> If you sign up for electrical service for your house, and your shithead neighbor taps your line to power his array of grow lamps and crypto mining rigs, the power company will happily charge you thousands of dollars

Unlike cloud services, your electrical service has a literal circuit breaker. Got a regular three-phase 230V 25A hookup? You are limited to 17.25kW, no way around that. If that shithead neighbor tries to draw 50kW, the breaker will trip.

If it were the cloud, the power company would conveniently come by to upgrade your service instead. A residential home needing a dedicated 175MW high-voltage substation hookup? Sure, why not!

Water leaks, on the other hand, tend to be very noticeable. If a pipe bursts in the attic you'll end up with water literally dripping from the ceiling. It is very rare to end up with a water leak large enough to be expensive, yet small enough to go unnoticed. On the other hand, the cloud will happily let your usage skyrocket - without even bothering to send you an email.

There are plenty of compute service providers working with a fixed cap, a pre-pay system, or usage alerts. The fact that the big cloud providers don't is a deliberate choice: the goal is to make the user pay more than they wanted to.