People here only wish it was like that with the smelters. The last smelter (and more significantly, its associated dam at Kárahnjúkar, the largest in Europe) drove people mad. Approval was rushed through without much public discussion, an environmental impact statement (which proved completely inaccurate, as in "the largest lake in eastern Iceland completely changed color" inaccurate) was approved with little review, and construction (the main source of jobs) was done with workers brought in on a temporary basis, mainly from Poland. Most of the people working there now (much smaller than the construction times) are also immigrants**. Honestly, it was so egregious that I think it helped galvanize people here to pay more attention and resist things like that more.

Interesting to see your insights on construction. :) Thanks!

** -- Not that I have much ground to stand on in regards to that objection, as I myself immigrated to Iceland... although because I love the place, not because I make more money here (just the opposite).

Fertilizer production isn't big up here. I don't know why. It's aluminum, and to a lesser extent, ferrosilicon, and there's lots of datacenter plans, too. And actually, the smelters aren't that big of employers. Aluminum is almost as much of our exports as fish, but it's a much smaller chunk of the employment picture.

I think it's a strange notion that on one hand, it seems that you're saying that the cable is going to take a ton of maintenance, but on the other, that there won't be many maintenance jobs. Which is it? This isn't my field, so I'm simply asking you, but it clearly can't be both ways! :) Or, I hope you're not trying to say that Icelanders aren't skilled enough to maintain a cable... And also in the jobs picture on our side is the power exploration, development, and production, which is no small factor.

I think you're overplaying losses. I read a thing from Seimens before which quoted the losses on one HVDC system they were working on at 3% per 1000km (I don't know the details like voltage, conductor thickness, etc). Reykjavík to London is under 1900km. Even if you double the losses from that figure, you're still not talking about that huge of losses.

Concerning your comment about electrical power transmission being more mature... actually I know enough about this field to register a strong disagreement. The surge in HVDC transmission is specifically due to the rapid advance of increasingly affordable, increasingly high power switching electronics in recent years (which has also fuelled a boom in increasingly small, increasingly high power AC induction motors, which is what made vehicles like the Tesla Roadster possible). This advance is, of course, a huge boon not just to long distance power transmission in general, but also specifically to undersea cables, since AC losses on a cable in saltwater are huge.

Sorry for the "press puff pieces", it was just a quick google search to get you some breadcrumbs so you could see that this is actually being seriously discussed, including official visits between government officials.

Again, though, the difficulty of constructing and maintaining such a cable? Not my field. It seems strange, though, that it would be considered so much more difficult than undersea data cables, given that all of the problems you quoted apply to them as well (scouring, currents, shifting, depth, weather, etc). And we've got several already running to Iceland. I mean, you're dealing with a much fatter line for power, but I'd think that would only help, not hurt. Could you elaborate on why power cables are so much more difficult?

Who decided that?

Mother nature, unfortunately. Men can father kids at virtually any time, but as a woman if we don't have the first kid by the time we're 30 we're behind the genetic curve. After 30 it gets much harder to have kids, and by 35 it's an invitation for birth defects.

Of course if you don't want kids you don't have to settle down quite so soon, but for health purposes you should make a decision fairly early. Otherwise it's IVF and praying that your kid comes out okay.

This just in: having someone collect facts, check them, and then present them takes time and money. Free news was never sustainable, it's just that until recently it wasn't attainable. News will always have a price, be it paying for your paper or having someone else pay for it by inserting ads. Unfortunately advertisers are discovering that online advertising doesn't work, so we'll probably have to settle on the former.

Regulators should have never allowed the Hitachi acquisition to happen. The HDD industry was already over consolidated.

Hitachi wanted out. There was going to be three HD manufacturers regardless. The difference was whether the company was sold for some value to another HD manufacturer, or effectively dismantled and sold piecemeal for pennies. This wasn't the case of a large HD manufacturer purposely trying to buy out another to reduce competition, it was low margins picking off the weakest of the bunch.

I think you misunderstand me. I'm not saying men should settle down for sex, I'm saying sex is why men settle down. They have sex with a regular partner and over time develop long term bonds with that person, and that's why they settle down. But if men don't need sex, then they have very little reason to interact with women and eventually settle down.

Using sex to get what you want is not what I meant, and I completely agree with you that it's the wrong way to operate in a relationship.

Agreed. It's not the end of the world by any means, but as is often the case there's some truth in the middle, particularly for porn.

Futurama's Don't Date Robots gag wasn't entirely wrong. At the risk of reducing my gender to an object here, the impetus for men to enter into stable monogamist relationships with women is the companionship of and sex with a woman. Over time stronger long term emotional bonds develop, but in the short term the hook is what we can do to satisfy the seemingly bottomless well of male lust.

Porn changes that. I would like to think sex with a good woman is still better than doing it as a solo activity, but at the same time I know I can't compete with porn from a variety perspective (I can't be blonde, brunette, 18, a MILF, and asian all at the same time). And to be clear I do like a good (or dirty?) porno now and then myself - it's something I enjoy sharing with my fiancee - but it's something we can do together that strengthens our bond. I know he's also wanking it on the side (what man doesn't?) but at no point do I feel like he's avoiding the opportunity to have sex with me, in spite of the ups and downs of a relationship. But can a guy still have some kind sexual gratification without actually interacting with a woman? With the incredible amount of porn available these days (and increasingly complex toys), absolutely. And that's the issue.

At least from my perspective it's something that has already changed relationship dynamics. I've been fortune to meet a wonderful man that is my fiancee, but for many of my friends they have not been so lucky. We are all at an age where we should be settling down and forming those long term commitments, and while my friends are ready, the men they should be forming those commitments with are not. It's not that the men aren't there financially or even emotionally, but from the perspective of someone entering into one of those relationship, so many of the men simply don't see the need for a woman. They go do things together as guys while rarely interacting with the girls, and apparently that's all they ever need. And I absolutely think porn plays a part in that because their sexual needs are being met elsewhere.

Is porn bad? No, clearly not. But there is such a thing as too much of a good thing, and I believe we've reached that point. As things stand we're going to end up with a lot of awkward middle-agers in a couple of decades, who will have never formed a long term relationship either because they shortchanged the original impetus to do so (men), or because there were no partners for them (women).

TL;DR: Porn not all bad, but too much porn means men never settle down with women because they don't need sex.

WD20EARS has been discontinued, which is why it's so expensive. Its replacement is the next generation WD20EARX.

Am I the only one who saw the comment about space pirates and thought, "awesome!"?

Residential power here in Iceland is 6-7 US cents per kilowatt hour, so I can only imagine that industrial-scale power is even cheaper. We're really sitting on more power production potential than we know what to do with, it's almost ridiculous. I mean, hot water goes to 90% of houses and people waste it like crazy, there's huge heated pools, etc... and a quarter of this hot water comes just from downtown alone, little sheds mixed in with the buildings. In Öskjuhlíð they drilled a 90 meter pipe into the ground, put a choke in the top, a water drip... and it's now an artificial geyser. Heat is just everywhere. 1/3rd of the lava on the planet in the past 500 years has come from Iceland. Traditionally, we've "exported" this power by making stuff here with it, like aluminum (importing all the inputs and exporting the metal). There are three smelters in the country, and even the smallest uses more power than all the homes and businesses combined. But we're still only using about 20% of our conventional high temperature geo (not counting using magma as an input, which was recently shown to be feasable at Krafla, not counting EGS, etc - and geo exploration has been quite minimal due to there being so much available already), virtually none of our low temperature geo (2/3rds of the country's primary energy is geothermal waters at 100-150C, and the target distribution temperature is 80C, but it just gets mixed with cold to bring it down that low), about 15% of our hydro, essentially none of our huge wind (makes the midwestern US look tame, but there's only one turbine in the entire country), tides (also quite large), etc. This country has just huge amounts of generation potential but nothing to use it on.

I'm sure you know more about the difficulties involved than I. But it's a very serious subject that's been discussed for decades, and now seems to finally be making some headway. There's even a conference going on right now about it.

Now, that's not to say that it's not without controversy on this side. Namely, because people here love having massive amounts of unspoiled wilderness, and up here, even geothermal is controversial just because you have to build roads and lines into it. And people also worry about our cheap electricity getting more expensive if we start selling to the UK.