rainsford

4 ms·

1.
by rainsford 6d ago
Rooftop solar in the US is incredibly expensive from most installers even as panel prices have come down and energy prices are typically low enough that the payoff time and up-front cost are seen as not worth it for many people. The US als
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by rainsford 6d ago
But the solar panels we already have don't suddenly stop working, which is an important difference between sourcing solar panels from a potential enemy and sourcing raw fossil fuels from one. There's also nothing stopping the US
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by rainsford 6d ago
You're not being pragmatic, you're being myopic. Our current energy systems are the result of deliberate complex work. It seems shortsighted to think it's somehow the only system that can ever be built just because other sy
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by rainsford 6d ago
That seems like a pretty bad example considering the rising popularity of EVs has coincided with an enormous grown in available charging infrastructure to service the EV customer base. It's almost like human society can handle complex
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by rainsford 17d ago
> That's is however also rather genius, because now the connection between X and "social media" is strengthened every time it's mentioned. If that was true we'd be getting closer to a point where you could mentio
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by rainsford 19d ago
I can't speak for everything the author has written about Tesla, but I don't see any intent stated or implied in this particular article. Instead it seems to mostly be accurately describing an action taken by Tesla that doesn&#x2
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by rainsford 20d ago
> going to go out on a limb here and guess that net-net, a datacenter provides more benefits to a broader spectrum of society than a golf course does. Is that true locally though? Having a golf course nearby your home is better than t
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by rainsford 23d ago
To be fair, there are an embarrassingly large number of places in the US where safely walking to a store a few hundred meters away would be very difficult at best.
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by rainsford 1mo ago
I don't remember any previous price increase this significant or sustained. Relevant to this thread, I don't ever remember major computer companies like Apple having to significantly jack up their prices because hardware costs ha
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by rainsford 1mo ago
I know it's at least a little irrational, but I am indescribably angry with the pricing trajectory of personal computing. I'm not all that young and for pretty much all my life the computers you as a random person could buy have
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by rainsford 2mo ago
One maybe non-obvious benefit I see in that from the individual Tailscale user perspective is that only having SSO rather than username/password keep the security of my login in the same bin as the larger customers where Tailscale make
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by rainsford 2mo ago
This seems like an entirely predictable outcome of data center builders and operators behaving like anti-social neighbors with noise just because no law prevented them from doing so. Building a data center near homes and running your incred
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by rainsford 2mo ago
There is a much stronger argument for why housing should be built near existing housing than for why data centers need to be built near existing housing. Housing NIMBYs are being unreasonable because if they got their way the only new hous
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by rainsford 2mo ago
The harder thing would be to explain why your species continues to get energy by burning things despite having multiple alternatives and that many people are deeply ideologically opposed to moving away from burning things. Or maybe not. Ma
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by rainsford 2mo ago
Does everyone there know they aren't running their own generators or are they legally prevented from ever doing so? I don't disagree people may dislike them for other reasons, but the horror stories around generator noise mean th
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by rainsford 2mo ago
The gas turbine thing really is justifiably killing the public perception of data centers since the obvious message is that even if your local data center isn't destroying your quality of life with incessant noise, it's only becau
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by rainsford 2mo ago
That article seems pretty ironic considering the Baltimore Sun is controlled by the head of Sinclair, a group pursuing (partisan) media consolidation.
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by rainsford 2mo ago
While the politicization of renewable energy isn't great, the interesting and positive thing to me is that it's entirely possible we're past the tipping point where the politics really matter. Republican politicians in the US
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by rainsford 2mo ago
Sure, but this particular issue isn't because we're hitting some plateau on computer cost or performance efficiency where instead of paying less money for more performance like we've gotten used to you're paying the same
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by rainsford 2mo ago
The fundamental problem is that almost any qualifiers you add that dictate voting rights gives those with voting rights a powerful incentive to run the country according to their own interests while ensuring those qualifiers continue to onl
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by rainsford 2mo ago
Like any engineering exercise, there are ideas within the bounds of reasonable debate and ideas that are so bad they should be immediately dismissed and those advocating for them excluded from further discussion until they can participate l
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by rainsford 2mo ago
Those aren't really two different arguments. Wanting housing to be a good investment is one of the reasons we have a supply problem because it incentivizes people to vote against allowing more housing to be built. But at the end of t
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by rainsford 2mo ago
It might be unsatisfyingly simplistic, but if prices are high in an area because a lot of people want to live there, building more housing seems like a fundamentally better approach than demanding everyone who wants to live in San Francisco
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by rainsford 2mo ago
I also feel like there has been very little discussion of a localized benefit of data centers compared to the negative impacts. As someone who uses AI and other services that need data centers, I certainly understand why they need to exist
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by rainsford 2mo ago
I can't speak for the person you're replying to, but data center growth wasn't massively exploding 20 years ago.
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by rainsford 2mo ago
At the very least they take limited land in a community that could instead be used for any number of different things. If they're not taxed, they provide essentially no benefit, economic or otherwise, to the community in which they&#x
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by rainsford 3mo ago
That seems too broad of an age range since you end up comparing 34 year old high school graduates to people with undergraduate degrees a decade earlier in their careers. Only looking at the first few years of a career for undergraduates has
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by rainsford 3mo ago
A significant difference in lifetime earnings doesn't necessarily imply a large jump in early career earnings. For example the difference in lifetime earnings could come entirely from significantly higher income later in a career that
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by rainsford 3mo ago
Unless I'm misunderstanding, that calculation sounds fundamentally wrong if it's comparing median college graduate earnings after 4 years against high school graduate earnings in general. After 4 years the median college graduate
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by rainsford 3mo ago
This is almost always the right answer to people who claim the government should be run like a business in a tone that suggests they believe they're the first person to ever have thoughts. Businesses and governments operate under wild

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