jandrewrogers

The main consumers of electricity are industrial, not homes. Nothing we take for granted in a home would exist without those industrial supply chains, including data centers. The homes are downstream of continued investment in and expansion of the processes that actually consume most of the electricity.

The amount of water being discussed is utterly inconsequential to the food supply. 10s of trillions of liters of water are wasted growing subsidized corn alcohol in the US alone. Natural resources can be used for more than one thing without creating any issues.

By your reasoning everyone should stop bathing so that we don't starve to death.

> "The majority [of water] is used for big agro industries, such as soya, rice, and wood pulping. Now we have Google planning to use enormous quantities of water.”

This is like calling a rubber raft "enormous" after comparing it to an aircraft carrier. Agriculture consumes astronomically more water, often wastefully, for far less valuable purposes. I can't take these objections seriously.

This is just the latest weird moral panic.

The Iridium constellation(s) are very much in active use. They transitioned their business model from pure communications to RF remote sensing. They are among the leaders in some markets for RF remote sensing platforms. AFAIK the businesses in these markets do not use the Iridium name, which makes sense given it is a historical telecom brand.

That's Wyden as Wyden, not because he is a Democrat. Some of the strongest proponents of these intelligence authorities, and in many cases the literal authors of bills expanding these powers, have been leading Democrats e.g. Feinstein.

There is no credible version of history where Democrats as a party are not enthusiastic supporters of these surveillance powers. They've been actively complicit the entire time.

> Rust is a lot easier to make more performant than C++

I have never seen evidence of this in the wild. C++ is still significantly faster than Rust in practice when doing performance-sensitive parallel development in the two languages.

The reason for the performance gap is mostly understood. Rust's codegen is currently somewhat worse for a variety of reasons. Rust's much weaker compile-time metaprogramming features make some optimizations impractical in the language that are easy in C++. Culturally, "unsafe" minimization in Rust pessimizes code architecture.

Rust can get pretty close to C++ but it often requires writing some very ugly Rust.

Much of the difference in optimizability is that C/C++ allows you to do fairly extreme copy elision. This is important because memory bandwidth tends to be a major performance bottleneck.

C/C++ code can trivially reach into some remote bit of state and mutate it directly. The compiler rarely objects, no matter how ugly the access method or pattern. It is up to the programmer to make sure the invariants hold and the compiler can’t always see through it. These elided copies add up, though it usually has a maintainability and safety cost.

It is related to why functional languages tend to be mediocre for supercomputing in practice despite having nice properties for massive parallelism in theory.

> since it allocates memory for the coroutine state

Heap allocation is not required, just the default.

You can do static allocation if you wish, though it is a little more complicated than typical static allocation due to the relative unpredictability.

If the objective with using async is performance and scalability then you should almost always "bring your own runtime". Bringing your own runtime is the main reason you might want to use async.

Delegating the runtime nerfs many of the benefits that async can offer. If you are going to delegate the runtime it offers relatively little compared to just using threads.

A big part of modern guidance package cost is rejection of noise and countermeasures. This still requires an expensive sensor implementation even though a cheap camera would work well in ideal conditions.

You are mixing up your facts. Patriots are primarily being use against ballistic missiles, not Shahed drones.

Shahed type drones are killed with APKWS missiles. A single fighter jet can carry ~40 of these missiles and the unit cost is similar to a Shahed. APKWS has evolved a lot during its 15 years in use and the new generations are expected to come in around ~$10k each, cheaper than the drones they are designed to destroy. You can put an APKWS on many different things. The US annual production rate is 35,000 but that could be increased several-fold if needed (it is based on a missile of which the US produces 200,000 per year). The Europeans are working on their own version of this.

These have been used in the Middle East for a long time. Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, and Israel all have orders for 10,000+ APKWS missiles each, so clearly they are effective.

The unit cost has been tipping toward the defender but the systems are not widely distributed yet. More effective defenses require more expensive drones e.g. you can't build an effective anti-ship missile (a type of jet-powered drone) for less than a couple million dollars because anything cheaper has too low of a probability of success.

The article is about the export of mined gold. The US produces ~160 tons of gold annually from domestic mining operations.

This article is kind of dramatic about describing a normal thing. Alpine highways everywhere in the world have to deal with this. The entire Mountain West is built for this, including some parts of California.

Maybe the Federal government has never bothered to invest in some aspects of road safety in Yosemite. That’s somewhat embarrassing. I’m surprised this is even an issue in Yosemite given how many other places have had this forever. Far more remote and unpopular highways have addressed this problem.

It is difficult to paint this as anything but incompetence.

I wonder how much the global population getting older influences the desire to migrate.