Indeed. The chorus of utterly ridiculous claims in support of Trump, many from otherwise reasonably-serious people, are baffling until you understand that performative self-humiliation is their goal. Standing up and saying true or even remotely defensible things to defend him, even using standard politician tricks like deflecting or dancing around the question, is something that anyone tasked with defending him might do, which means it's useless if your goal is to prove your loyalty to Trump.

In order to prove your utter loyalty it's necessary to inflict damage on your own reputation, to abase your self and humiliate yourself in front of the world. This is why Trump demands that his cabinet members pay him ludicrously over-the-top compliments, on camera, at the beginning of each cabinet meeting. It's not just that they know they're lying, they know that everyone knows they know they're lying and everyone knows they're doing it merely to toady. That reputational self-harm of publicly licking his boots is how they show Trump they're irrevocably tied to him no matter what.

> Is there no way to do it for data centers?

The water temps are typically barely warm enough for most people's preference for a shower.

> For example, use a heat pump to concentrate the heat to above boiling temperature then use that to boil water to run a steam turbine.

Getting a heat pump to operate at atmospheric boiling water temps is extremely difficult. Remember that to have a working heat pump, you need a refrigerant medium that condenses at the high temperature side under a given pressure and also boils at or below the low temperature side at a given pressure... then, you need to build a machine that can actually create those pressures.

Now consider that most steam cycle powerplants use superheated steam at temps of over 500C. What material could you use that can be made to condense into a liquid at >500C, what kinds of pressures would be required to make that happen, and what could you even build such a machine out of to survive those conditions?

> I think you could run that at a net-positive for power?

The second law of thermodynamics has left you a voicemail...
=Smidge=

Baseload isn't a myth, though the baseload is a small fraction of maximum consumption. It's also not true that nuclear can't load-follow, in the sense that there is nothing inherent in fission power that prevents it from being capable of load-following. It is true that older commercial nuclear plant designs can't load-follow.

High-level waste also isn't really a problem, though the much larger volume of low-level waste is somewhat problematic.

The real challenge for nuclear power is the cost. Nuclear power isn't inherently expensive, but regulations and opposition make it so. This is mostly driven by perceptions that nuclear power is very risky, which means tremendous effort is put into making it safe. The result is that it's demonstrably the safest form of power generation we have, but also among the most expensive. We could reduce the cost by reducing the safety requirements.

How expensive would it be if we reduced the required safety level to put it on par with other energy sources? I don't think anyone knows, and I doubt we'll ever know.

Hence Google's investment in RISC V. It's not yet competitive, but with some time and money it can become competitive. Also, ARM can't raise the prices too much because x86 is still right there.

You don't get to be a three trillion dollar company by saying "We have plenty of money so we don't need to be efficient". You also don't stay a three trillion dollar company that way.

Please elaborate.

Not where I live. They do have a stop sign that flips out to the side.

I'm wondering what I said that made you think I thought otherwise.

Have you pointed this out to Waymo? They're pretty responsive from what I've heard, and this is exactly the kind of thing they'd want to know about and update their model to consider, before a kid gets hit. Not only do they not want to kill kids because Waymo employees are humans, but it would also be horrendous PR that would seriously damage the company.

You can submit feedback through the Waymo app, regardless of whether or not you've used the service. There's probably also a way to report concerns through their web site.

One note: You might be surprised how good the cars are at noticing hidden dangers. I got a ride about ten years ago (when I worked for Google) and I was annoyed when a light turned green but my car just sat there... until about two seconds later when a cyclist came whizzing across the road in front of the car. There was a tall hedge in the way and I don't know how the car "saw" him -- no human driver would, the dude was asking to get squashed -- but it clearly did, and waited. My guess is that although LIDAR and cameras couldn't see through the hedge, RADAR could. Waymo uses LIDAR, RADAR, visual and infrared cameras and ultrasonic sensors so it's quite a bit better at "seeing" than any human could be. None of those can see a kid behind a parked car, though, so maybe they do need to update the model to be more careful in those circumstances.

I'm pretty sure the purpose of the pole is so the kids walk far enough in front of the bus that the bus driver can see them. Buses are tall and kids are short, so if a kid walks right in front of the bus they'll be hidden from the driver by the dashboard. If a bunch of kids disembark and several of them turn left out of the door, the driver would have to keep a very careful count to make sure they've accounted for all of the ones who could have turned left again, right in front of the bus and might be walking close enough to the nose that they're in that front blind spot. The pole makes the kids walk far enough in front of the bus before they turn in front of it that the driver can definitely see them.

It probably does help in the way you describe, but if that were the primary purpose the pole would be on the driver side.

No kidding. Those guys are scary.

If it's anything like their content ID copyright enforcement mechanism, I'm sure this will go absolutely perfect and there will be no drama whatsoever.

=Smidge=

It's really not. There is no plan, just a series of impulse-driven changes, shying away from the ones that cause problems that happen fast and are easy to see.

For the moment, until he randomly lurches in a different directly.

US policy looks like a drunken toddler staggering in random directions because that's exactly what's happening right now. The toddler bumps his head and lurches away from the pain, but the lesson doesn't stick.

The only answer for US business leaders right now is exactly what most of them are doing: hunkering down. No hiring, no expansion into other markets or offering new products, and cutting capex and opex wherever possible to build a cushion of cash to give them freedom to absorb whatever may happen in the future.