Where I work, electricity is 0,25ct/kWh and a specialist in IT or law costs 1.000,- EUR/d or more.

Assuming a server we're planning to shut down is rather old, they usually are, so it will probably fail on its own within 3 years, if not much sooner. It is not doing much anymore, so it's sitting at idle, drawing only idle loads. Assuming the idle load of an old server is 100W, how much specialist's time can we allocate to shutting it down?

100W * 8760 h/y * 5y = 2.628 kWh. This will cost us about 657,- EUR or much less if the server fails earlier. So electricity savings alone buy us 5,5 person hours for the specialists. What do we need: 2x1h for two IT guys to check what server are possibly unused, 2h for inquiries and talking to probable (ex-)users and the team that was once responsible for that particular project, 1h for the IT management and 1h for the legal team to give the go-ahead. Costs 750,- = 100,- EUR more than it will ever save.

We still save on cooling, right? Removing 1kWh of input (= heat) requires less than 1kWh for the cooling system. I am have no idea how efficient these things are, but a cheap electric heat pump for heating a small house has an efficiency factor of at least 3, so it moves 3kWh of heat for every 1kWh electricity consumed. Larger and more professional installations will probably be more efficient. So to remove 100W of heat, the cooling system consumes 30W more. So with less cooling, we save another ~200,- EUR over the course of 3 years, which isn't even enough to cover the costs to actually remove the server from the rack, reroute cabling, disassemble the case, destroy the hard drive and dispose of the rest. Costing 250,- EUR, that is 50,- EUR more than it will ever save.

The real savings are in the rack space, depending on the contract and the actual savings of HUs. Assume the price is 40,- EUR/HU/month and we have a 2 HU server. Over 3 years, this saves us 960,- EUR per year or 2.880,- EUR under the most ideal conditions imaginable. (If you rent data center space by the rack, it's ZERO savings, since you're saving nothing unless you get permission to clear out an entire rack, which is not going to happen until the servers burn out by themselves)

So you're Head of IT management for a minute: do you give the order to decommission the server, expending 1.000,- EUR and 1 day of your team today, risking angry users and maybe in one way or another violating a data retention obligation by an obscure law or contract that we just forgot about to save maybe 1.300,- EUR per year or less for the next 3 years or shorter? I wouldn't. I would rather allocate my team and resources on a) making absolutely sure our accounting system keeps running perfectly, since every day of outage there would cost us more than 20.000 EUR in interest and b) that big project X has all the resources it needs to finish on time so the 10 expensive consultants working on it cannot bill more hours and upper management does not need to find a person responsible for that.

I think the idea is that those drivers will be less likely to work that morning/afternoon when there is a high prices night up ahead. Of course the means there are limited drivers on the lower priced afternoons, but it should work out as time goes on with more and more drivers signing up.

Yep, you will see buses replaced by much smaller autonomous vans. At first you may even have the same old routes, but that's fine because you can a larger fleet of vans, imagine a van coming every 5 minutes instead of a bus coming every 30 minutes. Later the routes will get more auto customizable. You'll likely save money by walking to the nearest major road because navigating the small neighborhood suburban streets is very time consuming,
In general some type of autonomous pod would be cheaper in the long run than having to share a bus. Maybe pods that join up together on major roads and act like a bus for fuel efficiency.

What all these articles about appliance waste ignore is the fact that if you use electric heat, your Xbox waste heat is just as efficient as any other electric heater (ignoring heat pumps). If its cold outside, running your xbox 24/7 as long as the heat is in a necessary area isn't being wasted.

Never ever underestimate the speed and efficiency of China's construction abilities. They complete a handful of skyscrapers before most other nations have finished designing just one; remodel entire cities, build insanely large dams and dozens of nuclear power plants without any noticeable drop in GDP at all.

Not to mention that they own most of the world's high tech manufacturing plants.

As a side note, I would not recommend placing any long-term investments in Taiwan.

Aircraft carriers were key to defeating German and Japanese navies, which were more than peer-level opponents of the US in 1942. Their battleships were unable to do anything and by the end of the war, their subs were just easy targets for US aircraft.

Pummeling minor powers would be done best by decapitation strikes and if that doesn't work, saturation bombardment. The B52 fleet can do both extremely well now and had their service life and fighting role extended far beyond the wildest expectation of any of its designers because of that. And B52's can't easily operate from carriers.

Drones can start from carriers however and we will see how the drone war works out in the next few years.

A few LiveLeak videos of collateral damage later and accurate missiles are back in fashion for double the price or more.

The general public has all but dissolved the notion of "the enemy" and sees just the few of them that have actual weapons in their hands and ready to fire to even be remotely acceptable to fire at. The public only wants these few actual combatants and militants surgically removed from the other side, while the rest of their population is seen as sweet little innocent angels that would never harm anyone and were just praying for a miracle liberation thanks to Raytheon and General Dynamics.

People are truly believing that fighting will cease the moment that all currently-armed militants drop dead. That the general population of the enemy provides an indefinite supply of militants and will never change unless forced to, will boggle their minds.

That's why no Western power has won any wars in the last decades. They are winning battles left and right, toppled dictators, killed bad guys, built schools and bridges, thwarted endless terrorist plots, sacrificed scores of people and the best young men, but accomplished nothing in the long run.

Maybe we should bring the battleships back. Maybe area bombing works. At least people of Tokio or Dresden believe in democracy and freedom now.

Artillery is going to produce collateral damage. People with mobile phones will film all the gory details and upload it everywhere. The general public and the American public do not like collateral damage and gory details of that school that was hit instead of the ammo depot and training camp of the enemy. Public opinion wins wars today, with ammunition in a far distant second place.

Firebombing, city-leveling area bombardment will never be acceptable again to a public that currently imagines soldiers to always be well-equipped, omniscient and omnipotent superheroes that only kill the bad guys, with minimal damage and in the cleanest possible way.

The cost of munitions (and training of individual soldiers) has become irrelevant, because a single error can lose a war. The accuracy required from warfare by the general public is now at ridiculous levels, with associated costs per shot and can only be described as utterly insane.

So, unless all shells are GPS-guided with the same or better precision than current missiles, battleships aren't making a comeback. And when they are as accurate, they are as expensive and still only have a fraction of the range.

One could always try to work for a plumber to learn the trade. Many tasks done by a plumber are unpleasant, but don't require years of training. Maybe they'd accept someone to help them doing the easy or dirty tasks (that they can still bill the customer for) so they can only work on the clean or hard parts, like welding pipes, making threads and waterproofing fittings.

Anyone who can watch YouTube for a few hours a week can learn to change valves, connect a faucet or sink. Declogging sinks and toilets is even easier, and there's still customers who will pay someone else to do it.

YouTube is today's community college. Declogging toilets, installing SAT tv, repairing fans in a computer or changing oil on the car. Everyone has at least some aptitude in something and with some time can learn at least enough to be a slight help for an established small business or craftsman. But yeah, you can keep using it to watch cat videos all day and claim The Man is keeping you down.

The horrors of the free market, where call center employees are accepting a wage of $9.25 out of their own free choice instead of learning how to be a plumber where they could earn 22 or 40 per hour.

Apparently, dealing with customer's shit on the phone for $9.25 has about the same appeal to the general population than dealing with actual customer's shit on their toilets for $22-40.

I suggest a law for lowering income of the plumber, that greedy capitalist pig.

I get that the cop can easily verify it, all he needs is your ID number and he can look you up. So there really is no need to hand him anything. But I don't see how one would make this app secure or usable as a form of ID for buying alcohol or getting entry into bar.

One advantage is orbital construction. Aside from some rare metals, its probably best to use Asteroid material to construct space vehicles and fuel. The expense of bringing materials from the ground up to orbit is $10,000 per pound or so.

You have no idea about how big the vastness of space is. The chance of them colliding is like the chance of two bullets being fired in a high arc across New York city, and them colliding. Sure that chance happens once per orbit, but its simply not going to happen especially as they both will eventually establish stable orbits that simply will never cross.

If you have a small enough town with a small enough cell size, it should be blindingly obvious which handset IMSI numbers where usually in the area when a crime was committed.

With enough data, you can simply map out the handset IMSI of the most probable perpetrators. There were 5 instances of a street robbery, at night, and the only common denominator is IMSI xyz that has been in the vicinity and moving around the time of all 5 robberies. It either is a totally unlucky individual or the most likely suspect.

Follow that IMSI with a drone for a few nights, record evidence and then lock these people away.

Note that I don't mind any and all police activity directed against common street thugs, as long as they have reliable evidence against them. (not dealers, not pimps, not smugglers, maybe not even thieves - but violent criminals that assault and rob innocent people or even invade their homes deserve absolutely no mercy.)

We know that people that commit crimes are much more often from certain social and cultural backgrounds. There are untold numbers of "anecdotal evidence" around, but we don't want that to be true. So we tell ourselves white lies, blame victims, discount hundreds of incidents as "anecdotal evidence", pinpoint the few cases outside the norm and fabricate elaborate excuses about why such and such were practically forced to commit crime. We are constantly telling ourselves how we are to blame for not paying enough welfare, not enough education, not giving enough leeway while conveniently ignoring millions of people of other social and cultural backgrounds that simply don't commit any more crime than everyone else, being good people despite being poor and uneducated.

Choices of cellphone contracts and handset make and models are similar along cultural and social bonds. An algorithm will never know about that but detect the significance.

But anyway, even among the groups with the highest part in crime, only a few select individuals are responsible for a large percentage of crime.

Algorithms will find that when IMSI xyz is in the general area, people will get robbed. It will also find that when expensive handsets with IMSI abc where in the area when a phone robbery happened, they will probably be around the next crime area as well, since the thief will either have it now or sold it to a pawn shop in the high crime area.