But why keep evidence of embezzlement at home?
I dearly hope the gold was hidden in the now traditional freezer.
But you do got to wonder. If I had $40 million, I'd be so retired to a tropical island without an extradition treaty. I just looked at a list and it's pretty slim pickings. The biggest problem is you're stuck in whatever country you pick. There's no way you're travelling internationally, at least, not without a good fake identity.
Ordering $40 million in gold bars on work related expenses must have raised flags
I can only imagine: "Hey boss, I need to buy some new server racks. The vendor only accepts gold ingots."
Snark aside, it was probably more of the form "Hey boss, I need to bribe some third world dictator with a funny hat so I need some untraceable gold."
Still, you'd think there would be some follow up. "So Dave, how'd that bribery scheme turn out? Did the 3rdWDwaFH do the thing we wanted?"
Then ride share companies came along and "disrupted" it into a gig job....then maybe municipalities...bring in more competition.
Wait, I'm lost on your reasoning. Taxis had a effective monopoly on transportation services. Ride sharing came along, out-competed them, and that was...bad? But to rein them in we want to bring in more competition?
I don't understand whether you favor competition or not.
Here's the thing. I have no idea what the right price for a driver's time is, nor the price for a ride. Maybe they're high enough to support someone at a reasonable living. Maybe it's only valuable enough to be a side gig which supplements a day job. How are we supposed to figure that out? I'll tell you how, free markets and competition. If the taxi company model really is the best, just wait. The ride sharing companies will run out of investor money to burn then collapse. Taxi companies will re-emerge to fill the demand. Or maybe ride sharing really is the best model but the equilibrium price just doesn't support it as a full time job. That's too bad if you were a taxi driver but sorry to say, that's life. Jobs disappear all the time, just ask any typist from the 1975 typing pool.
Yes, downsides to ride-sharing companies and their profits, which can impact their executives.
Not saying "wont someone please think of the..." but you are factually incorrect.
I confidently predict the biggest losers will be customers.
If the union negotiates higher pay, that's going to cause some combination of reduced profits, increased automation, and higher prices. From what we're seeing with tariffs, the bulk will be increased prices. There's also a bunch of empirical research showing that increasing labor costs doesn't lead to lower profit margins. Unions may be great for workers who keep their jobs but they're entirely anti-consumer.
That balance goes both ways. If there's not enough work people won't do it and supply will drop.
I read an article yesterday. I don't remember where or the specifics. The gist was when the minimum wage for delivery drivers went up, demand dropped, supply rose, and tips dropped. Net net, drivers wound up making exactly the same amount as they did before the raise.
Hopefully this sorts itself out. You'd hope drivers in MA compare their unionized workload and pay against drivers in Rhode Island or Connecticut. We can speculate all we want, let's find out for sure.
What?
You are acting like this is a common occurrence happening all across the country - it isn't. This article is the first such case
It's
That said, I'm surprised NV Energy isn't bound by a contract or regulation to supply residential power. One year to find an alternate supply isn't a very long time if you're not positioned to install an alternate at your home. I'm quite sure many of the customers built or bought their homes assuming they had some guarantee that power would be delivered over the grid. It's an interesting legal question though, what sort of actionable legal right do they actually have?
The builders of the datacenters aren't setting themselves up to build infrastructure and power
They're increasingly doing exactly that, building on-site power. I just checked. First Google hit said there were something like 46 projects in the works with on-site power. I see a continuous stream of stories about data centers being planned with conventional natural gas generation. Data centers are frequently mentioned as a natural market for the small modular reactors people have been dorking around with for a decade or so.
they are setting themselves up to leech from public infrastructure.
They're paying customers like everyone else. That's not leeching, that's competing for a limited supply. If they can pay a more compelling rate than homeowners, perhaps this is how we pay for more infrastructure.
CThat's not their fault under capitalism. If a capitalist company will draw too much power to maximize its profits, the power company needs to limit what they sell them.
Under any sane system, the power companies would be building new capacity at a furious pace. You (the power company) don't maximize your profits by pissing off existing customers.
If they don't have enough capacity to service both their existing and new customers, perhaps we should look at why they're not building more generators.
It doesn't really do you much good to fit it into 2U if you need 20-30kW for that one box.
I saw some statements from Nvidia about how they want 1 MW racks. This would fit. At that power density you need liquid cooling, which I don't think this box has.
To get a 1 MW rack you need really interesting power distribution too. I think they wanted to go to 800 V DC to each rack. Care on the part of the maintenance techs is encouraged.
Maybe stop putting risky or annoying shit next to residential areas?
It's not that simple. Someone lives near anywhere you might want to build something. Even if you build in the remote reaches of Alaska, some busybody will get their undies in a twist that it destroys some aspect of the wilderness they personally value, even if that person has never been to Alaska and never intends to.
More practically, you want to build power plants near where the demand is because shipping power costs money and can cause other issues. You want data centers near people both to hire people working there, hiring people to build it, being close to transportation to haul gear in and out of the data center, and so on and so on.
We've been arguing about siting industrial facilities for probably 150 years now. This is not a new problem, it's just what people are hyped up about today.
What I think is ironic about your comment is clustering industry used to be one of the primary values of a city. You wanted all your factories and industry concentrated in one spot. Then people got all upset about how noxious industrial cities were so industry moved to the suburbs and exurbs. If we want to have a high GDP and wealthy standards of living, we're going to have to build industrial complexes somewhere and that somewhere can't always be "anywhere I can't see it."
Nuclear plants create jobs. AI datacenters eliminate jobs.
Both eliminate some jobs and create others. You'd have a tough time convincing the people at Nvidia or TSMC that AI does nothing but eliminate jobs.
Thing is, you can say the same thing about any technical change or any change in consumer preferences. We don't pay attention to polls saying whether people would rather have a Kmart store or a fitness center in their neighborhood, and yet the 24 Hour Fitness gyms have taken over many failed department store locations. I don't see any particular reason we should pay this poll much mind either.
Which one to like and want?
Talk is cheap. If only we had a way to determine what people actually prefer based on their revealed preferences. Oh, wait, we do, it's the free market. Let's use it.
Fortunately (or unfortunately) these trends and ideas make much less of a difference in a child's educational success, than parents.
That's my belief. Do you know of any data comparing all the various influences? Money, parental involvement, charter vs. traditional public, teaching methods?
But these things do tend to work themselves out over time. In the 1970s, for example, there was a big push for "new math"
The problem is, every generation of educators seem to get a bee in their bonnet to come up with new teaching methods and we go through it all again. We seem sadly incapable of learning from past experiments. There's always some new fad method. What I find annoying is we also seem incapable of trying controlled experiments and patiently waiting to see how well it works. If new math is so great, try it with 1,000 schools for a few years, then objectively study the outcome before rolling it out to the masses.
At the same time, the educational establishment is stubbornly opposed to accepting data when it tells them something they don't want to hear, e.g. charter schools work pretty well and closing schools during COVID did not. Upton Sinclair got this one right: ""It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
They've had 22 years to figure this out, but now it's a crisis requiring a rush mission because nobody thought it was important enough to do something a year ago, or five, or ten.
Swift is also 22 years into it's two year lifetime. It's lasted 11 times longer than planned. I'm kind of astounded that it still works and hasn't had problems with things like gyros failing.
I'm all for trying to dock and boost it. It's a great opportunity to try it out and if it fails, well, the mission was due to end anyway. Satellite telescopes don't last forever. You just would have thought people would have been looking into this for years so it wasn't a rush job.
They 'jump' to that conclusion because it's based papers based on analysis of crops grown in identical soil conditions.
Does it? I'd hope so, and that they're comparing the same varieties of crops. I couldn't follow the paper well enough to tell if they filtered studies based on how well they controlled for those confounding factors.
Once it hits the fan, the only rational choice is to sweep it up, package it, and sell it as fertilizer.
