They have a saying in aviation that their rules are shaped by blood. The entire safety system in aviation was created as a result of this crash. The pilot successfully landed the plane in the ocean. But staff could not persuade most of the shocked passengers to undo their seatbelts and leave the plane. Rescuers arrived quickly and everyone onboard should have survived but did not.
In the early PC days back in the eighties the bible was PC Magazine. They had a number of really talented columnists but towering above all of them was John C. Dvorak. He wrote so well, he was at times opinionated and other times intensely funny. Whether you agreed with that weeks opinion or not you felt you were better for having read it and that is truly rare.
Then along came PC TV and he got introduced to an entirely new audience. He had a blog for awhile and then I lost track of him. Then he reentered my world when he started a SubStack, actually several. One I didn't read and that was where he pontificated on things political.
Then during COVID he touched a live wire on his political SubStack, detailed why he didn't get 'the shot' and why you should too. He also correctly called out the players and what was really going on with COVID. He discovered a third new audience and became an enemy of the administration at the same time. That people was one hell of a career. He will be missed.
Well, look I don't want to discuss such miserable topics about the man in this context; i'll look elsewhere for understanding
He was a contrarian when it came to tech; I thought he had terrible taste, little sense of what others saw in computation, and little empathy overall; but, he articulated himself well. He was a good writer and occasionally had good jokes. I'll miss him; RIP.
Thanks for the link. His decades of tech columns were so well-served by his skeptic curmudgeon style. There's danger in bringing that persona to all topics, I now see, shown by this regrettable chapter of his blogging life.
Sadly this worthwhile project is paused because the Trump administration has cut its funding. For less than a million dollars we could place names on soldiers who fought the revolutionary war. Our nation has been pretty good about using DNA to identify soldiers from the second world war on but not before.
I do not know what GHG means but isn't the overwhelming amount of France's electricity generated from nuclear power?
In Lansing's case as he mentioned the power is already being generated and sold to other utilities. If it powered local data centers instead it would generate high paying jobs and rather large tax revenues.
"Already being generated and sold to other utilities," i.e., "already bought and paid for by you rubes to do useful things like heat your home and run your refrigerator."
I'd love to import a couple of high paid weirdos from out of town to build a data center for a year and then jet off to some other poor community to do it all over again. At least a couple of the locals can work as janitors and night security at the empty, shrieking warehouse that they erect.
They built the power in hopes of attracting more industry. With Michigan's high taxes and aggressive unions the state isn't as desirable as other locations. Now they've succeeded in attracting data centers who want to use the power, bring both high paying jobs and tax money but they are turned away.
Travis makes a strong argument that the city that birthed Oldsmobile and REO Motors would probably reject those companies today if they wanted to build there.
Awesome, I hope they attract a better industry than this. Maybe something that builds useful things for the world, and not a shrieking blight of a warehouse, dependent entirely on the economic dead end of frontier AI. An industry that provides better jobs than the menial long term work opportunities provided by a 5 acre box full of single purpose RAM chips.
I'm from the Lansing Michigan area where there has been a big fight over four proposed data centers. Travis was a childhood friend of the founder and an executive at Liquid Web. He helped them build four data centers and even though he was head of marketing at the company he knows everything about the business.
I am saddened that the industry hasn't spoken out and let the opponents define the debate.
> I am saddened that the industry hasn't spoken out and let the opponents define the debate.
Insisting on NDAs with the municipal leadership involved in approving the deals was a choice by the industry. This created the opportunity for their opponents to set the narrative. This was not a surprising outcome to anyone, and no one is going to cry for the execs without sufficient sense to foresee this result.
I have run the local ColdFusion users development group for over 25 years. I have heard variations of this same conversation more than I can count. Sometimes there are good reasons to move, company got bought and doesn't want five percent of their code to run on a different platform. But a lot of times the new CTO only knows asp.NET or Java or PHP so he commits the organization to a multi-year transition when they can't take on new work.
I have written programs in Node, Ruby on Rails, Nuxt. Ported programs to PERL and PHP. I just happen to like coding in CFML and I do not judge someone having another preference.
I have had people say ColdFusion isn't modern. But when I dig a little bit I inevitably find out their understanding of the language dates to 98-99. Python and PHP have changed a great deal since then why wouldn't CFML have done so? Did you know for example there are two open-source versions of CFML?
I grew up in Detroit where the city Chestnut trees were everywhere. I remember as a young boy when they all got this disease and quickly died. Our entire family was sad one summer when the big Chestnut tree in our front yard was cut down. Has anyone under sixty ever tasted roasted chestnuts?
Northern Michigan was full of Chestnut trees and supported a large lumber industry. Now they were replaced by a spindly scrub pine that has little value. For that reason there are few jobs with those counties being lightly populated. I think if they could plant these news trees that in fifty or so years the state's lumber industry could return. But I do not know if the state's politicians would be bold enough to make that long an investment.
From my work experience, and having gone through my fair share of layoffs, that wasn't surprising at all. It is good to see at least some instances of companies capitalizing on newly released human intelligence in their already trained and onboarded workforce rather than just dumping it into the street.
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