That is Mexico Cancún-level bait-and-switch without the curtain-clad "negotiation" rooms.

Did they patent transparent aluminum?

The raises will disproportionately hit people in deregulated markets who can least afford them: residential neighbors of giga-DCs who pay retail rates while DCs pay wholesale rates. And you can bet the DCs have tax credits and subsidies too, also known as socialism for capital.

And water rates aren't far behind for similar reasons.

So much for trickle-down voodoo economics.

Windows iterates by doing more and more unnecessary work inefficiently, slowing down, and dropping compatibility to sell more hardware. Apple was historically better somewhat in not precisely following this with a 7 year hardware support lifetime cycle, but with OS 26 versions, they've definitely embraced greater planned enshitsolescence too. FOSS must hold the line by not treating computing resources as infinite nor compatibility or UX as optional.

I begrudgingly use a cracked Windows 11 Enterprise box to drive an oscilloscope data collection/interfacing machine because there's a stack of specialized software that has only winDOwS support.

AI is going to look really dot com hype shark jumping in 2-3 years after the bubble bursts, and AI features recklessly shoved into products requiring backend infrastructure to function will go dark. Although neither NVIDIA nor Microsoft may become the next WebVan, but OpenAI (Microsoft's investment) and CodeWeave sure look like it because they're un-diversified, niche businesses. And their industry is buying basically all of the HDDs and loads of GPUs, and building DCs faster than any customer demand can materialize to support them. That screams reckless over-expansion of productive capacity chasing competitive one-upsmanship landrace between billionaires who forgot how a business works and stays a business. At this point, they're setting their investors' money on fire while spinning 12 plates to distract from all of the money being pissed away.

Around 1995-1997, I worked at a nuclear engineering consulting company where there was a thermo engineer VP who was also a professor of thermodynamics in microgravity research. Several times, he opined heat pipes would be amazing for cooling the new generation of very hot PC CPUs in desktops and laptops because these were what were used in satellites to remove heat from systems that needed to radiate heat away from point heat sources to cold sources elsewhere. And, sure enough, not a year later did Zalman have a giant copper block heatsink with a heatpipe for cooling Socket A CPUs.

If someone weren't familiar, heat pipes are typically self-starting, passive cooling loops that use a sub-atmospheric sealed pressure chamber filled a very high latent of vaporization coolant (i.e., water or ammonia) and usually a wick core or channelized piping surface to make the journey from cold to hot without gravity assistance. (Passive two-phase fluid flow, even with gravity, is very painful.) Mobile phone vapor chambers are basically extremely short heat pipes. I guess one could make an aluminum or lithium as coolant heat pipe for rocket engines, scramjets, reactors, or blast furnaces if they had exotic enough materials to contain them.

Yup. I thought about alternatives to LEO: MEO, GEO, VLEO, GSO, SSO but realized the economics for each case is even worse.

In the meantime, gigaDCs are invading unincorporated and small towns driving up the local cost of water and electricity while adding to traffic and noise pollution to mine BTC or fulfill Zuck's and Sama's fanciful mirage of stonks going up forever by virtue of "if you build it, they will come". It's billionaires and corrupt politicians having Great Gatsby parties and sticking random people with the "check" in the form of externalities; socialism for them and austerity for everyone else.

Servers without racks and cases are still heavy; even cutting to $500/kg, that's still $500k/mt just for the initial orbit without maintenance burns. Cosmic ray shielding is really fucking heavy. And then it must also haul up solar panels good only for ~50% duty cycle, which is even heavier. What goes up, must come down.

"Disentangling" supply chains, planting malware in consumer and IT infrastructure gear, banning brands, and building a fleet of invasion barges with comically-large drawbridges to drop tanks over Taiwan's anti-invasion perimeter wall.

Argh. Bias sucks, preferential advantage from guilt sucks, and pure merit alone sucks.

The way out is to keep merit, but make sure there is pervasive outreach to underserved/disadvantaged individual people. The problem with removing merit is it places a question mark over the head of someone hired for not merit reasons and it's disrespectful because it condescendingly asks less based on factors outside of their control rather than insisting on uniform expectations of excellence. Without excellence and integrity, there can be no building of pride and self-confidence if there's playing favorites. It sucks, but it's necessary to nudge, mentor, and advantage individuals who need the help to achieve more than to expect less because that furthers racist/discriminatory climate rather than raising up talented people who just need help to break the cycle rather than expecting less because of appearance/background attributes to continue the cycle in different ways.

Berkeley though is an exception (and Harvard). That's were all of my asian friends from high school went. There and Harvard with perfect SAT-I score scholarships. Everyone (more or less) from Leland and Belarmine CP had asian parents even if they weren't asian because that was the time when boomers were mostly middle-/upper-middle-class parents of our generation. We all received "the talk" riot act of "You must get perfect grades, take lots of AP classes, improve your test scores, start community things to show leadership initiative, and do extracurriculars or you won't get into a good school, and then you won't have a successful career, and then you won't have a good life, and then you'll be a friendless, homeless loser working at McDonald's." I opted for what was Berkeley's ag school because it seemed chiller and not so wound up, and that was just before Real World ruined it.

I'm opposed to very large packs of NMC and similar chemistry batteries in current form that are ticking time bombs that regularly burn down other cars, parking structures, and homes. It's like we've normalized the deviancy of eating lead (II) acetate and driving without seatbelts because of a mad dash new tech frenzy like it's the fucking 1910's all over again with radio and cars. I've watched too much StacheD Training videos about thermal runaway fires that cannot be extinguished and toxic fumes.

It sounds like fake shit and AI lyrics are always awkward, don't fit, and horrible. Country isn't exactly my bag. If they start flooding Tidal with AI reggae and heavy dub, I'll accept the universe is a simulation and reboot myself and hope I don't end up as a minnow or a jellyfish in the next cycle.

• - Acoustic bass guitars with slides
• - Banjos
• - God, guns, girls, flags, beer, cowboy hats, boots, jeans, trucks, and horses
• - "Cryin' in my beer because my girl stole my truck and horse trailer and ran off with my cousin who was a chick"

All it proves is, like MAGA, they have no taste and are easily fooled like dumb animals.

Look at the history of the PDF spec. Way back, it allowed embedded javascript and ActiveX controls. It has zillions of features and allows almost arbitrary shit.