and spreads to someone else's.
> It's absurd that we can find it in our budgets to pay for fireman and police but for some reason anything related to medicine needs to be privately contracted out.
Seattle spends nearly $400 million a year on the SPD, which is about 25% of their discretionary budget.
That's a more complicated example than I think you intended. Seattle tried to move some of the functions SPD was handling to other people during the badly named "Defund SPD" movement. The police got angry that part of "their" budget and responsibility was taken away, and has spent the past few years successfully campaigning to get it back.
Yeah, my country tried to do a switcharoo in the 2000, by funding what was called 'proximity police' on the national police budget. They couldn't arrest for misdemeanor or traffic infractions, couldn't do an identity check, didn't have any weapons, were only able to call other services in case of an imminent danger, and was tasked to organise regular spelling bees, basketball/football games etc. Basically street councillors. Worked in some areas, worked less in others, still, in most areas where young people violence was an issue, it had promising results.
Turns out the police noticed and lobbied the next government into removing the department and getting all the money back for regular law enforcement.
In my city, the ambulance service is run by a private contractor, but the city government offers ambulance insurance to residents. It's included on my monthly water/sewer/trash bill and costs about four dollars a month. All ambulance services are free. A friend has taken two ambulance rides over the past few years, with nothing out of pocket for either of them.
The insurance is optional. If you don't want to pay the four dollars each month, you don't have to, but it's so cheap and easy why wouldn't you for the peace of mind it offers.
I have a different different take. It's not the electorate's pocketbook that matters, it's the political donors pocketbook that matters.
"Drill baby drill" will be echoed so long as petroleum companies and petroleum rich nations dump billions into propaganda outlets, politician campaigns, and in the US, PAC groups to support "drill baby drill" friendly politicians.
So long as that dynamic exists, it doesn't matter if 80% of the electorate screams for change. So long as the incumbent advantage exists forcing people to vote mostly on social issues, these sorts of economic and world affecting issues will simply be ignored.
There's a reason, to this day, you'll find Democrats talk about the wonders of fracking, clean coal, and carbon capture.
IDK how to change this other than first identifying the issue. Our politicians are mostly captured by their donors. That's the only will they really care about enacting.
Not sharing your take of the electorate's powerlessness at all. It's not an overwhelming majority (only 57% of voters in the US: https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/54124-nearly-half-american...) which thinks they need to do more about climate change. I think most politicians are in tune with their voters - you need to change the people's minds if you want stricter policies. Refine the question a bit more and ask people if they still want to do more against climate change if some basic necessities in their life will get more expensive and you will likely even drop below 50%.
Well part of that 43% I think have their opinions primarily because of propaganda from the same donors who are buying off the politicians.
But also, I'd point out that even in the Democrat party where this is more of an 80:20 issue with their constituents, the democrats are still far too friendly to fossil fuels (Biden, for example, specifically campaigned on how much he loves natural gas, fracking, and carbon capture).
This isn't the only 80:20 issue where democrat politicians are out of alignment with their base. That's also what informs my pessimism.
Solar power is cheaper than oil, but it doesn't work 24/7. If you can find a way to work with that, switching to solar is already financially incentivised. Even if you can't, we're already seeing whole countries and regions saturating at 100% solar electricity during daylight hours, significantly reducing oil usage. It doesn't matter what the oil sellers want, because it's a buyer's market for energy when the sun is out, and they're not going to throw extra money at oil companies just because.
> It creates an incentive where someone doesn't follow the laws, burn everything they can to accelerate their economy, and take industry from other countries.
I think the flaw in this thinking is thinking that burning things is the cheapest way to get energy.
Oil processing and extraction is a complex industry which requires a huge continued investment. Coal requires massive mining operations. Natural gas is probably the least intensive of the burny things, and it still requires a pretty advanced pipeline to be competitive.
Renewables are relatively cheap one time purchases. Save energy storage, the economy that is most competitive at this point is one powered by renewables.
That transition is already happening in the US without a massive government regulation/mandate. In china, it's happening a whole lot faster because the government is pushing it. And the chinese economy is at no risk of being outbid by smaller economies burning fuel.
The main reason burning remains a major source of fuel is that for most nations, the infrastructure to consume it has already been built. It's not because it's cheap.
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