well, you try architect, and pre-stage, and segregate and all those things to give yourself as many is as possible and as few critical sections and points of no return as possible.

It's not always possible (or just too expensive ) to cover everything, and there's also that thing nobody thought about... but still this one sounds pretty bad. Reading between the lines I'm guessing this want some bigger things, but that they didn't realize that it was happening at first. otherwise, if it's just sw update (vs involving like multiple pieces of core infrastructure) you'd think they could just take the whole center offline and let other places deal with the calls while they fixed this one....
but of course that's just speculation, idk their architecture or what specifically was updated or what.

  would be interesting to see the report on it eventually

oh, but NYC has 311. I haven't used theirs but in the 2 places I have used it... they were more responsive and intellectual curious and engaged than the police/911 ones... at least usually.

my experience over the years calling the police non-emergency number (which also routes to 911 operators in my area) or 911 for urgent but not critical things in a few towns has had the operators be at best "curt, but professional". rarely had one who seemed to care about what was going on or that wanted to help or dispensed actually useful routing advice.

it was usually a "ugh.... fine I'll take down the info because the law probably requires that I do so" vibe. like my existence was tolerated... but "just barely"

Dr. Boz on YT ( https://www.youtube.com/@Docto... (check the Live tab which is less clickbaity than her "videos" one)
is a big proponent of it for all purposes. She started from mental health , but switched into advocacy mostly due to her mom's cancer.

She starts her live streams by measuring ketones and glucose. and she's been wearing CGMs for a while. i'm sure she'll pick up this combined device too.

Her Keto Continuum approach i find to be a pretty good way to transition into low carb then nutritional keto and even multi day fasting in a way more likely to succeed than just raw dogging it from SAD.

That's what I assumed and why the 1b GBP in ANNUAL losses number seems so unlikely. let's say 800 million is due to these larger 40 million GBP each losses .. that would be 20 such facilities per year! and still 200m left for the smaller stuff.

I haven't looked into the source for the 1B number but on background I have a hard time believing it

so they're saying 1200 fires cost 1B GBP.
That's 830K GBP average per fire which seems... rather high. Don't these places have some form of on site fire detection and suppression? like some fire hoses or something. These little batteries don't have THAT much energy in them; they're not EVs.

(and yes even EVs you use water on if they catch fire. just a lot of it over a long time. i mean ideally you'd just put it in a container of water and top of the water as needed as it boils off )

my argument is the opposite of ideological: I'm saying there's nothing so bad about datacenters themselves that justifies the level of hate against them.

They've existed and evolved over the past 30 years and the water, noise, and power issues can and should be addressed through normal planning process just like any other industrial building.

According to some good ol AI research (spot checked otherwise) the increase in costs in South Florida have mostly to do with natural gas prices and also some surcharges from hurricanes.

Also, even in the incandescent era apparently lighting accounted for ~ 12% of electricity usage in Florida (on average. for residences). So... not much savings to be had there compared to the A/C.

as to my power bill... well... as Brave AI says:

It's a moving target. I just listened to a podcast with Terrance Tao, a former child prodigy generally to be among the top (if not #1) among living mathematicians, https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/ter... , where he says his current math papers that he writes would take 5x as long to write without AI because he uses it to generate graphs and examples and simulations. He also points out that's not to say it made thing 5x faster, because if he didn't HAVE AI ... he'd just write simpler papers without as much illustration and elaboration.

(To me this sounds a lot like what a "financial analysis" looked like before spreadsheets vs after. )

I mean... that certainly used to be the case when i was going to school. Also there's editing and then there's ghostwriting. Traditional editing doesn't rewrite, it just gives comments, afaik.

What AI does is more like co-writing.... or ghostwriting.

when i first read the op-ed it sounded "AI" to me also. (the op-ed https://sfstandard.com/opinion... )

things like:
"We didn’t end up with one somewhat weaker calculus class. We ended up teaching two different classes in one lecture hall: ".

It also had some weird maximalist phrases. like "piling students at exactly zero". And a section title like "The math collapse". to me these all read like structures that Gemini writes when i argue with it about things.
Like it really likes to write "punchy" stuff. In an argument it itself identified the style as a "dramatic essay".

In this era of drowning in AI slop... it doesn't help her credibility, imo. She could have gotten a colleague or grad student to edit for her instead.

(That said, i 100% agree w/ the thesis of her argument... it's been a known issue for UCs a long time. They've been "test optional" for decades and also basically guaranteed admission to people in top 4% to 9% (changed over time) of high schools. So that partly explains why even her "before" picture (2018 -2020) is a little questionable with 11.6% of placement test students at "severe deficit" level)

This AI data center thing is the latest moral panic. Few really cares much about the water use or incremental increase to electricity costs... certainly not enough to become activists and start recall campaigns.

People are afraid that AI will take their jobs and otherwise replace humans and that it gives money and control to "billionaires".

except "the cure" will never have been developed.
Also, we've given insurance companies themselves rather perverse incentives. Everyone hates "overhead" and "administrative cost"... so we introduce the "medical loss ratio"! Basically insurance companies have to spend ~80%-85% of premiums on medical care. They don't really have an incentive to limit the cost of care.... because if medical care costs less then their profits (which are a small fraction of the remaining 15%) are smaller too.

(there are some "value based care" initiatives around like Medicare Advantage, and some similar things, but that's the exception rather than the rule)

mostly, but your taxonomy doesn't include metabolic syndrome and the interrelated things that come out of it:
High blood pressure, "heart disease", diabetes, chronic kidney disease, some cancers....

and the possibly related auto-immune diseases.

So a lot of spend goes to that. when it could be addressed with (significant) lifestyle and diet changes.

I mean i guess you can put all this under DNA in that there's a mismatch between our DNA and our environment (including society) which causes us these issues... but for a lot of it i think the more reasonable fix is behavioral / social but it is taking a while to accept...

This ^
From a hedonic point of view it definitely helps to take breaks from things.
Sugar is one.
But fasting also works. With me it takes about 4 days, but certainly food is a lot more interesting after not eating for 3 or 4 days. ( and no it's not as hard / crazy as it sounds at first. once you get used to it, and if you take some electrolytes while doing it it's pretty painless most of the time. though i admit it's very "seasonal". like sometimes it's trivial to do and sometimes it seems impossible... but it's almost all psychological.)