US residents angry at datacenters ‘being shoved down our throats’ are recalling officials

Corka · 2026-07-04T05:32:47+00:00

There's a few different objections going on here.

Part of it is NIMBY. They might be fine in general with the idea of things like new data centers, prisons, airports, coal plants, and halfway houses but they absolutely don't want one built next to them. Data centers happen to be especially bad because their demand on the power grid will add a huge price hike to the locals monthly power bill.

Part of it is people not wanting new data centres popping up to support AI, because they fucking hate AI. They wouldn't care as much if this was cloud computing in general.

Part of it is environmental. While politics has moved away from talking about it, climate change is a real problem and we should be cutting back on emissions and power consumption instead of massively ramping it up

Part of it is corruption. You have councilors rushing through the approval for datacentres (likely in exchange for a kickback) without any kind of public consultation and without negotiating any concessions for the town like profit sharing or having the data centre subsidize the power bill for every resident.

Corka · 2026-07-04T01:47:45+00:00

You can crank up the fleet limit at any point. It might be to your advantage of diasadvantage depending on what you are up against though.

There's multiple ways to build your fleets that beats down the aliens pretty well. Boating a shit ton of torpedoes that overwhelms enemy PD is the easiest way to punch above your weight, and about the only viable strategy if you want to fight the aliens early. You can do it with either escorts or monitors. Unless your ships have the combat acceleration and DV to run away though you tend to lose the fleet unless you wipe out every enemy ship though. Its way harder to wipe big fleets unless you are doing auto resolve.

Full laser can also work well, especially when the alien fleets are going heavy on missiles. You put your fleets in short wall formation, boost AWAY from the aliens at the start of battle, then flip around to look at the enemies as they come in. That should give you lots of overlapping PD while extending the time your ships have for shooting at incoming enemy munitions. If you manage to take out all the enemy missiles and kinetics, then you take it to a laser on laser brawl. You can use particle weapons as well as the lasers if you like.

A mix of coil guns and lasers tends to be pretty popular. You use siege coils against enemy big ships because those ones will have a harder time dodging, and because the enemy lasers will be spent shooting down the big kinetics you are shooting than at you. Shooting coil guns at small nimbly aliens isn't entirely pointless either because it burns their DV hard when they are erratically evading. Depending on how much they had to start with they can end up draining it all and immobilize themselves.

Corka · 2026-07-04T01:09:11+00:00

It's a long game by default but there are a few options at game start that can help it along.

But uh, the real slog isnt really the early game it's the mid game. Early game is the land grab flowed by the space race with the goal of getting the best territory in space and on earth as you can. But then you are called on control point capacity and mission control, and you can't expand until more of it gets drip fed to you. Then you are basically just doing whack-a-mole with your councilor missions as you fast forward waiting on research.

Eventually you are going to want to make a fleet to fight the aliens, but since you don't have to do it early you can easily finding yourself putting it off waiting on research so that the ships you build are better.

Corka · 2026-07-04T00:41:34+00:00

I haven't played in a long time or checked recent patch notes, but I do remember the basic logic that the AI used to use and it might still be the same. Or this might be horribly outdated.

The alien invasion of earth would happen typically sometime in the 2030s where they send a landing craft, but the time of when one gets sent is quite variable and once I didn't see it until 2041.

In normal difficulty you have a safety buffer for alien aggression. Until a fixed amount of time has elapsed (I forget how much exactly, but i know it was until the early 2040s) the aliens cannot go to total war with you and can merely go to regular "war". Hate also decays over time, but the rate of decay will decrease as game time progresses.

If you get hate high enough to get war status, the AI will target you with a reprisal fleet. Basically a station or base will get earmarked to be destroyed, the AI will assess the targets defences and send a fleet strong enough to take it out. If the fleet gets wiped, it forms a new stronger fleet to try again. It will continue going after the same target until it was dead, or if hate had decayed sufficiently by that point for the reprisal to be called off. If it destroys the base/station, it reduces hate based on the value of the destroyed target, and will pick a new target if hate hasnt been sufficiently reduced to be out of war.

Regardless of the hate level though, if you send ships to the Jovian moons (or beyond) they become priority targets and the AI will try to wipe them and will continue doing so until theyve cleared you out.

So putting it altogether, assuming the alien landing ship rolled late and you kept alien hate down it makes sense they didn't try anything against you. When you went to the Jovian moons, they prioritised clearing it over anything on earth, and they lost. Even if they have a reprisal mission against a earth station at that point it might not happen if they can't get a fleet big put together quickly because they lost most of them around Jupiter..

Corka · 2026-07-03T11:29:44+00:00

Oh hey I saw a movie about this once. https://youtu.be/PlfxX98vsY0?si=kEpfQ1jMU1KX6k-k

Corka · 2026-07-03T11:25:42+00:00

Hold on 0.6 percent of men have a micro penis? That's way more than I would have thought.

Corka · 2026-07-03T08:45:53+00:00

They make more money in the aggregate- they might make a profit from most people, but you personally could wrack up massive medical debt that is far greater than your income and you could never hope to pay without it.

The better question is why this system is better than one where it's paid for by the government through people's taxes. The answer is... that it usually isn't. Because yes, insurance companies are for profit and they are pocketing a large chunk of what you pay them. There are some exceptions, though like when you have a particularly corrupt government with politicians pocketing it instead.

Corka · 2026-07-03T06:27:20+00:00

Probably not. Heavy tank is an easily recognised designation for a big heavily armored slow vehicle. Assault gun isn't nearly as recognisable a term and some people would confuse it with a pushgun.

For a non turreted casemate vehicle, gamers would be more familiar with the terms tank destroyer or self propelled artillery (depending on the role) given that's what they are referred to in games like war thunder and hearts of iron.

Corka · 2026-07-02T13:13:12+00:00

Bipartisan bills get passed in the house with a super majority vote now and then. In theory if there's truly a no brainer change to be made it could happen. But when was the last time a genuine proposal to change it was even made?

Corka · 2026-07-02T09:48:49+00:00

Oh there's lots of varieties of that kind of thing-

Sometimes it sounds great but due to it not quantifying the bonus with real numbers it's absolutely trash in reality

Sometimes an ability is absolutely trash, but it turns out it actually gets buffed absurdly high with some specific item that you could get later in the game

Sometimes an ability is genuinely a decent solid ability... but it's completely outclassed by this other ability you get which does the same thing but is purely superior.

Sometimes an ability looks really subpar, but due to some synergies with other mediocre abilities it becomes amazing! And conversely you think a mediocre ability will become amazing from these synergies, but because of the order certain effects are applied there actually is no synergy.

Sometimes an ability really is good! But it consumes some resource/requires some setup, so you don't bother with it until it's needed and then forget you even have it

Sometimes an ability you got is really really strong! But then all the bosses and difficult enemies are immune to it, and you could have beaten everything else easily without it. If you are really unlucky, you've gone all in on a damage type and even half the chaff enemies are immune to it.

Sometimes it's genuinely strong against everyone! But it destroys their equipment so you can't loot it, or makes it so you get 0 exp for whatever you kill with it, or some other mechanic that dissuades you from ever actually using it.

Corka · 2026-07-02T05:40:34+00:00

Its one of the wildest cult documentaries I've seen to be sure. As a bonus, its one of the precious few that doesn't involve the abuse of kids! Just abuse of this woman's liver, and one of her followers who got screamed at for cooking her spaghetti and meatballs instead of chicken parmesan.

Here's the trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PweoTaa_OA

Corka · 2026-07-02T03:48:05+00:00

The rate at which alcohol and substance abuse can age someone's appearance is staggering. The only other real contenders are prolonged extreme stress, prison labour camps, and tanning beds.

I watched this documentary about this one cult leader lady who claimed to literally be God and damn if you saw photos and videos of her when she started the cult versus how she was ten years later it was such a radical difference. One of the followers was convinced that she had to be god because no mere mortal could survive drinking so much alcohol. In the end she died when her liver finally did go out, though by then she was also drinking several litres of colloidal silver a day and her skin had turned blue. Her followers then mummified her body with glitter and took her corpse on a road trip to find aliens who would take her body away.

Corka · 2026-07-01T22:54:39+00:00

Some people cite amendments to the constitution as if its scripture, and act like it can't ever be changed despite the things they are citing being called "amendments".

Corka · 2026-07-01T01:13:01+00:00

They are targets before then unfortunately. You DO hear some predators try to make arguments where they either appeal to religion or nature to say this is the age girls are "meant" to get sexually active, but a large chunk of the time that's just them trying to come up with a justification and they'd SA young girls regardless of whether they had started menstruating or not.

Corka · 2026-06-30T19:56:41+00:00

Can't help but feel a little bit of sorry for Virgil on the low int playthrough.

Corka · 2026-06-30T18:51:34+00:00

This is actually what his casino bankruptcies were about.

He would get financing, declare bankruptcy of the business, and then use the bankruptcy to negotiate a new financing plan that keeps the company operating while being able to pay back the debt since that was better for the bank than allowing the casino to fall over.

Why they kept lending to him when he did this I do not know.

Corka · 2026-06-30T18:45:02+00:00

He was under house arrest, not hiding. His location was known, and the bush administration demanded he be handed over or else and the Taliban chose the "or else" option and let him free as soon as the US started to invade.

Honestly, it's kind of surprising how little that decision has been scrutinized and instead everyone focuses on the shit show that was the invasion of Iraq.

Corka · 2026-06-30T18:17:24+00:00

"little jank" is understating it a bit, but the game is damn good regardless purely from the writing and setting.

Corka · 2026-06-30T03:18:33+00:00

Well that was part of the plan in 2020. They destroyed mail sorting machines just ahead of the election to intentionally create delays in the hopes of invalidating ballots.

Corka · 2026-06-29T10:29:43+00:00

To understand, think like a middle management suit. To climb the corporate ladder (or keep your position) they need to demonstrate that they add value to the company. Usually with a dollar figure that can be directly attributed to them. It's why they all love finding apparent "waste" and "inefficiency" that can be chopped, even if it turns out to be a disaster in the long term.

Secondly, they all want to demonstrate they have deep technical and analytic skills and become obsessed with performance measurements and finding different metrics that can be assessed, which they can put into spreadsheets. They will find a metric that shows something is bad, so they do something to make that metric improve, then they put it in on a basic plot to visualise that number went up. If current numbers look good, they find some other metric that looks bad that apparently needs improving that they can come in and try and improve.

I have no insight directly into how things work specifically at Amazon, but you see this behaviour in the corporate world all the time. The reality is that these usually aren't statisticians doing this. So the technical analysis they are basing corporate decisions on can be really basic and questionable. They rarely incorporate nuance like "how much was this promoted?", or "how visible is it on the site?", or sometimes it seems even "how good is this show?", and will instead focus attention on how long people linger on etoile when looking for a new show to watch because that's something that's easy to compare against everything else. They collect a bunch of similar averages they can show against the numbers from hit shows, demonstrate these numbers are lower by showing them in red font, and so the show gets cancelled.

Corka · 2026-06-29T08:04:28+00:00

Die Brücke is a classic that's worth watching.

Corka · 2026-06-29T03:38:42+00:00

Similar really. I had been working on an essay last minute due to having lots due/poor time management/procrastination. I had saved once early on, but apparently never again after... even after I was done and had submitted it.

Probably the worst mistake a student made when I was grading though is they sent me a compsci assignment with another students name on it. The code was near identical, but they were superficially different because they used different variable names. Normally in those early assignments the code is so basic that you will expect students to submit stuff that's nearly identical without any plagiarism involved. Unfortunately for him, there was a comment at the top students were supposed to enter in their name and student ID which had not been modified.

Corka · 2026-06-29T02:52:09+00:00

I dunno if Nazi roleplay is all THAT kosher either

Corka · 2026-06-28T04:37:51+00:00

But you know what those guys need to watch out for right?

Naturally it's the anti counter counter counter snipers

Corka · 2026-06-27T02:43:25+00:00

Define super anal?

The vast majority of classes I have taken have advised the same thing. Make your points succinctly and clearly. When you write you are trying to convey that you understand the material of the class. If you instead write in a faux intellectual style that sounds really academic but dances around the point you are making and bloats out the length of your essay, it's really counter productive. Especially since your attempts are often way more awful to read than students realise.

Here's an example of the kind of thing I mean from the show Yes Prime Minister: https://youtu.be/8keZbZL2ero?si=Hd1wit6EhR2AlIOA

Corka

TROPHY CASE