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Cake day: August 24th, 2023

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  • This thing is 7.65GW. The largest solar array in the US is 900MW and uses 4600-5000 acres. The scale to do this on solar alone is bonkers, but not impossible.

    You would need to at least 4x provision it which means a 30GW solar array, and 156,000 acres, before getting into battery storage for non sunny times.

    It’d be nice to use some solar absolutely, but this is better suited to nuclear.

    Edit: And if you aren’t storing / over provision to store, then you still need the peak output from another source anyway and these things likely always run near peak as they are constantly in use, so the size of the non-solar source doesn’t reduce, only its output during the sunny day time hours. So you end up with 7.65GW of natural gas still, but maybe they also build a 1GW solar farm on the side.





  • Okay I did some more digging for specifics on 0 representation, and came up with a case for 3F where it was legal. But I would be shocked if McDonalds actually had 0 representation at the time.

    3F had 0 active members in the union at the location, but they still had a sympathy strike against them which was ruled legal. Only after they signed an agreement with a different union, did that sympathy strike become illegal.

    Obviously the union isn’t part of the company, that would be weird and wrong.

    I didn’t mean it that way. I know in North America, you aren’t a union member at the company unless the employees at the location vote to join the union. In Scandinavia, you can just join the union and it’s an employee by employee choice unrelated to the company.


  • So are you saying that no members of McDonalds were part of the union? The union had absolutely 0 members at McDonalds? I understand that in Scandinavia being part of a union is completely separate from the company, and any collective agreement, but you still need to be a member if I’m not mistaken.

    In the case I’m seeing about another McDonalds blockade, cleaning contractors weren’t being treated well, which also resulted in a blockade. The union related to the cleaners called the blockade which brought in all sorts of other unrelated members.










  • (Lemmy failed to send my original reply and I lost it I think, but if another similar one eventually show up… that’s why)

    I wouldn’t rule nuclear out in the not so far future if SMRs properly come online. I think those could scale up demand at the pace they could build these monstrosities in the not so distant future, like give it another 15 years and it might start being okay?

    And ya, the renewable way IS possible, and Texas would be a good spot for something of this scale, but it would be a huge undertaking. I imagine we would see amazing improvements in solar/battery tech building something like that out with economies of scale and additional research from the huge amount of funding it would create. Also there’s no reason they can’t make them do some % with renewables.

    This is aslo why Space based stuff maybe isn’t as far flung as the idea seems. It obviously requires new tech that doesn’t function yet.

    e.g Starship needs to get down to its targeted $50-$200/kg) which is not a given.
    New chips that can run hotter so the radiator size is reasonable. Cheaper solar panels as space based panels are very expensive right now.

    But with that (and all the other things) you get 7.65GW of power being 7.65GW of power and minimal batteries required. Space solar is more effective as well since there’s no atmosphere, so the panels will be 30% more efficient or something like that than on land. It really does solve some problems, but it obviously creates others.

    (edit: I worked it out once, and at the launch cadence of F9, they could put ~1GW of solar up a year, which would be pretty fast compared to land)

    All that being said, while I don’t doubt they can launch these satellites, being profitable is an entirely other matter, but being profitable on land is also a huge unknown for something of these scales. Like, do they think there’s enough demand for these large quantities of huge datacenters? I’m not convinced this is a, if you build it, they will come situation for LLMs. True AI absolutely, but LLMs not a chance. So ALL of this IMO is betting these insane amounts of money and pollution on something they think they’ll eventually build, not something they have today.

    At least with these land based ones if they take on building the SMRs or massive solar fields, we can repurpose those after. If they do it with natural gas, that’s much less ideal, sure the power might be useful, but we need to move away from it and that is the wrong direction. Space based ones will just flop with no backup benefit.