Smart TVs replaced dumb TVs not out of consumer demand, but out of subsidy from commercial databrokers and streaming services. Despite adding $100 of hardware they were priced $100 cheaper.
The Chinese models keep American financial markets at "To the Moon" levels rather than "Igniting Jupiter as a binary star" levels. This amount of capital pressure exerts its own gravitational pull in markets and in geopolitics, and every additional dollar of valuation can propel acquisitions, which propels valuation, et cetera. Undiluted, very quickly Amazon owns countries like it today owns county governments.
Regulations are a bit different, not just on what counts as rest, but on physical format.
The normal US front-engine is rare in Europe.
The US extended sleeper generally doesn't exist in Europe
The European compact cabover generally doesn't exist in the US.
The scale influences this more than a little bit. The longest drives you'd find it sensible to make hauling freight inside Europe are between 12 and 18 hours of nonstop travel, while in the US they're more like 40-60 hours.
Many of them probably are. Individual EMF concerns are often debunked. It is possible but unlikely that all of them are categorically complete nonsense. But let's put them aside for a moment. There are real, known consequences of living next to a data center as implemented.
Coil whine from transformers, in audible and infrasound movement of air, has real known effects, as well as suspected poorly studied effects, on the human head & ear.
The fact that we're just allowing a data center that says "I'm out of power, let me use more", to run four extraordinarily loud, dirty airplane jet turbines at the middle of their property for power generation on an improvised basis. And then when we look at their operation in aerial photos, we see 36 jet turbines.
Any and all non-closed-loop cooling systems are an issue, especially when they pull from potable water or operate in dryland droughts. The ratio of wattage consumed vs water consumed should be instructive here.
The amount of money that is going into these things is obscene, and when they choose to involve local officials it is essentially buying out your local-level democracy wholesale. Total lack of regulation. Town council meeting videos where all of your supposed representatives are under NDA; Extremely blatant corruption that the state doesn't want to touch. Races to the bottom.
These things are designed to run basically as lights-off factories, with little to no local labor involved. While there may be some initial investment in facilities, that will dwindle. When they are simultaneously not paying taxes via assorted individual arrangements, and raising electrical rates, there's very little to recommend them to locals.
We have established no general rules as far as buffers. Large-scale construction in general tends to kill rural watersheds & aquifers in close proximity. The sound issue is real, the EMF issues may have some limited credibility, and well-water is often tragedy of the commons, all of which might be totally mitigated by a half mile or whatever of forest buffer mandated around a data center zoning.
A year of plugging it in once or twice a day to recharge it, and it blew.
Old rectangular USB-A was only rated for 1500 ideal insertions. USB-C is a big improvement at 10,000 ideal insertions. Most insertions are not ideal, and it is relatively common to have some leveraged pressure trying to wedge the port apart; When my phone bridges the gap between the arm of the sofa and the coffee table while plugged in, for example, it's got a bending moment. USB-C is much thinner in the up-down dimension than USB-A, and it is not designed to safely disengage when side-loaded like Magsafe. If you wanted to break it for some reason, I'm pretty sure you could do it in a few seconds while resting your elbows on the table, on grip strength alone.
"Feel free to create your own university where you have the funding for petri dishes. In the meantime, I'm going to publish without them, because I feel like this tissue culture I'm growing on my lunch is statistically significant."
Just because I am not personally entitled (by funding, by ethics, by career position) to collect the necessary data to demonstrate a hypothesis, does not make that hypothesis demonstrable with lesser data.
My impression is that friction is negligible once firmly in LEO. Orientation of a sub-component surface definitely matters, as does Earth's presence in half of the viewshed. But my point is that surface finish also makes a big deal, and paint is not necessarily a bad thing, because of the emissivity increases.
(Though I'd rather anodize the thing black imperfectly if it helps avoid paint flecks becoming orbital debris)
The radiative equilibrium temperature is a function of (watts in - watts out), with a fourth power law shoved in there somewhere. A blackbody at radiative equilibrium absorbs whatever visible light you throw at it, and then spits it back out according to a distribution law that mostly places it in the thermal infrared bands (at temperatures we've familiar with, anyway).
Remove convection/conduction as heat transfer methods, and you end up with two numbers dictating radiative balance:
Percent reflectivity in the bands it's exposed to
Percent emissivity in the bands it's emitting
The balance between these dictates temperature, and they're generally inversely correlated. Mirrors are good reflectors, but very poor emitters.
We did flex quite a bit on lesser powers, though, even in the 1800s. The US Navy was infamously rebuilt after the revolution to fight a war against Tripoli.
The blackbody equilibrium temperature at 1AU from the sun is about 278K. All satellite materials are fine at 278K because that's within the expected range of storage and atmospheric launch temperatures.
The equilibrium temperature of a polished aluminum surface at 1AU from the sun is 416K, hot enough to melt polyethylene and at least weaken many of the relevant aerospace plastics like the PET in mylar film.
Painting polished aluminum black drastically raises emissivity along with the lowered reflectivity, and brings its behavior closer to a blackbody.
So does allowing aluminum to oxidize, which it does almost instantaneously in atmosphere. So it's not like it's going to change anything drastically.
The reason this seems like it should change things a lot is that you're used to convectively cooled matte surfaces on Earth, where emissivity and radiative cooling is a less relevant factor and the only significant effect of painting something black is primarily that it absorbs more energy.
> but I'd like to point out that this kind of study must be done in a way that doesn't discriminate any of the students.
This is definitionally impossible. Testing whether the tool benefits the students that get it is an attempt to benefit certain students at the expense of others. Get over this hangup if you want to do this sort of research.
I argue that the idea of copyright of intellectual property was a social compact, and this violates it; These are not "copies" in the common vernacular, they're a temporary viewing of a spectacle, and do not deserve protection against replication, especially nonprofit replication.
When we ask "Can guns kill people? What are the rules of engagement that a gun follows? Who would the person shot by a gun sue, should it come to that?" we aren't so confused.
The last human finger that pressed the button, and anyone employing them to press the button. The real question is how much intent transfers. If you point a gun at a person and the trigger goes off without you pulling it, how liable are you? If you're pointing it at the ground and it does the same and the shrapnel flies about, how liable are you for that? If a loaded gun cooks off in a burning car and a bullet goes flying, how liable are you for that?
If you give an AI agent free reign to your computer and ask it to set your schedule, and it ends up sending classified weapons plans that happened to be on your computer to the Chinese Communist Party, how much should you be held culpable?
With novel technologies we typically answer this conservatively, and say that the person running the agent (or holding/owning the gun) has full civil liability for its actions regardless of their intent, but may limit criminal exposure.
We would (should) take an especially dire and suspicious view of anybody that has anything material to gain from using the tool irresponsibly or maliciously; We can demonstrate incentive/motive even if we cannot prove their intent. The law here is principally a deterrent against somebody that tells an agent "Win me this election" or "Build this product", and the agent then proceeds to hire a hitman to kill their opponent, or steal their rival's technology through industrial espionage. My fear is that the way things are going, it's a completely ineffective deterrent. My guess is a lot of people need to be killed by AI agents before we take it seriously and limit its use as a fig leaf.