The date was December 10, 2025. In Sydney and Melbourne, millions of teenagers woke up to a notification that would have been unthinkable just five years ago: Access Denied. Australia has officially become the first nation to pull the plug, enforcing a strict ban on social media for anyone under the age of 16. There are no "parental consent" loopholes. There are no grandfather clauses. If you are fifteen years and 364 days old, you are offline. This isn't just a local policy change; it is a...

Introduction: The Invisible Cost of Your Next Prompt It is 2025, and artificial intelligence is no longer just a buzzword—it is the operating system of our daily lives. From drafting legal contracts to diagnosing rare diseases, models like Gemini and GPT-5 have become indispensable. But as we marvel at the "genius" of these systems, a stark reality has emerged from the server farms powering them. For years, we worried about AI taking our jobs. We should have been worried about it...