Likely a lot more of the traffic is coming from smart TVs, vacuum cleaners, irrigation systems and the like.

They're looking at the upcoming effect on buying for the Christmas season. If Walmart's credit card processor gets DDOS'd at that scale they'd better be hosted on AWS or Azure, because Bank Of America's network sure as hell won't be able to deal with it. Amazon will be all right, but Pinconning Cheese's online store would be blown out of the water.

My daily driver is a 2002 Tacoma RWD with a five speed and the smallest 4-banger they sold, that vehicle or its equivalent is just plain not available in the US. I know damn well there's a market for it, since people keep leaving notes on it asking to buy it. I do a certain amount of remodeling and a lot of gardening and landscaping so I need a pickup. I don't need something that drives, sucks fuel, and weighs as much as a 737 MAX, but that's what manufacturers have decided that I have to buy. The 2003 Tacoma was the size of the 2002 Tundra, and it's only gotten larger and the same with Mazda. Why? Because the profit level is higher, so they can make more money from fewer vehicles. (Don't suggest something like the Santa Fe, it's a toy to carry other toys in. No one is putting a yard of manure or 1200 pounds of landscaping blocks in one.)

On the other hand, I **can** buy the vehicle that I need in Peru or Malaysia, but I'm not allowed to bring it home of course.

??? Maybe that's your point in another comment in another thread. In _this_ thread, all you said was that "I don't understand how they can be "dirty" implying local pollution or particulates." The parts about zoning and regulation were about noise. If we must though, the regulations themselves explicitly do not allow this. The data center is simply breaking the law. It certainly can be argued that the local and federal government are not doing their job in enforcing the actual regulations.

Regardless, the answer to the actual question you asked is exactly what I posted.

Basically what you are doing is spewing nonsense that's orthogonal to the actual conversation. I have to note though that it is odd to have an issue with the electrical grid, but have no problem with using natural gas stoves to cook considering the required infrastructure behind that.

And the US is responsible for doing the same thing in 1985 and 2008 (plus their unacknowledged tests from the 1970s). The US is also responsible for blocking multiple UN agreements against putting weapons in space. The much ballyhooed vote against putting nukes in space only came about after China and Russia attempted to prohibit **ALL** weaponry on orbit (which implies that we probably already have stuff up there).

Wow, they budget for a Plan B! Who ever imagined such a thing?

I'm curious, what military application does Voyager serve?

Their officially acknowledged 1985 test was a response to the 2007 test that China carried out? Really? How does that work? (Of course the tests in the 1970s were secret so they don't count.)

Oh, it's a pittance, to be sure and it is a very limiting way to live

To clarify, do you mean sure it is possible to generate electricity yourself, or do you mean sure it is possible to live without electricity? Either way, while some city dwellers can, it is simply impractical to the point that we might as well call it impossible for many people currently living in cites to live in high rises and skyscrapers without electricity. It is also practically impossible for most of them to generate enough electricity with the tiny access that they have to the resources they would need. For example, many apartment dwellers have a couple of square meters of windows or less and most of them do not have exposure in the right direction and have significant obstruction. Even if it were not probably illegal and disallowed by their landlord to install solar panels on the outside of their apartments, the amount of solar power they would generate even by doing that would not meet their needs. Cities are heavily dependent on infrastructure to support human life and often have a population density far to high to support human life if not for infrastructure and resources that come from outside the city. It is a form of specialization and some of the required infrastructure required is the electrical grid.

And one of the ways that the majority of city dwellers would have to change their way of living would be to stop being city-dwellers. Which was really my point: that you should have included that as a condition in your original post. Quite frankly, I suspect that the level by which you expect people to drastically change might require the majority of people now living to change their status to not living, though it is hard to tell because you have avoided being specific.

This said, I personally am not a big fan of city dwelling and I do not live in a city and where I do live is still too built up for my tastes. However, I can appreciate that many people do prefer to live in cities and there are traditionally some good reasons for them to exist. The fact that they are inherently incapable of being self-supporting is not really a big deal. Not when you consider that the modern world and its currently available technology and legal/tax/zoning/etc. framework makes self-sufficiency problematic for the majority.

I am however, in favor of people achieving as much self-sufficiency as they possibly can in the environment they find themselves in. I think everyone that can should probably be getting home solar and batteries at this point. I do not find the power grid intrinsically bad, but I do think people should avoid dependence on it as much as they can. I also recognize that we live in reality though, and simply expecting people to just abandon all aspects of modern living is not realistic.

As RossCWilliams pointed out, this is obviously not an example of natural market forces since this is a public project. The argument about property values also seems a bit dubious and like it may be just your opinion. You might have to cite some evidence of that.

The biggest problem I have with your post though is that, yet again, it has nothing whatsoever to do with what I originally posted about. Mea culpa I guess for not doggedly re-iterating my previous point over and over again in every post and naively expecting you to be interested in anything other than just pushing the same point over and over oblivious to what the other person is saying.

To re-iterate, my actual post was about the fact that nuclear power plants (which you seem to be talking about, but avoiding explicitly saying) have a long lead in time, but the demand from TFA appeared rapidly and may disappear rapidly leading to a lot of financial doubt and uncertainty by investors. Then, there is the huge expense by itself, which is also a problem for investors.

Wow, only 18 years ago, just like it was yesterday. Then the Pentagram did a similar test a year later, but that of course was just hunky-dory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It seems notable that in the recent UN Security Council vote to ban nuclear weapons in space that the Untied States was the only country opposing a joint Russian/Chinese amendment to ban **ALL weapons in space, which indicates that we almost certainly have non-nuclear weapons on orbit already.

Like NASA is ever allowed to do anything without permission from the Pentagram . . .

Could also run some World Community Grid tasks on BOINC, that's what I do.

But if you just want to heat your house nothing beats a heat pump for efficiency.