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180634420
comment
bynecro81
2026 @03:14PM
(#65940256)
Attached to: The Gold Plating of American Water
It's easy to point to the NYC plant as an example. The whole article reads like a libertarian hit piece "regulation is da evillll! We're so oppressed. Government can't do anything right."
I wonder though: how much of the increased cost is due to genuine improvements and maintenance?
It is worth noting that urban decay in the 70s, 80s, and 90s led to a huge backlog of deferred maintenance. (That, and human laziness in general.) We're constantly hearing stories along the lines of "a water main dating to the 1800s burst....It was never meant to hold up to this." Today lots of cities are painfully (and expensively) working through that backlog, either because leaks/breakage have forced the issue, or because they're finally realizing that those pipes in the ground were never meant to last forever.
We're also hearing stories about how storm sewers overflowing cause sewage plants to overflow into waterways. This used to just be accepted practice ("well shit...it's shit!"). Now, because we'd like to actually be able to use our rivers without catching e coli, and because climate change makes downpours more common, municipalities are starting to separate storm sewers from sanitary sewers.
Speaking for myself, my household water bill is never more than $50/mo. (It was about $30/mo until recently, when the city took out a massive bond to...replace all the old pipes, upgrade the treatment plant, and better manage storm water.) For every one of me, there's some household spending 3x as much each month to average $100/mo. Who is using that much water?!
Still, in my opinion, worth every penny. I've been to places where you couldn't drink the water, and places with no indoor plumbing at all. I really don't mind paying for what I've got.
180633138
comment
bynecro81
2026 @10:37AM
(#65939664)
Attached to: Verizon Wastes No Time Switching Device Unlock Policy To 365 Days
With Verizon, I haven't had to buy a new phone in a decade.
You may not have bought it, but you certainly have paid for it - probably a lot more over the last 10 years than if you had bought something out of pocket. Verizon isn't offering you a phone "for free" out of the goodness of their hearts - they're doing it to make a profit.
180633086
comment
bynecro81
2026 @10:29AM
(#65939642)
Attached to: Snap Settles Social media Addiction Lawsuit Ahead of Landmark Trial
Did consumers ever see that money? It was sent to the state governments, never to be seen again.
I'm not sure how that's relevant. We're talking about punishing companies (social medial, beer, tobacco) for their actions that harm people. Compensating consumers isn't necessarily the point. The people who are harmed aren't necessarily even the consumers of the products: a drunk can kill with their vehicle, second-hand smoke harms anyone nearby, social media has fomented civil wars!
And just because states may have frittered the tobacco settlement money, I don't see that as an argument to not hold social media accountable for their ongoing malfeasance.
180632614
comment
bynecro81
2026 @08:30AM
(#65939350)
Attached to: cURL Removes Bug Bounties
It's not that it's inherently incapable of producing good results it's that people abuse it through ignorance, incompetence or just a lack of care and create a flood of shite for others to wade through to find the small nuggets of gold.
In other words: this is why we can't have nice things.
180632604
comment
bynecro81
2026 @08:27AM
(#65939340)
Attached to: Era of 'Global Water Bankruptcy' Is Here, UN Report Says
I would also highly recommend The Water Knife, which itself has extensive references to Cadillac Desert.
In short, it's not like folks haven't seen this coming.
180632598
comment
bynecro81
2026 @08:25AM
(#65939334)
Attached to: Snap Settles Social media Addiction Lawsuit Ahead of Landmark Trial
One might say the same thing about beer, its packaging, and beer commercials. Can we start suing beer companies for getting you addicted?
We did the same with tobacco. The tobacco companies deliberately manipulated their product for maximum addictiveness, buried their own research on the harms, targeted advisements to children, lied to the public and Congress, and eventually got nailed to the tune of $200B for it.
180632562
comment
bynecro81
2026 @08:17AM
(#65939312)
Attached to: Verizon Wastes No Time Switching Device Unlock Policy To 365 Days
After year-over-year cost increases without any improvement in service (speeds, coverage, etc.), I got sick of Verizon's BS and jumped ship for an MVNO. My cost for comparable service is now 1/3 of what it had been. My only regret is that I didn't do it sooner.
I always buy my devices outright and bring them to the carrier, having learned the hard way decades ago that purchasing a device from the carrier is always a bad deal in the long run.
180625312
comment
bynecro81
2026 @03:41PM
(#65938054)
Attached to: Palantir CEO Says AI To Make Large-Scale Immigration Obsolete
Certainly the U.S. doesn't "need" mass immigration.
I wonder if Alex Karp is one of those who contends that a declining (or even stagnating) population level will mean the end of civilization, as a lot of tech bros subscribe to these days. If so, that is one place where mass immigration can help - there's no shortage of useful people in this world.
Oh, he doesn't want those people? Well, I guess he can still hang with the pronatalist, Gilead-coded nutjobs in Silicon Valley.
180615932
comment
bynecro81
026 @02:17PM
(#65935244)
Attached to: EHT Astronomers Will Film Swirling of a Supermassive Black Hole for the First Time
This story has been up for a long while now, and yet in that time it has garnered just a handful of comments, mostly about trolling and pr0n.
News for nerds, indeed.
180602482
comment
bynecro81
026 @03:53PM
(#65930038)
Attached to: US Carbon Pollution Rose In 2025, a Reversal From Prior Years
Gas combined cycle is still beating nearly everyone (solar/wind without storage "doesn't count" since it requires expensive peaker plants for support).
Well, good luck expanding electricity supply with that option. Last I heard, the lead time on new gas turbines is 5-7 years. Solar and batteries can go from green field to exporting power in ~1 year.
180598880
comment
bynecro81
026 @08:09AM
(#65928896)
Attached to: US Carbon Pollution Rose In 2025, a Reversal From Prior Years
And let's not forget, the Trump administration has forced certain aging, un-economical, more-heavily-polluting coal plants to stay open and running, rather than letting them be shut down and decommissioned.
180598868
comment
bynecro81
026 @08:03AM
(#65928892)
Attached to: 'Star Wars' Boss Kathleen Kennedy Steps Down From Lucasfilm
It's a matter of perspective
Come on! "From a certain point of view" was right there!
180585392
comment
bynecro81
2026 @10:41AM
(#65926310)
Attached to: Coal Power Generation Falls in China and India for First Time Since 1970s
Media outlets feel obliged to act as though the arguments are being made in good faith, when they are so obviously not.....
I prefer Eddie Mair’s approach to interviewing as demonstrated with his time with Boris Johnson:
https://youtu.be/3FFv7sqOhoU?s...
Ugh, I only wish.
180584826
comment
bynecro81
2026 @08:49AM
(#65926000)
Attached to: House Sysadmin Stole 200 Phones, Caught By House IT Desk
Taking away his federal pension will easily recoup the lost funds.
And, alas, the cost of his prison stay will eliminate those recouped funds.
180584820
comment
bynecro81
2026 @08:47AM
(#65925996)
Attached to: Cerebras Scores OpenAI Deal Worth Over $10 Billion
So they now measure Compute in MegaWatts
It is one contemporary measure, principally in the area of AI/LLM. You don't have to like it, but anyone on Slashdot these days ought to recognize it.
One could quantify this deal in terms of (peta?)FLOPS, except that may not be a meaningful unit for this use case. The FLOPS, as used by Top500 for instance, is typically defined for 64-bit (double-precision) float operations [ref]. AI/LLM models practically never use double-precision. Some training uses float32 (increasingly less these days), but almost all inference (running models after training) is performed using reduced precision (16- or 8-bit float).
As soon as Cerebras puts out a press release saying "We'll be supply ### petaflops of compute", the pedants on Slashdot would start frothing about how Cerebras is cheating the metric, because Cerebras might mean float8 precision, thereby "gaming" things to get a 8x multiplier.
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