Well stated. Thanks!

There used to be a whole army of people who walked around town every evening to light the streetlamps. Perhaps if they'd sued the Edison company, they'd still be employed.

Surely I can't be the only one who thinks "Raspberry Pies" would be a better pluralization than "Raspberry Pis".

Welcome to North America dude. The houses are all wired for 240V split into 2x 120V legs for residential service.

So they should spend $100K on proprietary software AND $100K on a replacement? Good luck getting that into your annual budget.

So your choices are A) spend $100K on working proprietary software that can be installed and used today, or; B) spend $100K funding development and hope that you get a suitable replacement in 6-12 months?

That happens when you only have 4 hours a day of fuel.

If you're buying 80,000 tons per month, you're not paying the $4.34/gallon retail price, idiot.

They way the article reads, they have the generating capacity now with the current diesel plants, they just can't afford the fuel to run them. Someday they'll have to invest in more generation, but it doesn't look like that's today.

Well, it's pretty easy. When you can only buy enough diesel to keep the lights on for 4 hours a day, there's no fund they can dip into to pay the up front cost of switching to solar. It may very well be cheaper to operate than the current system of diesel-fired generators, but the barrier to entry is high enough that it really doesn't matter if it's absolutely free to operate in the long run - there's no secret stash they can dip into to make the initial investment needed to make it a reality.

They can't afford diesel fuel, which is generally dirt cheap. What makes you think they can afford thousands of hectares of solar farms?

A great deal of Northern Virginia's power comes from the Lake Anna nuclear plant, which, while technically nonrenewable, isn't spewing gigatons of CO2 into the air either.

In Virginia, they put them in business parks in Prince William and Loudoun counties mostly, neither of which are third-world hellholes - Loudoun county has the highest median household income in the country, and Prince William is 15th on the same list according to the 2010 census. No, they don't employ many people, but they do pay property taxes on land that was previously sitting unused. If there are places that object so strenuously to datacenters, those two counties will likely be quite happy to host more.

Most, if not all of the actual decreases in the CDC budget over the past few years are due to expiring programs.

When certain outbreaks become the newest it thing monies are transferred to the CDC to deal with those. AIDS, Ebola, H1N1 etc.. all get special programs which generally run for a certain number of years and then expire taking their funding with them.

Actually, about the only action that was wholly under the Executives control was he banning of travel from specific regions for the past couple of months. Almost every other action taken is right out of the CDC playbook and is followed regardless of who is in the Oval Office.

This can be most clearly seen in the fact that although Trump wanted to ban any infected people from entering the US, the CDC protocols calls for the evacuation of US residents back to mainland US from infected areas no matter their infection status. This resulted in hundreds of citizens being flown into the US from China and from other known hotspots (including cruise ships with known outbreaks) and in some cases released to go on their merry way.