Undocumented residents are pretty different from squirrels. They participate in the economy pretty similarly to documented residents. Consumption, transportation, jobs, housing, etc, and all the related taxation and resource utilization.
23 karma · joined May 9, 2025
You could do the long list of things you listed. Has anyone done a high-quality implementation of those things? And checked the results? I’d be interested in seeing that.
Data center facilities are ~$10k per kW
IT gear is like $20k-$50k per kW
Data center gear is good for 15-30 years. IT is like 2-6ish.
Would love to see updated numbers. Got any?
auto-detected my IPv4 addy, but my tracert to google.com went over IPv6.
I'm pretty skeptical about being able to geolocate router interfaces from IP addresses, so I was curious about the output. My expectations were low but they were too high. Oh well.
generally not great to be around a lot
energy is a time accelerator. You can do more, produce more, using energy.
all of our "wealth" is due to our application of energy. Maintaining and increasing wealth both require energy.
Some people look at the relationship between wealth and energy. And there's more than one way to look at it. I found this interesting for a really big picture perspective.
In the Kahneman hypothesis, humans are naturally parsimonious with our mental energy, preferring to use System 1. If we are writing a good essay, we are investing real System 2 effort. When we read someone else's writing, we get a free ride.
Difficulty and (lack of) motivation in your schema drives people towards System 1.
I agree that "obtuseness" is too reductive. There are copious examples of people who have had brilliant insights through the application of their System 2, who go on to embarrass themselves with shoddy System 1 thinking. Anyone can be obtuse - or not - it's just not a clear category.
That doesn't feel right to me.
In the most recent year with data, as a percentage of gdp:
party healthcare military
eu 10.95% 1.56%
usa 17.36% 3.45%
stark difference, but "the only reason eu has socialized healthcare is because of their low military spending" just doesn't reconcile in my mind to the above numbers
[source data](https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/euu/eur...)
Generally I think (this is highly subjective and irrational, of course) that I'd be comfortable with a 10%-20% return-on-capital overall. Lower than that and I'd think that risky drugs couldn't get funding; higher and I'd think there's too much rent-seeking.
Perhaps some economists have studied what an optimal ROC might be for pharmaceuticals.
In any case, the gross margin per-pill doesn't really tell you anything about ROC. 99.875% is astounding, but what was invested to get to that point - including the drugs that never made it to market?