planets are suboptimal

He's a very gifted engineer that was critical to the design process but I think some important weather sanity checks he provided from his ✨ lived experience ✨ were 1. Maximum reasonable size of hailstones the dish would need to survive, 2. Maximum reasonable snowfall rate the dish would need to melt, 3. Maximum reasonable wind the dish would need to withstand without waving or bending, 4. Maximum reasonable size of daily thermal cycles.

like I can't believe that the green opposition to, say, building a new 9GW natural gas plant to feed a 9GW data center in Utah is primarily focused on how much water the data center might use for cooling chips, with NIMBYish land use fears and heat island catastrophism playing second fiddle. If the Utah guys had proposed exactly the same data center with exclusively wind+solar+battery power the green backlash would look almost exactly the same!

what happened here? Uncharitable guess is that the highest-viz climate groups (e.g. sunrise, extinction rebellion, greenpeace, Sierra club) got hollowed out by 5 years of scope creep (e.g. Gaza, BLM), leaving the field open for off-message influencers on tiktok or whatever.

also nobody in this crowd seems to have noticed that gas plants (like all thermal generation, including nuclear) also generate concentrated low-grade heat and require cooling, traditionally done by evaporating water. Not trying to summon any demons here but like that is exactly what those big towers with big white steam clouds billowing out are doing.

I tend to assume that Trumpism suddenly replacing climate change as the Doom is a bigger factor. It's all weird.

But my impression is that the anti-AI leftist youth movement you see on this hellsite has merged with nonpartisan local-politics NIMBYism and conservative-coded farm defenders to form a growing big-tent consensus that new data center construction should be banned or restricted. AOC & Bernie sponsored bills on this last month, but Josh Hawley and Nancy Mace are also in the news as being on this train.

like I can't believe that the green opposition to, say, building a new 9GW natural gas plant to feed a 9GW data center in Utah is primarily focused on how much water the data center might use for cooling chips, with NIMBYish land use fears and heat island catastrophism playing second fiddle. If the Utah guys had proposed exactly the same data center with exclusively wind+solar+battery power the green backlash would look almost exactly the same!

what happened here? Uncharitable guess is that the highest-viz climate groups (e.g. sunrise, extinction rebellion, greenpeace, Sierra club) got hollowed out by 5 years of scope creep (e.g. Gaza, BLM), leaving the field open for off-message influencers on tiktok or whatever.

also nobody in this crowd seems to have noticed that gas plants (like all thermal generation, including nuclear) also generate concentrated low-grade heat and require cooling, traditionally done by evaporating water. Not trying to summon any demons here but like that is exactly what those big towers with big white steam clouds billowing out are doing.

This is the quiz and I did not come up with it, credit goes to @iswearbyalltheflowers on this post.

She has some debt

Her boyfriend says he won't propose until she has fully paid it off on her own

She has a plan for that, but it will take 1-2 years

Ramsey tells her to drop that man immediately, because he's an unserious child who's stringing her along and clearly already has fundamental disagreements with her about money. She is a princess who deserves better. 👑 👑 👑

The version I watched was kind of shorn of context, but based on that blurb, my wife and I disagreed: she thought it's fine to expect someone who's gotten into debt to prove they can get out before you join finances, whereas I thought Dave was right: if a person shows they're serious about turning things around, then it's crazy to condition a proposal on completing a 2-year grind.

Anyway, we look up the rest of the context and it is:

The debt in question is $90k of student debt from a bachelor's degree

The boyfriend makes $250k/year

Well all right then, wife and I are in perfect agreement now: this isn't a chick who thinks credit cards are free money, she seems to have her head in the game, and the debt to income ratio of the family is "jack shit." C'mon buddy, either man up and marry that princess or admit there's another reason you're on the fence.

Okay, so it turns out that a certain type of Angry Young Man (lower-middle-class conservative with a brain slow-cooked in manosphere slop) is driven into a shrieking rage by this additional context. STUDENT DEBT? Like some sort of WHORE?! Anyway, I'm learning about all this through the replies to Wayne Rowcliffe, a trad/conservative wife guy with four kids and a 14-year marriage.

Come visit the rogue's gallery with me:

She has some debt

Her boyfriend says he won't propose until she has fully paid it off on her own

She has a plan for that, but it will take 1-2 years

Ramsey tells her to drop that man immediately, because he's an unserious child who's stringing her along and clearly already has fundamental disagreements with her about money. She is a princess who deserves better. 👑 👑 👑

The version I watched was kind of shorn of context, but based on that blurb, my wife and I disagreed: she thought it's fine to expect someone who's gotten into debt to prove they can get out before you join finances, whereas I thought Dave was right: if a person shows they're serious about turning things around, then it's crazy to condition a proposal on completing a 2-year grind.

Anyway, we look up the rest of the context and it is:

The debt in question is $90k of student debt from a bachelor's degree

The boyfriend makes $250k/year

Well all right then, wife and I are in perfect agreement now: this isn't a chick who thinks credit cards are free money, she seems to have her head in the game, and the debt to income ratio of the family is "jack shit." C'mon buddy, either man up and marry that princess or admit there's another reason you're on the fence.

Okay, so it turns out that a certain type of Angry Young Man (lower-middle-class conservative with a brain slow-cooked in manosphere slop) is driven into a shrieking rage by this additional context. STUDENT DEBT? Like some sort of WHORE?! Anyway, I'm learning about all this through the replies to Wayne Rowcliffe, a trad/conservative wife guy with four kids and a 14-year marriage.

Come visit the rogue's gallery with me:

Fleet exercises conducted in 1981 and 1983 near the far northern and far eastern regions of the Soviet Union demonstrated US ability to deploy aircraft-carrier battle groups close to sensitive military and industrial sites, apparently without being detected or challenged early on. These exercises reportedly included secret operations that simulated surprise naval air attacks on Soviet targets.  In the August-September 1981 exercise, an armada of 83 US, British, Canadian, and Norwegian ships led by the carrier Eisenhower managed to transit the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom (GIUK) Gap undetected, using a variety of carefully crafted and previously rehearsed concealment and deception measures. A combination of passive measures (maintaining radio silence and operating under emissions control conditions) and active measures (radar-jamming and transmission of false radar signals) turned the allied force into something resembling a stealth fleet, which even managed to elude a Soviet low-orbit, active-radar satellite launched to locate it.As the warships came within operating areas of Soviet long-range reconnaissance planes, the Soviets were initially able to identify but not track them. Meanwhile, Navy fighters conducted an unprecedented simulated attack on the Soviet planes as they refueled in-flight, flying at low levels to avoid detection by Soviet shore-based radar sites.  In the second phase of this exercise, a cruiser and three other ships left the carrier battle group and sailed north through the Norwegian Sea and then east around Norway’s Cape North and into the Barents Sea. They then sailed near the militarily important Kola Peninsula and remained there for nine days before rejoining the main group. [...] The projection of naval and naval air power exposed gaping holes in Soviet ocean surveillance and early warning systems. For example, in a Congressional briefing on the 1983 Pacific exercise, the chief of naval operations noted that the Soviets “are as naked as a jaybird there [on the Kamchatka Peninsula], and they know it.”