Belgium. I have solar panels, a battery (Pylontech, not Tesla), and an electric car.
Summers are cheap, winters are less expensive than they used to be. The market is asymmetric. If I push onto the net, I get 33% of what I pay when I pull. I also have to pay a fixed cost to be able to do this. I'm currently considering another battery, and maybe cryptomining or so. Selling my electricity is just not worth it.
Ireland was the last country in the OECD to create a postcode system. In July 2015 all 2.2 million residential and business addresses in Ireland received a letter notifying them of the new Eircode for their address.[4] Unlike other countries, where postcodes define clusters or groups of addresses, an Eircode identifies an individual address and shows exactly where it is located. The system was criticised...[5]
...for using an unsequenced code limited to postal addresses...[67][68]
In Belgium too. But it came from the habit of making the second and third name the name of the godparents, combined with so many women being named Maria. And yes, godparents are a Christian thing.
Do you have any good examples of tech that was immediately embraced without any prior examples or failures to monetize? I'm having trouble thinking of any.
DVD, then. Although that's sort of cheating since it's such a natural evolution from CDs -- it was clearly better than VHS and it didn't take any convincing for people to adopt them.
(you'll probably point to DIVX but that was an experiment with a terrible business model, not a technological failure)
The same link shows that a video was also put on his CD in the 70's!
> Their efforts led to a 20-minute video disc in 1973.
> In 1974 Digital Recording Corporation announced ... the first device to digitize a color image, at a Chicago trade show. The response from large potential investors was rather cool.
And, there's LaserDisc, of course (although analog, unlike the digital disk in the above), which was somewhat of a flop (the ridiculous dimensions being part of the cause).
Tangentially related, BlueRay was more about just waiting for a blue led to be invented, than some new disc tech! [1]
More and more, this has been weaponised: "No, we're not evil! We never intended for this to happen. It was just an accident" Is something I hear too often
reply