In theory, sure. In practice, the FTC regulates things like this about as well as the CPUC regulates electric rates. Regulatory capture and bending to industry pressure has become the default at this point. Right to repair laws are really the only solution. Such laws distribute the enforcement responsibility by potentially enabling random annoyed DAs to prosecute or class-action attorneys to sue, depending on whether they are written as civil or criminal law.

This reasoning is flawed. The same logic could easily be used to justify genocide. When I read your post, I read it as:

"You've killed 5% of [insert group of people]. Do you really want to stop now? Because if you do, the ones who are left will hate you for the rest of your lives, and will find ways to attack you for decades. The only reasonable choice is to nuke the entire country."

Because literally, you could justify turning Iran to glass with your same logic. This is why decent human beings do not even consider starting a war without a concrete strategy, including:

• goals that they hope to achieve
• exit criteria (both for a successful exit and a failure contingency exit)

Regardless, criticizing the U.S. going into the war in the first place is not letting the current government of Iran win. Hell, insisting that the U.S. exit the war is not letting the government of Iran win. Their country took a lot of damage, and it will take years to rebuild. At best, it would be a draw.

On orders from the elected hacks, with justification from the elected hacks, and exit criteria specified by the elected hacks, assuming it has been specified at all.

Unclear. What is clear is that if China decides to go to war with the world, their economic output will go away, so they have a lot to lose by doing so. Russia and Iran have every excuse to be abusive neighbors, because they have nothing to lose, and this is the fault of decades of failed foreign policy by the United States.

The U.S. is going after Russia? Seems like this war is creating a huge surplus of oil revenue for Russia, now that the entire Middle East is cut off from the rest of the world. It is making Iran weaker and Russia stronger. At best, it's a draw, but more likely, it's a huge mistake.

One would hope that the U.S. is going after Iran's drone factories, which does hurt Russia a little bit, particularly in their war against Ukraine, but given that this is likely to basically erase all of the consequences of Russia starting that war with Ukraine, not to mention massively damaging the relationship between the U.S. and its NATO allies, effectively making Russia *massively* more powerful on the world stage than it was before this disastrously incompetent war began, it's hard to see this war as having any meaningful upside.

Nobody ever thought it did.

Not going to happen. TSMC is building factories in other parts of the world. Lots of manufacturing happens in other parts of the world. If China invades Taiwan, TSMC will go scorched earth. The factories will be leveled, the machinery destroyed, and the world will go on. China gains nothing from that strategy other than control over a small amount of land that has basicallyl bombed itself back to agrarian levels of modernity.

For now. See above, though. They're going to make out like bandits because of this war with Iran. Instead of the U.S. helping Russia rebuild after a defeat, the U.S. is letting Russia basically win and keep the spoils. This is quite problematic at multiple levels, at least in the medium to long term.

Would be nice if it worked that way, but I think it is way more likely that Russia, enriched by all this oil revenue, will buy Chinese-made weapons and use them to make the lives of everyone around them miserable.

Sure, but only if it is planned competently. When you're bombing girls' schools and music schools and running out of actual military targets, while not planning ahead with enough air cover to prevent Iran's ships from planing mines in the Strait of Hormuz, you've taken what could have been a catastrophe in 5 years and turned it into a different catastrophe right now.

From my perspective, this is the most botched U.S. military action since Vietnam, planning-wise, and the only thing preventing it from turning into another Vietnam is the lack of troops on the ground. Start sending in ground troops as is currently rumored, and the outcome could be grim.

To what are you alluding?

They know that critical infrastructure *must* be repaired, and want exclusivity over those repairs so that they can profit unreasonably. As you said they're going to make frivolous claims that you might buy counterfeit parts made by some fake parts manufacturer in China or whatever.

The problem with any argument they come up with is that most repairs don't involve motherboards or other components that could realistically have compromised firmware, but rather power supplies, RAM, and storage. (And yeah, storage could have firmware, but probably not firmware that could plausibly result in any sort of remote compromise or anything similarly interesting.)

So there's no plausible rational reason for this weakening of the original law, beyond "IBM and Cisco paid a lot of money to lawmakers so that they could continue to get their mandatory handouts."

The way I see it, this is literally a bill whose sole possible outcome is increasing the cost of providing Internet service to the people of Colorado. If you vote for this bill, you're voting to raise everyone's Internet service costs, with no actual proven benefit.

This bill is trash, and anyone who votes for it should be voted out. It's that simple. Vote accordingly.

Yeah, but that doesn't mean they're ordering so far ahead that they don't have electrical connection approval for the building. Approval for connecting to the grid should happen before they even break ground for the building, after whcih it takes anywhere from one to three years *after* they break ground before the data center opens.

It can take a year or more just to get the high-kVA transformers for the building, which are often built on demand when ordered, not built and warehoused ahead of time. And it can take months to years for the power company to run new high tension lines to the site, depending on power availability. And so on. All that stuff has to be nailed down before you break ground, or else you might end up with a building that you can never light up. They wouldn't just be risking the hardware going out of date. They'd be risking dumping millions into a useless building that nobody wants.

So the only way power connections should be a problem is if they are so clueless about the way the world works that they don't get a will-serve letter from the power capacity with the projected capacity needs before brekaing ground. I wouldn't even be willing to risk building a *house* without a will-serve letter, much less a multi-million-dollar data center.

If they're even slightly competent, they'll have a hard date for when the power company can get power to the site, and that will happen in parallel with the permitting process, so that by the time the permits are available, they have a power guarantee. If they don't have that power guarantee by the time the permit process is finished, they should hold construction until they have it. And their construction plan should include dates for when building transformers have to be ordered to get them there by the time they're ready to light up the building. And so on.

I'm not saying there aren't incompetent fly-by-night companies that try to build data centers without any clue how to do it and end up getting burned, but I would hope that these are the exception, rather than the rule. If you're spending that kind of money, I'd expect you to have your ducks in a row.

Assuming the bubble bursts, then probably. Actually, that will probably happen no matter what, because when technology makes a big leap, there will still be outstanding orders for old tech, many of which will be too late to cancel.

How do you build a data center without plans for cooling or power? The surrounding area won't ever build chillers for you, and you have to allocate ground space for the infrastructure for all of that stuff. What it sounds like you're talking about are idiots who think they know how to build a data center, using other people's money, and getting burned. It's 1990s startup culture all over again. And I really don't care about them. They'll all probably go under anyway, because they don't have a viable plan to execute.

I highly doubt this represents a large percentage of data center construction. You'd pretty much have to have never tried to build a data center before and never worked in a data center and never even taken a tour of a data center to make those sorts of rookie mistakes.

Unless the companies are completely incompetent, they aren't having the processors manufactured until they have a plan for bringing the building online, including power delivery.

Everything else in the data center is pretty much the same no matter what hardware you put in the racks. You still need floors, walls, and a ceiling or roof. You still need places for cables to go between racks (either above or below). The floors still need to be built to handle high static weight loads where the racks are. You still need power infrastructure. You still need cooling infrastructure. And so on.

Gas prices collapsed because of the pandemic. Diesel prices increased because more people were buying things from Amazon and similar instead of from their local stores. Also, they couldn't do it then in part because they were enjoying all the extra revenue from people buying more online, and they wouldn't have wanted to risk disrupting that by increasing the fees.

But otherwise, yeah.

Okay, allow me to educate you for a moment. There are two things that affect the price of gas: supply and demand.

Supply is affected by wars, mostly, and to a very limited extent by laws regarding where you can drill.

Demand is affected by the economy.

President Trump left office with one of the worst economies in decades, mostly because of COVID and our government's botched response to it:

• Lockdowns were put in place too late and released too early.
• Restaurant exceptions were disastrous.
• Part of our government ignorantly told people to not take any precautions at all.
• We ignorantly locked down only travel from China, completely ignoring that diseases tend to escape borders, and causing the travel bans to get tied up in court and be shouted down as racism.
• We ignorantly did not use that travel ban period to create proper isolation facilities near airports, buy buses and bunny suits for the drivers, and ensure that we could safely reopen the borders.
• We ignorantly put a whole lot of people on ventilators who did not actually need to be, driven in part by hospitals seeing a payday from insurance, and in part by genuine ignorance about how long a blood draw is valid for blood oxygen content purposes.

All of these things made COVID objectively worse. But the global zero-inventory supply chain disruptions triggered by COVID would likely have been crippling to the economy no matter what. So I blame our former president for maybe 30 to 40 percent of the problems, and the rest was probably unavoidable, given decades of offshoring manufacturing, decades of zero-inventory supply chains not failing catastrophically often enough to serve as a good cautionary tale, etc.

So yes, when that downturn ended and people weren't so scared of not having jobs, travel increased, and gas prices bounced back to normal. Biden didn't cause that. The economy recovered. I mean, if you wanted Biden to cause an economic catastrophe to keep gas prices down, I suppose he could have done so, but it wouldn't be a good idea. :-)

The other cause of gas price increases is supply. Biden didn't really do much to affect supply. Maybe preventing the Keystone XL pipeline expansion negligibly increased the cost of delivering some future fuel by requiring it to be trucked to the top of the pipeline, but that's noise. Reinstating existing bans on drilling in environmentally sensitive areas also doesn't really affect oil availability much now, because that affects supply that might be available in a decade, not what's available today.

But getting into a war with Iran and causing Iran to mine the Strait of Hormuz, effectively isolating the entire world from almost all actively producing sources of oil other than the United States and Russia? Yeah, that reduces supply immediately and catastrophically, which increases prices.

That's not small. But agreed that it is the wrong solution. The right solution is aggressive enforcement. Require everyone who is transported to a hospital to describe, in their own words, the events leading up to it. Immediately prosecute when fraud is detected. Keep doing this until the fraud stops.

I suggest:

First offence: Have to watch CSPAN for 5 hours a day, for a week, without sleeping through it - evidence to be provided in court

Second offence: Have to sing Miley Cyrus songs and Baby Shark on TikTok - sober

Third offence: License to practice and all memberships of country clubs and golf courses revoked

Basically everyone who lives in the area or studies the climate or hydrology would tell you that you're insane.

More like a once-in-a-millennium event. Though I suspect it's going to be considerably more common going forward.

Deserts have some amount of normal precipitation, too. And when you get a lot less than normal, that's called a drought. Yes, even in a desert.

We do have pretty good data from tree rings. Unless you think the trees came from somewhere else?

Everyone expected it — not necessarily in the American southwest, but at multiple somewheres in the world (without guarantees about which specific locations). Droughts and heat events are literally what climate scientists have been warning about for as long as I can remember hearing about global warming. And it always stood to reason that the most at-risk areas were places where rainfall is barely adequate to meet demand (e.g. the American southwest). So if you were going to make a prediction, that area would have been most people's top pick.

And maybe it is the most statistically anomalous heat, but this isn't the first snow pack anomaly in recent memory, nor is it the worst, at least for California's Sierra Nevada snowpack. It's reportedly the second-worst. I'm pretty sure that 2015 was the worst (not positive, but pretty sure).

In short, we already knew that this could happen in that location because of climate change, and that it could impact snowpack in ways that could compromise our water availability. Anybody who didn't realize this has either not lived in this part of the country very long or doesn't watch the news.

What is the power consumption for doing this tens of millions of times, and how does the greenhouse gas emissions from that compare with the power consumption of running the servers? It seems like there are a lot of hidden costs in the current approach.

They tried that with Apollo 13. And.... that actually did work, sorta.