A better question is why a company is allowed to effectively lie using fraudulent false advertising in its marketing and brand image about being environmentally conscious and become the largest polluter in the country?
Is Amazon too broke to buy the necessary land to build out wind/solar/battery? I thought a company that name sponsored “Climate Pledge Arena” could afford to pay a little bit extra to care about the climate.
A wind/solar/battery solution is not even really much more expensive than gas power and it’s far less dependent on fluctuating fuel prices.
I'm absoltutely not defending the environmental decision, but these datacenter projects seem to be funded mostly by free cash flow (not borrowed money), from the hyperscaler profit margins.
I don’t think business really wants interest rates that high. Without conspiracy theories, a simpler explanation is that this is simply democracy in action. People don’t want the spending reigned in, and they don’t want their taxes raised.
I think in this thread it’s worth posting out that interest rates aren’t actually high historically. They’re pretty normal. They were just wildly low for around a decade or so.
If you look at a 30-year fixed mortgage chart, the <6% rate situation only existed between roughly 2008 and 2021. At no other time in the history of the 30-year fixed rate mortgage was it ever that low. Ever.
If I understand correctly, for speed of deployment they're building a less-efficient simple-cycle plant (instead of the typical combined-cycle). Even though it's larger, the efficiency is worse than a typical natural gas plant.
Natural gas is basically a waste product that gets flared off in many oil-producing parts of Texas. If this private power plant can use that gas for something productive then I guess at least we're no worse off. But it's not clear that is what is happening.
Which is nonsense. There's plenty of pollution that's been diluted as much as it possibly can be and is still problematic. CO2 is an obvious example. Or consider leaded gasoline or mercury. You have to be careful not to eat too much fish or you'll have trouble with the mercury in it. That's been diluted by the entire ocean and that didn't solve it.
also, i don't necessarily mean to endorse this worldview in terms of its potential impact on policy, though there may be some truth to it, technically speaking.
The quip doesn't say "dilution helps." It says "the solution to pollution is dilution." Dilution solves the problem. And not only that, but it's the solution, not merely a solution.
This is just not true, and you seem to agree with that.
Yes, CO2 is problematic because of the sheer volume. The sheer volume means that dilution does not solve the problem.
Leaded gas and mercury are a problem because of bio-concentration. Which means that dilution does not solve the problem.
A bigger unit is generally more efficient, but this is a single plant with a bunch of units, and I don't know that the individual units are any bigger than they would be elsewhere.
Back in the day, it wasn't just better snacks - Facebook served three meals a day, they had free drop-off laundry on campus, all the snacks in the world, and that barbecue shack on campus was legitimately decent.
Of course, you had to sell your soul in the process, but particularly for young, single folks just out of university, it was like moving to another better college campus, and if you took full advantage of the perks you could bank another 30-40k of your comp, easy
I came up with a color code based on the wiring: Red for Power Only, Blue for USB 2.0, Green for USB 3 (the ones with the extra pairs connected). I use paint pens to mark every cable I come across with this code. Generally speaking, only the Green ones have special PD emarker chips.
It doesn't cover every possible configuration, but it's good enough for when I'm like "I need a USB cable" vs "I need a good USB cable"
As much as the original author bemoans having to do the labeling themselves, 99% of people don't care or don't have such a mix of cables as to make it a challenge to find one to suit the task.
If you care, then care enough to do small, practical things for yourself. A little loop of tape. Paint marker. Even just sorting them into drawers/boxes/whatevers by type.
I think the issue isn't that it's this huge ordeal for a person to do, but that if billions of people have to do this then that's a fundamental design flaw that could have been avoided.
E markers are required for USB3, so that’s why. If you have a cable capable of 100 or 240W, they will also have a marker (it’s required), even if they only do USB2 speeds.
Jul 16 3:18 AM PDT We continue working to resolve the increased 5xx errors for CloudFront customers utilizing VPC Origins connectivity. Customers utilizing other origin types remain unaffected by this issue. Based on our investigation, we believe the root cause is related to a packet processing subsystem responsible for routing requests from CloudFront's edge locations to resources within customer VPCs. We continue to recommend that customers who are able to do so temporarily change their origin type to resolve the errors. We will provide another update by 4:15 AM PDT, or sooner if additional information becomes available.
They aren't actually shipping the new RP2350 silicon revision on Pico 2 boards yet. If you want the errata fixes, you've gotta source the chips and make your own boards.
I toured a sorting facility in Seattle recently. They said the only really profitable output is aluminum, everything else costs more than virgin material.
I worked at a plastic furniture manufacturer in Indiana for a few projects.
They got paid to accept bales of recycled "HDPE" that they could mix at between 10 and 30% into their virgin materials. They get paid to accept it! Negative profit for the waste management company, pure profit for the "user".
This worked best on black, coffee, slate grey, mahogany - you get the idea - the whites and tans and bright colors were basically pure virgin material (and their own internally-recycled offcuts of dyed virgin materials of matching colors) even though their FAQ states:
> What percentage of recycled materials are used?
> The percentage of recycled materials in our lumber can vary depending on the availability of post-consumer and post-industrial plastics. We continuously strive to maximize the use of recycled content in every piece of lumber.
Personally, I don't think that the fact that you started with pure virgin material, extruded some plastic, cut it up and used most of it, but put some of what was virgin material a few hours ago back into the grinder and extruder makes the resulting plastic "recycled".
It's 100% recycling, if the alternative was just "throw away the excess". For all practical purposes, recycling just means "repurposing material that you would have otherwise sent to a landfill".
My understanding is that glass gets downcycled into a lot of products like concrete or asphalt or aggregates. It's not profitable, but it's really easy to provide at a low loss.
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