I run several services on a VM, with no automation to restore them if there's a hardware issue with the VM host. (There is some resiliency: a managed datacentre, the servers have RAID, dual PSUs, dual network, etc.)
For over 10 years, this has not been a problem. We understand the risk, and know how to restore services onto a different VM host if necessary.
I think the more complex system (e.g. K8S) has problems when people don't fully understand it. We've had outages there, caused by misconfigurations or unexpected behaviour.
That only counts if you grow the trees explicitly for power generation. Burning trees that already existed (as is the plan for the plant I mentioned) is like burning coal, which also removed CO2 from the air in the past.
Trees are part of the active carbon cycle. They grow while taking in CO2, then die and rot while releasing it again. Burning them does the same thing as the second one, which was going to happen on its own.
Coal isn't part of the active carbon cycle. It would stay locked in the ground indefinitely if you didn't dig it up.
Moreover, that plant appears to be getting biomass as compressed pellets from sawmill scrap wood and sawdust, i.e. it's the refuse from trees that were already being logged to make lumber. If they didn't burn it then it would go into a landfill to rot and release the carbon anyway.
That’s not the plant I’m referring to plans to do. They’re planning to bring in 350-500 logging trucks per day.
Sure they will get sawmill scraps if they can, but if built this will be by far the largest biomass reactor in the country. When I did the math there’s not enough available scrap in the entire country to power this thing.
They’ve explicitly stated that they need 5.5 million tons of timber from the surround 250 miles of forest annually.
>Burning them does the same thing as the second one, which was going to happen on its own.
Over 50-100 years for short lived species. And much longer for longer lived species.
So yes better than coal but over the lifetime of anyone alive today it’s essentially the same thing, so it’s only really better than coal if you are looking 100 years into the future and if you stop doing cutting down existing trees at some point.
> When I did the math there’s not enough available scrap in the entire country to power this thing.
Which tracks since it's in England and they're getting pellets from the US, Canada and Europe.
> Over 50-100 years for short lived species. And much longer for longer lived species.
But who is logging old growth trees for biomass?
In if someone is cutting down a tree in a first world country it's generally either because the tree was grown intending to cut it down and they immediately start growing new trees there, or because it's going to be cut down regardless of what you do with the tree because they're removing it in order to make some other use of the land.
Moreover, you can always find that one asshat doing something ridiculous, but the world also generates a lot of scrap wood or cuts down a lot of trees just to clear the land. Burning them to generate electricity is never going to be large proportion of world power generation, but doing it to the extent that the trees were just going to rot anyway seems pretty hard to object to.
The plant that I was talking about when starting this thread plans on harvesting 5.5 million tons of timber per year.
That’s not all that much unused wood scrap, so if you’re building a large biomass plant you’re going to end up harvesting timber.
> In if someone is cutting down a tree in a first world country it's generally either because the tree was grown intending to cut it down and they immediately start growing new trees there, or because it's going to be cut down regardless of what you do with the tree because they're removing it in order to make some other use of the land.
In Europe maybe. In the US and Canada it’s very common to harvest timber from naturally grown forests (vs managed plantations) that are being cut primarily for the timber.
Mining iron ore is presumably nicely profitable and could afford this for routine use. I know people in academic or charity work, and they have Iridium phones but only for emergency use, Starlink would probably make a bigger difference to them.
My washing machine sits on the floor in the bathroom, but Danish apartment building regulations require there to be a floor drain (which is just the shower drain in this case) in case of a leak.
This is how it works in Denmark. A letter costs 23DKK ($3.44) within this small country. A fast letter is 36DKK ($5.39).
I think I've received two letters in the last year. I haven't received any individual junk mail letters.
The letter volume last year was 90M for 6M people, so about 15 each. I assume elderly people and others who have opted out of receiving government and business mail digitally drive that number up.
(Someone still delivers a bundle of leaflets from local businesses all together every month or so, and a local newspaper, but I don't think it's the postal service. Every home gets the same bundle.)
but the confounding fact is that the US mail is largely paid for by "bulk" mailers, they pre-sort and give to the post office in order saving the post office a lot of work at volume. If they didn't send lots of mail and pay for it, the system would be in a deep red ink crisis.
I give away a lot, or buy people things I know they'd enjoy. I feel bad spending a lot on myself if I know other people need it more. Or maybe it's a selfish thing to make me feel less bad when I do spend on myself.
Some of the big mail senders must currently have enormous queues of delayed messages.
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