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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • You can say whatever you want about him, but one thing I’m fairly certain is that at the end of the day Mitt Romney cared about the average American. I’m not saying I agree with even half of his beliefs. But I believe his beliefs were focused on what he thought was best for the country and it’s people. I’m also not saying he didn’t attempt to make himself and those around him stupid rich, but that he wasn’t going to do so by throwing everyone and everything out the window to obtain it. It’s really a stark contrast to Trump. And you might think that’s sad, but what’s really sad is that it’s not just Trump but nearly the entirety of that party now.



  • It’s incredibly disheartening to look back at the relation between the U.S. and Vietnam with the frame starting after the end of WW1. Had Ho Chi Minh been given the time of day it’s easy to wonder what could have been. The Vietnamese simply wished to follow the example that the U.S. had achieved with breaking away from Colonial rule.

    Modern day attitudes really go a long way to show the true character of the Vietnamese. You hear of stories of the Christmas Truce, and opposing sides being relatively friendly after a war concludes, but the Vietnam War feels different. Between the racist dehumanization, war crimes and nature of the war putting civilians directly in crosshairs, you wouldn’t be a fool to think that such a conflict would instill a near permanent hatred on both sides. Yet that doesn’t appear to be the case. The overwhelming theme from anecdotes of meetings between former soldiers from both sides is an incredible sense of understanding and shared loss. And the onus of all of this lies chiefly with the Vietnamese. There’s no reason they should forgive or turn the other cheek considering it wasn’t a war they started, but that’s not a distinction that really seems important to them.

    A country fiercely determined to defend its independence that has thrown off not one, not two, but three separate wars against such independence with each opponent being unarguably more powerful. I can hear an eagle screaming now.

    Besides, this is the same Vietnam who kicked China’s ass in the very same decade that they forced the U.S. out of their country. At this point I wouldn’t bet against the Vietnamese in any conflict if my life depended on it.



  • Was in the thread yesterday saying the same thing. What you describe is exactly what TVA does in essence.

    Ideally, they would convince the miners to install their own solar and wind generation (and maybe pumped storage as well)

    Texas has a ‘problem’ that prevents them from being able to incentivize this well. At least from what I overheard during my stint at a mine. Texas’s big draw are all of the abandoned oil wells. You can simply go purchase a plot of land with a capped well, uncap it and install a Natural Gas generator that captures and burns the NG often released when drilling for oil. This gives you a one time fee for the generator costs and then after that you are in the clear with ‘free’ (relatively, minus initial costs) energy. This isn’t exclusive to Texas, but obviously it can be done at a higher rate in the state compared to others.



  • My knowledge is specific to TVA, but I was privy to such an agreement that a Cryptominer I worked for had.

    The Local Utility Provider would bill the company for their usage, but they did not provide the rate. TVA did because of the amount of electricity. This rate is much cheaper than the Utility Provider offers residential customers; economies of scale as well as the inability to store this amount of power meaning it’s “wasted” otherwise. Whenever there is a period of intense usage TVA would provide a 30 minute notice. After the 30 minutes were up the rate provided to us (industry) would more than quadruple, and was actually quite a bit above the residential rate. Residential customers are entirely exempt from this. Your rate, is your rate, is your rate.

    The effect of the above meant that it was a mad scramble to shut everything offline whenever we got notice. Otherwise we were losing money. Regular industry trudged along because their bottom line doesn’t care if their power rate quadrupled for 3 hours a dozen days out of the year. It’s not that big a deal.

    I definitely got to see the sausage being made, and it’s opened up my mind to some of the ignorance around crypto mining. If anything it drove me further away from being interested in it as anything more than a neat tech demonstration that people figured they could trade.