Absurd generalizations? Wut?

On what basis? It's unquestionable that the political left in the US has both:
- fought nuclear tooth and nail since the 1970s
- is clearly the most concerned (panty-wetting fear in other words) with climate change.

There is no sane person that can dispute those assertions, gaslighter.

"ignoring the fact that your tech isn't actually the only fossil fuel alternative out there" I said LITERALLY NOTHING about that. Nothing. Are you asserting that expanded nuclear WOULDN'T have reduced hydrocarbon emissions substantially, or... are you just afraid to admit that?

I think wind and solar are great; they weren't meaningfully part of the conversation 45 years ago, which is what I rather specifically referenced.

I feel like you might not be getting enough oxygen. I made a single irrefutable assertion and you go off on irrelevancies as if they matter.

You can write as long tirades and as expletive filled as you like. But the central point is: do not advocate taking action which will have no effect on a problem in response to it. Do not do things which achieve nothing.

Consequences matter and have to be taken into account when making policy decisions. The only rationale for refusing to take consequences into account is going to be religious dogma.

You may feel that riding that extra trip on the motorcycle is making the problem worse. But in fact this is irrational, it has no effect on it.

If what you are advocating has no effect on global emissions or on the global climate, stop advocating it. Or at least, stop advocating it in the name of climate.

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.

If only the people crying about the imminent doom of climate change weren't exactly the same group that INSISTED we abandon nuclear 45y ago.

A classic example of the total lack of realism about climate and energy occurred the other day in the UK:
________________________
Greenpeace climate campaigner Maja Darlington has called on the Government to act to stop a 'doomloop of extreme weather', after a summer of wildfires and drought.
She said: 'We've barely cooled off from a summer of blistering heat, and now the first winter storms are battering at the front door.
'While millions of people face the prospect of ruined homes and businesses, oil giants are preparing to announce multi-billion-pound profits next week.'
'The Government must take a stand against this doomloop of extreme weather and corporate impunity,' Ms Darlington added.
_____________________________

Right, the UK Government must do something about the weather. Like what must it do? Oh, it must take a stand. Right, that will really stop the storms. If we can only figure out what it is!

Where do they find these people? And why do they promote them to being Party spokespeople on energy and climate?

Your reaction is perfectly sensible and justifiable and there is no reason to deprive yourself of the pleasure of riding your motorcycle.

We should assess acts and decisions according to their consequences. We should not, in general, do things because they have some vague conceptual connexion to something else, but will have no effect on it.

Take the question of antibiotic resistance. Its a problem, no question, and national level and international level action on it is very desirable. Does that mean I should refuse antibiotic treatment for a family member, even when I know that it is necessary to treat their illness and that its the only treatment that is effective? Of course not. The refusal will make no difference to the global problem, but will risk the life of someone dear to me, to no gain. And there is an elephant in the room: large scale use of antibiotics in agriculture and stock management. Even if we all start refusing them, as long as the use in agriculture persists it will have no effect on the problem. Chinese emissions are analogous to agricultural use. If the US were to ban human use of antibiotics it would have no effect on the problem of resistance. The only thing that will is changing agriculture, and not even doing that at a national level, but at an international level.

As to climate and energy, there is no point doing things on energy which will not, for whatever reason, affect the climate. I do not believe that continued use of fossil fuels will lead to the catastrophes that are so often cited here, and RCP 8.5 (which was always totally unrealistic) has finally been discredited and should not be the basis for any policy decisions. There is nothing special or disastrous about exceeding 1.5C. But even if the extreme scenarios are likely and caused by emissions, the fact is the largest and fastest growing emitters don't believe it, or are deliberately ignoring it. Both China and India are growing their economies as fast as they can, and letting their emissions rise to whatever level this requires. So indeed are all the non-Western countries.

In addition, there are no realistic plans, even were China India and the West prepared to adopt them, that lead to emission levels as low as the alarmists claim are required. Current global emissions are a bit under 40 billion tons. I think most of the alarmed think they have to be got down to well under 10 billion, and within a decade. You cannot do this by building wind turbines and installing solar panels. Even were China and India prepared to try, which they obviously are not.

The rational approach to this is to approach the problem from a different angle, the angle of what is realistically possible. A country may not be able to affect global temperatures or make any dent in global emissions. But it can take more or less effective action to protect its people from the most likely effects of rises in global temperatures - for instance, flood control, housing improvements and similar things.

The Maldives could go to net zero. It will have no effect on global emissions or global temperatures or global sea levels. Better spend the money on flood protection and stop extracting ground water.which produces subsidence.

The poster boy for this at the moment is the UK. They are finding that the attempt to move to net zero by converting generation to wind and solar, while at the same time converting heat to heat pumps and transport to EVs, is not feasible - it is just raising the risk of blackouts while not providing enough energy. And even if the UK could cut its emissions to zero, it only does a bit over 1% and falling of global emissions. Any cuts it makes are eaten by China in a matter of months.

People have to accept that there are some things that cannot be affected by individual action, or in this case not even by national action. If international action is not going to happen, they also have to accept the logical consequence of this when paired with the duty of governments to look after the welfare of their own people. Do not engage in feel goodery or cries of 'what if everyone'. Get on with doing things that will be effective and will help your own people. Because like it or not, that is all that is possible in the world as it is.

And this is what it told me. This is the best the BBC could fine to explain PHP to its viewers? Someone whose main acquaintance with technology has probably been writing literary criticism (nowadays called reporting and jurnalism) in Microsoft Word?

____________________________________

Zoe Kleinman is a British journalist and broadcaster who serves as the BBCâ(TM)s first-ever Technology Editor, a role she took up in 2021. Her background combines a university education in English literature with more than two decades of experience in journalism, digital media and technology reporting.
Royal Television Society

Education
University of Southampton: She graduated in 1998 with a BA in English. Her LinkedIn profile also records that she studied there from 1995 to 1998.

Student journalism:
While at university, she was features editor of the student newspaper, Wessex Scene, gaining early editorial experience.

Early communications experience: During university holidays, she worked in the university press office, writing press releases and helping publicise academic research.

The *exact* same idea with the *exact* same complaints from the Left, the UCS, all the progressive crybabies...can reasonably be seen as having ended the Soviet Union by ramming it financially into its own contradictions.
Is that ACTUALLY what you guys at the Paul Robeson bookstore are all still salty about? That the guys you insisted all along were the "good guys" turned out not to be?

Anyway, the idea that defense = escalation hasn't been a thing since MAD was largely abandoned in the 1990s. Welcome to the post cold-war era, comrade.

...and it is genuinely an efficiency gain: now I can completely avoid 2 shit product families from only 1 vendor.

That's great!

FYI, the original XBox release price back in 2001 is the equivalent of $569.18 today.

So they're still doubling or trebling the price of something that's now commodity, even once you take into account inflation.

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 US is escalating"?
That's a rather specious viewpoint, isn't it? Or did you intend to lie by omission?

The Soviets/Russians have had space based weapons platforms in orbit since the 1960s
The Chinese have had weapons aloft for at least 10y.
Honestly, if the US *doesn't* have functional, effective orbital weapons already up there, they're fucking incompetent.