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Why do you say so?

Watt-hours and joules are the same thing, and you are indeed technically correct, but you'll get funny looks if you ask to buy an 18MJ BESS for your home...

This argument is always held up as an argument for bitcoin. I swear it's sometimes the only one that bitcoin proponents can think of!

Other than drugs and mullvad, what else are you buying?

The thing about tortured analogies is that when a camel stubs its toe in the desert it's liable to start speaking french.

All it takes is one modest upward blip and it's price will "crash" to the moon. There is very little interest now, but FOMO is real and the moment it does something interesting many defenerate gamlblers will reconsider their disinterest.

Solar installation capacity is measured in watts, not watt-hours. So the unit you should he using here is GW, not GWh.

Pushes glasses up nose well actually, we should use GWp, but that's not really a unit and good ol' watts should suffice.

No it doesn't, because the price is the same. If the Apple Pay route was 30% expensiver, then I reckon most would not opt for that option.

This is a good argument for local brick and mortar representation for the critical services we consume. My bank, mobile and fibre providers all have branches/offices/shops in the town closest to where I live (15km drive).

At each of these locations there is one or more necks that can be wrung if something goes wrong with my services

I know it's not really a solution for your nocturnal proclivities, but I think the argument holds. If you had to sacrifice a couple of your sleeping hours but you know you can sort your problem, then you migt be inclined to do so?

Europe gets one, under the eiffel tower.

Wow, you are right. There is a new movie out. I did not know until just now, and now that I know, I don't care.

I grew up during the prequel trilogy, I dressed up for the premiere of TFA.

What a sad state of affairs :(

"just"

Pre google ban huawei phones were incredible. 2-day batteries, great screens, fantastic cameras and an awesome price. I had a Samsung after my last huawei and it felt like a solid downgrade, even though the samsung was way more expensive.

FYI, if you are looking for a post google huawei, check out honor phones.

You realize that mirrors can also have a wider fov by making them concave, right?

Heh, took me about a year after moving from SA to Ireland to get them to leave me alone about my tv license.

Here they have a tv license as well, but so far I've sidestepped it because I shipped my TV over, but one day I'll probably need to pay for one again. Only problem is now its something like 250 euro, not Ront, so it's a lot more pricey!

> making starship out of steel

The whole reason for this was because of SS's supposed strength under the heat of reentry. Yet they now need to cover the whole thing in thermal insulating tiles. So I wonder if a composite Starship would not have been a better decision?

Apparently?!

> because then people would use it plugged in all the time.

So people want to use the mouse while plugged in, and Apple designs a product that limits that...

Talk about hubris.

I posit that a mouse that needs to be on its back to be charged, thus rendering it completely useless during that time, to be much much much worse than a round mouse with no immediate indication which way is forward...

I see, that is different indeed, and rather silly to force you to apply from abroad!

Seems like it's a ploy to get all the undesirables out of the country, then it's "oops your application was denied, or it takes years to be approved, you can't come back. Sorry not sorry!"

Presumably because they are spending their money prosecuting people complaining about bad water.

Money does not grow on trees, you know!

Simila in Ireland: you are not allowed to seek work while in Ireland on a holiday visa, you can only apply for work permissions/visas from outside the country, and depending on the type of visa you get (general work vs critical skills), your spouse might have to wait a year before they can join you.

I think you and I are coming to the same conclusion. It's totally viable to have 20kw of compute in a satellite in space. Hell, you can probably get away with 100kW or more with some sort of megasatellite.

I'm pretty sure we'll see this within the next 5 years.

But deploying a megawatt scale DC in space? And then doing that multiple times a year?? I can't see how this is the only solution to this problem. I can't see how that will be the de-facto way of deploying DCs. Not for the next 100 years or more.

Plop these satellites on a massive barge in the middle of the ocean with 2x the solar and battery capacity to (to account for day/night cycles) and you have exactly the same solution, only it's multiple orders of magnitude easier to "launch", service and you can actually recycle the deprecated hardware. It will also solve the cooling problem that's associated with space.

The fact that elon's colossus data centre needs to burn jet fuel on site for power tells you everything you need to know about the viability of a solar powered space based solution.

Merci, the hint about youtube set me on the right path.

The starlink satellites have hall effect thrusters, and presumably beefy laser and radio comms systems that will account for a lot of the energy budget. Also, they are sometimes in the earth's shadow, a naive calculation says they have 2x the solar budget they need, in order to charge up batteries for shade-time operations. There is no where near 20kw of compute in a single satellite, and thus no where near 20kw of heat to get rid of.

Furthermore, xAI's colossus supercomputer is specced at 250MW. And this seems to be a number that'll just increase over the coming years with new bigger DCs.

To match this level of performance they will have to launch what, ~15k satellites _per_ equivalent datacentre?

Regarding cooling: you can't just cover the outer surface with pipes. You cant't dissipate the heat, you need to _radiate_ it away. You need to point that surface to the deep dark cold of space. If you point it to the sun, you will heat your satellite. Think a massive "reverse solar panel" that works with infrared. You need surface area, and loads of it.

I'm not saying this is impossible. Obviously elon will prove us all wrong because he's stubborn like that. But there is no way this will ever be economically viable when competing with terrestrial based systems.

How does France pronounce it?

At some point a massive landfill will become more economically viable to mine for rare or useful elements than an actual mine. There is a good case for piling rubbish into to a well-managed landfill for future generations to mine with better technologies.

Also, burning plastic waste in a power plant at least liberates the energy for use. One can argue it's just fossil fuels that spent time doing something useful before it became energy.

Taking rare elements to space only for it to stay up there or burn up in the atmosphere removes it from this whole equation.

Latency

Thanks for you metric conversions. Very considerate of you!

Just an fyi, precipitation is usually measured in mm. There is no need for the decimal point in your conversions.