There are 640 acres in a square mile

[Sighs in metric]

The proper response to being in an area where datacentres are crowding in is "lobby your elected officials to increase property taxes and not give out tax increment financing deals". Tax everything, and tax it well. They'll stop building new datacentres in your area, and the ones that are there will (unless they were given a long-term sweetheart deal beyond your already-low tax rates) start being cash cows for your area.

They're just thug gangs. What makes them weird is that they're government subsidized.

That means labor disputes with the government boss aren't resolved with a bullet, so you get collective action like that. (See also Dinkens & the NYPD.)

But it is a great time to clean house in that town! Get some professionals in quick, though - the former cops will figure out their extortion failed soon enough and need income, and they're not going to find anything honest that pays as well as being a badged thug.

Really, you don't see any difference between Elon Musk and, say, John Stankey? Is John Stankey actively transforming the US into an autocratic fascist-adjacent state?

Would you buy from a company called Plantations Inc which proudly advertises that all of its products are made by daily-whipped slaves? Are there no limits to how self-focused you are in your consumption?

It's one thing to say "this particular issue isn't mine, so I'm only going to think amount myself". It's an entirely different issue to have no moral bounds.

This headline sounds like something you'd hear coming from a news report on a TV in the background near the start of a horror movie.

Social media moving back to gas station bathrooms. And since there's no gas to buy, the threads are pretty sparse.

Russians are great folks, but never let them form a government.

The problem is not overall capacity. It's that they're all crowding into the same areas. Most places in the US (let alone the world) have nobody building datacentres anywhere near them. They all want to go into the places with not merely cheap power, but cheap property taxes and other incentives. Some places will tax everything, down to the servers themselves, whereas some will only tax the land and the building shell, not even the power interconnects or cooling systems.

When everyone wants to rush into the same place, it overtaxes the local grid; they have to build not just more generation, but power lines, substations, etc. And all of this has to go through permitting. There's no real limit to how much generation can be built, but none of the datacentre operations want to wait, because they're all worried about missing out on the opportunity. Hence the reason that they try to come up with stopgaps, like installing their own generators, or... this approach.

ECL MV1 / Lambda is 3,5 miles from the Googleplex. And 10-12 miles further to the southeast, Santa Clara is one of the densest datacentre hubs on Earth.

If you care about where they actually live, and distances to datacentres:

Sundar Pichai: Los Altos Hills, CA: ECL MV1 / Lambda (Mountain View), 5-6mi; Santa Clara Data Center Hub (CoreSite SV9, Vantage, Colovore), 9-11 miles

Larry Page: Palo Alto, Ca: ECL MV1 / Lambda (Mountain View), 4-5mi; Santa Clara Data Center Hub, 10-12mi.

Sergey Brin: Los Altos Hills / Bay Area: ECL MV1 / Lambda (Mountain View), 5-7mi; Santa Clara Data Center Hub, 9-12mi

Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind CEO): North London, UK: London Docklands Hub (Telehouse / Equinix), 7-9mi; Slough Data Center Hub (Equinix, Yondr), 18-20mi

I don't know about you, but they're all way closer to datacentres than I am.

They're brilliant at making games. They have their suite of exclusives that people love and will buy the console for. And they keep a consistently high quality bar for those games. Even the worst Mario game was still good. Same for Zelda. Same for Metroid. As long as they keep that the case, and their consoles are reasonably priced they'll sell. Which, combined with cheaper parts, is why they generally made a profit per console rather than a loss.

Xbox and PS don't have that. They used to each have some exclusives- but they've gone away from that road due to the high cost of creating them (Nintendo's focus on gameplay over high end graphics also reduced the cost of making a game). Even the exclusives they do have don't have the reputation for quality- they tend to run hot and cold. And MS in particular has waffled between wanting to push xbox vs PC gaming, reducing the number of exclusives as they launch on PC. It leaves them in a place where there's no driver for their new product other than better graphics quality. And with the economy tightening, that's something that will be dropped first.

The reading comprehension fail is you failing when reading the GP. They were talking about Falcon 9 replacements being two decades behind. The implication was that nobody will catch up to Starship any time soon.

Falcon 9 did not launch first in 2018; its first launch was in early 2010.

The mistake you seem to be making is your assumption that Falcon 9-lookaline development would begin tomorrow and be bulk launching payloads to orbit just a couple years later. Development takes far longer than that. From conception to first launch may only be a few years, but from there to actually being reliable, cheap, and rapidly reusable takes many, many years. Anyway, here's the playing field:

Tianlong-3: Started in 2022. Almost a direct 1:1 copy. Failed launch this spring; they're redesigning.
Zhuque-3: Started in 2023. Stainless steel and methalox, and a bit wider than Falcon 9, but otherwise a very Falcon 9-like design. First orbital launch and booster landing in August of this year.
Terran R: Started in 2021, pivot in 2023. Larger diameter, 13 engine cluster. Integration/testing phase, no launch attempts yet.
Pallas-1: Started in 2018-2019. Sort of a mini-F9. Flew to orbit for the first time in September of this year.
Nebula-1: Started in 2019-2020. Another mini-F9. Doing small hop tests, of mixed results.

(Amur-SPG isn't worth taking seriously ;) )

There IS work on Starship clones/competitors - Long March 9, Cosmoleap, Xingzhou-1 , Astronstone, Project Jarvis , Nova - but they're varying degrees of long timelines, less ambitious, paper-concept-for-now, etc. Long March 9 is the most likely to be fully realized, since it's run by the state-owned CALT, but they're not even expecting to start their first test launches until the early 2030s. And we've seen how hard test launches can be on a Starship-style vehicle (though at least others can make use of lessons-learned). But who knows, some of the startups may succeed with accelerated timelines.

And here comes Node.js....

The split was massively beneficial for GE. Post-split, GE Aerospace went from ~135-160B to ~300B. GE Vernova went from ~35B to ~240B. And GE HealthCare went from ~25B to ~30-40B. The aggregate return of the split was ~300-400%. The new companies have a total market cap of approximately the same value GE had at its absolute peak during the Dotcom boom, dramatically reversing decades of decline. Their value is ~40% more than before GE's Dotcom surge; double that of GE's pre-collapse level (~2016); and ~800% of what it was post-collapse.

It's not just GE. Siemens. Johnson & Johnson. United Technologies. DowDuPont. 3M. Kellogg. Daimler. It's just been the trend to unbundle. Musk's empire is going in precisely the opposite direction. He sustains it with a cult of personality.

What even is the point of Europe?

It took you 2 1/2 centuries to get as centralized as you are. We're still in our "Articles of Confederation" phase, and being just as crippled in crises by it as you were under your Articles of Confederation.

That doesn't mean "give up and die"; it means "work to try to get the extremely high level of agreement needed to unite better (nations, like the early US states, are loathe to give up any sovereignty), while simultaneously doing the best we can with the system that we have".