merc

Controlling contagious diseases is not left to private providers.

But, by the nature of the US, it still has to involve them. Because of the system, you can't get shots into people's arms without involving private hospitals, private insurance companies, etc. Which, during the pandemic resulted in some insurance companies still trying to charge co-pays for vaccinations, or billing people who received them. Maybe it was just paperwork mix-ups but it happened. And, since many people are used to the private system, they assumed that they would get charged or couldn't get vaccinated because they lacked insurance, so they didn't get vaccinated.

Imagine if a city had all kinds of private fire departments but it had a Center for Major Fires that could issue orders if a fire was declared to be "major". Until that point, firefighters could refuse to put out a fire at a business that hadn't subscribed to their firefighting services. So, they could sit there and watch a building burn down, only using their hoses on the stray embers that flew into houses nearby which had subscribed. Then, one day, there's a fire at an abandoned warehouse (no fire coverage, naturally) and it starts spreading to nearby buildings, some of which are also abandoned. The Center for Major Fires examines the situation and declares that this is a Major Fire, and that all the fire companies need to help put it out, regardless of whether it affects their pre-paid customers. But, unfortunately communicating that with the various fire companies is hard because the fire has already started to spread. Some companies are willing to do what's required, but first they want to ensure that their paid-up customers are safe, then they'll get to the abandoned warehouses... Other fire companies are hard to contact because they're already too busy fighting part of this Major Fire, so any hope of a coordinated response is slim.

There are just some jobs that should be done by government. Firefighting and healthcare are both in that category.

That's the part that makes the US system insane.

In countries with a public health care system, the goal of the patients and the doctors is the same. Everybody's goal is to prevent diseases and sickness, and to treat it when it isn't prevented. The administrators just estimate how much funding is needed to achieve that goal.

In the US system, the patients are trying to prevent and treat their sicknesses and diseases. The administrators are trying to find ways to avoid paying for any treatments, and the doctors make more money if they can find a way to bill more things.

And, what's especially insane is that healthcare really isn't a normal market like other things. If you're buying a truck, you can shop around, haggle with salespeople, etc. If you're hit by a truck, you're not going to be comparison-shopping emergency rooms.

Healthcare via taxation can be viewed as a some sort of public insurance

But, why would any sane person view it that way? Do you think of the fire department as "some sort of public insurance"? Or is it just the people who come put out fires?

It doesn't sound like they've "solved" it. Just that they have a work-around that means that bit by bit their sealed datacenter pod becomes more and more broken. And if their solution for that is to build in redundancy so that even when it's say 30% broken it operates at 100%, that means they have to ship up something like twice as much hardware as a standard datacenter with most of it being redundant in case something fails. That extra expense may not be too bad if it's a pod under the ocean, but if you have to pay $5000/kg to put it in orbit, that's a huge additional expense.

Your well come.

I miss Allie's blog alot.

In short no. Longer answer? Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

Seriously, parts fail. It's going to cost more to get a HDD into space than it will cost to buy the thing in the first place. Even if you design the system so that it doesn't require maintenance, you're going to get parts failing regularly. If you're not going to have an astronaut living up there and doing repairs, you're eventually just going to keep losing capacity. I suppose that you could design it so that eventually when 30% of a module/rack has failed you just give up, eject it, and let it burn up in the atmosphere. But, then you're going to require regular deliveries of new racks to the datacenter just to keep things at the initial capacity.

Then there are the power requirements. Yes, you get "free power" from the sun, but a 1 rack server might need 5000 W, for which you'd need about 20 square metres of solar panel. And, that's per rack, and assuming you never go into shade (like behind the planet). If you want to be close enough to easily transmit data back and forth, you're probably going to be going into the planet's shadow pretty often, so you'll need maybe double that. And, of course, the bigger the solar array, the more it's going to be heated up by the sun, so the more heat you're going to need to dump.

And, cooling is the killer. On earth, cooling a datacenter is a major issue. The old systems used air conditioners which required lots of power. The newer systems use evaporative cooling. None of those work in space. The only thing that would work is to radiate the heat. But, radiating heat is hard. You'd need a big structure, and you'd need to ensure it's never exposed to the sun, or it will heat up instead of cooling off.

Then there's getting the data in and out. Let's assume the DC is mostly doing compute tasks, not IO tasks. It's training AI models, not hosting videos. Even then, you'll need to send data up and get it back down. On earth you can lay fat fiber optic pipes to your DC, bury them underground, and never have to worry about it. A DC in space would need to communicate via radio or lasers, and that would require either multiple ground stations or short bursts whenever the DC happened to be overhead. And, whatever solution you came up with would only get a fraction of the data you could send via fiber optic lines.

Really, the only real advantage of a DC in space is the free power. But, install a bunch of solar panels next to your DC on the ground and you've got essentially the same thing now. The difference is that you can rely on traditional, reliable, cheap cooling methods, you can send in a tech to replace a dead hard drive, and bandwidth is much simpler.

Noone should of aloud this code to go out the door. Atleast alot of other people people probably complained aswell, so your apart of a bigger group, incase you were worried.

COBOL

If you're going to forbid any 2-letter initialism because it might have naughty connotations, you're not going to be left with many options.

Yeah, Display Port is old, but I've never seen that P and D symbol before, or at least never noticed it. And, even if it existed before Display Port over USB, you'd think that that potential confusion was a good opportunity to come up with a new logo for something that would be put next to a USB port.

It’s almost as if having all these different features would be easier to differentiate if they had different physical shapes.

I think the goal was always that you'd only ever need one type of port and one type of cable and that that port and cable could do anything. Unfortunately, because there are so many revisions and so many features are optional, you've now got a situation where the port is the right shape, the cable fits into the port, but you can't get the thing to work without reading the fine print, or without decoding obscure logos.

subsequently getting ousted for putting ethical concerns before short term profits.

The irony is that there are no profits. The companies selling generative AI are losing such vast sums of money it's difficult to wrap your head around.

What they're focused on isn't short-term profits, it's being the biggest, most dominant firm whenever AI does eventually become profitable, which might take decades.