Are you under the impression that there are no nuclear power plants in America?

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs...

Of the 54 nuclear power plants in America I can't think of a single one that caused a city to be evacuated for 10 years. Did I miss some news? Which cities have been evacuated for 10 years?

These nuclear power plants have been operating for a LOT longer than one quarter. Your claim is just entirely contrary to objective fact. There are 54 nuclear power plants that have been operating in the US for many quarters and exactly zero of them have resulted in a city being evacuated. It's not impossible, but it's also not impossible that an asteroid could hit the earth and wipe out all life. Your assessment of probability is out of sync with observed fact.

Sure, that means this story is false. Obviously coal use did not hit a record high in 2024. How could it have with solar, wind and batteries being so cheap? Why would anybody burn coal when there's a limitless supply of cheap solar, wind and battery power available?

Unless maybe solar, wind and battery are not limitless and need to be supplemented with something else. But I'm going to trust you. Climate change is a solved issue because there's enough solar, wind and battery power available to replace all other power generation and keep up with new demand and not only that, but it's cheaper too.

Right, but as I just said obeying a disallow directive isn't legally mandatory, so it doesn't mean much.

The difference depends on context, of course.

Generally speaking there are several cases to consider:

(1) Site requires agreeing on terms of service before browser can access content. In this case, scraping is a clear violation.

(2) Site terms of service forbid scraping content, but human visitors can view content and ...
(2a) site takes technical measures to exclude bots. In this case scraping is a no-no, but for a different reason: it violates the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
(2b) site takes no technical measures to exclude bots. In this case, the answer is unclear, and may depend on the specific jurisdiction (e.g. circuit court).

(3) Site has a robots.txt file and ...
(3a) robots.txt allows scraping. In this case, even if the terms of service forbid scraping, the permission given here helps the scraper's defense.
(3b) robots.txt forbids scraping. In this case obeying robots.txt isn't in itself legally mandatory, but it may affect your case if the site takes other anti-scraping measures.

Not *explicitly*. Offering such a database would be an invitation for people to look at the whole data broker industry. So what you, as a databroker who tracks and piegeonholes every human being who uses the Internet to a fare-the-well, do to tap into the market for lists of gullible yokels? You offer your customer, literally anyone with money, the ability to zero in on the gullible by choosing appropriate proxies.

For example, you can get a list of everyone who has searched for "purchasing real estate with no money down". Sad people who buy colloidal silver and herbal male enhancement products. People who buy terrible crypto assets like NFTs and memecoins. Nutters who spend a lot of time on conspiracy theory sites.

It's kind of like doxxing someone. You might not be able to find out directly that John Doe lives on Maple St and works for ACME services, but you can piece it together by the traces he leaves online. Only you do it to populations wholesale.

Only if during that hour those customers make the decision that they really didn't want what you were selling. If they buy it later today or tomorrow or next week, you didn't lose anything. If a container ship carrying your product across the ocean sank, that's a loss. The item you didn't sell during your e-commerce website outage is still in a warehouse waiting to be sold. When it sells, you'll collect the money that you didn't collect when your website was down.

And if the outage did allow them to realize that buying the item from you would have been a poor choice and a regrettable use of their money, that's probably a net benefit.

No money is lost just because a transaction doesn't take place. The seller still has whatever they were selling, the buyer still has the money they would have spent. If a delay allows the buyer to reassess and determine that their money is better spent on something else, then different sellers make sales they wouldn't have.

If billions were truly lost by some, most of those billions were gained by others. But I suspect that at the end of the week the net losses were negligible. The vast majority of money that would have been spent during the AWS outage probably was still spent. The vast majority of work that would have been done during the AWS outage probably still got done.

A few people were busier than usual, other people got a bit more time to slack off. But most of the people who slacked off, probably made up what they missed a bit later.

Are you claiming that people went hungry because of this AWS outage? I find that hard to believe. But even if some people did skip some unhealthy delivered meals, the money they would have spent is still in their pocket waiting to be spent on something else. You could just as well claim that billions were gained as a result of the AWS outage because people who couldn't order food delivered bought something later with the money they didn't spend on food delivery.

And I seriously doubt AWS or other companies spent any additional money fixing this outage that they wouldn't have spent otherwise. Some people had a busier day than expected, others had a less busy day waiting around and reading slashdot or other non-AWS-dependent entertainment of choice. But at the end of the week it is very unlikely that very many people accomplished less than they would have if the AWS outage hadn't happened.

Are you claiming that bakers couldn't bake without AWS? Or that people went hungry?

Even if a bakery did shut down due to an AWS outage, which I doubt, the people who would have bought the baked goods almost certainly bought something else. No money was lost, it was just spent somewhere else.

When things are destroyed value is lost. The broken window fallacy is a fallacy because the work that went into replacing a broken window could have gone into installing a window in a new location. Two windows is more than one, so replacing a broken window is a loss compared to installing a new window while still having the unbroken old window.

Shifting money from one place to another is not a loss.

If some companies lost billions due to a few hours of AWS outage, it's likely that other companies gained billions from customers who went elsewhere. But more likely, in most cases the customers just waited and spent the same money later.

Or, perhaps the customers just saved money. Maybe they would have spent money, but when the AWS outage prevented them from spending it they had a bit of time to think and realized that they didn't actually need to buy the thing they would have bought. Perhaps in some cases the AWS outage was a net benefit, preventing people from wasting money on something they didn't really want/need.

wait a week or two and the details will change completely.

Trump is nothing if not mercurial. His fans will tell you he's playing 11 dimensional chess... I have my doubts, but let's say that's true. The problem is that when it comes to the economy it's not chess. It's more like basketball, and the President is the point guard calling plays, except the play being called keeps changing before the players can execute the last call. It's a tough time to be running a business, you can't plan out more than a couple of weeks.

Right, the economist refer to this as "externality". Fossil fuels aren't cheap, if you factor in the costs that people using them transfer to third parties. Theoretically, if the true cost of using fossil fuels were factored into every pound of coal or gallon of gasoline consumed, then we would use *exactly the right amount* of fossil fuels. Probably not zero, but not as much as we do when we pretend pollution isn't a cost.

That's what they've done. Or rather they've bought the politicians who create the regulatory frameworks. But if people woke up and realized they've been frog-boiled into giving away their privacy, then that would be prohibitively expensive.

I essentially made the argument that if we want capitalism to work the way we were taught in civics class it is supposed to, companies must be forced by regulation not to undermine the basic assumptions that lead to efficient operation of the free market.

I am neither here nor there on a basic income. I think it depends on circumstances, which of course are changing as more and more labor -- including routine mental labor -- is being automated. We are eventually headed to a world of unprecedented productive capacity and yet very little need for labor, but we aren't there yet.

Anybody who is pushing AI services, particularly *free* AI services, is hoping to mine your data, use it to target you for marketing, and use the service to steer you towards opaque business relationships they will profit from and you will find it complicated and inconvenient to extricate yourself from.

The question is -- ideas that are bad for *who*? This may be a very bad idea for you and me, but it is a very good idea for Microsoft, especially as, like their online services, they will make money off of us and it will be very inconvenient for us to opt out.

In civics-lesson style capitalism, which I'm all in favor of, companies compete to provide things for us that we want and we, armed with information about their products, services and prices, either choose to give them our business or to give our business to a competitor.

Not to say that stuff doesn't *ever* happen, but it's really hard to make a buck as a business that way. So what sufficiently large or well-placed businesses do is earn money *other* ways, by entangling consumers in business relationships that are opaque and which they don't have control over, may not even be fully aware they're signing on to, and which are complicated and awkward to extricate themselves from. In other words a well placed company, like Microsoft or Google or Facebook, will constantly be looking at ways to make money outside the rigorous demands of free market economics.

Sugar cane is a type of grass. Corn is a type of grass. What is "proper sugar" other than the desiccated remains of juice squeezed out of grass? What is high fructose corn syrup other than the not quite completely desiccated remains of juice squeezed out of grass?

Sure, the sugar juice maybe squeezed out of the stalks while the corn juice is squeezed out of the seeds, but in either case you're squeezing juice out of a particular species of plant in the general family of grasses and removing as much water as you conveniently can in order to make it lighter for transport.

In both cases you're doing it because the juice is a mix of sugar molecules in water. The exact ratio of glucose molecules to fructose molecules is different between the two juices, but both molecules are sugars and they are very similar to each other in general shape and constituent atoms as well as in how they are perceived by the human tongue.

I'm not suggesting you overindulge in either, but you're putting too much weight on the word "proper" when you write "proper sugar" as if that particular desiccated grass juice is the "correct" one.

If it were worthwhile, either one could be further processed to increase or decrease the fructose to glucose ratio to any desired ratio. It would cost money to do it, so there would have to be a good reason. But glucose and fructose are made of the same atoms, so converting either one to the other is just a matter of chemistry.