jaycifer

Hey now, I understood that reference and I’m… only… 27.

30 years draws ever nearer.

But who will they find to play Norman Reedus?!

There’s a sentence in the article I linked to in another comment that, in the city the article was about, there were data centers for Microsoft and similar companies that had required high-speed internet infrastructure be built in town despite its small size. I suppose, based on what you said, that speed wouldn’t be too essential but you would want stability to maintain a connection. Satellite internet probably wouldn’t be great for that (maybe Starlink is?) in which case you still want to run some kind of cable.

I’ll concede there’s probably something to miners footing the initial capital to build the infrastructure, and if it’s in a remote area it may be prohibitively expensive for public utilities to extend the grid to it. But mining setups still require high internet speed connections to use the network, and I just have to wonder if installing that is a better use of resources than installing power lines to take some load off non-renewable power sources.

I dug up the original article: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/09/bitcoin-mining-energy-prices-smalltown-feature-217230/

In this case, they already were exporting 80% of the hydro-energy generated, about enough to power Los Angeles in 2018 when it was written. Maybe there are some cases for your suggestion on a small scale, but if a site is generating enough excess electricity to make mining worthwhile, why would it be less worthwhile to connect it to a larger grid?

There is a caveat to this. It’s been a few years since I read the article, but oftentimes the reason Bitcoin miners run on renewables is because they set up shop in places that have established local cheap electricity.

The example in the article was a town with ideal geography for hydro power, to the point electricity was cheap enough to sell it to the next town over. Crypto-miners set up in the first town and quickly began using more power, driving up the cost and eventually causing serious issues for the second town as there wasn’t enough electricity leftover to send their way anymore.

This song has merged in my brain with the opening song for TMNT: Back to the Sewer from the mid-2000’s. That opening has a bit that goes “back, back to the sewer… Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” that lines up so well with the Power Rangers theme here that I always hear it internally as “go go Power Rangers… Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!”

I think what they’re getting at is that the land being used to grow that grass and inedible plants could instead be used to grow plants that humans can eat.