quickthrowman

Also thoughts of mine recently: why are we not doing subterranean datacenters, why are we not doing tall/skinny skyscraper like datacenters (versus enormous sprawling warehouse-style).

Because it costs an order of magnitude more money to build underground or build a skyscraper than it does it build a precast concrete tilt-up warehouse.

You can build a single story warehouse building with as large of a floor plate as you want, it could be hundreds of square miles if you didn’t need any utilities inside of it. Obviously you do need utilities which limit the overall building size because of things like voltage drop, pump sizing, etc.

Excavating that much earth, building a concrete underground structure, and then covering it, or erecting a steel and concrete tower is much more work than having precast wall sections shipped in from the prefab plant which are then tilted into place with cranes and secured to the concrete slab foundation.

The average person is familiar with sound mitigation enclosures for generators and chillers? I kinda doubt that.

If noise regulations are in place where the data center is being built, companies that make chillers and generators will sell you an enclosure that reduces the sound level to comply with sound regulations. It’s not like these data centers are the first buildings ever to have a lot of generators and chillers installed, all non-AI data centers have plenty of each.

If you live in an unincorporated area and a data center moves in and there’s no sound regulations, then they can do whatever they want, but that’s the risk of living in an unincorporated area.

You can buy chillers with enclosures that limit the sound to a reasonable volume, Google “chiller noise attenuation”. You can add walls around lots of chillers to further limit the noise.

If the data center follows the city statutes for noise levels at the property line that exist in my municipality, then sure, I’ll take the data center above the iron foundry.

Power usage is massive

The utility can approve or deny the connection. Data centers in areas without any available power are not getting grid connections.

Why is that a problem? It might raise the temp within a few hundred feet of the chillers by 0.5-1F which is substantially less than an urban heat island temp delta vs surrounding rural land.

A sane municipality will require sound mitigation on generators, chillers, and other loud equipment. Sure, there are shitty places that don’t take care of their citizens that will let you run natural gas turbines to generate power, but it’s possible to contain the bad effects of data centers with local and state regulations.

I’ll take a data center that evaporates water to replace the iron casting foundry in my neighborhood any day.

It takes 2.5 million solar panels to generate 1GW of electricity assuming 400W per panel and direct sunlight. 2.5M times 18 sq ft per panel is about 1000 acres or ~1.55 sq mi.

That would work for a 1 GW data center, during the day, without clouds, during the summer.

The problem is that everyone doesn't know this to be false. A substantial portion of the population "knows" it to be true.

If they choose to believe a histrionic liar, that’s their problem. The rest of us don’t have to entertain their credulousness and ignorance. Repeating lies doesn’t make them true, it only makes credulous people believe it. Once the aggrieved-in-chief victim of the century is out of office, the theatrics around election fraud will cease.

I thought he got rich conning Mattel to buy The Learning Company in 1999? They paid $3.5B for it and gave it away a year later. Then there was a lawsuit with a $100M+ settlement.

Kevin O’Leary also published pictures of him shedding tears while buying an Audemars Piguet watch, which should be brought up and mocked every time he’s mentioned.

Not in the slightest. Telling yourself “this is a drug that is altering my perceptions and it will end” is enough for me. That’s all the grounding LSD and mushrooms require and I’ve never had a bad trip, but I have plenty of drug experience so perhaps I’m just used to being in an altered state.

Psychedelics don’t reveal anything profound, they just alter your thinking and perception temporarily.

Probably the same theory for how a microwave cooks food.

At 60 hz? I think that’s a bit low for microwaving.

The ground sounds like a bad place for lead paint and asbestos, two things which can be found in demolition waste.

When we need fill in the US, a big truck comes and dumps actual soil and rock so that lead and other things don’t leach into the groundwater, the construction waste is landfilled after removing the metal for recycling.

If you have well water and have been using construction demolition waste nearby your wellhead, I would suggest an RO filter for drinking water, yikes.

Yes, the RAM Rampage is comparable to a Ford Maverick which is a unibody vehicle with a truck bed.

The massive truck they likely meant would be a RAM 3500 HD super crew cab full size bed Cummins diesel dually rear axle with a vertical dual stainless steel smokestack exhaust kit for good measure. Which is essentially the largest truck you can get with a pickup bed from RAM, GM, or Ford; and they go for over $100,000 with options.

There are even larger monstrosities with pickup beds built on top of 550/5500/Class 5 truck chassis which are basically a Canyonero from He Simpsons in real life: https://www.elevationoffgrid.com/

My favorite derogatory term for a vehicle type is ‘hausfrauenpanzer’ which means ‘housewife tank’ in German, which is used for a large SUV in Germany, lol.

Propress compression fittings which use a hydraulic press are effective enough for domestic water pipes, along with traditional solder joints.

Electrical compression fittings are excellent too, but some engineers still specify exothermic welds (cadwelding) for grounding conductors in particular.

I did a project a couple years back with a mechanical contractor that used a similar machine to the one in the video you shared, except theirs was a bit larger ;) They were welding 18” HPDE pipes together for a geothermal district energy project, we were laying some puny 2” schedule 80 conduit that was glued together with primer and cement for future fiber cables that will connect to the meters of the customers of the district energy system.

Not if you use options. Let’s say you short a stock that is priced at $100 and you want to limit your upside risk. You can buy a call option that gives you the right but not the obligation to purchase a stock at a specific price.

One call option in the US equity market gives you the option to purchase 100 shares of the underlying stock at the strike price.

Let’s say you want to limit the downside (upside since we’re short) risk of your short position and you’ve sold 100 shares short at $100.

You can buy a call option with with a strike price of $110 that gives you the option to buy 100 shares of stock at $110 a share, which limits your upside risk to $1000 plus the cost of the option, which let’s say in this case it expires in 90 days and costs $300 or $3/share.

If 90 days pass and the stock a trading at $120/share, you will have an open short position showing a loss of $2000, but you can ‘exercise’ the call option to purchase 100 shares at $110/share which you return to the person you borrowed them from and closes out your short position with a $1000 loss, for a total loss of -$1300, including the $300 the option costs.

If it is trading at $80 a share after 90 days, you buy back the shares at $80 each and return them, closing out your short position with a $2000 gain, for a total gain of $1700 after subtracting the $300 cost of the option, which expires with a vale of $0 since the share price is under the strike price of the option.

You can hedge a long position with put options, it’s just the inverse of what I described. If you buy 100 shares of stock at $100/share while simultaneously buying a $100 strike put option, your downside risk is limited to the cost of the put option. If the put costs $500 (or $5/share) that is all you can ever lose as long as you exercise the put option to sell the stock for $100/share if the stock price is below $100 when the option expires.

This is two of the largest, most powerful, most well-capitalized companies on the planet in a legal fight.

OpenAI being well-capitalized made me laugh out loud, thanks for the humor :)

Apple has a ridiculous amount of cash, AA credit, and makes $100B of net income per year. OpenAI has none of those attributes, what they do have is investors willing to bankroll them, for now.

Re: Texas and Israel, that old time religion is why.

A 2017 LifeWay poll conducted in United States found that 80% of evangelical Christians believed that the creation of Israel in 1948 was a fulfillment of biblical prophecy that would bring about Christ's return and more than 50% of Evangelical Christians believed that they support Israel because it is important for fulfilling the prophecy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Zionism#In_the_Unite...

Also, there’s been a long search for a red cow to sacrifice to bring about ritual purity and construct the Third Temple, which from what I understand is believed by some Christians to be a prerequisite for the return of Christ. The Jewish people behind the search just want a third temple after the Romans burned temple number two a couple thousand years ago.

https://templeinstitute.org/red-heifer-introduction/

And lastly, a Texas rancher attempting to bring about the second coming by sending red heifers to Israel.

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/red-heifer-prophe...

Seems to me that Al-Aqsa being in the way might complicate things, even with the right cow.

Did you guess "wages for two guys, hotel rooms for two guys, 800 miles of diesel, and a couple of ferry tickets?"

Yes, but I happen to sell and run electrical work so it’s an easy question ;)

That’s extremely easy for Ferrari to do, here is how it works:

“Hey, it’s your friendly Ferrari dealer. About your position on the list for an F80… we’re going to need you to buy a Luce to maintain your position and ensure you are eligible to purchase an F80 when we get an allocation.”

And that’s how you sell out a production run for a Ferrari that looks like a Kia. Force rich people to buy it to get the car they actually want, just like a Rolex AD does with Lady Datejusts if you want a Daytona allocation.

When you short a stock, you borrow shares from someone who is holding that stock and their broker gets money for lending the shares and sometimes the holder of the shares lent out gets money. You sell the shares, probably to a market maker. The cash is credited to your account and held as collateral.

Sometime later, the stock has fallen and you decide to close the position. You buy back the shares with the borrowed money probably from a market maker and close your position. You give the shares you borrowed back to the lender. Your net profit is sell_price - buy_price - borrow_fees, anything left is your profit.

Stocks are not zero sum like options or futures, they also have no expiration date (unlike derivatives), it’s possible a short seller sold shares to someone who later profited, and then it’s also possible to buy the shares from someone who profited, even if you made a profit on shorting the stock.

So the answer is “other market participants” who also may have profited on their buy or sell.

They need to fire whoever is running AP and AP software development. Vibe invoicing is ridiculous for anyone to do, let alone Amazon.

There’s around five trillion dollars indexed to the S&P 500 in large funds. QQQ is half a trillion dollars.

If you look at Fidelity mutual funds, the difference is even greater. FXAIX has $827B in it, USNQX has $9.6B in it.

The absolute dollars do matter, as do the risk characteristics of both baskets of stocks. If and when SPCX meets the S&P 500 index criteria it will be included.

Also, NASDAQ both operates the NASDAQ exchange and also decides what is in the NASDAQ 100. S&P decides what is in the S&P 500 but they do not operate an exchange. Allowing SPCX into the NASDAQ 100 was good for NASDAQ the exchange and it was legal, so it happened. The S&P 500 committee was not facing the same incentive so SPCX will have to wait until it meets the criteria for inclusion.

If you understand the incentives, you can predict the outcome. I agree that it sucks that QQQ holders had to swallow SPCX.

One last thing, if you reread my post, I explicitly acknowledge I have exposure to SPCX through VTI which I own in my Roth IRA. As of right now, 0.14% of VTI is SPCX which means I have $91 of exposure. I think I’ll be OK if it goes to zero :) I said I have no SPCX in my 401K which is just FXAIX, an S&P 500 index fund.

You can post short regular YouTube videos, I have dozens of favorites that are under 30 seconds long, some are only a few seconds long. The YouTube algorithm didn’t always punish short videos.

The method of ingestion for short form video content is what I dislike, it encourages endless consumption. Each video is immediately followed by another video. It’s very hard to critically consume that style of content when you don’t have time to think about what you’re watching or just watched once another video starts playing. I believe this leads to uncritically believing whatever you’re watching.

The format itself incentivizes sensationalism and puffery, I feel like I’m ingesting questionable information every time I’ve watched short form videos. That’s the main reason I reject short form video content outright, it just feels .. ‘wrong’ somehow.

That is the solution my sister and brother-in-law chose for my 10 yo nephew. He can call home and a few family members and do whatever other limited things an Apple Watch can do. I wear a regular mechanical watch and have never used an Apple Watch so I’m not exactly sure what else it can do, lol.

F2P games with dopamine drip loot boxes and things of that nature seem super unhealthy for kids, I can’t even imagine what it’s doing to their impulse control. I am unable to tolerate games like that myself, probably because I grew up with regular video games that didn’t use psychological tricks and pay to win ecosystems to induce people to spend money. If I had grown up playing them I probably wouldn’t know any different, like the fish asking “what the hell is water” when asked “how is the water this morning?” By an older fish.

Volatility should be lower with more market participants. More participants means that more information can theoretically be priced in.

Producers that use commodity futures to lock in a sale price need a buyer or speculator to take the other side of the transaction.

Gambling is placing a wager with a negative expected value. If you can gain an edge and have positive EV, it’s not gambling. That’s the distinction between poker and slots. A skilled poker player can take advantage of positive EV positions while slots are programmed to have negative EV. There are traders that have positive EV bets.

There’s an order of magnitude more money indexed to the S&P 500, you have to go out out your way to buy QQQ since NASDAQ 100 and total market funds are uncommon in 401K options for employees.

QQQ is more volatile and higher risk than the S&P 500, the people buying it should understand that.

They don’t meet the inclusion criteria. The committee went through the motions to be diplomatic, not because there was ever a chance of it happening.

No, they don’t. I’d be surprised if Oracle has more than a few hundred thousand customers. $500 a month does not let the largest department in Oracle (Legal) flex their muscles. Oracle is a law firm that sells software licenses so their lawyers have something to do, they aim for bespoke agreements slanted to their side.

I don’t even have access to a NASDAQ fund in my 401K. You have to go out of your way to buy the NASDAQ 100, QQQ and /NQ or /MNQ futures are the most popular instruments for getting exposure.

I have a tiny minute slice of SPCX from owning VTI total market ETF but my 401K holds no SpaceX.

The S&P committee never said they would. Space X asked and the committee said no. They should not have asked.

To be fair, the use of TFR had approximately zero context to clue that person in to what it could mean. If you go back and read the first paragraph, there is no mention of children, birth, babies, or any other context clues that help the reader understand what the acronym is even relating to. It abstractly compares ‘TFR’ of several religious groups, it could mean anything. If you want to casually drop semi-obscure acronyms it’s good practice to give context clues by using words related to the acronym near the use of the acronym instead of being abstract like the OP.

I knew what the acronym was but I’ve spent time reading about religious groups and economic/social classes and fertility rates of those groups depending on the level of whatever you would call devotedness or strict adherence to the most conservative version of that belief system.

Which one of these two sentences makes it easier to guess what the acronym means or to google it? I could probably think of a better example using an acronym that has collisions, but this will have to do.

1. “The SOFR has not changed during 2026.”

2. “The Federal Reserve has voted to maintain the SOFR during 2026.”