Yeah and that type of work bid usually goes to huge conglomerates. A local mom and pop electrician shop isn’t going to be building a datacenter, it’ll be something like Siemens.
A friend of mine is an independent electrician in the Columbus, OH area. Last summer he told me he was getting plenty of datacenter construction work, albeit it was in the form of subcontracted jobs from the larger firms who were awarded the contracts.
Even if the datacenter does hire some local labor for construction, that's still all temporary jobs. It's not an ongoing source of employment for locals.
I work for an electrical contractor that does large data center projects and we almost always partner with a local contractor to provide labor from the local union(s).
sure, that only covers construction though. Once the thing is built they are going to travel in all the maintenance that needs to happen, and that local tradesman is not going to get to many new home construction jobs after it goes in. Who wants to live nearby a noise polluter like that?
I would imagine there aren't too many electricians in Yeehaw, Minnesota, trained and qualified to do gigawatt data center installs. So they'll freight in contractors to do that work, and maybe temporarily employ a few locals for a month or two for auxiliary stuff.
More generally, this is the universal playbook when someone wants to dump some megaproject on a community that doesn't want it: This will create X jobs and inject $Y into the local economy. Can you name one case where this actually happened? It's usually very few additional permanent jobs and, particularly for public-works stuff, millions or even billions in extra debt to pay off. But don't worry, this next thing we're working on once we get the local council to issue a permit to bulldoze your forest park, that will bring in jobs, we promise.
Same as if the radios stopped working or otherwise communication fails. Execute the planned procedures (which vary).
Often Approach will take over the "tower" and operate in crippled mode (no clearances to cross active runways, you must go down to the end kind of thing).
Some airports are uncontrolled at various times and would revert to that. Some airlines would require the pilot execute a missed approach and deviate to a towered airport, others may allow them to land.
I admit I'm incredibly naive on this subject, but what makes it so hard to track an object as large as an aircraft carrier when starting from a known position such as a naval port?
You certainly can't do continuous observation but even just with commercial satellite offerings you can get pretty close.
For example nowadays Planet Labs [1] offers 30-50cm resolution imaging at a rate of one image or 120sec video stream every 90 minutes over a given 500 km^2 region. There is no situation where an aircraft carrier is going to be capable of evading a commercial satellite offering with that frequency and resolution. Once you know approximately where it is or even where it was in the semi-recent past, it's fairly trivial to narrow in and build a track off the location and course.
> Planet Labs PBC, a leading provider of high resolution images taken from space, said Friday it would hold back for 96 hours images of Gulf states targeted by Iranian drone attacks.
Break out the pocket book and pay Planet Labs to do it. You could do it with much less frequent visits than this probably the search area for it every 2 hours isn't very large and image recognition systems are pretty good. The big threat is cloud cover.
Note that that article is from 2020. Nowadays the frequency is actually down to 90 minutes/1.5hr. The resolution is up as well and they can do massive image capture (~500km^2) and video (120sec stream) from their passes.
Also nowadays they provide multi-spectal capture as well which can mostly see through cloud cover even if it takes a bit more bandwidth and postprocessing.
The problem then is the black out zones themselves reveal a lot as well if adversaries can find their bounds. That narrows the search area for their own observation satellites immensely even if it's too large to respond to IRL.
Well in that case congratulations. You've just made it easier. Now you don't even have to track them. You just have to look for the blacked out box, the "error we can't show you this", reused imagery from their long running historical imagery dataset, or improperly fused/healed imagery after alteration.
So now you don't have to do the tracking, just find the hole.
And then you can use a non-US provider to get direct imagery now that you know exactly where to look.
If the restricted area is large, a carrier is regionally disabling for an imagery provider. If it's smaller (and therefore must move over time to follow the carrier group) as soon as the imagery provider starts refusing sales in an area, any customer can test and learn its perimeter with trial purchases, find a coarse center, and learn its course and speed. You don't care about anything else until there's actual hostilities.
...literally yes (to the latter)? Is that not exactly why modern warships have to implement things like measures to reduce their radar cross section? If you could actually just rely on "ocean too big" then there would be no need for that.
It is in part for small crafts (frigates and corvettes) but for pretty much anything larger there's no concealing those ships.
The primary reason however for minimizing radar cross section and increasing radar scatter is to harden protections against radar based weapon systems during a conflict.
Even if the ship is still visible in peacetime operations, once electronic countermeasures/ECM are engaged, it gets an order of magnitude harder for guided missiles to still "see" the ship.
Depending on the kit, once missiles are in the air the ship and all of their friends in their strike group/squadron is going to start jamming radar, popping decoys, and trying to dazzle the missiles effectively enough for RIM-174/SM-6, RIM-66/SM-1, and RIM-67/SM-2s to intercept it without the missiles evading. And should the missile make it to close-in range then it's just praying that the phalanx/CIWS takes care of it.
And if everything fails then all that jamming and dazzling + the reduced radar cross section is going to hopefully result in the missiles being slightly off target/not a complete kill on the vessel.
So they still serve a purpose. Just not for stealth. Instead serving as compounding increases to survival odds in engagement scenarios.
But what you're describing is stealth. "Stealth" doesn't mean "invisible". Humans wearing combat fatigues aren't literally invisible either especially when moving, they're just harder to track/get a visual lock on to aim at.
The point still stands that you cannot rely on "ocean is too big for anyone to find me" because it very much is not.
I think you are sim-interpreting what I was saying (and if you see what I've posted elsewhere in the discussion thread I'm very much in agreement with you).
I was just saying that stealth is a component of ship design for small crafts (i.e. those that would generally stay close to the coast) but that it's not the case for larger ships and even for those smaller ships it's just not the primary purpose for radar optimized hulls.
Close to the coast, non-coastal radar won't be able to detect ships nearly as well as out at sea where they stand out like a sore thumb. And of course coastal radar will still light up any ship so stealth there is of little value on foreign shores.
But really outside of some niche cases for small crafts, radar "stealth" is all about survivability and not the traditional view of stealth.
Every PC I’ve ever tried to repurpose as a gaming console of any sort has had way more jank to it than I’d ever tolerate in a console, in the 25ish years I’ve been hooking computers up to TVs. Even the Bazzite box I’ve got is pretty bad by comparison. Hell, my actual Steam Deck has a lot more undesirable “enthusiast” behavior to it, let’s say, than I’d want out of a Nintendo product for example, even though it’s just about the best I’ve seen (the actual best is Retroarch with a skin mimicking the PS3’s menu, on a dedicated distro that could take it from cold boot to interactive in like three seconds flat even on an rpi2… but that won’t play actual modern PC games, just emulated consoles and such, so it’s not a fair comparison)
A common failure is the controllers. It’s hard to get a combo of OS stack, Bluetooth chip, and controller that Just Works like they do on consoles. Something always needs fiddling-with.
Video or audio out are also often a problem. Glitched audio or audio mode-switching, trouble switching video modes, screwed-up HDR, all kinds of stuff. Maybe fine on your monitor with headphones. Not fine on a TV or projector with 5.1+ audio receiver.
The UIs also bug out or crash more often, and usually aren’t that great at being a TV UI in the first place (even Steam IMO is worse than most consoles, as far as the Big Picture UI)
It also gives devs a stable target with a known market, which is nice for both the devs and the owners of the devices.
There's something to be said for having a standard, known SKU, both as something for developers to target if enough people own it, and for users to troubleshoot if they're e.g. having an issue running X game.
This kind of already exists with the "Deck Verified" label on Steam games.
That said, this sounds similar to Valve's upcoming Steam Machine and I'd much prefer that to be the standard console/PC hybrid to keep the Linux gaming momentum going, and perhaps one day I can ditch Windows for good.
The main goal is money, an Xbox branded windows PC has potential to drive sales.
Microsoft can also hopefully target a smoother user experience than a typical windows PC provides. They want this to be a valid console competitor, but just slapping xbox brand on a windows PC isn't enough to do that.
Having a first party hardware device to target for PC games can also help devs with having a clear performance target for PCs, similar to how the Steam Deck is currently a minimum spec performance target for a lot of games.
1. Console-like living room ready experience. It's surprisingly hard to get a PC made with off-the-shelf parts to integrate cleanly with a home theater system (think features like HDMI CEC, One Touch Play, etc). A custom SoC can solve this, something we are seeing Valve also do with the Steam Machine.
2. As the target hardware for basically all Xbox games, end-users who don't want to fret over system specs can easily just buy this and know they are getting the intended experience.
Whether that's enough to move units remains to be seen.
If this is true then the reason that a console would be better than a custom PC is that it would also be designed to work better for that purpose. Turning on the device when the controller turns on and sending CEC commands are two huge things that aren't well supported outside of the console space. Also it would likely run a trimmed down version of Windows and would be set up to "just work" in a way that a system that can have any arbitrary set of hardware will never be able to do.
But the really nice thing about the concept of treating a PC and console as the same platform is that you don't have to worry about why people might prefer to go the route of buying the console. You can go with a regular gaming PC if that's what you prefer and your library will have all the same options.
Microsoft are in a tough spot (as far as Xbox hardware goes at least). PlayStation is selling much better on the console side, and Valve with the Steam install base has a good shot at making a non-Windows OS a serious platform for gaming.
Their hand was forced in the end. They have to consolidate PC and Xbox users to compete.
The idea of a machine with a locked down mode that can boot legacy Xbox titles and probably run competitive games with very little chance for cheating is interesting. But given Microsoft's track record with consumer devices I await to be convinced.
Valve should be worried if they do turn out something good, maybe this will mean the Steam machines are pushed more aggressively price wise. We can hope...
It's a device with a fixed, known-good set of hardware for developers to target, which is all that any of the major consoles is. Your question applies just as much to the Steam Deck and upcoming Steam Machine.
I mean, at that point it is a pre-configured gaming PC. Hardware that's uniform across millions of units provides advantages, both for developers and users. IMO that's a big part of why the Steam Deck outsells more powerful competitors: there are so many of them that it gets targeted by developers, so more people buy them, in a virtuous cycle.
Not OP but from my experience, the LEGO I had in a bin since I was a kid still fit perfectly with LEGO I'm buying for my kids 30 years later. That's unbelievably impressive to me.
Lego from my youth, which was a hand-me down at the time, doesn't fit well with new lego. So it might be 40 years old, (which seems like a long time until you actually reach that age!)
I think it's more likely do to plastic aging than the original tolerances though.
To add even more - I was handed down Lego that belonged to my mom in the 60s, played with them through the 80s and 90s, and now my kids have them today. I wouldn’t be able to tell you which were hers and which were mine.
I am constantly amazed at how many people blatantly run red lights now. It used to be that people would sometimes press their luck on a yellow a little bit, but now it'll be red for several seconds and people will still just drive right on through.
I'd love if the police enforced this insanely dangerous behavior instead of trying to catch people going 10 over on the highway.
I see this a lot too here in Australia now, and yes it used to be pretty unusual but now I see it every day. I've sometimes wondered if it's just a frequency illusion but I'm sure it has got much worse, maybe since the COVID times?
It depends. Traffic lights are just mutexes. They are there to stop traffic so that other traffic may pass safely. There's no point if there aren't any other cars.
Obviously anyone running a light on a busy intersection deserves to get fined but if you know the terrain, have good visibility into the road where the other traffic comes from and can clearly see there are no vehicles present, running the red light is utterly harmless.
In my city, certain traffic lights literally turn off at night. There's not enough traffic flowing to justify them.
Use your eyes, your situational awareness and your best judgement. The traffic light is not god's word.
In my neighborhood there used to be a traffic light that would be red for a long time despite not usefully regulating any traffic whatsoever. It stopped traffic despite the fact no other traffic could possibly conflict with it. People realized this and routinely ran that light with zero consequences. At some point the city realized it too and redesigned the traffic controls so that the light would be green in this situation.
I understand the desire to act holier than thou and pretend that going through a red light with no traffic is murder in the making, but the situation they advocate for (running when clear) is even written into law in some states (at least for motorcycles/bicycles). Some vehicles don't trigger the sensors and the lights never change, so you are allowed to go after a full stop. I would not be surprised in the least if there were some states where the wording of the law applied to cars as well.
The correct action is to understand why certain barriers were erected in your way before attempting to demolish them. If you don't understand, just respect the barrier. If you understand, you know if, when and under which conditions it can be safely bypassed. Use your judgement.
Jaywalking laws were also written in blood. People break them every single day regardless because they have eyes and can look both ways to determine if it is safe to cross the street before actually doing it.
And yet, jaywalking pedestrians get killed daily, despite their best attempts at determining whether it's safe to cross. The problem with allowing drivers to use their best judgment as to whether it's safe to continue through a red light (after stopping) is that a non-zero percent of those drivers will fail to judge the situation correctly, especially during an edge case they rarely encounter.
It's impossible to get hit by cars if there are no cars around you. Vehicles are not going to materialize out of nowhere and crash into you. They are going to be funneled into your path by the roads. If you look at the road and see zero traffic, then you cannot be hit by traffic. Even if you run a red light.
Obviously, if you can't see the road where the cars will come from, then you cannot know if there are any cars coming towards you in a potentially intersecting trajectory.
In my city there are segments where I can see several kilometers ahead, including the traffic lights and their associated roads and traffic.
If you can't understand the fact it's safe to run a red light when you can see the roads are clear for several kilometers ahead of you, then I simply don't know what else to say.
Even police does this while roaming about on patrol.
Honestly, these arguments sound like cartoon logic. Guy looks both ways and sees the roads are clear but on the exact second he starts to cross the street 10 cars materialize out of nowhere at 200 km/h and nearly run him over just to teach him a lesson. This isn't how the world works.
>A vehicle will materialize out of nowhere and crash into you.
God I hate these sort of responsibility shirking opinions and their peddlers.
I do this several times a day in a major US city for close to a decade now and I've never had a close call closer than the "two people trying to pass each other in the hallway" routine with a driver trying to take a right on red.
Vehicles and everything else on this rock flying through space obey the same laws of physics.
If the traffic on a road goes X miles per hour, then simply don't cross it where you don't have a sufficiently long line of sight. If crossing where the lines of sight are sufficient is not tractable due to traffic volumes or road construction then cross at a marked crossing, intersection that interrupts traffic flow or use proper body language and someone will stop for you.
Sure, you might get exceptionally unlucky and choose to cross at the exact minute some car that's a few standard deviations above the norm but you might also get hit by lightening.
> I do this several times a day in a major US city for close to a decade now and I
I, I, I
> Vehicles and everything else on this rock flying through space obey the same laws of physics.
Yes. Yes they do.
That's why some countries (e.g. Sweden) actually have this in drivers ed: how fast a vehicle travels, how long it takes for the driver to react, what the stopping distance is for a vehicle etc.
They even teach things like "parked cars are a double problem because you can have people especially kids suddenly appear from behind them".
Or things like "at night you only see this far, and judging distance to things becomes harder".
But all that, including laws of physics, is invalidated by a litany of "I, I, mine, my, me".
I'm not special. I'm fairly normal. Hundreds of millions of people manage to walk and drive as uneventfully as I do. The presence of some few number of people who can't manage to jaywalk decently and not run reds when it matters doesn't justify saddling the literal entire rest of society with some automotive flavor of 1984 anymore than some small number people robbing convenience stores to pay for their drug addiction justifies subjecting all of society to pervasive surveillance and the war on drugs fueled police state.
Obviously. Don't take risks near pedestrians, near schools, near parked cars. Don't make assumptions in low visibility conditions where you can't actually see what's ahead of you. Use your judgement.
well, if they weren't doing something that would've otherwise been deemed illegal, then why would they consider it self-incriminating to have to follow KYC/AML rules?
You sound like a helpful world citizen. The other problem the US has is that it is illegal for a US Citizen to pay a bribe but there's no realistic enforcement. Luckily you can help solve this. Whenever and wherever you travel you can keep
some forms with you and every time you are pulled over you can fill them out with the police in quadruplicate so that each of you can mail them to Washington. At some later point the US can try to cross reference and determine who didn't mail theirs and then whether anyone was actually under US jurisdiction during the incident.
The right to a fair trial fundamentally requires the government to do 100% of the job of proving you guilty, and it shouldn’t force you to generate evidence against yourself while going about perfectly legal things
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