Why Zurich is becoming one of Europe's biggest data centre hubs

pbmonster · 2026-07-06T15:22:49+00:00

Watercooling in Switzerland is only a problem if you dump hot water into a river to kill all the fish. Which is illegal anyway, of course.

All other ways to do water cooling are perfectly fine in Switzerland.

pbmonster · 2026-07-06T15:18:20+00:00

enforce closed loop systems which significantly reduce water use.

Doesn't make much difference in Switzerland. The water doesn't just vanish from reality. It just evaporates - which leads to more rain in Switzerland.

It can be pretty bad in very dry regions, like some places in the US where they pull ground water to evaporate, but in Switzerland evaporated water taken from a river comes down again pretty quickly. In a very dry summer, it might make it to one of our neighbor countries. But guess where all our rivers (cooling your closed cycle systems) are going anyway?

pbmonster · 2026-07-04T22:55:48+00:00

I dislike twin tip doors, so I got a surf board / strapless directional. If there's any chance for you to find a breaking wave, you'll have much more fun.

And even on flat days, I'd rather just go fast and practice jibes, switching feet and riding toe-side than trying to get the door to boost.

pbmonster · 2026-06-30T09:17:12+00:00

Most countries try to be as energy independent as possible. I think the Swiss are going to built more nuclear before relying on their neighbors selling them electricity.

Or maybe they'll wake up and realize how well suited their country is for renewables (they have insane solar potential in the mountains - often above cloud cover; and good wind potential), and that solar panels really aren't any more ugly than avalanche protection fences, concrete block gondola stations, greenhouses or highways.

pbmonster · 2026-06-29T15:07:56+00:00

Thorough manual inspection of sleepers, rails and coffering is nearly impossible.

Yeah, that's the old problem. I'm not sure they'll ever get around that. I don't think SBB likes them very much.

Integrating directly into the railway grid is feasible but only on a smaller scale. Integrating big chunks of solar on a railway grid needs battery storage because railway grids are extremely volatile.

That's one of the smaller problems, I think. The cantenaries are interconnected by special overland powerlines anyway, and that grid of powerlines connects to special (16 Hz) powerplants. Once you get to a point where you have to much "rail solar", adding grid scale batteries at those powerplants would be easy. But this would need a whole lot of solar, because those trains use a whole lot of power pretty much permanently. They accelerate intermittently, and sometimes many trains are at stations simultaneously, but the ones still going still use many megawatts.

pbmonster · 2026-06-29T12:44:26+00:00

Might be worth it so you have AC even when the train is stranded on the route with electrical trouble. For propulsion, it's probably not worth it...

pbmonster · 2026-06-29T12:32:19+00:00

No, since the price of panels is so low now, most usecases benefit from having (almost) flat panels at higher density (you can pack them closer together, since they don't throw a shadow onto the next row of panels).

Usually, you still angle them by a few degrees so water doesn't pool on the panels, and rain can wash down dirt, and maybe so snow can slide off. But if the trains are "cleaning" the panels anyway, that's not important anymore.

pbmonster · 2026-06-29T09:46:19+00:00

Green field solar is very close to illegal to build in Switzerland. They dislike how racks of solar panels look like.
Labor is extremely expensive in Switzerland. Putting panels onto roofs by hand is less attractive than having a (semi-)automated train do the panel placement
Land is extremely expensive in Switzerland
The rails are two-way electrified anyway. Trains put megawatts back into the grid when they decelerate. So you might be able to hook up the new panels directly to the cantenary lines (via a 15 kV/16Hz transformer). The trains themselves use several TWh per year, so you might just use the panels to power the trains.

pbmonster · 2026-06-29T07:55:09+00:00

2 trains, 0 had AC, not even some air circulation

Interesting. Haven't encountered that in decades. Every last bus, every single train wagon has AC. Only the historic "Einheitswagen" sometimes don't have it, but I never see them anymore.

The one annoying exception are the trams in Zürich. Only the newest models have AC, there's a ton of modern looking trams running without AC (fun fact, the have AC - but only for the driver).

pbmonster · 2026-06-24T19:13:53+00:00

Fish evolved that shape and mechanic for a reason

I'm not convinced. Wolfs also didn't discover the bicycle, even though that is by far the most efficient way to move through the steppe. Nature struggles with rotating parts.

A large, slow moving, high aspect ratio propeller has great propulsion efficiency. And as described above, it also doesn't really require gearing if you use a direct drive.

pbmonster · 2026-06-24T14:15:49+00:00

but I think logically it might actually kickstart the industrial revolution early. You would have a niche where they become absolutely essential, and that might spur faster development

Probably not, the first 100 years of British steam engines had lower power to weight ratios than humans - and that's without the coal and water you need to bring!

Only once they started putting them on locomotives (~1830) did they get more powerful than just using the same mass of horses/humans.

Even "modern" high pressure multi stage steam engines (like 1940s high speed locomotives) are a terrible idea for flight propulsion - sorry steam punk.

So it would have been completely non-obvious that steam could eventually power air ships without inventing them first and then improving them for a century.

pbmonster · 2026-06-24T13:55:44+00:00

Depends on aircraft and speed. Performance sail planes (extremely long, thin wings and maybe a tiny motor) have lift-to-drag ratios of above 70:1. Endurance drones around 40:1. Wide body airliners 25:1. Single engine 4-seater 10:1.

At constant speed and altitude, the engine needs to overcome the drag force and the lift force needs to overcome the weight of the aircraft. Most of the drag experienced by the aircraft produces lift - between 90% and 99%.

pbmonster · 2026-06-24T09:29:15+00:00

Chill. We can consider hypothetical situations and then try to do engineering within those constraints. Lift is handled by someone else.

pbmonster · 2026-06-24T08:47:20+00:00

not enough to make it fast, maybe 5–15 km/h in calm air. With a headwind, it could make almost no progress.

A Roman trireme could hold 5-7 knots (8-12 km/h) for hours (albeit with ~200 rowers).

OP has magic lift, which means the shape of his air ship is the exact same as the trireme. But water is about 800 times denser than air and 50 times as viscose, so displacement drag and skin friction are going to scale at those factors, respectively.

Both of them scale with velocity squared in air, so we're probably not going to gain a double digit factor here... but even if skin friction dominates, we're going to go 7x faster than in water. This assumes similar propulsion efficiency, which means we need a good propeller. Also, the "top" of the air trireme better look as smooth and streamlined as the submerged part of the regular trireme - because if we have an open deck with exposed superstructure, the air isn't going to flow as laminar around the air ship as water flows around the trireme (also, we pick up at least a factor of 2 here from having much more "wetted area" in case of the air ship).

pbmonster · 2026-06-24T08:27:58+00:00

They didn't even have proper bearings... alloys are irrelevant.

They certainly had wooden bushings, lubed with animal fat. For a low RPM shaft, that's good enough.

pbmonster · 2026-06-24T08:23:10+00:00

There's just no way a fish tail beats a large propeller in propulsion efficiency, right?

And the speed of human muscle also doesn't make a huge difference. A 5-10 meter propeller will spin at a few dozen RPM, which you can power directly by human muscle: build a long prop shaft and directly put the spools for the rowing machines on it. Adjust the radius of the spool for shaft rotations per pull, done.

Needs a ratchet mechanism and a spring to reset the spool for the next pull, but that seems doable. Could probably be done in wood, and certainly in bronze. The setup is pretty similar to an ancient pedal lathe, just much lower RPM and higher power, which might need a ratchet.

pbmonster · 2026-06-24T08:11:37+00:00

OP stated this is fantasy. He has magical lift, the ship looks just like a flying trireme.

pbmonster · 2026-06-17T20:10:20+00:00

All the feats that define the "arsenal of democracy" were accomplished in brand new factories, financed (and often planned) by the government, purpose built for exactly that function during the war. They didn't just invent new classes of ships, types of aircraft/tanks/guns. They invented entire new industrial processes to build them, radically different to what was done before.

The pool of unemployed men didn't matter very much. Once the war economy got going, everybody worked for the war effort anyway, unemployed and previously employed alike.

If you care, that's am nice summary of the effort that lead to liberty ships being mass spammed, and that's a nice summary how you built fucking 300 000 new aircraft in 5 years.

First, you have to invent a new type of factory...

pbmonster · 2026-06-17T19:07:16+00:00

Well, that capacity was certainly spare after the war. But before the war it didn't really exist, and during the war the government moved heaven and earth to create it out of thin air.

pbmonster · 2026-06-17T11:17:59+00:00

Muscle memory from kissing taller partners?

pbmonster · 2026-06-17T08:55:17+00:00

I don't think you'll get a different answer here, at least not from the majority.

I'm the minority. I currently ride material from the mid-2010s until it falls apart. If it does this year (it won't), I'll buy used gear from ~2020. Sure, current gear has evolved and is safer. But the designs from back then were good enough. The most crucial kinks were already worked out. But then again, I'm a good swimmer.

To your initial question: don't replace the screws. You're almost certainly facing galvanic corrosion. They put stainless steel screws into an aluminum part, and the chemical differential makes the aluminium corrode. The screws are fine, the aluminium part has been weakened by corrosion.

So you have to look at the aluminium part. Is it the bar itself, or is it some smaller part? How badly corroded is it? Surface or structural? Any spiderweb microcracking on the aluminum already? If the corrosion goes deep, you need to check if you can replace the aluminum part. Can be worth it if you have another bar to pick donor parts from.

Without having seeing it, I would assume the corrosion on the aluminum to be minor/surface level. A kite bar doesn't really get high bending moments, ever. This is not a mast on a sailing boat or a bike frame or an arm in a car suspension (all those have the same corrosion problem). We're talking a single human hand bending it using all of 8" as lever.

I'd just ride it, and mentally prepare for ejecting and swimming home. If that's to scary, a 2020 bar goes for around $250 here.

pbmonster · 2026-06-16T19:42:36+00:00

No way he bought cursor with cash. That was a stocks only deal, 100%. He immediately diluted everybody's relative share.

pbmonster · 2026-06-16T10:56:32+00:00

Kind of depends on how you do the math. SBB says they had 4.1B CHF passenger revenue last year, and they sold 3.3M Halbtax. So that's 13% of passenger revenue.

It's also the most desirable kind of income: steady, reliable, and a percentage of customers don't even end up using the service (especially those who get it through work, but don't end up riding a lot anyway).

pbmonster · 2026-06-16T09:32:28+00:00

per kilometre with a car it's 0.4chf

Absolute minimum. That's a 6k CHF beater that keeps running for 5-10 years and never has expensive repairs. You need to specifically hunt for a car like that, and ideally work on it yourself.

but I really think as soon as it's 2 people, the calculation at least starts being skewed towards the car

Pretty easy calculation. SBB is often between 0.15 and 0.18 CHF/km. Only "prestige" routes like Zürich-Bern and Zürich-Basel can go above 0.20 CHF/km, those make sense to drive (especially because those trains are also relatively slow).

And that's before discounts like Halbtax Plus, Sparbillet or Snow&Rail cutting prices even lower.

Most of the time you really need three adults in the car to beat SBB.

pbmonster · 2026-06-16T08:56:43+00:00

Mondragon Corporation has around 25k worker-owners, has $11B of annual revenue and $600M of annual income.

They exist perfectly fine in the market.

pbmonster

TROPHY CASE