...involved

I suspect that it's more symptom than cause, and probably not at the top of the list of causes; but I cannot overstate how much I loathe the hyperbolic use of the term 'unthinkable' in these sorts of situations. Both because it's false; and because it often acquires a sort of implicitly exculpatory implication that is entirely undeserved.

Not only is it 'thinkable'; having something awful happen when you perform a procedure that requires longterm hardcore immunosuppression and then let them follow through the cracks is trivially predictable. It's the expected behavior. Successfully reconnecting a whole ton of little blood vessels and nerves is fairly exotic medicine; predicting that thing will go poorly without substantial follow-up is trivial even by washout premed standards.

This isn't to say that it isn't ghastly, or that I could imagine being in that position; but 'unthinkable' is closer to being a claim of unpredictability or unknowability; which is wholly unwarranted. None of this was unthinkable; but nobody really cared to check or wanted to know all that much.

Dog-whistle for "vagina"

But my dictator can beat up your dictator!

It will take a really annoying or long outage before people notice they've been screwed by Big Money.

It's hard to know what industry or company Xi is subsidizing, as their system is not transparent.

Give me 5 million and I'd do it, I confess.

the hunger by the 1% to remove as much humanity from the workplace is sickening.

they fully know they are destroying the middle and lower classes (even more than they already have).

they, like the R party, just dont care. they think they are rich and insulated enough. they never cared what their own people need. the 'let them eat cake' time has come back again, but even worse.

there will be no thought to social systems needed to support the unemployed (which will be many of us, given enough time).

I'm glad I'm retiring soon. I would not want to compete in a job market that bosses think can be done by computer, alone.

and I would not want to be the 'prompt meister' to try to coax answers from the machines that make sense.

some see a great future with AI. I see nothing but doom and gloom. the greed factor is strong in humans and the class disparity will cause rioting and civil wars.

maybe not wars. the US has created a special police force that is above the law, so any uprisings will EASILY be dealt with. they thought about that. ICE is not just for foreigners. its a general purpose police force answerable only to 1 person.

people, please show me I'm wrong. but all signs point to a very bad future for 95% of the 'thinks for a living' workforce.

ObSF: Photino Birds.

But "95% of international traffic" is not the same as "95% of traffic". You are slicing the wrong pie, Happy Thanksgiving!

That's the problem: they are not a web. The original idea of the internet was to have a web of connections so that a few cables or nodes going bad wouldn't stop data movement, it would route around the bad spots via going through adjacent parts of the web. Seems we have to return to the original vision.

Technically they usually route around damaged sea cables via a larger scale redundancy, such as through another continent, but the webbiness needs to be per sea based on the rate of damage so far.

"Epstein diddit"

Especially when basically all methods of sabotaging cables(except possibly very near shore) are 'remote'/disposable; if only at the tech level of 'put anchor on rope because water deep'. Nobody is going to give a damn about losing an inert metal chunk.

Reportedly, none of that is public, the business of tapping a fiber line underwater is considerably more fiddly, and enough mines might make that a hassle; but it would also make install and repair far more expensive and probably just theatre when you consider the risk that someone at the telco isn't updating their ASAs.

I think the parent commenter was proposing an analogy to the various temples-overtaken-by-jungle and cathedrals-and-hovels societies; where the competing c-suites of the magnificent seven and aspirants suck our society dry to propitiate the promised machine god.

I have to say; datacenters will not make for terribly impressive ruins compared to historical theological white elephant projects. Truly, the future archeologists will say, this culture placed great value in cost engineered sheds for the shed god.

At least for new builds/major conversions; it's often a matter of incentives.

There's certainly some room for shenanigans with power prices; but unless it's an outright subsidy in-kind you normally end up paying something resembling the price an industrial customer would. Water prices, though, vary wildly from basically-free/plunder-the-aquifer-and-keep-what-you-find stuff that was probably a bad idea even when they were farming there a century or two ago; to something that might at least resemble a commercial or residential water bill.

If the purpose is cooling you can (fairly) neatly trade off between paying for it in power and paying for it in water; and when the price differs enormously people usually choose accordingly if they can get away with it. In the really smarmy cases they'll even run one of the power-focused datacenter efficiency metrics and pat themselves on the back for their bleeding edge 'power usage effectiveness'(just don't ask about 'water usage effectiveness').

You can run everything closed loop; either dumping to air or to some large or sufficiently fast moving body of water if available; but the electrical costs will be higher; so you typically have to force people to do that; whether by fiat or by ensuring that the price of water is suitable.