If you are interested in staggering some more: go check out how much power is channeled via the Gulf Stream, both in terms of heat transport and in shear kinetic energy. It's tens-to-hundreds of terawatts.

(It's tough to tease the Gulf Stream on its own from the larger AMOC, which is on the order of one petawatt.)

If only we hadn't forced Trump to call off dismantling that ocean monitoring network, none of this would have happened! I mean, if you don't bother to measure it, does it really happen?

...is this fucking legal to withhold federal funding to strong arm states into anti-consumer policies?

Oh wait, it isn't.

Congress itself wrote into the BEAD statute that states must ensure that prospective subgrantees can carry out their projects “in compliance with all applicable Federal, State, and local laws.” And also “Nothing in this subchapter may be construed to authorize” the excutive branch's NTIA to regulate broadband. Trump is abusing a grant agreement to do something Congress explicitly declined to authorize because state laws were already expected to be a part of getting the grant money.

So, as per usual, Trump is just being a bully and making shit up.

I'm holding out until they can use their model to locate whales on the moon.

CGPGrey summed it up nicely:

"The nature of a keyhole is to be cracked, and the nature of the Internet is to bring demons to the door. No matter how much we might wish it, there is no way to build a digital lock that only angels can open and demons cannot. Anyone saying otherwise is either ignorant of the mathematics, or less of an angel than they appear."

Yeah, well, I was considering a turkey sandwich for lunch. What of it? Is anything actually going to change? Game Theory suggest no.

Well, the climate-denying mouthbreathers in power wasted a few decades claiming that it didn't exist. Now they're claiming that 1) it's too expensive to do anything about it (as though not doing anything is costless), or 2) anything we do now won't matter because Look Over There!

So, yeah, it could have been an easy, orderly, and gradual transition, stretching over generations. We could have avoiding both the drastic economic upheavals and the worst effects on the climate. But we wasted 30-40 years with our collective head in the sand, and now shit's gettin' real, so both drastic measures and effects are piling up. Is it any wonder? It's like bitching about having to pull an all-nighter for a college essay, even though it was assigned weeks ago.

Really tough to get pictures of a monitor without Moire effects making it obvious what you've done.

"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened."

What are the odds of this loan actually being paid back? NextEra (and Google) are certainly large enough to have the means to repay, but will they actually, and will the Administration force them to? What is the penalty if, after burning through all this money, no electrical power is actually produced?

This, in my opinion, is more like a grant - a giveaway. What is the public benefit for the risk being assumed by the taxpayer? Given the current government's love of ownership stakes (despite decrying "socialism" with a pearl-clutching gasp), why not provide the money in return for stock? Or make it a corporate bond such that, if NextEra defaults on the terms, the rest of the corporate bond market can extract their own form of punishment?

And furthermore, if this turns out to be a flop, will the politicians in favor of it get raked over the coals the way Obama was over Solyndra? Heck, that was only $500 million of lost taxpayer money!

It means Iran has severely limited the capacity of the Strait of Hormuz. It's a hostage situation. No one is winning, but the objective isn't to win in the sense of completely closing the Strait, the objective is to create a sufficiently long period of pain that eventually the US and its allies walk away. Christ almighty, force multiplication is hardly a new concept.

There are plenty of places in North America without coverage because there's so little to cover. The Los Vegas metropolitan area has about three million people. So yes, that would be a place with cell phone coverage. By the same token, coverage in states like Montana, particularly in mountainous areas is spotty because, well, there's not a lot of people.

Open source doesn't rely simply on users making code changes, it relies on a specific subset of users. Feature developers are users who are also coders and who are also able to get up to speed on the project and who are also skilled enough to implement it and are also able to navigate the politics of the project.

If the feature didn't get implemented, that person for the original implementation has probably already left the project long ago. In many cases because they weren't a supporter of the re-architecture.

It could be because a given feature-developer wanted the production release before they wanted that feature, which would sound plausible if it were one or two significant features left behind. But once you have to start counting the missing major functionality on more than one hand, that points more at the fundamentals of the re-architecture than personal feature-developer priorities.

Whenever I see this sort of statement, it means it's gone. If they could readily do it in a non-janky way, they'd have done it before release; the re-architecture was too fundamental to accommodate it. Particularly on an open source project, where nobody is forcing them to release on a specific schedule.

The press release says Blue Origin "will design, develop, integrate, launch, and operate the network". Who actually owns it, though? For $700 million, I certainly hope it is the U.S. taxpayer. I'd contrast it to NASA's Deep Space Network, which is infrastructure with unique capabilities that is owned by NASA and operated by JPL. (JPL is, in turn, operated by CalTech, but is so enmeshed with NASA it's hard to see as a separate entity.)