Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"

We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.

I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.

Electricity prices in Europe are around 2x what Americans pay. In Japan it is even higher. Each 9 added to uptime has a cost, and Americans have apparently decided they don't want to pay.

It's a trade off: you get abundant free energy to run the server, with extreme constraints on cooling because your server is running in the most perfect Thermos bottle ever.

Others are taking the opposite tack: undersea data centers for abundant free cooling at the expense of having to get the power down to your servers.

If had to bet on which one is more practial, I'd go with undersea servers. Build them off the coast of Chile, run cables out from batery-backed solar plants in the Atacama desert.

I've been seeing a LOT more ebikes and small (250cc and lower) motorbikes on the road lately. I live in a state where summer is oppressively hot (winter is bike season) and most riders appear to be commuting to low-posting jobs. It seems to be the k-shaped economy manifesting on the road.

I think it may be evidence that Amazon has a shitty corporate culture that squeezes every penny it can out its employees.

Corruption can happen anywhere, but it's more likely to happen in totalitarian cultures where people feel like the system is rigged anyway. That's why countries like Russia and China have corruption problems. But I suspect the same feelings of me vs. the system occur in a capitalist enterprise like Amazon where employees are governed by dystopian, rigid, computerized metrics.

Not to mention these vehicles are a huge pain to work on. I changed the spark plugs in a 150/1500 class truck recently and had to lay down on to of the engine on a chunk of old mattress to reach any of them. And needed a 2-step stepladder to get up there. I've since changed to a Ridgeline and you can reach anywhere in the bed and most of the engine without a ladder. The interest in the Slate and recent sales of smaller trucks suggest that this is a growing market.

There's trillions of dollars of investment wanting to be thrown at datacenters and the power is part of the package. If tech bubble money can be used to help with nuclear economies of scale and building institutional experience, I will not turn it down.

It's probably so they don't have to go fetch hundreds of cars if the update goes wrong. Same reason I don't update software when I have something important tomorrow.

Recent legal cases have been on the basis that the services are/were defective by design and, as a result, presented dangers which were independent of any specific post on the platform. It's not a specific post or set of content which was the issue. It's the whole system.

The restrictions are a mix of reasonable nuisance management and paranoia about who is flying drones, what they can do, and chain of custody.

Beijing proper is a city with a population density of over 21,000 / km^2 -- so you can imagine the chaos if any tech enthusiast resident could fly a drone without a permit. Except for a couple of free zones in the outer boroughs, New York City restricts drone launcing and landings within the city to flights with a permit and flight plan, because otherwise the sky would be black with drones. Many cities -- both red and blue -- have zone restrictions for drone flights, and those currently hosting World Cup matches have tightened them for the duration of the tournament.

I think the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East are relevant here, although most probably not the dominant factor. Russia and Iran are undoubtedly spending down their Bitcoin reserves at a rapid pace to cover revenue losses elsewhere and move money sanction-free.

The only justifiable reason to tolerate coal is because it is one of the few energy sources that can store, independent of weather and other factors, large amounts of "fuel" at the project site. Generally sites will hold 1-3 months worth on the coal pile. The only other energy sources which can do this at a reasonable cost are nuclear, biomass, and geothermal, all of which are more expensive than coal (if you exclude health impacts).

The most likely outcome is that we will end up with the same deal as the previous one which Trump canceled. Arguably worse because Iran has demonstrated that they can indeed close the straight for all practical purposes. 60+ days of bombing by the most powerful nation on the earth accomplished basically nothing. A few more days will surely do it though.

Many, many places in the world get their water from underground aquifers. These are not really part of the water cycle and are being depleted at alarming rates in many areas. Even if the water is taken from a river, someone downstream may have been counting on that water for their needs.

The word "capitalism" wasn't coined until much later. That means two things: One, it doesn't uphold capitalism and Two, it doesn't disparage it. What is in the Constitution is fundamental rights. Capitalism is a consequence of individuals exercising those rights, up to the point where it infringes on the rights of others. Recognizing that is one of the things that made Theodore Roosevelt a great president. There is nothing un-American about wanting to reign in capitalism, but there is something decidedly un-American about wanting to destroy it wholesale, since as mentioned previously it arises from the exercise of natural rights. This is the much-hated nuance, particularly despised by the left, who seek to abolish capitalism; but also some on the right who have an agenda to give free reign to robber-barons and undo the works of T.R. and others.