I’m in Niseko (Hokkaido) and had just driven 2.5h through a snowstorm to my hotel, opened door, and put down bags and phone. Weird alarm from my phone (new phone; forgot to disable, which I usually do because where I live abuses the system for a bunch of stupid alerts for chronic issues), looked at it, realized in Japan it is probably real, so I stood in a doorway. Pretty decent sized storm.
If a tsunami affects me on a mountain something would be seriously wrong, so I’m not going to worry.
Yes. My partner got one in Morioka about 6 weeks ago.
Edit: very, very quickly after the quake, which we felt, I might add. I got a notification via the 'Safety tips' app long after. I think I was on Airplane mode at the time.
Hokkaido is by a wide margin my favorite place in the world. If I could easily HQ a tech company there (for global sales; Japan domestic market is stagnant), I would.
Almost all of the larger commercial miners (especially public companies) are looking at this. There are a bunch of issues (I have a conference talk last week at one of the big mining conferences on the topic, and have met with a bunch of miners on this.)
Probably long term the solution will be hybrid — mining gets done using any spare power. AI training generally requires protected power even beyond firm power and few miners have this for their mining operations, and also most of the mining facilities aren’t in the ISO 5 or 6 facilities we (I insure miners and AI) want to see for $500mm worth of mining hardware. Usually the mining companies don’t want to make the upfront capital outlay for these, so a lot of the time they do partnerships where part of their PPA is shared.
No one I've seen does without at least battery backup/conditioning/etc. Some may have less than 100% redundancy on generators, but that's mainly because some of them are running with e.g. a 200MW grid feed and 20x10MW gensets and ALSO running about 10-15 of the "backup" gensets as prime power. It's possible corners are cut during commissioning (like they use modular structures during buildout of the tilt-up ISO 5 permanent structure), but substanially no one would do this as their long-term design goal.
More. In 2024, Bitcoin mining companies collectively spent over $3.6 billion on hardware, data centers, and infrastructure to maintain and expand their operations.
I insure like >$3B worth actively I think (which includes some additional power equipment, hvac, etc. below the scale of main site transformers, etc.). If you count former equipment which has been removed from service over the years it is probably about $5-10B for Bitcoin in total? (Not pulling the BDX to look at specific breakdown of miners vs AI)
One $4mm cabinet of GB300 can generate maybe 10-20x the power/hvac cost per hour so it doesn't make sense to ever have it idle. Vs. $100K worth of miners for the same 40KW conditioned or 100KW raw power.
I'm definitely interested in these if they work -- both because mosquito elimination (the world's most dangerous animal...) is interesting, and because it's an obvious demo for inexpensive autonomous drones for various terminal effects.
Even better "please give us all the things which could be used by a foreign power to blackmail you, or apply pressure to relatives or other close contacts" and then poorly secure that database.
Those are the same guys who told us we must give them backdoor keys to every encryption algorithm, because nothing can go wrong with it and otherwise terrorists win.
I preordered one for $20k (so I'd get it earlier), but it's going to live in only public areas of house, outdoors, etc., due to privacy concerns. I think it will probably be sufficiently useful to be worthwhile, but I'll probably wait a few weeks from public launch to be more sure.
Seemed weird to me that they turned it into a secondary site; we were fighting relatively incapable-of-force-projection people in the mountains and deserts at the time, but even if Russia wasn't a clear threat in 2008, it seems like it should have been obvious EMP, conventional infiltration attacks, etc. would be reasonable threats in the future. Unless you're willing to go to fully dispersed command (and thus risk a commander at theater or below level launching on his own authority...), or run 24x7 airborne looking glass (which ended in 1990, and presumably was even more costly than modernizing Cheyenne Mountain Complex), what we had from 2008-2015 was clearly less survivable.
According to Daniel Ellsberg the US did implement a scheme where regional commanders could use nuclear weapons without explicit authority from the President:
"Walking out of the theater, Ellsberg turned to his friend, another nuclear denizen, and said, “That was a documentary.”"
In descriptions of the process it always amuses me that they talk about failure to receive Radio 4 being the test (perhaps of it also being broadcast on long wave)...
I don't understand why this suddenly happened (except if asked by the USG in response to the recent scare/reality over rare earths).
The 50% ownership by a sanctioned entity was a reality for a while, and was an issue as soon as the purchase. This didn't change recently. So, this action should have been part of the pre-purchase review (CFIUS in the US...I assume there is an equivalent in China). On the face of it, this all could have been avoided by having a non-sanctioned entity (including another random Chinese company) own enough of the company to get sanctioned entity ownership below 50%.
Definitely US pressure. NL is always eager to get on the good side of the US, even if they get nothing in return. For example participation in the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and Gaza today.
There are a few other downsides to borosilicate vs soda lime in a home kitchen (I still have euro and vintage only); if borosilicate breaks it is somewhat more dangerous.
If a tsunami affects me on a mountain something would be seriously wrong, so I’m not going to worry.