Where do you think most of the excess energy from anthropogenic climate change is being absorbed? It's measured on a scale of hundreds of 1e21 J, of which each 1 is 1 million 1 Mt nuclear bombs equivalent. We're already at +200 from 1993. Human activity is leading to massive changes in Earth's delicate systems, and data centers folks want to more than double energy production primarily for AI.
You're not wrong, but not all values of big are equivalent.
e.g. volume of the worlds oceans is ~1e21 L and annual global energy production is ~3e16 Wh = ~1e20 J
1e20/(1e21*4e3) = 0.000025 ΔC
So even all world's energy production dumped into the ocean as waste heat is a minuscule direct effect. It's all in the second order effects of generating that energy...
What about the local effects of raising water temperature? (In the scenario where a large number of underwater data centers were built near each other)
It's generally bad and kills local eco system with algae blooms and messing up seasonal cycles of nutrients/food. But that's just with dumping the heat into environment especially in freshwater river based reactors and a pretty raw system of dumping hot water into the river ...
Clever use of physics and cooling towers allows us to mitigate the problem..release the energy slowly over time or use the thermal for something else.but costs a lot more than just dumping it into ocean and doing lazy misleading napkin math.
Yes of course, local impacts would be more pronounced. Wouldn’t want them near coral or anything.
To be clear, this isn’t an argument for underwater DCs. I just think it’s important to keep the scales of these things in view, so one doesn’t dilute actual causes of large scale climate change (GHGs etc.) with things like this that have basically zero chance of any even mesoscale effect.
I am starting to be convinced that anything we do (at scale, over time) will become "counter-environmental" ...
... it is as if the only thing that suits our poor planet is some sort of very delicate homeostasis, which we disrupt, in what amounts to, our fight against entropy.-
This is basically how an optical CMM (OMM) works. There are tricks to determining and calibrating out alignment issues and determining snapshot viability, and you're touching on both of them. Very well done!
"courts have long given voucher programs a pass, ruling that they don’t violate the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state because a publicly funded voucher technically passes through the conduit of a parent on the way to a religious school."
Oh wow, I didn't realize all it took to break the law was a middleman. This is why intent of law matters, not just the letter of it.
As long as both secular and non-secular schools are eligble for vouchers in both law and practice then that is fine. You could imagine a situation where they have vouchers 'available for all' but in practice there is some kind of bureaucracy that only allows vouchers to be eligible for religious schools. If the state prevented religious schools from taking vouchers then arguably that is violation of the separation of church and state because they are punishing religious people.
> I didn't realize all it took to break the law was a middleman
You might have meant this sarcastically, but using a middleman is exactly how many laws are routinely side-stepped (broken). It turns out that this is a crazily effective technique.
My understanding is the "separation of church and state" is at the federal level; states may be free to establish their own religious institutions if their state constitutions permit it. Perhaps the relevant part of the Ohio constitution is Article 1, Section 7.
I'm regularly involved in the car community, and this is far more common than is often thought. I've met dozens of people who have illegally modified their diesels, and that's in California. There's plenty more for the EPA to crack down on.
Car modders toss catalytic converters all the time too in states without emissions enforcement. It's just not a problem that is handled.
At one point I was working on a startup idea that would produce a piece of electronics for helping with drive train swaps. However, I realized that it would make it very easy to ignore all emission and safety requirements despite my efforts to prevent that. So I dropped the entire idea and moved on with my life. I don't want to unintentionally help other people make the planet worse.(But I also wanted people to reuse/recycle car parts more effectively. Oh well.)
This is most fun if you're not allowed to say the target phrase. Otherwise, I could just say "Is numbnuts a word?" and of course the language model will say numbnuts in the reply.
Can we roll it out to Google Home as well? The idea of having a home voice assistant is great but in practice it falls short in so many ways.
"Hey Google, please turn the tv on for the championship game when I get home tonight" is a very simple request for a human, but Google Home will never understand what I want.
"If you read past accounts of how Wayne drives a car you hear about the usual tactics, like being super-light on the throttle, keeping the vehicle’s speed down, and trying to time his arrival at stop lights so they’re green."
I'd like to think this is what Prius drivers are doing in front of me instead of assuming they're just completely insane.
