If you think NFLX is going to increase x%, then your total comp goes up accordingly. If you took straight cash, you'd only recognize those same gains if you had purchased NFLX with it.
Apple News+ helps there a lot. $13/mo for articles from a ton of paid outlets. It’s not everything on those sites, but I find that most of the popular articles are available.
Distributing the work across machines essentially comes for free with the ability to replay workflows from any step. You could run all of your worker processes on a single machine if it had enough capacity, but resuming a workflow on a different machine is transparent to your workloads assuming there's no local state.
Look at the reaction to Adobe's behavior when people terminate their yearly subscription early and are still required to pay for the entire contract. They're not selling Photoshop by month, it's installments on a yearly contract.
Why the focus on coal? California as a whole only sourced 3% of its energy from coal in 2021, and some regions were at 0%. It only made up 20% of the entire US' consumption in 2022