Fire dragon here and yeah, sometimes Google won’t even let me log in either.

Carter’s reelection. When they abandoned New Deal politics.

Why don’t they have free will?

How about: there’s no difference between actually free will and an infinite universe of infinite variables affecting your programming, resulting in a belief that you have free will. Heck, a couple million variables is more than plenty to confuddle these primate brains.

The bulwark is a bunch of never trump Republicans.

But, the enemy of my enemy can sometimes be useful, or something like that.

I recently enjoyed laughing heartily at them as they discussed the falling apart of their personal American exceptionalist myths (6m45s here)

Seems satisfactory to me.

To a significant extent, they do, contracting for construction of generation and transmission (very often renewable), at least at the largest scale.

But, it’s (mostly) all on the grid.

With demand like that, it’s not like there isn’t significant negotiation with the local power company, especially because they’re frequently built a significant distance from existing large power infrastructure.

Heck, all the big 3 cloud providers signed deals for nuclear generation in the last few months. https://spectrum.ieee.org/nuclear-powered-data-center

Here’s just one more article about these sorts of investments: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/google-has-a-20b-plan-to-build-data-centers-and-clean-power-together