So what?

Yes, you can configure a ridiculous thing that nobody will buy from other manufacturers. And guess what? Those guys don't sell those ridiculous configurations either. But for them it's just options on top of the base config that everyone does buy.

For Apple it's an entire product line.

I had one of those back in the day where I had dropped in a firmware flashed Nvidia GPU, with a small secondary power supply stashed in the second optical bay.

That thing destroyed almost any other similarly priced workstation for years.

Most environmental quality regulators monitor the heat of the discharge because it causes algae blooms, etc.

A small town close to where I live was constantly getting fined by the state regulator because the discharge from the sewage treatment plant into the river was too warm for the volume of the river. A dairy farm about a mile downriver established a pipeline from the sewage treatment plant to their pump house, so they could spray the water on their fields that they were pumping out of the river anyway. They were able to lower the discharge volume under the regulator limit, and the dairy had more available water than their pumping permit from the same regulator.

As it turns out, neighbors working together can really work out.

Please have a look at Loudon County, Virginia. There are at least 6 more datacenters being constructed along a single highway that I saw last fall, in addition to all of the DC's they already had (basically anyone that sells any capacity at all to the US Government, including AWS us-east-1, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, etc.). You can bet that everyone's bills are going up due to the sudden switching on of needing several million gallons of water per day. That means they have to expand municipal treatment capacity - at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. And they aren't doing that without a ratepayer hike, which is essentially a giant off-the-books taxpayer subsidy for a private business water hog.

In Prineville, Oregon the government made requirements for permitting, so Apple uses groundwater + an injection system to put their cooling water back into the ground when done. They also operated on treated outflow water from the city wastewater treatment while getting the groundwater system in place. Meta has paid millions of dollars in local water restoration projects in addition to the usage fees, so that they can offset the increased consumption. Remember, Prineville is over on the "hot side" of the state, so water is indeed an issue, but they're managing it well: not allowing unlimited growth, and what growth you get pays for it's footprint.

Water can indeed be an issue, if your local regulators are essentially captured by industry. But we have a solution for that: elections. Bad regulators can be swayed through political pressure - the entire city / county / state of voters has far more leverage than fucking Meta when the next local election comes around; Meta isn't on the ballot, but the asshole who is letting Meta not pay their way - their name is.

It's also completely unrelated to the point at hand.

The level of oppression in Iran can't possibly be more than the level of oppression in North Korea, can it?

Yet there is two reasons why we feel enabled to bomb the shit out of Iran while leaving North Korea alone, isn't there?

1. Iran does not have nukes, where North Korea has demonstrated nuclear explosive capability with underground testing
2. Iran has oil, where North Korea does not.

The oppression never enters the equation until after the bombs already fell as a convenient excuse and post-facto justification. By the way, how's that regime change working? Seems it's all the same people still in charge over there, and we aren't exactly seeing freedom parades, now are we?

I thought we got over the whole "bombing the middle east for specious and outright false reasons" thing 20 years ago too, but here we are.

Well that makes it better, doesn't it?

Somehow we're having talks with Iran, when we don't even know who's in charge. Are we negotiating with just some guy that says he can negotiate, or is it THE guy? Or are we talking at all, because the only one saying we are is Trump, and he's a proven liar that shouldn't be believed without factual correlation or witnesses.

Seems I touched a nerve when I called out your binary understanding of geopolitics and said that you needed to look at the nuance.

And you still aren't.

How can something be "totally obliterated" and then be a problem again in 6 months? That sounds like "damaged" instead of "obliterated."

Take your complete lack of nuance and go find a dictionary. You sound like an idiot. And then you go on to throw shade at someone else's intelligence by claiming they have a position that they already say they do not.

Don't focus so much on "bad" and "good" - it clearly will only confuse you.

And to answer your question of why Iran has HEU? Because Trump tore up the deal that limited them to far less enrichment, which they were complying with. Looks like your "nuance" is absolutely lacking once again.

Again, you're the one making the argument. Why are you asking other people to do your research for you?

Lazy.

Interesting.

I bought a Shield TV Pro when they came out in 2021, and it's been rock solid right up to today. I even still got a software update for it last week, so they're still doing development on an Android device 5 years after launch, and they might be the only company doing that.

I couldn't have been happier with the purchase, and I don't use it for games. I wanted a STB that does real HDMI audio passthrough so I can use high definition formats with my high definition AV receiver.

Just make sure it is somewhere with *some* airflow and it's fine.

That sounds like a feature to me, as long as it doesn't constantly nag you to log in.

So the Vietnam War wasn't a war? The Vietnam War Memorial just to the northeast of the Lincoln Memorial is misnamed? 55,000 US military personnel died for a not-war?

The Korean War wasn't a war? The Korean War Memorial just to the southeast of the Lincoln Memorial that the Embassy of the Republic of South Korea puts a wreath at every week since it opened is misnamed?

The Iraq War and War in Afghanistan weren't wars that lasted for 20 years? Pretty sure any of the tens of thousands of US military personnel that were involved in those wars and were shot at would probably disagree. Especially the ones that shot other people and are living with that psychological trauma and PTSD.

Formal declarations of war don't happen any more. You are arguing in bad faith on a ridiculous technicality that hasn't been the case in literally 70 years. US Marines are on the way as we speak, and we're spending billions of dollars per day on munitions and wartime operations for "warfighters" (as this dipshit SecDef... sorry "Secretary of War" likes to call them) to drop those munitions.

The fucking President even calls it a war.

Time to shut the fuck up on this nonsense talking point.

I was against them.

But please go on standing up straw men to knock the hell out of.

I'm not the hypocrite chickenhawk warmonger here.

This sentence alone shows you have no understanding of nuance, and have no understanding of what I'm saying. You are an ignorant rube that cannot logically defend anything happening here, yet you continue trying.

Go back to wearing your MAGA hat and trying to justify anything the cult leader says, no matter if it's contradicting something he said mere minutes before in the same event.

THAT is who you are defending here. And his stupidity is drowning you.

You have a lot of blind faith in 53 Senators to not be self-interested cowards who go along to get along.

You have a lot of blind faith in 218 House members to not be come-to-do-good stay-to-do-well self-enriching hypocrites.

We know that's who these people are, because they're not even interested in holding this administration to account for violating laws that THEY WROTE AND PASSED, AND THIS PRESIDENT SIGNED. See: the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

The system isn't working as intended, because we have 273 bad faith actors at the levers of power in the system. These people are not interested in what's legal, or even what is "right" - they are interested in keeping their jobs and fundraising, not causing a famously vindictive asshole who holds the entire conservative political apparatus in complete control to focus his ire on them.

This isn't governance. It's mass cowardice. And you're trying to put a high-luster shine on that giant pile of shit while telling me that's the way it's supposed to be.

Let me ask you this: if you saw this shit coming from Biden and Democrats, would you be just as zen about it? I think we all know the answer.

I sure as shit wouldn't be, just like I'm not right now. Wake up and stop being an apologist for a regime that routinely breaks the highest laws our government has when it suits them.