Conspiracy theories are silly, and unnecessary.

Remember when Elon ruminated about hyperloop and everyone went nuts? Well, this time he ruminated about space datacentres. Oh, and SpaceX investors cashed out for ~$85 billion.

It is LEO.

Size is not free. Besides having to get the thing up there, which might come down to merely very expensive, there's drag in low Earth orbit, and the bigger the surface area of your satellite the more propulsion you need to keep it up there. The life of Starlink satellites is primarily limited by their propellant.

Even if you ignore launch costs entirely, is it cheaper to put your datacentre in space and replace it and your power plant every few years, or put it in a nice desert or on a floating island somewhere instead? Oh, and you have to engineer it to be completely maintenance free for the first option too.

What's the downside? SpaceX stock got pumped for their IPO. The money is made. As long as the hype keeps going they can raise more any time they want, or Elon could sell some of his shares. If it turns out to be unworkable, SpaceX (and subsidiaries) are back where they started.

There aren't really any unsolved engineering problems. SpaceX can absolutely put a rack of nvidia GPUs into low orbit. We could have done that in the 70s. The argument is whether it's economical or not.

Which is cheaper, putting a thousand square metres of solar panels, a rack of GPUs, a vacuum cooling system and propulsion in low orbit and incinerating and replacing it all every few years, or the panels, GPUs and a convective radiator that is ~50x more efficient on the ground and runs for twenty plus?

If I put some bricks or concrete blocks in a vacant lot and they assembled themselves into a house you'd think that was pretty cool.

That and Russia has suggested destroying the orbit if Starlink doesn't stop enabling terrorist attacks by NATO proxies on its people.

The AI cut-off dive bomb tactic is a blatant warcrime.

Space Data Centers are in the same category as fully autonomous self-driving cars within eighteen months that he 'promised' in 2019.

You can watch the 'Autonomy Day' video on YouTube. People financed Model 3's on the promise of renting them as robotaxis while they were at work.

Physics is a hard stop on false promises.

It's OK to back difficult challenges with no underlying physical impossibilities that's engineering. Radiating heat into space is a physics problem.

I didn't believe the robotaxi promise then and I don't believe the space data centers claim now.

If there's a new topological physics breakthrough then let's see the paper and get the Nobel Prize gears turning because that would revolutionize technology on and off planet.

I'd love to see it but I don't believe it.
   

I didn't say they didn't. Those missiles were very effective. Much more effective than ten times as many drones would have been.

Both missiles and drones are of limited use when you're not willing to send infantry to take and hold territory. Cheap light drones much more so than Tomahawks and GBU-57s.

Reddit isn't wrong about bots but odds are what they really want is your identity. That earns money.

The trouble is people in Saudi Arabia will use old. to read about liberation topics or people in the US will read about drug topics, or whatever the mala prohibita are that will land you in prison for things that are perfectly legal in other jurisdictions.

Even people with accounts who read other subs logged in.

"Just create a new anonymous account" is what people will say who don't understand how identity correlation works. Sure there are ways that 0.0000001% of the population can manage securely, but that's not how this will go down.

The UK just arrested an American attorney who was critical of UK politics and they have multiple people in prison for clicking 'Like'. If you think they won't arrest somebody for reading the wrong sub, give it a few months.

Also, don't connect through Heathrow ever again.

The US didn't fail in the Iran war due to a lack of offensive air power, and its offensive air power definitely wouldn't have been improved by packing the Bush, Lincoln and the Burkes with cheap drones. It failed because it was a half assed effort organized by clowns who apparently don't know any military history and decdied to disregard all their advisors who do.

You can theoretically win a war with air strikes alone but it depends entirely on your enemy. If they fail to surrender then you lose, and there's a strong incentive to dig in when some foreign invader starts dropping bombs on you. That's why no real war has ever been won that way.

Using projected military power in general has always been hazardous. It's expensive, unpopular, and depends on either a quick victory or local allies, preferably both, or it will fail. "Local allies" are part of the soft power that Hegseth is so disdainful of, and the US has lately been lighting on fire just to watch the pretty flames.

Datacentres are coveted by lots of local governments. Lots of construction jobs, high paying jobs in operation and maintenance, no on-site pollution. It's like tourism without the tourists.

The locality in this story, along with the state of Virginia, offer a lot of incentives for datacentres to site there, which is why they have so many. Meanwhile, the electricity price today is just slightly higher than it was in 2000, corrected for inflation, and lower than it was in 2010.

Also, turning off the lights in empty rooms is something we learned to do as soon as we were tall enough to reach a light switch. The fact that adults have to be told to do this suggests electricity is still too cheap in Henrico County.

> I used to think that. Then I looked at the math. The amount of money possessed by the billionares and a trillionare pale in the face of the size (and needs) of the actual economy

The Derivatives Market recently surpassed 1 Quadrillion Dollars.

Notice how none of the politicians are talking about taxing that? It's all a show to stoke up conflict between the lower classes.

On the other hand, the same people do want to put AI in charge of totalizing Central Planning, because "this time Communism will work", because Magic LLM Dust.

We just need an AI Surveillance Police State to bring about the Great Utopia.

Every single time they say the same thing but with different nouns substituted as Madlibs. Then millions die.

The way the article is written makes this seem sudden, but Wayback has a discontinuation article at least as far back as January.

https://web.archive.org/web/20...

Maybe third-party cookie blocking killed this. I can imagine automated personality profile builders being done in the background based on GIF's people choose to use.

This isn't a new thing. Soviet doctrine for dealing with carriers was to fire as many missiles as they could at them to overwhelm their defences.

The US focus on expensive, highly capable weapons isn't baseless. The US military is designed to project power, and projecting power is expensive. If you're going to ship equipment halfway around the world and support it there, it might as well be the best you can make. That is very different from Ukraine or South Korea where they are, or expect to, fight in their literal back yards.

Expensive invading armies have always been vulnerable to the defending swarm, from hoplites and knights to empires getting their asses kicked in Afghanistan, Vietnam or Iran.

The people building the datacentres had a plan. The people approving them, and offering big tax incentives, also had a plan. Part of that plan was electricity rates going up.