The cloud is a trap
Run away!

That's increasingly true here too (UK). I'm on an EV-focused tariff which guarantees me up to 6 hours cheap EV charging per day, and in addition there are lower, cheaper overnight rates for the electricity.

What's been noticeable recently is that these periods are now tending to be different. I've been driving EVs for eight years and on roughly the same tariff (the 6 hour cap is new), and usually the "cheap EV charging" and "overnight low rates" coincided. Now however, I've noticed that if I plug in the EV during the day it pretty much starts charging instantly and you're right - I could say that's 100% around lunchtime. My usage means I can't really take advantage of that much since I commute in the day and plug in in the evenings, but it's still a noticeable pattern for the days that I am either working from home or its a weekend.

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.

Completely agree, however this should just be rolled into the "how much does a data centre cost?" bill. Add the solar, add the necessary battery storage...that's your cost. Not "we'll build it without anything and hope everyone else will give the power instead".

It's not, but that's where home batteries come in. I'm a new'ish convert to solar, having had it installed in March and so this will be my first winter with it. I also installed a 12kWh battery to go along side it. The combination pretty much takes care of all my daytime home usage, although it does not take care of my full usage since I also have an EV.

I charge the EV overnight, plus top of the battery on cheap overnight rates. Result is barely any daytime usage for me. How that translates to a 24 hour data centre of course is a question in its own right, would they start affecting the overnight rates? Hmm.

you are probably correct, but luckily I don't play sports games and I gave up on battlefield after 1942...

Erm, yes it is and yes it does. At least if you use systemd. And you say "perfectly possible" and yet sysvinit and other systems don't do it.

Every invention ever made has been used in war.
This is sad and depressing, and clearly points out the biggest problem with human society.
I wish we could kick the habit and get over our addiction to war, but this appears to be a fantasy.
And yes, in the past I have worked on jobs for the military.
It's complex.

I fly 200ish flights a year so figure 70-80 nights away.

2025 was 100% hotels but 2019 was about 80% Airbnbs.

Airbnb will never get my business back. Ever. The professional scammer hosts are so good at finding a way to nail me for a fee. Iâ(TM)ve taken perfect check out video and still had to spend hours fighting fees.

Airbnb allowed making guests do it.

They lost so much money to hotels theyâ(TM)re banning hosts from requiring it.

The DOD/DOW have been working on this for a while. They discovered, early on, that the device had a propensity to cause permanent nerve damage.

It's very unlikely the US have fixed that, as they'd largely sidelined the work as a failure. However, at 36%, Trump needs something he can call a win, no matter what the long-term consequences.

Your sentence is gibberish. Assuming you mean to say "systemd does not preclude somebody adding security by other means", then no it does not.

But does any sysvinit based dist do it? Devuan, the white knight of the dump-systemd "movement" certainly doesn't. Service sandboxing? Nope. Cgroup process tracking? Nope. Credential handling? Nope. Log tamper proofing with FSS? Nope - rsyslog has some tamper evident features but the capabilities are way easier to set up in systemd. Disk encryption via TPM? Nope. Least privilege? Nope - its all LSB spaghetti code running as a user and no control beyond that.

Devuan admits how terrible it is by offering OpenRC during installation. OpenRC supports cgroups, capability dropping and supervision. But then it runs OpenRC over the same LSB scripts in compatibility mode, so none of that is used. And even if it was used it would still be limited compared to systemd. And it tacitly admit that sysvinit sucks when that was its whole schtick in the first place.

And I don't think people raging about systemd were ever motivated by security, or common sense for that matter. You demonstrated that with your Poettering remark. There are reasonable points of debate / concern about systemd, about overreach, modularity, packaging and suchlike but you're not interested in any of them. Just some kind of irrational fear of change even when it is progressive and beneficial. Almost as though you see a change to a subsystem in an operating system as a threat to your world view. It's very weird IMO.

I am not sure I kicked it. I still dream about EQ and the old raids.

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.