A corollary of economies of scale is high opportunity cost for maintaining small organizations. Partly because of this, many institutions providing the benefits of small organizations have high costs of entry---sport/country clubs, boating groups, HOAs, social clubs, etc. The opportunity cost is real, and it must be paid.
This has made membership to small organizations unaffordable for some portions of society. Especially students, fresh graduates, and other young people in formative parts of their lives. The result is a disenfranchised youth with very weak ties to a disparate and diffuse set of communities, and often none of those communities are robust enough to supply the empathetic benefits mentioned by Tao in the post.
It seems like this trend is only increasing in the near term.
The downside is that price per unit will increase as minimum unit size goes down. You're essentially buying at a "retail" price whereas the monthly bundle is wholesale.
But the tradeoff would be worth it for sparsely used applications.
The article says you sell hydrochloric acid as a byproduct:
> [Heimdal] uses electricity to rearrange molecules in the water, removing acid. It can then sell the acid it removes, which ends up in the form of hydrochloric acid.
What are the other costs/revenue streams are hidden in here? Are there ways to capitalize the waste carbonate instead of depositing it back in the ocean?
