Because in addition to all the filthy pirated booty I stole, I would also show them this:
* My 350+ physical CD collection
* My 200+ physical DVD/Blu-Ray
* My entire merch collection for Nine Inch Nails (>$1000)
* My entire merch collection for Rings of Saturn (>$1000)
* My merch collection from many, many, many other bands
* Pages of receipts from Bandcamp and other e-media distributors
* Pages of receipts from direct payments to artists themselves
* The mass of ticket stubs I've acquired from live shows
* The mass of movie ticket stubs I've acquired from theaters
I'm never paying for entertainment again. I paid my dues and the industry has done nothing but fuck me and everyone else.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to refuse to do business with the media companies who are, indeed, evil and dishonest in how they do business. By all means, never give them another dime.
But you also don't have the right to decide "but I still want to consume the content that comes out in the future" and take it without paying. Doing that is no better, morally, than this shit which Sony is pulling. It's taking something which doesn't belong to you. If one does that, then their ideals are hollow and they really were just rationalizing their own selfish behavior. I'm not accusing you specifically of that, but it is depressingly common.
This is what I'm asking... It's like going to the wholesaler and wondering why they don't have a nice pretty brick-and-mortar to buy from. GS doing consumer credit just seems like a large impedance mismatch in various levels.
Sorry... just musing on this topic because this is giving me a laugh.
I'm not sure how much it would really be needed. Part of my family owned and operated a gas measurement business in West Texas and I don't recall ever having to do anything special for winter conditions on pipelines. Most of the water and oil comes out with the plunger lift in the well head and is stored on-site next to the well. Trucks come to haul it off and one of our jobs was to coordinate all of that plus maintenance.
There are glycol stations but as I recall those are really only used in gathering systems with a compressor. The large plants will have tons of equipment online to condition the gas before pushing it upstream. The biggest issue we ever had was just baby-sitting compressors in the middle of the night because some of them just really don't like to operate in cold conditions.
I used to test the gas in a lab and there wouldn't be enough water vapor left in the line to cause any issues under freezing. You have far more issues with carbon sludge build-up since anything above butane just really wants to be a liquid. That area typically produces wells with something like 4% N2, 70-80% C1, 2% CO2, and the rest is basically C2+ with maybe some H2S in a few places. It's very easy gas to pipe around for the most part.
That's very helpful. Press info in this area is politicized enough that the engineering info isn't getting through.
Any comments on this: “Gathering lines freeze, and the wells get so cold that they can’t produce,” said Parker Fawcett, a natural gas analyst for S&P Global Platts.[1]
??? Texas's 2021 winter disaster, which the Governor stupidly blamed on wind turbines, turned out to be largely caused by frozen natural gas delivery components.
>There was not only insufficient power generation capacity online, but also insufficient natural gas supply to the power plants. The failure of some gas distribution infrastructure, which had not been adequately winterized, resulted in exceedingly high prices for natural gas. Some gas compressor stations lost power when utilities began shutdowns, and overall gas supply fell by 85%.
One related thing that happened was that when the rolling blackouts started, the power companies had a list of critical customers that should not be cut off like hospitals, police stations, etc. Unfortunately some natural gas pumping stations were not on that list (or were on the list but were ignored), so they got cut off. Which of course created a positive feedback loop.
Look at the dip in Permian versus Haynesville, Eagle Ford, Barnett and Fayetteville. Permian is West Texas where I said I was and it didn't even dip below the previous low. East Texas is a whole other country...
The stacked line chart [1] of daily production by basin on the wiki page is very misleading. Following through to the source EIA data [2] and comparing Feb 2021 against Jan and March 2021 shows permian production down 19% from "average", the biggest decrease of the reported basins. The other basins you mentioned were between 13 and 18% below their "average". Of course this is a pretty big extrapolation from a monthly average number...
> There’s a meme that Git is hard to use but I think it’s conflating the challenges of getting used to version control at all
No. I had used CVS, SVN, SVK, Bazaar, and Mercurial for years before I switched to Git. I can generally explain the internals of all of these tools (a DAG) to someone in simple terms in minutes. Overlaying that onto the commands becomes easy.
What Git does is take that concept and wrap it in the worst possible workflow UI. The people that immediately grafted onto the Git community cheered this on for some reason very early and then recanted by saying that you are really supposed to build "porcelain" for Git since it was meant to be a rough tool.
To this day all I see are articles about people's confusions and conniptions over simple things that Git does incorrectly because it's UI is horrible. Most can't even get to the point where they understand the DAG. Even though I know what is supposed to happen it's hard for me to fumble around with simple commands because the naming is inconsistent and I have to research to find solutions. This was rarely an issue with Mercurial and when I talk to people that have used both they seem to share that sentiment.
Git is the PHP of version control. Widely used and very popular but has a lot of architectural problems that make it a total mess.
> I'm guessing due to some backwards compatibility idiocy that seemed like it made sense at some point ...
> ... making a compelling reason to fuck over the future in favor of optimisation now
> I never questioned the competence of past engineers
False just based on your opening volley of toxic spew. Backwards compatibility is an engineering decision and it was made by very competent people to interoperate with a large number of systems. The future has never been fucked over.
You seem to not understand how ASCII is encoded. It is primarily based on bit-groups where the numeric ranges for character groupings can be easily determined using very simple (and fast) bit-wise operations. All of the basic C functions to test single-byte characters such as `isalpha()`, `isdigit()`, `islower()`, `isupper()`, etc. use this fact. You can then optimize these into grouped instructions and pipeline them. Pull up `man ascii` and pay attention to the hex encodings at the start of all the major symbol groups. This is still useful today!
No, the biggest fuckage of the internet age has been Unicode which absolutely destroys this mapping. We no longer have any semblance of a 1:1 translation between any set of input bytes and any other set of character attributes. And this is just required to get simple language idioms correct. The best you can do is use bit-groupings to determine encoding errors (ala UTF-8) or stick with a larger translation table that includes surrogates (UTF-16, UTF-32, etc). They will all suffer the same "performance" problem called the "real world".
Maybe it's just me and my bad attitude toward products today but this could explain why everything seems to be turning into low-quality garbage. I'm not a millionaire business man so I must be doing it wrong, but spending over 1/3rd of your revenue stream on customer acquisition rather than anything product-related seems like a bargain I don't want as a consumer.
For SaaS companies, 30-40% sales and marketing expense ratio is totally normal with R&D 20-40%. You need to keep up (in both) if not competitors will eat at your revenue which means even less dollars for product/R&D, running businesses is hard!
> Why do you pretend that you are entitled to free video storage and bandwidth from YouTube?
Because they offered it for free.
YouTube can close the doors any time. If they want my money, they can make a service offering that meets my needs. They could charge content providers for bandwidth and storage and meter it with assisted ad-support networks. They could charge a price I'm willing to pay.
But they don't and I will not accept any argument that consuming resources they put into the public sphere for free use means I am under any moral obligation to either give them money or facilitate them making money off of my traffic.
The only time ads worked was when Google made them an unobtrusive part of search. They dominate literally every piece of software I use now. I'm sorry but I say burn it all to the ground. I will either pay for or build its replacement.
You don't want ad-blockers? Shut it down. I was doing the internet before there was a need for them.
You can get a Youtube Premium family plan for $15/mo that works for 6 people.
I'm as against ads as anybody, in the sense that (1) in general I think ads are unhealthy (2) I want infrastructure that makes access to content without ads possible (3) being able to disable ad blockers is one reason it's bad to let one company control how your browser works.
I can't say I disagree with Youtube's right to monetize, it's more of an "I'd really rather if you didn't" thing, but I think they do in fact offer the affordable plan you are asking for.
My Service Provider License Agreement states that I am able to circumvent any ad technology when using my own devices. It is free. The "with ads" part is someone else's opinion.
I watch primarily wildlife documentaries, educational lectures, and podcasts related to academic topics like paleontology, archaeology, ancient history, and other subjects. I don't want music, live shows, television, sports, or most content that would incur a premium markup.
If YouTube would be willing to charge me something in the neighborhood of $5-$10 per month for that I'd happily pay. I have never had a Netflix subscription. I stopped consuming pop content and movies in 2010.
I am serious about this. If you have any way of making recommendations to anyone anywhere within Alphabet that will listen, please offer it up. I would point you to a site like HistoryHit which is far more in-line with what I want. It is $60/year.
Also, I already pay $5/month to the Kevin Richardson foundation and the ad-blocking mechanism on YouTube prevents me from watching those videos (which I paid for).
You're not going to shut them down, it sounds like they shut you down. Just pony up the $100/year. It's the cheapest television has ever been. This is hacker news, not hobo news. If you've been using the Internet this long, then you should remember the outrageous amounts of money people were paying for cable television back in the 90's. And that still had ads.
Most content creators are either doing it for free, or getting a percentile of a cent on the dollar. As far as I'm concerned, that makes it communication infrastructure, not service provision. Youtube is providing the infrastructure, the creators are providing the service.
As I think that infrastructure should be publically owned, I'm happy to do my bit for nationalization, and use adblock.
> I get that we -need- electricity at night. But frankly, there is zero incentive for me to put my billion there. Its high risk with no reward.
That's why we aren't getting nuclear right now. Once the regulatory hurdles come down and all of these questions get answers it'll be clear how to make a return on nuclear investment and that will attract investors.
Also, solar (and all other "renewables") are only quick to build assuming you have raw materials. We are probably going to be hitting a raw materials crunch soon because virtually all new technology is pulling from the same resource pool (copper, molybdenum, nickel) and cheap extraction is effectively gone.
Also, from an investment point of view, I'm not sure why you'd prefer a more volatile commodity. All commodity markets were set up to reduce volatility and base-load power is a huge reduction of electric grid volatility. You are telling me you'd prefer a world where you have intermittent failures because you could set it up more quickly than have reliable, constant, always-on base power for cooling/heating, food, hospitals, etc. Most people think that's a bad trade-off, hence the desire to have nuclear become the base-load provider fuel of choice.
Also, the more the personal transportation fleet electrifies, the more electricity we will need during the night/evening: everyone will want their car/bike/scooter/autogyro ready for commuting in the morning.
Transportation charging at night will be a drop in the ocean, something like 10-15% of our total energy needs, much of it happening during the day time. If half of vehicles are charging for a few hours of the night night, that's a couple percent of night time demand coming from transportation. A couple percent, maybe maxing at 3-5%, will be far less of a worry than the double digits required by home heating and electricity or industry or agricultural needs.
The regulatory hurdles are already low enough and nuclear is usually lavished with subsidies and good PR as well. This is because it shares a lot of the costs of running a nuclear-military industrial complex.
Baseload with 5x the LCOE of intermittent sources that takes 10-15x as long to build just isnt valuable to civvies when there are plenty of cheap enough storage options.
It's not 5x, it's more like double AFAICT. Which isn't great, but compares reasonably to fossil fuels once you factor in greenhouse emissions.
It shouldn't be the default, but it has plenty of niches where it's clearly the best choice - for instance, in Japan/Korea/etc where the bulk of their energy is imported liquefied natural gas. There's very little space to build solar/wind and so nuclear makes a lot of sense there.
I'm not telling you what to do, but I really wish this kind of thinking would stop.
I've spilled concentrated round-up all over my arms and legs many times because I used it regularly as weed control all over my property in Texas. I've also been regularly exposed to all sorts of noxious chemicals like acetone, gasoline, diesel, various alcohols, and many different organic compounds in general. On bare skin (solvents get your hands clean fast!). Part of my life is a mixture of agriculture, oil/gas, and just general West Texas grime.
I eat virtually 100% meat now which is also supposed to give me cancer. The teflon-coated pan I use to cook eggs doesn't have much teflon anymore because I've scraped most of it off through cooking (I never wash it). When I was a child, J&J baby power was an absolute staple in all households I ever visited and I've inhaled clouds of it. I have been sun-burned countless times in my life and still regularly seek long intervals of intense sun with no sun-screen. My family were early adopters of cellular phones so I've been exposed to brain-cancer causing RF/EM radiation for over 30 years now.
No cancer. No diseases. No allergies. No excess pains. No respiratory issues. No mental fog. No general health issue to report in any way. I'm the healthiest and fittest in my life at 47. I never go to the doctor any more because the last few times I went all of my lab work came back perfect.
Maybe one day I will get some fatal disease or just get run over by a truck. For now I'm going to just keep betting on the odds, though. Most of the health fears I see today seem to have an extremely low chance of occurrence (if at all) and many times is confined to very niche cohorts. The science behind most of it is pure garbage and popular opinion is generally driven by court case outcomes rather than verifiable facts.
I'm sorry for your loss, but there doesn't need to be "justice" for every case of bad fortune. There has never been a causal link to cancer with glyphosate and it has been well studied and used for many, many, many years by many, many, many people.
This stuff is all about risk. If two people add their personal experiences, we have two data points. What are we supposed to do with that? It's not enough to quantify risk.
You can do everything wrong and be completely fine or you can do a single thing wrong and suffer the consequences immediately. Those are the two extremes and then there will be a bunch of data points in between those extremes. What you want to pay attention to are averages. How likely is it that I suffer negative consequences from this? If I do, what is the magnitude of the negative effect going to be on average?
In a data center you have racks of computers performing all of the workloads. At this point these racks are fairly standardized in terms of sizing and ancillary features. These are built-out to solve the following:
* Physical space - The servers themselves require a certain amount of room and depending on the workloads assigned will need different dimensions. These are specified in rack "units" (U) as the height dimension. The width is fixed and depths can vary but are within a standard limit. A rack might have something like 44U of total vertical space and each server can take anywhere from 1-4U generally. Some equipment may even go up to 6U or 8U (or more).
* Power - All rack equipment will require power so there are generally looms or wiring schemes to run all cabling and outlets for all powered devices in the rack. For the most part this can be run on or in the post rails and remains hidden other than the outlet receptacles and mounted power strips. This might also include added battery and power conditioning systems which will eat into your total vertical U budget. Total rack power consumption is a vital figure.
* Cooling - Most rack equipment will require some minimum amount of airflow or temperature range to operate properly. Servers have fans but there will also be a need for airflow within the rack itself and you might have to solve unexpected issues such as temperature gradients from the floor to the ceiling of the rack. Net heat output from workloads is a vital figure.
* Networking - Since most rack equipment will be networked there are standard ways of cabling and patching in networks built into many racks. This will include things such as bays for switches, some of which may eat into the vertical U budget. These devices typically aggregate all rack traffic into a single higher-throughput network backplane that interconnects multiple racks into the broader network topology.
* Storage - Depending on the workloads involved storage may be a major consideration and can require significant space (vertical Us), power, and cooling. You will also need to take into account the bus interconnects between storage devices and servers. This may also be delegated out into a SAN topology similar to a network where you have dedicated switches to connect to external storage networks.
These are some of the major challenges with rack-mounted computing in a data center among many others. What's not really illustrated here is that since all of this has become so standardized we can now fully integrate these components directly rather than buying them piece-meal and installing them in a rack.
This is what Oxide has to offer. They have built essentially an entire rack that solves the physical space, power, cooling, networking, and storage issues by simply giving you a turn-key box you plant in your data center and hook power and interconnects to. In addition it is a fully integrated solution so they can capture a lot of efficiencies that would be hard or impossible in traditional design.
As someone with a lot of data center experience I am very excited to see this. It is built by people with the correct attitude toward compute, imo.
Because in addition to all the filthy pirated booty I stole, I would also show them this:
I'm never paying for entertainment again. I paid my dues and the industry has done nothing but fuck me and everyone else.Fuck them. It's over.
Have fun paying to sing "Happy Birthday".