In eurocents, my local power company (37 GW installed capacity) charges 3.83 ct/kWh, and they are highly profitable.

Of course, our power company is owned by the government, the rates are set by the government (at levels that are still very profitable), and all their power generation capacity is renewable with plants lasting for many decades (hydro). I realize that not everywhere has anything like the hydro capacity available, but nuclear plants can last similar amounts of time, and solar prices can be much lower than what power costs in Germany (perhaps why solar is becoming so popular there). Unsubsidized solar costs less than half those prices you're quoting for Germany.

Yes, because the idea of harnessing a supervolcano to build a 3900 mile long tornado-killing wall sounds so much more reasonable ;)

Yes. I bet you could get a sweet deal on that 3.4 trillion cubic feet of concrete, because any company would love to have your ten trillion dollar concrete contract.

No need to mention that the wall alone would require doubling the world production of concrete for 12 years just to produce enough...

Yeah, but he's talking about a wall that is about 3.4 trillion cubic feet of concrete. Doesn't matter what the purpose is, that's an insurmountably high cost. Some googling shows that concrete costs roughly $3 per cubic foot. So... you're looking at a bill of materials for this wall of about ten trillion dollars for concrete alone, before the cost of labour and equipment...

Nobody says "it's too expensive to build hydro plants" here, because all of our power is from hydro, and it's quite profitable for the government (who owns the power company)...

If the Hoover Dam would have cost $10 billion today, that would only serve to bump up my cost estimate by an order of magnitude. I don't think that there's much of a difference between a $15 trillion and $150 trillion public works project, both are effectively "infinity dollars".

One mile of this wall would seem to me to be like roughly five hoover dams. The hoover dam cost $750 million in today's dollars. So wouldn't one mile of this super-wall cost $3.75 billion, not $160 million?

On the other hand, building a concrete *anything* that is a thousand feet tall and 165 feet thick isn't easy. They're claiming that a one-mile stretch of the wall would cost $160 million, which comes out to 871.2 million cubic feet of concrete, or a cost per cubic foot (including labour and materials) of about $0.18. That sounds really unlikely to me.

Let me put it this way, the hoover dam is actually relatively similar to what we're talking about here. It's roughly 700 feet tall, varies from 45 to 600 feet thick, and is about a fifth of a mile wide... So let's say that the cross section of the hoover dam has about the same area as this proposed wall.

OK, so now we just need the length of the wall. Well, the circumference of the American midwest is roughly 3900 miles (cutting through the great lakes, because what the hell). So basically, what we need to do, is build the equivalent of roughly 20,000 hoover dams.

The hoover dam cost the equivalent of about $750 million to build. I suspect it would cost a lot more today than pure inflation would account for (unions, health and safety standards, etc), but let's say that technological progress would counteract all that...

So, $750 million, times 20,000... and we come up with $15 trillion.

It's actually a team of just 4 working on No Man's Sky. The other 6 people are working on other things (not everybody at the company is working on this one game).

My ISP is an indie ISP. They used to charge $0.25 per gig, but then the incumbent carriers got the federal regulator to increase their tariffed costs to smaller ISPs by an order of magnitude (incumbents now get to charge indies up to $20/megabit/month for connecting to their networks), so it had to go up.

My ISP does still have overage caps (of $50) on their slower tiers (as in it's unlimited after that much overage), and they are trying various strategies to ease the pain on customers (I have a 300GB cap, but they don't count upload, and they don't count usage during off-peak, which they've defined as 2AM to 8AM).

But if I open up my wifi to the general public, I won't have the ability to manage my bandwidth, to shift my downloads off-peak to reduce my billable usage.

I've got a reasonably fast connection (50 megs down, 10 megs up), but I have a cap. My ISP charges $0.50 per gig overage, who is going to pay for that when strangers pump my monthly bill up?

Fine, but that doesn't change my basic point. Why bother with an auction that will necessarily get less than an open market?

I don't get it, why are they auctioning money? Why don't they just exchange them for USD? They will necessarily get less than the market value for them, because nobody would buy money for more than it's worth...

Parachutes won't slow down something that big slow enough for it to survive landing on dry land. They put parachutes on the early Falcon 9, it didn't survive even a water landing.

The shuttle's SRBs used parachutes and survived, but they also hit the ocean, and you can't land in the ocean and be rapidly reusable (need to refurbish after the saltwater damage).

You also have little to no control over a parachute landing (if you also want to land at a sufficiently slow speed), so instead of being able to land rather precisely on a small pad, you'd need an absolutely enormous potential landing area. So you'd pretty much have to land at sea, which as I said, makes rapid reusability impossible.

So you're telling me you want to go back to the days of slot-loading CPUs :P

The problem with stacking is the thermal/power situation. Specifically, how much power can a processor use before it's impractical to power and cool it? And when you have two or more processor dies stacked on top of eachother, the heatsink is only going to contact the topmost one. How do you remove that heat from the bottom one?

I suspect the answers to those questions are, it's not practical to use that much more power that we use in high-end desktop chips today (150-200W is probably the limit of practicality), and I recall some interesting stuff from IBM years ago where they were building vertical cooling channels into CPU dies to handle stacking, so that the heat could be moved from lower dies up to where it could be removed.

Perhaps the approach could be going with CPU designs that optimize for power consumption rather than performance (but still more efficient, consuming less power per unit of work), and then stack a bunch of them.