Mostly never -- most of the deferral was an accounting adjustment for the value of future tax credits that they could no longer take advantage of, so there is no actual tax liability here that will eventually be paid.
ISS radiators run on water and ammonia. Think about how much a kg costs to lift to space and you'll see the economics of space data centers fall apart real fast. Plus, if the radiator springs a leak the satellite is scrap.
The point of the Starship program is to drop the cost of a kg going to space significantly - this isn't meant to be launched with rockets that aren't fully reusable.
I don't pretend to understand the thermodynamics of all of this to do an actual calculation, but note that the ISS spends half its time in the shadow of the earth, which these satellites would not do.
The earth is actually a pretty big heat source in space. Solar radiation is a point source, so you can orient parallel to the rays and avoid it. The earth takes up about half the sky and is unavoidable. The earth also radiates infrared, the same as your radiators, so you can't reflect it. Solar light is in the visible spectrum so you can paint your radiators to be reflective in visible wavelengths but emissive in infrared.
Low satellites are still cooler in the Earth's shadow than they would be in unshadowed orbits, but higher orbits are cooler than either. Not where you'd want to put millions of datacenters though.
You would put these in polar orbits so they are always facing the Sun. Basically the longitude would follow the Sun (or the terminator line, whichever you prefer), and the latitude would oscillate from 90°N to 90°S and back every 24 hours.
No. Otherwise how would you power them? We could use nuclear power methods, like we did in the Voyagers for instance. But the press release doesn’t mention that and, for a constellation of satellites around the earth, it would be a terrible idea.
Radiator size scales linearly with power but, crucially, coolant power, pumps, etc do not.
Imagine the capillary/friction losses, the force required, and the energy use(!) required to pump ammonia through a football-field sized radiator panel.
Moving electricity long distance is a lot easier than moving coolant long distances, which puts a soft limit on the reasonable size of the solar array of these satellites. But as long as you stay below that and pick a reasonable orbit it's indeed not too bad, you just have to properly plan for it
It does if you don't turn off the heat source every 30 minutes or so. Since the "datacenters" are targeted at sun synchronous orbits they have 24/7 heat issues. And they convert pretty much all collected energy into heat as well (and some data, but that's negligible). Those GPUs are not magically not generating heat.
Wouldn't the panels themselves need cooling too? The ones on earth generate heat while being in the sun.
There are commercial systems that can use open loop cooling (i.e. spray water) to improve efficiency of the panel by keeping the panel at a optimal temp of ~25C and the more expensive closed loop systems with active cooling recovers additional energy from the heat by circulating water like a solar heater in the panel back.
Twenty-five years after the ISS began operations in low Earth orbit, a new generation of advanced solar cells from Spectrolab, twice as efficient as their predecessors, are supplementing the existing arrays to allow the ISS to continue to operate to 2030 and beyond. Eight new arrays, known as iROSAs (ISS Roll-Out Solar Arrays) are being installed on the ISS in orbit.
The new arrays use multi-junction compound semiconductor solar cells from Spectrolab. These cells cost something like 500 times as much per watt as modern silicon solar cells, and they only produce about 50% more power per unit area. On top of that, the materials that Spectrolab cells are made of are inherently rare. Anyone talking about scaling solar to terawatts has to rely on silicon or maybe perovskite materials (but those are still experimental).
What does it mean to "fund protests"? I'm also a "normal" person who has been to a couple No Kings protests, and no one paid me. Someone spent some money on fliers, I suppose.
The major No Kings events were in June and October last year. January is not a great time for outdoors protests in much of the country. Does it somehow make the protests inauthentic if focus has now shifted towards ICE?
"With Bitcoin you do not get government bailouts" -- yeah maybe not yet? Is it beyond belief that a government with leadership deeply invested in crypto currencies might take action if something super disruptive happens?
Possible. But Bitcoin is hard capped at 21 million coins. The government can peint more paper money to bail a company out if it makes stupid decisions, but they cannot print more Bitcoin. This will devalue the paper currency even more and also increase the value of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is called a hedge against inflation for a reason.
Bitcoin is not an immutable law of nature. If the coin minting cap is reached, all that needs to happen is for miners to start running a fork with a higher cap. Tada, more coins conjured out of the ether, just like all the previous ones. If you want enforced scarcity, you need to be tied to something physically scarce.
The miners can totally start mining a fork, in fact they can start doing so today, but it doesn't matter because nobody will use their fork and then they will have lost out on their hundreds of millions of dollars of investments into mining equipment.
The node operators play just as critical of a role in Bitcoin as the miners.
It's not the node operators either, it's the people who transact on the chain that determine the value of the coins. The miners can disrupt the ability of the chain to transact to some degree, but they can't make people think their fork is worthwhile (why anyone still thinks BTC has much long-term value is beyond me, but...).
In fact they already have. There are 10s of thousands of forks of Bitcoin. Only a handful ever got significant attention. And, the original is still much larger than all of the forks combined.
Right, but a counter point is the etherium fork. Only a handful of people stayed on the “classic” chain after that first DAO turned out to have a massive extraction bug in it.
It would require the market to move as well to consider those new coins worth anything, though. Miners do not have enough control of the chain to make such changes on their own.
all that needs to happen is for countries to destroy their nuclear weapons
all that needs to happen is for governments to stop burning fossil fuels
all that needs to happen is for researchers to publish boring papers replicating others results
all that needs to happen is for fishermen to stop overfishing
Coordination problems seem easy but never really are. The chance of all the miners just suddenly agreeing to do something all at once is pretty low to impossible.
The point of a hypothetical suggestion is to direct a specific course of action. I am simultaneously amazed at how complex the 'hypothetical' construct is, and also how many people aren't able to reason around them... since this is basically what our big brains are for.
If you assume everybody involved just stops responding to their current incentives, you can solve any coordination problem, in a manner of speaking. But it's useless as a battle plan. Operationalizing a change demands that you pick a party you're talking to, and with full view of their capabilities and limitations, modify their current course of action in the smallest possible way that accomplishes a change.
You say "devalue the paper currency even more" but if bitcoin holders need to be bailed in any given country aren't we talking about a scenario where bitcoin is the thing that's lost a bunch of value? Some sort of "it turns out shady bitcoin holders or companies were artificially pumping up the value in a sneaky way and then someone connected the dots" situation?
First thing that comes to mind off the top of my head as a US-Govt option here would be something like: bail out US people/companies of bitcoin holdings in USD in conjunction with banning bitcoin in the US going forward. So that would be quite the string of events at that point for non-US bitcoin holders: first a crash that caused all these US bitcoin holders to go screaming to the government for help. Then the overnight removal of a huge chunk of the bitcoin market, coupled with either a firesale to comply with the ban or US gov seizure of a bunch of the coins, which will push the price lower for anyone who hasn't sold yet since their buyer pool is now much lower.
I wouldn't be surprised if the US government doesn't attempt something just like this in the next 3-5 years. There are a lot of people fleeing the very inflationary US dollar for BTC.
I think at this point it would be too late though. There are too many countries, individuals and corporations around the world that own BTC for it to be successful.
There was a long term holder that dumped 24,000BTC onto the market in August and the price dropped down about 5% for maybe half a day before recovering, and it's not going to be long until other countries follow El Salvador's lead and invite Bitcoin owners to live there tax free.
If the USA bans Bitcoin there will be a massive brain drain of very intelligent people who will just move to those countries.
At present BTC is usually denominated in USD. Until I start to see BTC used as the cross-rate I'm sceptical. Presuming it occurs, it would occur relatively quickly?
Sure, I agree, I guess what I’m trying to understand is why don’t they have even higher rates of skilled worker immigration?
Think back to what the person I replied to said about the economic benefits of immigration in general (again which I believe are true based on what I understand).
For that matter we can just say the United States offers temporary work visas for skilled workers through the H1B program. Case closed! In the case of maybe New Zealand or Switzerland they represent less than 1% of the global population, most of the talent lives outside of those two countries. Are they importing enough high skilled foreign workers? I’m not sure. Switzerland for examples seems very expensive to immigrate to and get citizenship. But I’m not an expert there, just what I’ve skimmed through online.
I think I'm not understanding what comparison you're trying to make. I thought you were expressing some doubt about whether H1B, or temporary skilled worker visas generally, were beneficial for the host country. You asked, "why don't other countries encourage this specific type of immigration" and I pointed out that they do have similar programs. Now you ask "why don't they have even higher rates of skilled worker immigration?"
Japan's SSW program has close to 300k workers. The U.S. H1B program has about 700k workers, so by population, Japan's program appears to be a bit larger. New Zealand's AEWV program has 80k workers with a population of 5 million so proportionally that's much larger.
> They cheated because their cars didn't meet new emissions standards. They were fine by the standards of the year before.
> So a bureaucracy just declared that a legal level of emissions was now illegal.
That is not at all what happened and not how emissions standards are deployed. The EPA's Tier 2 standards were finalized in 2000 to phase in during the 2004-2008 model years [1].
The terminations so far focus on anything with any mention of a DEI related objective and that may seem "fine", but these don't constitute a lot of the NSF's budget (the terminated grants total < $1 billion and if you click through them you'll see that for many, that's 5 years of funding). The planned cuts are much deeper[1], DEI is just not where the "big bucks" are.
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