Even in the US, I don't know many friends with enough living space to have an entire spare guest room.
When friends visit, they sleep on the living room couch or an air mattress. Is this not typical?
Flippant answer: in the U.S., in your twenties, you have no spare space, and visiting friends sleep on your couch. In your forties, you have a guest bedroom, and visiting friends stay at a hotel.
Possibly more accurate answer: it depends on what kind of housing people live in, if they have kids, and if they work at home. Most residential houses were built for couples with children, so if someone owns a house and is single and/or childless, they likely have spare bedrooms that serve as a home offices, hobby spaces, or guest bedrooms. People living in apartments usually don't pay for more space than required for their daily needs.
Somebody else was likely sleeping in the living room already. The reality of living conditions in the USSR was harsh.
You were typically allocated spacious 9 square meters (96 sq. ft.) of living space per person, with an additional 18 square meters for the head of the family. So a 4-person family would get about 45 square meters (485 sq. ft.)
And these were _typical_ numbers, not a guarantee. Plenty of families had less space.
In most of the Eastern block the accommodation given to a family was sized for that family. Few had the luxury of a completely unused room.
The kitchen was routinely used as a room for two reasons, one that it was obviously a room, the second because it was easy to heat with the stove being right there. A lot of families were using the kitchen as permanent living space, usually relegating the grandparents to that worst room so the young ones could get a decent start in life.
It doesn't seem that crazy that there would be very little space. Visiting parents and/or grandparents probably got the bedroom, some friends the living room.
It's less common than it used to be, but in India it's still kind of normal for newlyweds to live in the groom's parents' kitchen for a while until they get their own place
> Often they don't pay high taxes nor do they employ large numbers of people... They are building and selling a non tangible good i.e where do you tax it?
You could easily charge a property tax (could even have a higher rate for data centers, specifically), or an excise tax on number of servers, or a tax on excess energy/water consumption. There's lots of options here, if that's what you're worried about.
> Their is also noise pollution concerns which can destroy communities near by and water usage concerns. These plants drain aquaifers.
Factories also do both of these things. They're noisy, often have emissions much worse than anything coming from a datacenter, and most factories use large quantities of water as well.
We need to go full Oracle and charge an excise tax per logical CPU core. For GPUs we can count SIMT lanes.
More seriously they should be taxed per watt, likely in an asymptotic manner because most of the externalities don't scale linearly. Any additional infrastructure requirements should be directly rolled into their electric and water bills, which is to say that they should receive a very unfavorable rate.
I mean yeah it think their are some ideas around how to tax things better and rolling up the real infrastructure and resource costs. All these things can be done but the conversation above has that as the last thought which is what many towns that get destroyed by data-centers do. They job to conclusions about these things being universially good or making jobs but dont' engage with the reality of the math that goes into that decisions. Whether towns can do that hard to say but I believe the state government has an obligation to aid its local governments and stake holders i.e people to not get ripped off and forced in to terrible contracts that hurt the states long term
Yeah but the data centers write contracts that making changing the laws around property contractually impossible if you don't argree to their hostile terms they just move to the next town willing to accept. Towns are not a necessiarly smart enough to do all contractual footwork especially when companies heavily lobby the towns population with empty promises. But even if they do the best thing that happens is the company moves to a more willing town. Most data centers are build in poor places because those towns are looking for something to change their circumstances.
Also I am not saying factories are all good they pump stuff like TEFLON in rivers but at least the people locally get a good job out of it. And they make those trades even when the negative impacts exceed the positive gains like with data centers. Its from position of depressed town where the people want to see the golden days return.
Also this is a deal with negatives and positives you haven't listed a positive for these data centers in your reply I think is indicitive that you haven't explored the effect of data centers in places like Louisiana which is very permisive.
I think just saying maybe towns should do better laws doesn't recognize the power differential between a town and likely a poor town and a Trillion dollar corportations. Idea's like an excise tax like that is way more complex than you are thinking does a server excise tax effect just these data centers or anyone doing data center processing i.e local hospitals. The Law is very complex when it comes to inventing new taxes but yeah some of those things should be investigated it might be a good case to have a pause to study those proposals and implement them so that towns don't just get screwed over. And I am not saying there isn't a dynamic in which data centers can help local communities its just that has not been the case for more data centers than the public is potentially willing to tolerate. Make the economics better for people and I am sure governments would not stand in the way its just at this point their is little effort to do so.
Does anybody else find these AI-authored blog posts difficult to read? Something about the writing style and structure just feels unnatural, it's hard put my finger on it.
At the very least, the writing takes way too long to get to a point.
AI does a good job of condensing the blog post to 2 paragraphs -- Mac refuses to let the tcp_now clock rollover when it exceeds the max value in its data type.
This but Gemini and Email - literally marketed as "write bullet points and Gemini will draft your email", followed by "received a long email? Let Gemini summarise it for you."
The world's most effective _de_compression technology for email - total waste of time and compute when combined, but each product would make sense in isolation if human-generated mail was the majority of email sent/received (except sadly it isn't). We're using AI to spam people, AI to detect spam, AI to write non-spam and AI to summarise non-spam. AI inefficiency at every level and no way back.
That could still get prohibitively expensive. Take the example from this article, where there's only one person still using the paper ticket option...
I could see someone arguing you need a specially trained staff member or supervisor to verify your ID for anti-scalping, which they don't need to do for other e-tickets. Say only one person uses this option all season, they could be asked to pay for an entire employee's salary/benefits.
It's a bit hyperbolic, but supporting non-standard workflows is organizationally expensive with many non-quantifable costs.
> I could see someone arguing you need a specially trained staff member or supervisor to verify your ID for anti-scalping
They can argue that all they like, but they'll stop pretty quickly when I ask why they can't just print out the same barcode as the smartphone user would use, and have the same person scan that using the same equipment so that they can enjoy the same anti-scalping protections (i.e if that barcode has already been scanned, you don't let them in).
If the law had existed all along, it would not be a non-standard workflow.
And there is precedent on the pricing. For example, FAA is not allowed to charge any more for any service than it costs to deliver said service, which is why if i lose my pilot's license, a replacement is $3.
There's no way that costs the FAA $3. It is a wealthy service for wealthy people, so they can afford to absorb some costs. Your knowledge and wording indicates you are likely part of the demographic that knows how to threaten with lawyers.
One cause for the cost-recovery rule was the case Asiana Airlines v. FAA: The court ruled that the FAA’s enabling statute required fees to be "directly related" to the agency's actual costs. They held that the FAA couldn't look at the value of the service to the airline; they could only look at the receipts for what it cost the FAA to "flip the switches and manage the radar".
It depends on whether the ticket is considered a criminal or civil matter in the US.
For a criminal case, yes, they need to prove "beyond a reasonable doubt" - which would require that you are positively identified as the driver.
For a civil case, they only need to prove by a "preponderance of the evidence" - which is a much lower standard.
This is why tickets from red-light cameras in many states are zero-point citations. You're still charged a fine, but there's no finding of guilt attached to the offense, which keeps it away from being considered a criminal matter. (This is the same way parking tickets work.)
FileMarker Pro had a dedicated server product (FileMaker Server) that you could use for multi-user access. Claris still sells it: https://www.claris.com/filemaker/
Microsoft Access was strictly file based. You could drop the .mdb/.accdb file on a SMB share and it would support basic concurrency via lock files. However, you could also swap out the internal database engine (Jet) with anything else via ODBC, so your Access database could connect to a remote Microsoft SQL Server instance - or even MySQL/Postgres.
Back in high school, I even wired up an Access database to give a graphical frontend to an accounting app running on an IBM AS/400 mainframe. ODBC made it easy, and Access itself didn't really care where the data lived.
Nit: If you're filing a flight plan, you do it with the country you're departing from. Even if you're piloting an aircraft departing into the US, it wouldn't have any effect on operations if you couldn't reach US websites. There's also several alternative ways for pilots to file flight plans outside of the web.
(The flight plans get passed between countries via AFTN/AMHS, which are dedicated telecommunications networks independent of the Internet.)
There's also several different ways to transmit the passenger manifest to CBP - including over a CBP-provided VPN and IATA "Type B" messages sent through ARINC/SITA.
The network for Type B messages is also independent of the Internet (it was developed 60 years ago).
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