> The Japanese have found a way to use small temperature differences to generate electricity

And for about $50 I can buy an engine that runs off the temperature difference between the ambient air and a cup of hot water. The idea of using thermal gradients in the ocean to generate power is at least 150 years old. Any guesses why it's not caught on?

Hint: the facility in Japan you're probably thinking of only generates 100kw (~135HP), and it's not clear if that's before or after they account for the power to pump the seawater.

There is no utility in chasing down such incredibly low quality thermal energy unless you happen to actually want heat, but even then it's not really hot enough for most things you'd want scavenged heat for.
=Smidge=

It's short sighted of a special kind, even.

2-3 decades ago, it was car manufacturing. Every car maker by then knew that the Chinese would steal the tech. There's a famous example of a Mercedes Benz factory making busses which for the first year or two sold like hot cakes. Then demand suddenly vanished. Research found that the chinese joint venture partner (you had to joint venture in those days, not sure about now) had copied the entire factory, brick by brick, one city away. An exact copy making the exact same busses, just without Mercedes Benz in the loop. And, of course, slightly cheaper.

Everyone knew that.

And yet everyone went to China. They figured that it was still profitable to accept that risk.

Of course, the fact that CEOs these days change every few years and get a severance package large enough that they can immediately retire doesn't exactly make them long-term thinkers.

Heck, stop getting any food that is available locally. It's insane that I can buy some food that was grown in South America, shipped to Asia for processing and packaging and then shipped to Europe for less than the same food grown in Europe.

There's quite a bit of utter insanity there.

Yes, but this cuts both ways. These days, a LOT of essential day-by-day supplies are manufactured in China. If China and the G7 stopped all trade tomorrow, the damage to the G7 would be bigger and more immediate than that on China.

True. Germany is learning that lesson now that cheap energy from Russia is no longer available and its export business can't compete anymore.

> Is there no way to do it for data centers?

The water temps are typically barely warm enough for most people's preference for a shower.

> For example, use a heat pump to concentrate the heat to above boiling temperature then use that to boil water to run a steam turbine.

Getting a heat pump to operate at atmospheric boiling water temps is extremely difficult. Remember that to have a working heat pump, you need a refrigerant medium that condenses at the high temperature side under a given pressure and also boils at or below the low temperature side at a given pressure... then, you need to build a machine that can actually create those pressures.

Now consider that most steam cycle powerplants use superheated steam at temps of over 500C. What material could you use that can be made to condense into a liquid at >500C, what kinds of pressures would be required to make that happen, and what could you even build such a machine out of to survive those conditions?

> I think you could run that at a net-positive for power?

The second law of thermodynamics has left you a voicemail...
=Smidge=

If it's anything like their content ID copyright enforcement mechanism, I'm sure this will go absolutely perfect and there will be no drama whatsoever.

=Smidge=

It's called Jevons Paradox

In short: the more efficiently you can use a resource, the better the ROI you get for investing in the utilization of that resource, and the more people consume.

This applies to computing power. Maybe it doesn't make sense in 1974 for a small business to invest in computer workstations for their staff. But by 1994 computers were so much more powerful, so much more capable, and actually cheaper relative to that capability (read: more efficient) that it now makes no sense to NOT invest in the technology for your business.

If this succeeds in lowering the barrier to entry for leasing AI data center resources, expect demand to go up as more people try to do more things.
=Smidge=

Look man, I know actually understanding things isn't your strong suit but white-knighting Roblox is not a good look.

Yes, religious organizations have been and still very much are a hotbed for child abuse and assault. I fully agree we should be doing a lot more to investigate and incarcerate offenders among the clergy and related professions.

But even if I accept it's "the primary vector of attack" - and these days I'm not entirely convinced that's true anymore - it does you no favors to handwave literal tens of thousands if incident reports associated with Roblox. 13,000 reports from Roblox in 2023 alone. And that's Roblox reporting them... given how much effort they put into protecting predators on their platform, if they themselves reported 13K incidents you can imagine the real number is much larger.

Maybe imagine that Roblox is like a Jesus Camp with 70+ million children attending every day and there are zero safeguards in place.
=Smidge=

> We have decades and decades of studies on this. Children are going to be assaulted and taken advantage of by people they know who are in positions of power.

"People they know" include people they make friends with online.

"Positions of power" include people who offer money (robux) in exchange for favors.

Yes, we should be putting a lot more priests and cops in prison for child abuse and exploitation, but Roblox is a MASSIVE playground for exploitation and fishing. This has been an open secret for years with a fairly recent media fiasco involving Schlep. Apparently Roblox was more interested in banning him and any mention of him on their platform for the high crime of reporting predators to the authorities than they are about actually punishing those predators at all.

> But whatever the case going after Roblox isn't going to save any children.

You are either fucked in the head if you believe this, or scared of getting caught yourself.
=Smidge=

> If they are not grown in dirt that has arsenic in it

Good luck finding dirt that doesn't. It is present naturally in topsoils everywhere, and because of the way rice fields are commonly irrigated, those fields tend to have higher than typical amounts. The the rice itself is exceptionally good at absorbing it.

Not so say it's ever a dangerous quantity; actually getting arsenic poisoning from eating rice is vanishingly rare. That's kind of the point I was making; if your response to protein supplements containing toxic metals is to just eat natural proteins, bear in mind that natural proteins ALSO contain toxic metals... and you just happened to choose the worst two crops for your example.
=Smidge=

> Rice and beans

Rice is abnormally high in arsenic compared to other grains, especially brown rice. Legumes seem to have a higher affinity for heavy metals like lead, mercury, and cadmium compared to other plants, to the point where they are actively studied for potential use in cleaning pollution from fields.

Delicious.
=Smidge=

Satellites can broadcast to a tight geographic area thus minimizing any potential interference. Basically it's an aimed-cone around the antenna that restricts the signal from reaching any area other than an intended geographic circle on the ground.

Dish Network does this with local broadcast channels. If you subscribe in one geographic area, and move to another far away, you lose access to the old local network channels, not because of any digital restrictions based on zip code plus gps location, but because you're simply outside the area the signals reach.

The same technology could be implemented (perhaps already is) to mitigate any potential interference with ground-to-space signals.

Then they'll find out the hard way that Steve was right.

Are Bitcoin and Etherium cryptocurrencies? If so, then this is too.

There's a reason I cited Coinbase.

Saying it's not doesn't make it so.
=Smidge=

I mean... at the peak of his malignancy the last time around, we were down to only about three dozen countries that would allow us to enter and visit. No one should be surprised that we are a pariah state again.