CA has the most insane smog and environmental laws in the country. The bureaucrats gained much of their regulatory power on the backs of cars and smog. Cars have gotten much cleaner, yet the CA Air Resource Board hasn't exactly gone away. These environmental centers of power in government never go away, they just grow.. In true CA fashion, I expect them to impose more requirements on car emissions so that data centers can be allowed to pollute..Can't say "no" to a corporation paying a large tax bill -- but you? Screw you, deal with it, your cars emits too much pollution anyways, why don't you go buy an electric car?. We still need a reason to have an air resource board to keep a boat load of people employed. Sound crazy? NoVA isn't that different.

I use to work for a large consumer internet provider and one of our sites had 10 MW of standby power. I think we used 2 MW at full load. But this site, previously owned by a telco you know of, had the ability to back feed that power into the community. So, the power company could cut power to the 5000 home neighborhood, power up the diesel generators, and feed the neighborhood and data center until they could bring their main power feed for the area back. Those generators were not "clean". We didn't run them often, but you could smell the diesel exhaust when we did... It was mostly a non-issue just because it was uncommon...

Now, imagine you're 5 years from getting your 1 GW grid connection.. You can have a 5x 2 MW diesel units in a month. A couple 20 MW "clean" natural gas in 6 months, and a nuclear plant in 6 years. What do you think is going to be powering those data centers 24/7 and who do you think is going to be breathing the emissions?

The government won't attempt to protect you from those emissions, won't prevent you from buying expensive fuel blends, but will likely complain that our air is dirty and we must do something. When we say 'we' we mean you.

LORAN: Harder to jam due to low frequency, accuracy good enough for ships and non-precision approaches. They shut down because GPS supplanted it. Maybe Starlink could help?

https://www.technologyreview.c...

Apparently their constellation information can be used in "other" ways. 20/30/40/50 GHZ are much hard to jam due to the nature of microwaves, tiny beam widths, and the active tracking means even if you could jam it, your success in jamming would depend on being between the ship and satellites. Unlikely... LORAN or Starlink, and since I doubt anyones going to put some large antennas and transmitters around the world, I'd bet on Starlink,

Not exactly..

We are not water deprived. We have plenty of water. The issue is that 70% of it is "owned" by farmers and large land owners. Todays Phoenix residents are using less water than we use to use, We are putting up direct potable re-use water plans. We already recycle our water and feed it to the nuke plant.

If only we stopped growing crops in the desert

All true. Please don't tell anyone, the cost of everything here has gone off the rails. I don't think I could afford to buy my house today,

We are short of housing, and because everything is expensive, we only build expensive housing.

The traffic is so much worse than when I got here in 2004 that sitting on the 10 in traffic isn't much different from when I use to sit on the 10 in traffic - in LA.

We are blessed with no natural disasters, but it is hot. Because we've built so much nothing cools down at night. Last year, there were a ton of nights where the overnight low was in the 90s.

Our power grid is already strained. A single QTS data center complex expects to use something like 220 MW when fully built out. 20% of a nuclear reactor. And they are only one of many doing the same thing. The electric company wants to raise rates to help pay for "improvements."

Did I mention it was hot here? Its best you find some other state Mr. Son.

It is extremely difficult to license a new reactor design. Consequently we are still (maybe) building derivatives of the AP1000 and CE System 80 in 2024. Toshiba wanted to deploy their tiny 10MW 4S reactor in Galena, Alaska, literally the middle of nowhere.and the pushback (not from people who lived there) from the the anti nuclear lobby stopped it "cold" and Toshiba never even submitted the design for regulatory approval.. I think the Toshiba exited the business and IP was sold to the Chinese. Game over.

We can build nuclear plants at scale and without enormous unplanned costs and delays. France does it. We know how to make nuclear energy safely. Even Fukashima, which melted down, there were very few casualties due to the meltdown and it's unclear to me how "contaminated" the surrounding area is.. 3 Mile Island? Nobody died. Nobody even got hurt. So the worst nuclear accident in American history killed ZERO people and PA is still there - I checked. But try to build a better mousetrap, entrenched interests will beat you down until you cave.. We don't want improved solutions, we don't even want you to test them in order to demonstrate them, no go build more windmills and import solar panels from China.

Which leads me to my point. We need a place to test these new nuclear designs. Some place where maybe we can fast track approvals and just accept that the basic safeguards are likely good enough . We built a reactor to withstands 3000 degrees and the fuel cannot get hotter than 1200 degrees, Ok, good enough. If you are Cuba and your people are pissed and probably want to overthrow the government, how soon can you be here with that untested reactor ya have. Modular you say? We have trucks waiting for the containers.

Cuba - The NextGen Nuclear Testbed that we.. err. they need.

I'm under fif- ... well never mind.. I have an XM radio in my car. I don't know why either, every year I call to cancel and they give me another year for $60. In an emergency, have everyone tune to an Emergency channel on XM.

In an emergency my phone is gonna start blaring.. No radio needed.

AM is free and past it's time. FM is not far behind. The US never adopted a DAB system, and HDradio was never viable. I've got an idea. Let's put 2x ATSC 3.0 transmitters up. We'll put one on TV channel 6 (82-88 Mhz) and one on FM (88-94 Mhz). Combined around 40 Mbps.. 64 kbps per stream using xHE-AAC gets you 625 streams.

This would be huge for smaller radio stations that maybe couldn't afford a big transmitter up on the hill. They would simply be a participant in the transmitter share, at greatly reduced cost. You might even get some additional content/viewpoints out of it that wouldn't make sense under the current cost structure,.

ATSC3 also dovetails nicely into DASH and existing Internet delivery mechanisms. Lets say you are listening to your favorite new AM - now xHE-AAC - and you go through a tunnel. You can pick it up from the Internet via your phone. When out of the tunnel, you go back to the off air. AM/FM/XM/NextFM - it doesn't matter. It is the content you want to listen to. Traffic reports will be delivered as data to your Android Car GPS. Amber Alerts may come complete with a picture of "Amber"

Ignore the ATSC3 encryption and LG patent noise. I'd like to see both AM and FM brought into the modern era. I think ATSC3 is the future and I don't care much about TV getting compressed with HEVC as opposed to MPEG2. No - ATSC3 is simply a mechanism to merge IP and over the air broadcasting. It exists today. The receiver chips will be fairly inexpensive and you can almost count on automakers embedding them so they can send your car messages. As an added bonus - it has this new radio format. I can almost assure you there will be content someone would like to sell you. 300 channels for free and and 200 that you can elect to pay for.

FM = 88-108 Mhz -- 20 Mhz -- leave 2 MHz for Analog - 18 MHZ + 6 MHZ from channel 6. 24 Mhz .. 4*20 Mbps = 80 Mbps = 1250 radio channels.

If it were up to me - AM would disappear. FM would become a data stream for things in motion. Maybe we leave 108 Mhz open for end of the world announcements.

I'm not the only one! I literally could not get the Creality I bought to print anything. I ended up returning it. After much research, I think that a filament warmer/feeder wasn't working right.. But, I can't tell you how much time it took to get to that point. I'm sure some 13 yr old kid could school me in what I should have been doing or how to do basic tasks like cut this part out of a "drawing" and print it, but I don't have one of those.

If I were in need of a gun, I know exactly where mine are. But if I want to adapt from one plumbing fitting to another fitting that doesn't seem to exist - I dunno whether to call AliExpress or the FBI, but after screwing with the damn printer, I was ready to kill the printer. It eventually got the death penalty, out of my house.

Ghost guns don't scare me nearly as much as auto sears, which essentially take semi automatic guns and enable them to quickly burn through all the ammo in the magazine. Those are even easier to make than "ghost guns" and they can go through a magazine before I could hope to grab a gun. Accuracy and control seem not to be of paramount importance to the people using them.

Companies fight tooth and nail against unions because it costs them money. They fight tooth and nail against everything that costs them money. Its just how it works. Someone doesnt want to accept a smaller bonus, screw the workers.

You are right though, healthcare tied to employment IS the only reason I remain at my current employer... (Who pays 90% of my $300 deductible PPO) The pay is marginal and I could make more, but I really like the current insurance setup. That and the PTO is generous..

I don't think unionizing is going to matter. The lower level jobs are being phased out. Once upon a time there were sysadmins and QA testers. You needed people to run your exchange server and people to test for bugs..Now. much of the testing is automated and who runs their own Exchange server anymore? Not us.

I wish I could say, unionize and things will be better, but I doubt it. The only thing that saves me is I have a lot of experience in the field I work in and someone who shows up on a visa or from an agency is never going to have that. If you are easy to replace, companies will do it, because back to my first paragraph, it's all about money.

(side note: I migrated to WFH pre-COVID and I didn't really care if it ended my employment, I'd had enough.. They have replaced me with ~4 people in the office. It would have been much cheaper to throw an extra 20k my way, but instead they now spend an extra 200k and still pay me!)

Unable to fill jobs at sub-par wages and overzealous demands, only to be discarded at the first sign of an economic slowdown, and possibly replaced with an H1B. I can't imagine why nobody wants to work for them.

Job interviews are a nightmare and don't tell employers much. Are you a good fit? Can you learn? Can you deal with people? Can you deal with DIFFICULT people? So, we hire people we know. Theres a referral bonus if they make it 90 days and we already know if will get along with our team. It reduces the risk we'll get someone who won't work out.

Anyone who has ever left your company is a contact at a new employer. And forget this linkedin crap, i've never figured out how to network my way into anything with it. Other than as an online resume, I refuse to use it. Totally meaningless activity. However, the sales guy who I bailed out a problem, remembers me and if there is a way in at his current employer for me, he'll find it. The job interview where you get asked logic problems I probably would fail even straight out of college is an instant alert I don't want to work there. How long is this string? What string? I see a drawing, where's the string, polyester or wool? Does the string have a pronoun I should use? Yeah, probably not gonna work out.

I solve problems that cost companies money, often having absolutely nothing to do with my job description. I wasn't hired for it and I may fail whatever test you have for me, but I get shit done. I also get my assigned job done. At the end of the day, that is the best job interview, someone who saw my impact and told the interviewer.

At my somewhat less profitable employer, we do not use ffmpeg in our end products. We write our own encoding algorithms, we have a barrage of picture processing mechanisms that enable a picture to just look better at a given bitrate. ffmpegs output does not come close to what we produce. You can throw it at a PSNR or SSIM or whatever metric you want, we will win.

ffmpeg is used on the dev side, and I use it to slice up video on my laptop, just because I don't always want our software on my laptop.. (I didn't have enough hd space to begin with, it's like IT doesn't know what we do. 250 GB is fine, yeah fine for those of you who don't capture raw HD-SDI or have a plethora of kube stuff to deal with. Was the 1T really that much more? Another topic for another day.)

Bottom line, ffmpeg is great, it democratizes video encoding. It's not perfect. It's not as efficient as some implementations. It just won't look as good at a low bitrates. I have a customer, a network on cable TV, whose output is AVC @ 1080i - 5 Mbps. It's really insufficient for cable TV distribution, but as long as there isn't a complex water splashing shot, they can get away with it. In the cases where they run out of bits, the concealment is good, you might not notice it if you weren't carefully looking. I expect this problem to get worse as C-band bandwidth gets impossible to find and hugely expensive. (Already a problem, courtesy of 5G.) More and more companies are shifting to HEVC just because they can't get the BW at a price point they can tolerate. 1080i HEVC looks just fine at 5 Mbps. A large national broadcaster does contribution links at 1080p60 @ 7.5 Mbps HEVC with our equipment. (I think it looks great!)

My own employer has been subject to constant phishing attacks and in one case, they even got paid by us. Data security has since been tightened up and now everything is 2FA. We have still had phishing attempts where people have accidentally put in their password in the fake website, even technical types, however, the credential the phisher pilfered was mostly useless they managed to use it within about 20 seconds. (Call me paranoid but I wait until the code is about to turn before I submit the 2FA code). Fortunately, most of the time they aren't that quick, but no doubt they soon will be.
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I wish the MS Office LDAP offered Yubikey support. Its long overdue for mass adoption.

She is 100% con artist and fraud. I think she may even believe her own lies. However, she should not be treated better than say Madoff, because she's a pretty woman. She committed billions of dollars of fraud and knowingly gave patients incorrect positive test results because her tests were not reliable and she knew it.

I hope she does atleast 10.

The public decided to stop the bleeding and I don't blame them. Rancho Seco isn't a bad site in terms of CA and being mostly away from faults and oceans, but you could say the same of Sundesert in Blythe and it was never built either. I don't think nuclear works in CA. It's not the technology in as much as the vocal minority that ignores all reason on the matter. We just don't listen to them in AZ.

If you like your anti nuclear stance, you can keep your anti-nuclear stance.