On what AI is trained on, promised minimized labor of the unit worker in socialism/communism certainly seems attractive from a few human who are labeled communist "thinkers" (and not already erased), but when you get to the death toll tables from "thinkers" doing industrial scale farming or "education" , things change. Hopefully unlike a world of socialists the death tables will get some weight in the output.

In employment matters, the citizen employee with a masters or PHD can pack their things and walk for better working conditions, if that masters or PHD means anything. The entire debate about wage rates is ridiculous, nobody but teens and interns seeking their first job would take anything under what is worthwhile to do x labor in x conditions. The second working conditions change, every worker has to evaluate and decide if they are walking to the parking lot or logging off the VPN. Always be the worker that makes the hapless manager have an oh shit moment every time you have the sniffles.

There is large pulse of people inbound with current H1B fears, that were misplaced by the media in India most of Friday. I hope people slow down and read the EO and the guidance released before booking the flight at surge pricing.

This is south of the equator Africa, much different than the Med and North Africa. The other repair ships are in the Persian gulf, red sea and med as the base of operation. The primary place this ship will service is the Madagascar and Tanzania. Many of the closer islands it is cheaper to put up a microwave link and back it up with multiple sat vendors. There are not a lot of underseas cables that are solely critical, perhaps handling the contract after a break will be expensive, but not be critical.

The overland routes are becoming many as most of the African Nations have power systems with interconnects that are supported by fiber optic networks and are accessible and leased as either managed solutions and perhaps dark fiber to qualified vendors. Once someone maintained the roads along the power system, these links were financed by the cell phone providers nearly 15 years ago. The whole earth motherboard of wired mag describes 25+ years ago was a snapshot of a buildout wild west that was gone just two years later. I would say rural africa is better connected by fiber service footprints that the united states in 1992 by T1s, OC3s. It might be much more of hassle to get into the connection point in a few of the nations, but at least its not putting up and keeping the power on a series of microwave links of the early 1990s.

The exact same thing can be said about UPS, USPS and FEDEX. But the economies of scale get things to me for $1.20 to $5.00 while sitting on my home and never going to a store without a bank, grociery, lotto retailer, bakery, sushi bar, coffe shop, cell phone kiosk, parmacy, dog wash and photo printer on the same trip. Good thing the pub is on the way, or home brewing would be more attractive. The american shopping mall and retail distirct has died, it is gone, just like the small town centers they killed. The 5 and dime, Blockbuster, Local hardware store, Sears Gone, K Mart Gone, Macys Gone. The computer fix it shop/cell phone retailer....is there to collect bills for the cash economy user. Consumer traffic going to buy stuff has made your average STRODE a empty thruway at 4pm on a weekend afternoon.

Amazon is a logistics company that optionally by the call of the algo owns warehouses of the items people want in 1 day or less. This has been true for the past 5 years, if you did not figure that out, wake up. We need 3 more Amazons so that local pricing imbalances can be volumed around.

All the results of a wildfire are not on the generators, the producers, it is on the grid operator who is passing the bill to consumers. The grid costs in California should be larger than the production costs (good amount of peaking can be done by hydro). Knocking down 65% of your demand with a solar farm works if your portion of payments for wildfires of the past also goes down by 65%.

Because the power the residential customer produces is being consumed before the substation in anyplace but certain neighborhoods in phoenix AZ. The unreasonable charge is the grid/delivery/connect charge for net power producers, if the label was storage company, or peak power provider, the utility would write a check.

Until you can contract you own hourly model for purchasing power, the utilities are allowed to rob you for 98.5% of the time so they can take the hit 1.5% when every gas peaker is running near 100%. Yet another place where you are actualy paying for insurance and not the service. The easiest solution is just to offset you cooling needs with solar, do not bother with the grid tie, and use a commodity portable power bank as emergency power for internet, a TV, computers. When you get an EV, that commodity portable power just got huge.

Solar in excess of you HVAC and pool demands are not worth it. If you lower your overall demand off the grid by 65%, you have offset the problem since 2018. Its an accounting perception problem, people will happily pay to remove that hot humid feeling. Turning off you HVAC has a ROI of 0 years, until the divorce lawyer.

If you turn a 50A consumer to a 50A producer, the load past the first substation towards the big producer drops. The home player is powering his neighbors AC unit. The consumption of power is for cooling for residential, the hard neighborhoods in the sun with no tree cover just became easy. Why are we upgrading the grid in the direction of big producers for the residential customers. The utility rate boards are not asking the right questions: Are we building a grid for a demand curve that no longer exists and the residential consumer does not need?

Hopefully your state allows both NG and ELECTRIC to be sold to you by someone other than the utility. They should be working to offer you the solar mid day power for you to squirl away for them at .09USD/kWH. Mine only allows me to buy NG with a fixed price contract, making hot water and winter heating costs are not my issue. The cost of what shows as 65% solar power from a producer local that exactly matches about 70% of my load (cooling) as it appears on my bill is the problem.

The easy fix is for the people who do not need a new electric grid, is not to charge them for ignoring the transmission grid for the past 40 years. Take the obscene grid charges (to rebuild a 50 year grid in 10 years) off of residential bills, actualy have stock holders particpate in investment and allow consumer choice, and power is in line with the economics of the situation. The consumer will then decide to add solar and storage to offset summer cooling.

Having even a over priced fixed price contract, I can buy an contract to protect me from not being able to participate in a NG crash, that happens 3 out every 5 years.

Just like the residential customer, solar producers at utility scale signed a contract before being built that the utility was going to buy power at a minimum rate, so the initial build out could be panels only. There would be no federal loans, no grants, no public-private partnerships if the local utilitiy was not obligated to buy power at the price of producing the same power with a tradional fueled thermal plant.

The .09/kWH was the cost everyone thought noontime power would be worth, noontime consumption is flattening because of LED lighting, office power consumption being cut by 50% and classic retail space is being abandoned. New warehouse space is lit by motion activated lighting and is powered by panels and storage. The outlook for NG for seasonal heating is flat with a war in Ukraine and downwards without one.

If I could pay .09/kWH for noon power 200 days a year, and pull my 4 hours of peek usage into my own storage, that system would pay me back in 7 years. If I put solar pannels on my roof, the payback becomes 5 years before the home owners agent calls seeing the new risk on google earth. If my utility offered that solar power cheap, I would spend more on the dishwasher that is smart and fires off when power is cheap. I would not drive my EV to lunch at noon, but change lunch to 3pm. I would buy a resonable storage array, and even would sell them back the same power at .09/kWH out of the goodness of me heart, as they tell me the grid is another charge, let it be another charge.

Residential bills are going up because consumption is up 35% because of home office, total consumption per capita in the US is flat including what is going for AI if we properly put EVs as transport energy delivered at the expensive endpoint of the gird. Investment for anything but the sins of forgetting about the grid for the past 50 years are not for the consumer to make, unless we can participate in a tiny bit of upside. Until I can put myself on a hourly rate controlled by market forces, I feel like the utilities are making the most money off of selling me to the producers.

If the AI people want to spend money like they are building a transcendental railroad, the government is fine stepping back and letting it happen. Regulate mature industries we at Slashdot said during the last boom, all kinds of dread was predicted, and the network neutrality went crashing because everyone got 1Gb/S bandwidth down and 100Mb/S for under 100 a month now that the residential build out is all but done.

What people dont like, instead of tree hugging Northern California Hippies with eastern philosophies bent networkers, we have people more in tune with venture capital and mega industries industrialist philosophies. That the world only needs data centers where power is the cheapest, reasonable latency and out of the reach of state takeover, is now in the mantra. For those of us along for the ride, dont really care, I am selling them enterprise network consulting...the tent, the maid, the cook they will need in the goldfield.

I am very surprised someone isn't building ten nuclear reactors in a row in Wyoming, ten Giga data centers, and at the same time digging the disposal for 100,000 years on the same site. I have found nothing yet in AI (guess other than self driving) that NEEDS in region latency.

Not end of story.

NVIDIA might be absolute performance leader, but when the NVIDIA part is sold out, the AMD guy is can get you a pallet of cards that do the workload at the same number of watts. Making margin is better than waiting on making slightly more margin, we are in the gold rush, and dam strait I want any shovels and Pans and blue jeans to sell to the idiots running for the goldfield. And some times you have to tell an investor you have put x dollars of hardware under a roof, if INTEL and AMD deliver we are golden.

AMD often outperforms NVIDIA in price-to-performance value, especially in budget and mid-range gaming graphics cards, and in specific AI inference workloads where cost, power efficiency, and latency are prioritized over the absolute highest performance. While Nvidia leads in high-end gaming ray tracing and AI model training, AMD's competitive pricing and strong performance in tasks like AI inference provide significant value for certain users.

AMD aims to outperform NVIDIA in AI inference primarily through a focus on cost-effectiveness, higher memory capacity, and optimized hardware for large language models, making it a competitive alternative in specific inference workloads despite NVIDIA's overall market leadership and dominant software ecosystem. While NVIDIA often excels in training and certain real-time inference tasks, AMD's MI-series GPUs offer strong performance per dollar and excel in scenarios demanding high memory bandwidth, such as large context window LLM inference, leading to increased adoption by major cloud providers.

US wholesale energy prices are .09 to .13 / kWH if you have your own substation and are willing to let the power company to tell to when they need you to load shed. The average price published is twice that. The steelmill near me is at .09kwH for everything but 2 hours on days with wind and sun, and does not do batches another 15 days a year for weather. Typically the staff does not want to show on those weather days either. Perhaps 1 day a year a anything other than winter storm warning or extream cold event they have production staff and cannot run a batch, everything in sight gets libercated and closer inspection. The soon to be 4 nuclear power plants near me, absolutely need a customer making low pressure steam out of high pressure steam else they might have to throttle or send power to canada for really to cheap.

The cost diffrence between building 2 and 5 datacenters chasing cheapest prices isnt a factor of two or three, it may be a factor of 1.75. Since excess power and excess compute is sold on the open market, no time like now to build a data center and let the utilities and generators fight with knives to sell you the extra raw material elections in exactly the way a compute DC can take it, scheduled by the minute. Those backup battery farms now drop in value at the same rate if your providing the service to yourself or the utility, so leaver that to get the utility to deliver at the substation at unity to the producer.

If you can negotiate a better rate with China, I got guys who will build a DC on a barge and park it anywhere.