Orcas rarely venture into the Mediterranean much beyond Gibraltar.

1. A favorable business climate.
2. Skilled workforce, specifically in semiconductors
3. Low humidity
4. Stable geology. No earthquakes. No hurricanes. No blizzards.
5. Stable utilities. No power blackouts.
6. Located close to labor in Mexico for packaging. Direct flights to Asia.
7. Decent universities
8. An attractive location for new employees to relocate to. Arizona is a nice place to live with affordable housing.

Using water for cooling doesn't "use it up". The warm water is still available for other uses, such as irrigation. Evaporative losses are not significant.

Compared to agricultural irrigation, these other water uses are minimal and create far more jobs.

A bigger environmental impact will be the residential water used by the employees drawn to the area, mostly for watering their lawns. Xeriscaping can help here.

TSMC is already having trouble recruiting skilled tech workers in Arizona. Softbank will have the same problem.

You're talking about Florida in the United States, right?...because that shithole has a ton of litter all throughout, especially in Central Florida, like along the I-4....much more so than in the communities I live in with bag fees and plastic bag bans. Sorry, your state may be cleaner than the poorest neighborhoods in NYC, maybe some abandoned rustbelt cities or warzone neighborhoods...but that's about it.

By making you bring bags, you're more suggestible! Giving small commands make you more likely to obey larger ones. This is well established for special needs children and ABA. If you have a difficult child with a learning disability who doesn't want to do something, ABA therapists will give them a simple command first as part of behavioral momentum . So you want a kid to brush their teeth and they refuse?...try asking them to touch their nose first...then clap their hands...and weirdly enough, they're more likely to obey afterwards.

So if everyone else is throwing out conspiracy theories, I'll make up one...by telling shoppers they need to provide their own bag (in my town, you get charged a fee if you use a reusable bag), the retailers embraced this long before it was mandated by local ordinance because it is like ABA...Bring your bag...walk through the produce section to get to the dairy (you came for milk, but now you're thinking about fruit)...buy our special. My baseless conspiracy theory is that reusable bags make you more susceptible to following commands.

The point of big businesses like this is they either charge less or are more widely distributed than superior local restaurants that use conventional food instead of partially processed foods. Few eat at McDonald's because they LIKE it more than a superior restaurant. They eat it there because they can't afford the places you prefer or none are around. Applebees and iHop are extremely inexpensive restaurants.

Everyone fucking knows fresh is better...it's just some can't the extra cost or don't know where they can find one when they're on the road and their kids are hungry. You're basically saying...why drive a Toyota when a Lexus is superior?

The comments here demonstrate a lot of AI Effect, to the point that most of it is clearly wishful thinking plus lack of experience with current-generation LLMs.

This whole debate is a little weird to me, because unassisted suicide is very easy, and cheap. Out of an abundance of caution I'll refrain from describing common cheap, painless, easy methods, but the information is very easy to obtain online. So it seems to me that the issue really only arises if the patient is already severely debilitated by their illness, such that they lack either physical capacity to carry it out. Those situations occur, of course, but they're far less common that the scope of the debate would seem to imply.

Thus, I think the first step any regulation should apply is to ask the question "Is the patient physically capable of unassisted suicide"? If the answer is yes, then no one may assist, except to provide information. This alone should filter out nearly all of the "greedy relatives" cases. If there's a case of an individual who says they want to die, and is physically capable of doing it but just can't bring themselves to... IMO that's a case of someone who hasn't really decided they want to.

I've lived all over, in all sorts of dwellings and properties. At the moment, I'm in the sort of neighborhood you have in mind.

FYI: On large properties — when you have private roads, culverts, shared fences lines, trees and other growth, property line issues, etc. — you do have to interact with neighbors. Repairs, maintenance and other issues come up, and this has to be coordinated with neighbors. Properties are often unoccupied, and neighbors rely on each other to deal with things. In the pricier neighborhoods, there are HOA officers that are in regular contact with property owners. In rural properties, where no HOA is involved, you and your neighbors are on the hook for everything, and everything has to be worked out among you.

When I've lived on smaller properties in dense neighborhoods, this is where I've had little to no contact with neighbors. Similarly when living in apartment complexes.

So I think our tech bro coastal city dwellers have a naive view of what goes on on all those pricey surburb and exburb properties they hate so much. It isn't what you imagine.

Happy to: It has NO VALUE.

The problem here is that your definition of "value" is invalid. Your claim is equivalent to saying that shares of Apple stock have value because we have built systems to ensure that ownership of them is unique and non-duplicable, and that the supply is finite. But that is not what makes shares of Apple stock valuable. What makes them valuable is that they represent partial ownership of a company that produces and sells hundreds of millions of useful devices every year, among other things, and generates hundreds of billions in profits.

Shares of stock, dollars and bitcoins are all non-duplicable, finite-quantity tokens, but the shares of stock and dollars are tokens that represent something in the real world, while bitcoins represent nothing beyond proof that some electricity and some hardware was diverted to create them and transact them, rather than put to a productive purpose.

Yes, it's true that the guarantees of the non-duplicability and finite quantity are stronger for the coins than the others, which could theoretically make bookkeeping easier and reduce the need for auditing of transactions, but it turns out that the cryptoasset guarantees are hugely more expensive than the old way of bookkeeping and auditing, and the non-reversibility of crypto transactions is a fatal flaw for serious real-world use (though it's a boon for scams). If cryptoassets were easier and cheaper to exchange than traditional methods, and if there were a good way to address the reversibility gap, it would make sense for countries and companies to switch to using crypto-tokens rather than audited database entries. Maybe someday someone will invent a crypto-token design that achieves that, and then we'll trade shares of Apple stock by exchanging tokens on a blockchain (or similar). But even if we do that, it will still be the case that it's the ownership of a productive enterprise that provides value, not the token, no matter how elegant the cryptography.

Note that I'm not saying this because I don't understand the cryptography behind cryptoassets. I'm a mathematician and a professional cryptographic security engineer; this stuff is literally my day job, and has been for most of my 35-year career. I deeply understand the (actually quite simple, though cleverly assembled) cryptography and precisely what it does and doesn't do. It strongly ensures that there is a limited supply and that coins cannot be double-spent, and it does this in a decentralized way. That's it. The limited supply and non-duplicability are properties required of any asset, but aren't what give an asset value.

Most people fundamentally don't believe in markets. Look at how they react when prices rise due to a supply bottleneck or similar. They shout "Greed, we're being gouged!", even when there's plenty of competition to keep prices down and rising prices is actually the optimal solution to suppress demand in the short term and encourage increases in supply in the long term. Conservatives are worse than liberals these days, since conservatism/liberalism has evolved to be divided in large part by education level, and market mechanics are really non-obvious and counterintuitive unless you've had at least some level of formal (even if auto-didactic) education in basic economics.

I think markets are, to a first approximation, the ideal solution for every problem that involves optimization of large-group human behavior. Only when markets clearly don't or can't work should you even start to think about non-market alternatives, such as direct regulation, or even subsidies.

But shockingly few people agree. Carbon pricing immediately makes them want to know who's getting the money and why they should get it, even though that question is irrelevant to the primary goal.

I have great confidence in market-based solutions to rapidly move us toward optimal solutions to the climate problem. I have near-zero confidence that it's what we'll do. Heavy-handed, imprecise and mildly counter-productive regulation is the strategy we'll take, if anything.

More like 80% for me. I use Rust.

(In Rust, an expression without a semi-colon at the end of a block -- including at the end of a function -- is the return value for that block. This is used heavily in idiomatic Rust, which means there are lots of lines that do not end with semi-colons. The more you use short, single-purpose functions and the more you program in a functional style, the fewer semi-colons you use.)

I'm also a fan of market solutions. Most people aren't, though, and they're especially challenging with an international problem, so I don't think carbon taxes or warming fees is how we'll do it.

I rarely use semicolons.

When I do, my grammar checker always complains.

Grammar checkers may be the reason for the decline in semicolons.

I think you present a false dichotomy. Several of the proposed geoengineering schemes are relatively inexpensive, though of course a lot of investment will be needed to demonstrate their practicality and effectiveness. I expect that geoengineering will be much cheaper than getting to net zero.

However, that doesn't mean we don't also need to get to net zero, because the geoengineering proposals only address warming, not the other effects of high atmospheric CO2. Ocean acidification and whatever is downstream of that is probably the biggest one, but there are others.

Geoengineering should be viewed as a short-term mitigation strategy, not a long-term solution. I think we'll need that mitigation, though. Assuming AI doesn't kill us all and render the whole question moot :-).