Texirish, Thanks for this in­for­ma­tion. I am an old man now and when con­tem­plat­ing sit­u­a­tions like this am thrust back to my early years work­ing for a For­tune 500 man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pany with in­ter­na­tional brands. The rapid rise of in­fla­tion in the 1970s and 1980s and the en­ergy shocks dur­ing those years forced our man­u­fac­tur­ing plants to be­come nim­bler at adapt­ing to a chang­ing world.
  It was also dur­ing those years I earned an MBA in the evenings. This meant at­tend­ing lec­tures and eval­u­at­ing dozens of case his­to­ries. A few years later in 1986 when watch­ing the movie "Back to School" the part where the pro­fes­sor was lec­tur­ing about wid­gets and Thorn­ton Mel­lon kept re­spond­ing with real life push­backs, im­me­di­ately sug­gested how cus­tomer be­hav­ior does not change until con­fronted with the equiv­a­lent of a brick wall. When water short­ages, and/or the in­creas­ing cost of water, en­ergy short­ages, and/or the in­creas­ing cost of en­ergy be­come brick walls in their path, the AI com­pa­nies will find novel ways to pivot to water re­cy­cling, lower cost op­er­at­ing struc­tures and other adap­ta­tions.
  In my early start-up years, I was a one-man busi­ness sell­ing an en­ergy sav­ing prod­uct that usu­ally paid for it­self in re­duced elec­tric costs within 1.5 to 3.5 years. I’d put elec­tric me­ters on their elec­tric units or my home­made timer on their gas fired units to de­ter­mine their present en­ergy con­sump­tion and then would in­stall my equip­ment free of charge to de­ter­mine its en­ergy con­sump­tion in their fa­cil­ity. It turns out my MBA pro­fes­sors, like Pro­fes­sor Bar­bay in the movie, were wrong about human be­hav­ior. My pro­fes­sors drilled into us to al­ways jump on in­vest­ments re­turn­ing more than the cost of cap­i­tal. A two year pay-back is an an­nual 50% re­turn on cap­i­tal that keeps on pro­duc­ing year after year. Alas, while my prospec­tive cus­tomers were av­er­age to above av­er­age busi­ness­women and busi­ness­men, they could not get both­ered mak­ing small de­ci­sions that saved/made money for their busi­nesses.
  After es­sen­tially fail­ing at that busi­ness, we (my bride and I) came across an en­vi­ron­men­tal prod­uct that fit into a micro-niche en­abling a cus­tomer that was under the gun to meet local sewer dis­trict dis­charge re­quire­ments to bolt on this sys­tem and be granted their badly de­sired Cer­tifi­cate of Oc­cu­pancy by the local au­thor­ity hav­ing ju­ris­dic­tion.
  Why would a prod­uct that pays for it­self in two years not be bought and a prod­uct that no­body wants to be bought? The an­swer is the brick wall. Man­age­ment can put off doing any im­prove­ments while the over­all going is good. When a brick wall sud­denly shows up in their path, their focus moves to get­ting the brick wall out of the way.
  When brick walls start get­ting in the path, the AI com­pa­nies will im­ple­ment the adap­ta­tions. Until then, they will keep on keep­ing on with their present sta­tus quo busi­ness as usual path. One more thing, when I am con­sid­er­ing an in­vest­ment, ROE is the num­ber one item on the qual­i­fi­ca­tion check­list. The man­agers and own­ers en­coun­tered many years ago that did not ju­di­ciously take ad­van­tage of ways to re­duce op­er­at­ing costs and costs of goods sold opened my eyes to the rel­a­tive scarcity of se­nior man­age­ment with those skills. War­ren Buffett’s re­quire­ment of bring­ing prof­its back to Omaha for re-deployment into high ROE op­por­tu­ni­ties, in my opin­ion, has been the se­cret sauce for Berkshire Hathaway’s out­stand­ing com­pound­ing jour­ney. Let’s face it, most man­agers are loathe to change the sta­tus quo and are al­ways look­ing to build a larger or­ga­ni­za­tion. Berkshire cir­cum­vents those ten­dences by starv­ing its sub­sidiary com­pa­nies of ex­cess cash (starv­ing = not hav­ing sur­plus money on hand to fret away in low re­turn or risky projects, etc.). This sweep­ing away of sur­plus prof­its keeps man­age­ment fo­cused on run­ning their busi­nesses much like blink­ers on a mule or horse keeps side dis­trac­tions from being seen in their field of vi­sion.
  Uwhar­rie