Still i think it'd be more in their interests to just keep lowering the merchant fees and then the rewards card issuers would have to keep whittling down their offerings Creating a bunch of different visa card types is going to be a mess

Seems like this could be a win for amex and discover really. I'm not going to want to carry a visa that risk being rejected because its the wrong type

I also suspect he won't be happy with doing it underground

Tritium is usually the bigger issue - it's got a pretty short halflife at 12 years and is used in a lot of weapon designs.

Are you sure about that? I heard MBS through a Canadian wealth management firm.

Look up Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions - there's a well defined language for talking about this.

If you meet the lower income requirements and have a 2013 or earlier to trade in, then Colorado has a $6000 credit for buying a used EV (starting in 2 weeks time) https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fenergyoffice.colorado....

Hanford announced last week that their spent fuel vitrification plant is officially in operation, converting nuclear waste into glass ingots that can be safely stored for millenia. If they keep going for about a century they might be able to vitrify the spent fuel we already have. But we still have no place to store the ingots.

All these small modular reactors have the same deficits. They require high assay low enriched uranium (HALEU) produced only in Russia. They're a proliferation risk. They require a substantial footprint with passive and active defenses, 24/7 armed security, security clearances for all the highly paid professionals involved. They're slow to approve, finance, build. They're more costly even than classic nuclear reactors to build and operate, and those are the slowest building and most costly form of energy which means high energy costs when (if) they are finally built. Traditional nuclear reactor projects have a 95% failure rate from proposal to generation so 19 times of 20 they never deliver a single watt hour. Those times the money is just spent and lost. The one time in 20 that the generation comes online to produce the world's most costly power doesn't even include those costs.

At Hanford cold war nuclear waste continues to seep gradually toward the mighty Columbia river. Inch by inch.

Somewhere in America just now a homeowner just plugged his DIY solar panels into the inverter and battery he bought on Amazon for the first time. It will give power 24/7 for 30 years at no additional cost. It was quick and cheap. He didn't even need permission. It won't kill his family, nor yours, nor mine. There is no chance that his solar panels will result in radioactive salmon or other seafood.

I mean sort of yes, but they also have to have some money to begin with and nominally that fraction is based on an actual deposit. They can probably structure ways of looping that round on itself too which seems like it'd create some very risky exposure. But it's still considerably more concrete than being able to press a button and make a trillion dollars

Plus this isn't bank-style behavior. A regular bank can't magic up $1M out of thin air, much less $1T. I suppose a few banks are authorized to print paper currency and could conceivably do something on a small scale, but that takes a lot more effort to pull off covertly. Being able to create currency from absolutely nothing is firmly in the domain of central bank territory, there are really only a handful of entities round the world like the Federal Reserve or Bank of England that have amassed enough trust to do things close to that.

I'm less sure about that.

I'm finding Claude is really good at removing layers of abstraction - i just went through a stack of shipping code that created Fedex labels, there were multiple layers of abstraction on top of some code written years ago. I had the LLM go through and develop a spec for what each method needed to do, propose a clean interface and then rewrite the existing code into the new architecture.

Then I can have it find a common interface between my UPS and FedEx code and wrap those up and correct all the code that has ugly ups-specific hacks in it.

I don't think there's a magic bullet for technical debt, but with clear instructions it's very good at working through the kind of stuff that "I should get to someday"

Imagine, a small hits a satellite and the satellite sends out a shitload of shards moving at extremely high speed. And then some of those hit a sky data centre and cause a cascading (Kessler) effect. Of it the meteor hits the much larger data centre directly. We already know we are walking a fine line of losing a significant proportion of satellites if there are collisions.

Or worse, what if some bad player shoots a missile into one of those centres? This would cause orders of magnitude worse results than a simple collision. If a cloud of debris started orbiting, it could knock out a large portion of the world's computing power (assuming most adopted this silly idea). If most of the data centres were put in space and that worst case scenario happened, the whole world would shut down. And if you moved the centres far enough apart in space, they would be so high up the communications lag would have just as bad a consequence.

For shit like this, you have to plan for worst case. It's why they put berms around terrestrial data centres and have enough security to protect a gold repository, just about. Right now, there is no way to protect against a Kessler Syndrome/Effect/Event if it happens.

"You don't need to know how to learn; In fact don't need to know anything. Just ask 'Brother AI', he will tell you everything." [In a soothing big brother voice.]
Keep the masses ignorant and only tell them stuff you want them to hear. It's the next step in making the rich richer, and the poor poorer.
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Fair point, but i think procurement is a lot of the problem.

I've seen a few software contracts in private industry and if they are negotiated by people who couldn't build the thing in the first place, then they are almost universally shit because the people paying for it don't fully understand the requirements. I can build software and am in a good place to negotiate small projects because I understand what's involved. If you've never been involved in building a system on that scale then you aren't going to be able to even know what to ask for, then it's doubly bad because Oracle absolutely _has_ been involved in projects of that size and knows exactly how to protect itself.

Birmingham could have likely implemented this for less if they'd hired a bunch of developers and project managers to build it locally - and that would have the side effect of creating a good number of high paying jobs right in the community.

Especially in a wide far reaching project that's likely ill-defined. While I certainly don't mean to excuse Oracle's performance (and i have absolutely no knowledge of the system) with an overrun like this it's likely that parts of it weren't specified at all. I think the real travesty here is that city councils are being left to their own devices to make these kinds of contracts. Surely Birmingham's needs aren't meaningfully different from Glasgow and Manchester - if only there were an overarching government that could help develop one system for all large city councils to use.