There was a controversial article in Slate from a decade ago about “double hit” drivers killing people because of the perception that paying the compensation for someone’s death was cheaper than paying for someone’s lifelong disability care, might that be it?
But even if true, that still seems a little different than what “paying to get out of murder” implies.
They executed Bai Tianhui a few months ago for taking $156 million in bribes in his role as a financial services manager. If he couldn’t buy his way out of a bribery conviction, I’m not sure how much buying your way out of a murder would cost.
They also jailed the former justice minister 3 years ago for life for concealing his brother’s crimes and taking bribes, so I’m guessing that even if it used to be a popular option, it might be a bit harder now.
What an excellent shot, the photographer must have been very pleased with themselves!
Ok, now I understand, thanks for the crash course on dc cooling!
I assumed scale was my issue but having only second-hand knowledge of coastal larger-scale cooling systems was the big part of my problem. Then I couldn’t understand why they were building them inland, especially with the mineralization issue when drawing from inland reservoirs. So I thought that might be a tax jurisdiction reason, plus comparative cost of metal or pump heat exchange setups, especially because Altman said they weren’t using evaporative cooling (not that he’s a trustworthy source).
But this made it all click:
both of these mean extra capex and/or energy use, but evaporating water is cheap, so it’s done instead. it doesn’t help that one of dc ratings is ratio of how much energy gets into dc to how much energy powers actual silicon.
They were always optimizing for the cost, but I didn’t know about this regulation. Water usage is probably either absent from the regulations or a minimal contribution to it, so they’ve used it as the trade-off without adequate (if any) modeling for impact. They’ve probably since done a little of that and found it’s pretty catastrophic. A little extra reading indicates the 2-8 million gallons is the supply per day by the county, and not total (re)circulating water in the dc, which implies evaporative cooling and aligns with what you’re saying about it being the cheapest solution.
Cool, everything is yet again awful, but at least it makes sense on some level. I have been educated, and I again thank you for your effort in that.
Ok that makes sense, thanks for the explanation!
The data center nearest to me works a bit differently, I know they use sea-water for their HVAC because they share the pipes with other buildings using it for the same purpose, and I was lucky enough to get a tour of the system in one of those buildings a few years back. It’s multi-storey so perhaps I simply didn’t notice the windcatcher parts in the architecture.
But that obviously means it’s also near the coast and therefore not the driest biome from the start. I don’t doubt it still impacts the ecosystem but at least it’s not draining the potable reserves at the same time. To me this begs the question of why they’re building these data centers so far inland.
As a side note, it’s pretty amazing we still do the windcatcher setup. They’ve always been fascinating to me, but I can’t help but be amazed they’re still relevant even in the highest tech buildings.
Reposting the comment I made in the other thread here too:
The bottom half is a cropped section of the top, which unfortunately detracts from the very real tragedy of the far too many people pictured.
Thanks for giving it a go, I mostly hoped there might be someone who had some experience in the area who could shed some light. But the numbers were certainly interesting. Then the pivot to AI post went up 30 mins after I posted and shed a little light on the while thing too.
It would seem odd to put the heated water back instead of cooling it off and re-using, but I don’t have faith in any kind of sustainability designed or built into the system, so that would make sense for impact.
If they’re being quiet about it, it means one or two things. Either they’re actually considering it proprietary new tech, but there would almost certainly be patents filed somewhere for that case, and/or they have something they’re not proud to announce. I have no idea what words would be used for a patent here, being an area well outside my expertise, but I’ve not heard any patents mentioned, so I’m going to assume it’s squarely the shame reason.
The protonmail thing… I just assume nothing I do is private and keep all my services as decoupled as possible to make me more annoying to track down, should the situation arise that I become somehow not boring. One day I’ll set up something more private and annoying, but I have a long list of todos that never become todones…
Imagine saying that in a Slack channel filled with journalists and thinking it wouldn’t be leaked.
Because they’re using them in their products, or the non-public infrastructure that keeps the product running, or their teams are using them internally.
Check the licenses of the projects you listed. If they allow free commercial use, you can assume those products are key to the software somewhere.
Don’t underestimate how much of big tech is made of OSS - companies will always take free stuff. They pay them because if the projects die or are compromised, so are their paid products.
Genuine questions borne of ignorance:
When they say “using” water, is this water that has to be actively removed from the supply each day, or does this number just say how much water is circulating in the center? I’m assuming it doesn’t all disappear, or does a lot of it end up released as steam or piped away as contaminated water or something?
The data center nearest to me uses sea-water, but I have no idea how much. And it doesn’t seem to put out steam or dump bad water back into the sea (not that I could tell if they were doing that).
I totally understand the electricity resource issue for data centers but the water usage thing confuses me, because I assumed it would be for cooling and therefore mostly contained and recirculated. With the exception of predictable maintenance issues like leaks and waste from mineral scale or algae, I don’t understand why this water would need to disappear, or why they would need to use potable water from the outset.
Admittedly my mental model is based on consumer CPU water-cooling setups at an imagined industrial scale. What am I missing?
The headline for this article from Jan 30 is probably sufficient explanation for that: US approves major new arms sales to Israel worth $6.67 billion and to Saudi Arabia worth $9 billion
Note that the guardian article also says the decision to attack Iran was made end of November 2025. They stockpiled exactly for this situation. Admittedly that’s supposedly mostly ground equipment, not bombs, but that also raises further questions about the intent.
Given the delay, I’ll bet an internal review discovered more instances in other articles where COVID couldn’t be the excuse.
Someone with more time and motivation could probably look at his past articles and see if any others have been quietly pulled or edited, although I have no idea if ars could be assed to change the ones which weren’t publicly criticized
Because she’s named in very few of the lawsuits as defendant, and all the victim testimony indicates that she primarily groomed them and occasionally participated in the rape? Because she is included in very few of the financial and political conversations in the files? If she played a bigger role, don’t you think she would have featured a little more prominently in both of those categories?
You don’t need insider knowledge, a solid decade of court transcripts, victim statements, and emails are right there to read.
Behind every man
Or perhaps you just prefer thought-terminating cliches.
Maxwell obviously is entirely complicit in trafficking, abuse and rape. But the eugenics, political manipulation, and money laundering were pretty clearly Epstein’s bag.
All of finances, the extent and details of rapes, probably murders, and I assume even more horrors. Maxwell groomed kids for Epstein and occasionally took part in the rape, but for the most part wasn’t in the room, by choice. Maxwell seemed to be far more interested in just living a life of luxury.
Unfortunately Epstein was the main person who really knew each and every skeleton in all of the closets across the entire global corrupt system. The others who would probably be better informed than Maxwell, like his lawyer and accountant, are very free.
Nobody really does support him though, they just support not being punished. At this point I’m not convinced there’s an end to that
Lake Travis / Lakeway is mentioned in the Epstein files. There were a few marinas in Lake Travis bought by a company run by Farkas - “Island Global Yachting”, and Epstein had his company “American Yacht Harbor”. Those businesses had some kind of semi-merger for the Caribbean marinas, and Epstein and Farkas also had a financial dispute about one of those Carribbean marinas.
Birchall was a senior vice president of private banking at Morgan Stanley, and we know Farkas/IGY had a huge financial relationship with them.
I wonder if this is more than coincidence and if there are any of the older Musk shells listed in the financial parts of the Epstein files.
Aw, he just needed the right person. Thanks for being that person. And thanks for being a person who shares all their nice pics and stories with the rest of us.
The little head bump gets me right in the heart.
To be fair, he does already do a lot of sitting. Let’s see him turn the keys!
Deeply unrealistic. There’s no way Trump would do anything that looks like manual labor.
I have an acquaintance who was interning at Block until a couple of weeks ago. All of the team they were on was laid off except the manager, and everyone who remained got a pay rise. They’ve taken out the people who actually do the work and kept the managers, who are arguably most effectively replaced by AI… It makes so little sense.