It’s got what plants crave.

Well the companies that have dead peasant insurance do assign some value: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate-owned_life_insurance?wprov=sfla1

In my area, fitness clubs closed as well

Where else would people be going to obtain baby formula and other necessities?

Yes, and conscription for defense is not the same thing as conscription for invasion and occupation.

Lincoln

“They’re watering crops with a sports drink?”

One example:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/threat-protection/security-policy-settings/maximum-tolerance-for-computer-clock-synchronization

Another use case: when you look at activities that flow across multiple devices and you’re correlating the sequence of events, having every device set to the exact same, ideally correct time makes correlation of events less confusing.

The investment firms are a big part of the problem, coupled with the fact that anyone who locked in a 30 year mortgage at rates between 2.5-3.0% really, really don’t want to sell and give up that rate.

Another option for very cheap VM, storage, bandwidth: Oracle Free Forever

https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/

Enom