You know who was never clever in any area but still thinks he knows a lot about everything? Reporters.
Journalists are trained to give us Pulitzer-winning coverage of political scandals. They are piss-poor at developing any sort of science/technology story.
Extracting water from the air would only work at all during summer monsoon, which is from early July through early September. The rest of the year, the air is so dry that the adjacent nuclear plant is the only nuke in the world that uses desert air as a heat sink, rather than a large body of water. It gets a boost from Phoenix municipal sewage.
If Los Angeles could produce its own water by desalination, inland areas would be able to retain the water we are now sending them. But until that happens each state on the Colorado River gets a specific annual allocation of the water in it. The Phoenix metro area has a local supply of mountain drainage, but Arizona law requires that any new development prove out a 100-year supply of water before it can be built. Water is the limiting factor for any development in this state.
Energy will not be a problem. The area gets over 300 days of hard clean sunlight a year, and is next to a large nuclear plant. But Gates is going to have to change the name. There is already a Bellemont on I-40 in the mountains, a large new residential development near Flagstaff.
Nuclear is for baseload, not load-following, so China is using hydro for that. Wind and solar don't load-follow either; in fact, the grid has to be redesigned ("Smart Grid") to allow such sources in the first place. The battery farms that will have to be developed to allow adding of renewables other than hydro will, if they work out, be add to the load-following capabilities of all the other sources.
Choking on its own pollution is exactly why they're doing this. Carbon is a long-term, more secondary issue with China, while doing something about the unbreathable air in cities is paramount.
Sure, the actual computing is being done with an ASIC specially for this task. But because the limiting factor on mining is already keeping the cost of power below the value of the coins produced, any way of shaving power used counts, as does any way of cramming in more parallelism.
There is a small benefit to the increasing cost of mining BTC, in that it pushes the technology of high speed computing, including economizing on power consumption.
Fortunately China does not believe any of these arguments, and just ignores the opposition rather than letting it use its lawyers to make everything it doesn't like too expensive by holding up projects for years. It has to get out from under the world's largest pollution problem, and although it already produces and installs more wind and solar than anyone else - cheap early deployment of factory-built tech, once again - it is under no illusion that it doesn't need baseload sources to support heavy industries and large cities.
China is working on fusion too, and when you people fish for reasons to oppose it because big and industrial, they will become the major supplier.
His strategy is extremely high-risk. If he guesses wrong about the demand for one major concert, he is through. The way to make long-term money on reselling tickets to anything is by charging a commission.
Nuclear is expensive to build initially, given our current regulatory climate, but cheap to operate, and runs for years at 90% or more of nameplate capacity. What makes wind and solar cheap to install is that they are factory-built technologies. But now try to run them at more than a small fraction of nameplate.
Standardized nuclear, regulated by type instead of by individual installation, is what will replace the fossil baseload. Imagine how much an airline ticket would cost if Boeing had to get a full set of permits from multiple jurisdictions for each plane it built?
Chinee penis soooooo small they snort ground up rhino horn because that will magically make their cocks bigger.
Not a problem. While we're scared-shitless busy labeling all our food No GMO, China ill be applying the same tech to give every man a pepperoni. Then watch them invade North Korea to get the women they now find themselves so short of.
What you're not taking into account is that because the speculative value of Bitcoin is based on its algorithmically limited money supply. Introducing Bitcoin Cash doubled that supply. Add Etherium, and you have tripled it. There goes your speculative commodity value.
Now for the BIG BUT... TO the extent that BTC "goes up," is hoarded by speculators, it loses value as a currency. Call it what it really is, a virtual commodity. Don't call it a medium of exchange.
Seriously? Let me know when people are using it for toilet paper.
Bitcoin has no physical existence. At least when the farmers had all been driven out and dysentery ravaged the Zimbabwean countryside you could use those famous trillion dollar bills as TP.
One surefire indicator of a bubble in Investment X is when, after the price of X shoots up and everyone is recommending it, you start to see a proliferation of downmarket imitations of X. Buy X1 or X2, the reasoning goes, and you're in on that ground floor you missed in X.
Even if every imitation of X is just as solid an investment as X itself, you are effectively multiplying the supply of X with each new version. In Bitcoin, the reason it went up in the first place was limited money supply. Unwittingly, you are increasing the supply of your putatively fixed commodity.
Actually I'm lately hearing this line of argument:
"7 cents? That's outrageous, the bubble will pop soon!" "70 cents? Such foolishness, who would ever pay that much for a single bitcoin?!" "7 dollars? Bitcoin is a scam, who's fool enough to fall for it? Stay away!" "70 dollars? My barber recommends Bitcoin, and so does my dog walker..." "700 dollars? Okay, now I'm buying in." "7000 dollars? I'm riding this to the stars. Desert Rat Blog is calling for $100,000 BTC by 2020!"
It is a blog post hosted on economist.com that did not appear particularly coherent to me.
Spotted the Bitcoin speculator!
The Economist nailed it. BTC would be valuable as an anonymous digital currency if the ratio of coins to everything that can be traded for coins remained stable. Traditionally, this is what the central bank of a national currency is supposed to do. BTC has no central bank, and limits its money supply mathematically. The advantage of this is that BTC cannot inflate, but it also means that as the currency trades more widely (is exchanged for for more things), the money supply grows only very slowly through new mining. It is DEFLATING, so people have taken to buying it only because they hope to sell the coins themselves for more later on.
As soon as you avoid buying a beer for BTC because you think you will get more for your coins later, it stops being a currency. It becomes a speculation, and by now it's tulip time.
A large bunch of people showing up on your doorstep, unvetted by any national immigration system, is an insurgency. At least our own insurgents are Catholic.
Slashdot Mirror
This might be why he chose this particular location. Palo Verde has ample room for expansion, so why not add some of his experimental units to it?
You know who was never clever in any area but still thinks he knows a lot about everything? Reporters.
Journalists are trained to give us Pulitzer-winning coverage of political scandals. They are piss-poor at developing any sort of science/technology story.
Extracting water from the air would only work at all during summer monsoon, which is from early July through early September. The rest of the year, the air is so dry that the adjacent nuclear plant is the only nuke in the world that uses desert air as a heat sink, rather than a large body of water. It gets a boost from Phoenix municipal sewage.
If Los Angeles could produce its own water by desalination, inland areas would be able to retain the water we are now sending them. But until that happens each state on the Colorado River gets a specific annual allocation of the water in it. The Phoenix metro area has a local supply of mountain drainage, but Arizona law requires that any new development prove out a 100-year supply of water before it can be built. Water is the limiting factor for any development in this state.
Energy will not be a problem. The area gets over 300 days of hard clean sunlight a year, and is next to a large nuclear plant. But Gates is going to have to change the name. There is already a Bellemont on I-40 in the mountains, a large new residential development near Flagstaff.
See what I mean, folks?
Nuclear is for baseload, not load-following, so China is using hydro for that. Wind and solar don't load-follow either; in fact, the grid has to be redesigned ("Smart Grid") to allow such sources in the first place. The battery farms that will have to be developed to allow adding of renewables other than hydro will, if they work out, be add to the load-following capabilities of all the other sources.
Choking on its own pollution is exactly why they're doing this. Carbon is a long-term, more secondary issue with China, while doing something about the unbreathable air in cities is paramount.
Sure, the actual computing is being done with an ASIC specially for this task. But because the limiting factor on mining is already keeping the cost of power below the value of the coins produced, any way of shaving power used counts, as does any way of cramming in more parallelism.
There is a small benefit to the increasing cost of mining BTC, in that it pushes the technology of high speed computing, including economizing on power consumption.
Fortunately China does not believe any of these arguments, and just ignores the opposition rather than letting it use its lawyers to make everything it doesn't like too expensive by holding up projects for years. It has to get out from under the world's largest pollution problem, and although it already produces and installs more wind and solar than anyone else - cheap early deployment of factory-built tech, once again - it is under no illusion that it doesn't need baseload sources to support heavy industries and large cities.
China is working on fusion too, and when you people fish for reasons to oppose it because big and industrial, they will become the major supplier.
His strategy is extremely high-risk. If he guesses wrong about the demand for one major concert, he is through. The way to make long-term money on reselling tickets to anything is by charging a commission.
Nuclear is expensive to build initially, given our current regulatory climate, but cheap to operate, and runs for years at 90% or more of nameplate capacity. What makes wind and solar cheap to install is that they are factory-built technologies. But now try to run them at more than a small fraction of nameplate.
Standardized nuclear, regulated by type instead of by individual installation, is what will replace the fossil baseload. Imagine how much an airline ticket would cost if Boeing had to get a full set of permits from multiple jurisdictions for each plane it built?
They fake the moon, they fake space. Whatever it takes to convince you the Earth is round, because they certainly can't prove it.
Can you write this up, with diagrams, as an article for Slate ? They eat up stuff like that.
Chinee penis soooooo small they snort ground up rhino horn because that will magically make their cocks bigger.
Not a problem. While we're scared-shitless busy labeling all our food No GMO, China ill be applying the same tech to give every man a pepperoni. Then watch them invade North Korea to get the women they now find themselves so short of.
What you're not taking into account is that because the speculative value of Bitcoin is based on its algorithmically limited money supply. Introducing Bitcoin Cash doubled that supply. Add Etherium, and you have tripled it. There goes your speculative commodity value.
Now for the BIG BUT... TO the extent that BTC "goes up," is hoarded by speculators, it loses value as a currency. Call it what it really is, a virtual commodity. Don't call it a medium of exchange.
Seriously? Let me know when people are using it for toilet paper.
Bitcoin has no physical existence. At least when the farmers had all been driven out and dysentery ravaged the Zimbabwean countryside you could use those famous trillion dollar bills as TP.
China doesn't have to plunder anything. They are building the technologies that to a large extent we are no longer bothering to develop.
think of burgers and fries as American.
You actually can get a burger and fries in Hamburg. I checked.
If IBM had bikesheds, it wouldn't be IBM.
One surefire indicator of a bubble in Investment X is when, after the price of X shoots up and everyone is recommending it, you start to see a proliferation of downmarket imitations of X. Buy X1 or X2, the reasoning goes, and you're in on that ground floor you missed in X.
Even if every imitation of X is just as solid an investment as X itself, you are effectively multiplying the supply of X with each new version. In Bitcoin, the reason it went up in the first place was limited money supply. Unwittingly, you are increasing the supply of your putatively fixed commodity.
Right now, this is how many cryptocurrencies are in circulation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Actually I'm lately hearing this line of argument:
"7 cents? That's outrageous, the bubble will pop soon!"
"70 cents? Such foolishness, who would ever pay that much for a single bitcoin?!"
"7 dollars? Bitcoin is a scam, who's fool enough to fall for it? Stay away!"
"70 dollars? My barber recommends Bitcoin, and so does my dog walker..."
"700 dollars? Okay, now I'm buying in."
"7000 dollars? I'm riding this to the stars. Desert Rat Blog is calling for $100,000 BTC by 2020!"
It is a blog post hosted on economist.com that did not appear particularly coherent to me.
Spotted the Bitcoin speculator!
The Economist nailed it. BTC would be valuable as an anonymous digital currency if the ratio of coins to everything that can be traded for coins remained stable. Traditionally, this is what the central bank of a national currency is supposed to do. BTC has no central bank, and limits its money supply mathematically. The advantage of this is that BTC cannot inflate, but it also means that as the currency trades more widely (is exchanged for for more things), the money supply grows only very slowly through new mining. It is DEFLATING, so people have taken to buying it only because they hope to sell the coins themselves for more later on.
As soon as you avoid buying a beer for BTC because you think you will get more for your coins later, it stops being a currency. It becomes a speculation, and by now it's tulip time.
A large bunch of people showing up on your doorstep, unvetted by any national immigration system, is an insurgency. At least our own insurgents are Catholic.
In situ treatment of a genetic disease is just a first step. Next we apply it to the germline DNA.