Caveman_Coder

> "Data centers are ridiculously efficient. The latest generation of data centers from the big cloud providers have PUE in 1.07 territory, which would've seemed like pie-in-the-sky ludicrousness even 10 years ago. Every CPU cycle that's done in a data center instead of on someone's client machine or on-prem server is a decrease in power consumption."

Those PUE statistics are self reported and aren't very accurate. I've seen them done and they are more marketing/PR fluff than actual conditions of energy conversion efficiency. Nobody in the actual field treats them as being accurate.

Can confirm...when I was living in AZ the main argument against net metering is that the Utility company would suffer...nevermind the fact that solar users would benefit, the state legislators and ACC (Arizona Corporation Commission) always sides with the utility company.

TLDR:

"Google has been spending tens of billions of dollars annually in recent years to expand its global cloud data center footprint. It’s also been adding enterprise-specific capabilities to the cloud platform – things like the recently launched managed Postgres (Google Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL), a service that takes the burden of managing infrastructure underneath the popular enterprise database management system off customers’ hands...

To close the support gap between itself and the market leaders, Google has introduced things like its Customer Reliability Engineer program – a high-tier service for customers running critical customer-facing applications in production and at scale on Google’s cloud. Customers that use this service get assigned Google engineers, referred to as CREs, who help them recover when things go wrong. 'If they go down, we’re going to get paged,' Ward says about the program. 'Google engineers will get on the horn.'"

The defense industry, weapons manufacturers, and, by extension, the congressmen and congresswomen they own certainly do...

It isn't that tall of an order and the Navy certainly has talented and capable individuals that can execute a conversion...it has a pretty large talent pool to draw from...just because the "surface fleet" hasn't done it before, it doesn't mean they couldn't ever do it.

Of course it requires more than experienced personnel, but the person I was responding to made it sound like the Navy doesn't have people with the experience to run such a program which is what I was arguing against...the Navy has many personnel experienced with nuclear weapon system maintenance, operation, program management, etc. from which they can draw from...

Mods on existing ships has been done before...logistics/legal/security for boats with nuclear weapons are already well established and these converted ships would probably have to be either relocated to where the SSBNs reside or new facilities would be built that mirror the SSBN bases...in any case, I don't see it as being "impossible" to accomplish.

How hard would it be to get a couple of Senior MTs and SSBN weapons officers to go to those surface ships? Then they'd at least have personnel experienced in handling nuclear weapons.

Simple...disrupt the electric grid, that'll definitely create some chaos

I had this happen when I was obtaining my degree a couple of years ago. I forget the issue exactly, but I had this homework problem that I was able to solve using Python docs but what was happening underneath wasn't really "clicking" in my brain. So I posted the problem I solved, my solution, along with my actual question about the underlying issue. I got a lot of "did you check the documentation?" and "is this for HW?"...sadly my question was closed and I never got an answer.

I like your list, very funny!

I recently moved to Washington (eastern side) and out here it is more about what you can do yourself...do you own a excavator? did you build your own house? do you homestead? how much of your food do you produce yourself? can you rebuild your truck/tractor? etc.

> "...learn survivalist skills (how to make a fire, make a shelter, grow food, treat disease, make medicine, etc.)"

These used to just be "normal" skills that people knew...funny how things have changed.

I'd imagine that the lead time on getting the substation equipment is probably the longest for all of equipment inside a DC. Chillers, UPSs, generators, and breakers are probably not in as high demand or take as long to manufacture as a MV XFMR.

> "why it should be interrupted by a constant treadmill on recruiter's rat race?"

Isn't this self imposed if you are the one applying for the job??? I don't get it, if some rando recruiter emails me a Hacker Rank test, I delete the email if I'm not interested...pretty simple. If I am interested, then I apply and that is no longer an "interruption"...or at least it is self imposed so there is no real reason to complain.

> "...the next 110kV transformer being at capacity"

They will mostly likely work with the local utility to build an entire substation for the DC, so they won't have to deal with sharing capacity on an existing sub's XFMR.

Same goes for Google and Amazon. I'm sure each of these companies may lease out space from another colo for their edge computing needs, but the are primarily using DCs they built, own, operate, and staff.

More likely it is watching Netflix and reading HN...let's not pretend we're all out there saving the world and volunteering our free time for selfless causes...

> "...working on something benefiting humanity..."

I think you forgot to add the "/s" to this statement.

The company I work for uses it for all of their customer billing, and when I was first doing my orientation I met another new hire that was joining the mainframe team, and from what he described, it is the same for most COBOL programs in most industries...legacy stuff that will continue to run for years

Didn't that exact scenario happen at like Berkeley? I thought Ann Coulter or someone what prevented from speaking...maybe it was someone else

What do think about the other content in the report?

I posted my experience with this on HN before...it was very disheartening: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=16396441&goto=threads%...

I don't think this would need to be codified...There seems to be too much of that going already

Plus, the TSO/Dispatcher role is a lot less bureaucratic than being an RO/SRO. I think most current RO/SROs would enjoy the job immensely more. You still get to operate a pretty large, intricate, and intellectually interesting system but without all the fuss of dealing with the NRC.

> "It seems like that minor inconvenience is worth the net benefit to the community, from which your wife benefits"

You'd be hard pressed winning her over with those arguments in all honesty

> "...for example, by being legally protected against sexual discrimination in the workplace"

Sexual discrimination in the workplace protections aren't the result of the work done by groups previously mentioned...

I think that is a fair point. Our group is relatively homogeneous in our interest in HAM radio (and there aren't that many of us), so when we find others that share the same interest, perhaps we're more likely to overlook any political/religious/racial differences...

> "Can you point me to an example of "discord" brought about by better rules of conduct? Or to this funding that you mention?"

Only my wife's anecdotal experience...she was a full-time software developer and the companies she worked for routinely tried to use her as an example in their "we support women in tech" PR. She hated it and said it felt degrading. Also, there were various "women in tech" groups that reached out to her, based on some of her open source work, for conference speaking engagements/panels/writing/etc, and they were pushy about it. When she was showing the groups to me, they were all operating off of donations from various Fortune 500 companies. The "discord" is that a lot of these "women in tech" groups, advocated in some cases by women who aren't even doing anything tech related, castigated my wife, on two various instances, for not wanting to participate. My wife didn't want to be a pawn for some corporate PR or for some "women in tech" group...she just wanted to engineer things in peace.

I wonder why tech communities need their CoC...

I'm a member of a local HAM radio group and we don't have any CoC and we don't have any issues at all. The male/female makeup is about 70/30 and there are people of various political/religious viewpoints, but I haven't once seen any issues over these differences. I've seen leftists amicably talk and work with conservatives because when we meet as a group it is all about HAM radio, nothing else. I'm not sure why tech communities have all these problems to be honest...it seems like there are groups that purposefully want to stir up discord because they make money (get funding) if there are issues...

> "My concern with reactor operators is that it's a dying industry due to the challenges in getting a commercial reactor permitted and constructed, along with the costs of renewables driving nuclear out of commercial viability."

When nuclear power plants shut down, the ROs/SROs will not be too hard pressed to find new opportunities. The renewable energy plants that are replacing nuclear will still need to have their control rooms staffed, and operators will simply move into new roles with those utilities, or they'll get out of the generation business altogether and find a cushy transmission/distribution operator role, which isn't really dependent on the political climate with regards to generation technology.

What you found for RO/SRO positions is pretty much spot on, and there are other "experience-in-lieu-of-degree" types of jobs that pay exceptionally well.

Regarding the naval experience aspect, the utilities that hire navy veterans look for certain qualifications obtained while in the navy (EWS for enlisted folks in lieu of a degree).

I think you hit the nail on the head here.

As an anecdotal example, I was hired as a software developer on a team of mostly electrical engineers, and our group develops software/supports the energy management system at a major utility company. Now when I was interviewing, what the team seemed to like the most was my background in actual electric utility operations (I was in the electrical trades for a long time before I figured out that I wanted to study CS). I was the only person on the team with actual operations experience.

My boss love it because I could go and talk with the operators, and speak "operator" with them. It made translating their requests into features/upgrades/updates a lot easier for our team, and our customer service improved as a result. By having that background in operations, which was different from the rest of my team, I was able to bring a different perspective, and most importantly, the perspective of our customers to our day to day work.