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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • If I make a gas engine with 100% heat efficiency but only run it in my backyard, do the greenhouse gases not count because it’s so efficient? Of course they do. The high efficiency of a data center is great, but that’s not what the article laments. The problem it’s calling out is the absurdly wasteful nature of why these farms will flourish: to power excessively animated programs to feign intelligence, vainly wasting power for what a simple program was already addressing.

    It’s the same story with lighting. LEDs seemed like a savior for energy consumption because they were so efficient. Sure they save energy overall (for now), but it prompted people to multiply the number of lights and total output by an order of magnitude simply because it’s so cheap. This stems a secondary issue of further increasing light pollution and intrusion.

    Greater efficiency doesn’t make things right if it comes with an increase in use.


  • Yes, Bush was the president for most of 2008. Obama got a short portion, although the exact president in place doesn’t necessarily tell you if they agreed anyway. Since president’s don’t really write law, I was looking for the exact law to see the history of which representatives were pushing it. I wanted to see what the angle was for that piece of the bill and what else was attached to it. Nothing gets passed as an individual law, meaning it was probably a rider in a much larger group of laws that likely made it a non-negotiable requirement bundled into a more pressing matter.

    But I guess 9+ people read my simple question as total contempt for the situation.






  • Standard map projection strikes again. Starting from the tip of South Africa, it’s 4300 miles to Uruguay (where you’d land straight east) and 5300 to Perth, Australia. New York City is 3300 miles to Portugal and obviously the smoothest route to Australia is hopping through southeast Asia. Coincidentally, the northern hemisphere has way more population.

    Cape Town is only 34° south. Going to 34°N, you’re lined up with Los Angeles, Dallas, and Atlanta USA, then Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, then the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, middle of China, southern tip of South Korea, and grazing below Tokyo. It’s still 4100 miles between Georgia (USA) and Morocco.

    There are no southern polar flights and no southern undersea cables because the southern continental points aren’t as far south as the northern points are north. Population volume doesn’t create the demand for more direct service.