What are you basing your they are not as clean assertion on? It's more likely that data center generation can be run continuously instead of turning on and off according to market prices. Can see the swing in amount of natural gas production during a day, https://www.gridstatus.io/live/ercot
It seems strange for this article to word this as a new or unusual source of pollution, natural gas is the primary source of energy in the US, adding 10% to existing thermal fleet in ERCOT https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards is not a huge deal and its disingenuous to say this one plant will become a "top source of US pollution".
Solar generation buildout in ERCOT is also proceeding very quickly, the new Tesla megapack factory outside Houston and proposed new solar factory will help speed up the transition to sustainable energy.
It's also, as the article points out later, a permitted cap, not an emissions estimate. New plants generally have permitted caps far higher than their expected emissions.
Some searching led me to this report from an NGO called "AirWars" [1] which, in connection with The Guardian, reports that "at least 22,679, and potentially as many as 48,308 civilians, have been likely killed by US strikes".
You can't bomb an apartment without also hitting the neighbors. And while we know the US has the the technology to hit a car driver without (physically) hurting the passenger, we also know that this is not the type of technology deployed regularly.
I don't think a drone operator would be naive enough to believe that they are killing exclusively military targets and no one else.
The real truth is that Israel is happy to flatten entire, crowded, apartment complexes. That "one guy" is just an excuse.
Most recent example (out of at least 100,000 examples in just these last 3 years alone) would be their "defence" (hah!) minister delightedly boasting how they have Gaza'fied South Lebanon and destroyed over 15,000 structures.
Israel actually has the capability of targeting a single apartment in an apartment building, and has done so dozens of times in the current war against Hezbollah.
Destroying civilian infrastructure and killing civilians is the current Israeli government's goal. Military advantage is just a nice window dressing for the Geneva Conventions.
Lot easier to steal land if there aren't any people living there (because the infrastructure to support modern life was destroyed).
To take out just the room where the target is requires knowing what room the target is in. They usually do not have that kind of information. Hamas has been on the front lines for decades, they know about concealment.
Does Israel actually have the capacity to target the whole of Hamas with those small accurate bombs, as they get intelligence on them? If Hamas is in the basement can the small bomb get them? And if they forgo the opportunity will it be possible to target that person again soon without civilians nearby?
An important one that often that gets lost in "drone strikes bad" internet debating: the cost of the alternative.
If a nation is conducting drone strikes on another nation's territory, the alternative is usually conventional forces at scale on the ground*.
As the Iraq occupation showed, conventional ground forces at scale cause an even larger number of civilian deaths.
So drone strikes, if kinetic intervention is pre-decided, are a less-bad option from a civilian casualty perspective.
* Granted, there might be a decision not to deploy conventional forces because of the risk / cost, but if there are regular drone strikes, it feels like the aggressor country is past that Rubicon.
Isn't "if there are regular drone strikes, it feels like the aggressor country is past that Rubicon." kind of self-refuting?
Conventional forces aren't deployed in many instances where regular drone strikes are used, thus the country didn't feel it was the right risk/cost to deploy conventional forces.
At the very least, it's a statement that deserves more debate, and I'd point to the many examples of how reducing cost and risk tends to increase the rate of an activity.
GWB got heat for extralegal extraordinary renditions. Obama solved it by just killing them. I guess we can’t ask the dead guys if they’d prefer to go to Guantanamo.
> key organizer for the Islamist militant group al-Qaeda.
Yeah, I don't see a problem here. Due process, slippery slope sure... but this was a cut and dry case. I've got better things to do with my time than be concerned with this.
In Afghanistan, and presumably Iran as well, the US military defined all "military-aged males" (12-65 years) as "combatants". This makes children and old men killable. You could drone strike pretty much any guy you wanted and all you were doing was eliminating combatants.
An addition, again from Afghanistan, only 2% of drone strikes were against identified targets. The rest were targets of opportunity. So you make most of the male population of a country killable through the use of appropriate language, and then hit 98% of them because you think they might be thinking about doing something bad in the future.
I can see why this would mess with people's mental health when what they're doing to random civilians sinks in.
Do you have a source showing this is actually the U.S. military’s standard, rather than a distorted reference to the Obama era casualty counting controversy?
Let's see. They were part of the US military, right? In just this war alone, they started by triple tapping an ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, murdering nearly 200 little children.
And on the same day, they attacked a SPORTS STADIUM, completely vapourising a women's volleyball team who were in the midst of a game.
And that was just ... DAY ONE.
By now, we should be asking - if you're a member of the US military on active duty in an active war - prove that YOU DIDN'T kill a child, mother, handicapped person in a wheelchair, or a grandpa.
- Built as part of an IRGCN base (that base was closed in 2013)
- Within 100 yards of the perimeter of an active IRGCN base at the time of the strike
- Targeted as a result of extensive use of Palantir's Maven Smart System and Claude by the US military to pre-identify targets
Given all of that, I think the most accurate takeaway would be that the US military is deficient in their target approval process. (Arguably grossly so, though that's an international law legal question)
There's been less investigation into the background behind the Lamerd sports hall attack, but it's fairly certainly an intended US strike, likely for the same reason that the Azadi stadium was hit: assumption that it would be used as a muster point for an Iranian military response.
My takeaway from the atrocities is that there need to be substantial updates to international laws of war around (a) automated target approval (even worse excesses by the Israelis in the initial Gaza strikes) and ultimate human responsibility and (b) more strongly defining what constitutes due diligence in intelligence and classification of military targets.
Currently, both are far too nebulous and will likely lead to both incidents being classified as war as usual. Whereas there was a plausible route to both being removed as targets with even non-manual open source intelligence scraping (substantial patterns of school activity over years and the volleyball game schedule, respectively).
You are behind, FSD is already here, my car drove me to work today (fully self driving)
Starlink v3 satelites launch next month, the first starmind sats based nvidia chips sometime next year, large new factories for the needed solar panels are already half built outside of bastrop texas
There is a big difference between "something like" and actually passing the tests, I would be surprised if any non vision based system has the reaction time needed to pass the new pedestrian tests.
And do you think the this next launch will deploy actual satellites in orbit around the Moon? If not, I still don't see why you'd compare it to SLS's current success. Or do you think this will deploy 100 tons to orbit for less than $10/ton, or fly to Mars, since these are the stated goals for Starship?
Do you think perhaps you should give SpaceX as much time as NASA has had for SLS to fail at its goals before complaining that SpaceX’s system in testing isn’t accomplishing all of its goals?
Not mass production yet, but the first one rolled off the completed assembly line at giga texas last week
Sensor fusion is not far simpler, when the sensors disagree, and they will often, you have to pick which to trust.
It is amazing to see how many people here are confident they know the one true way to build autonomous systems based on nothing but wanting to confirm their biases
Sensor fusion is a piece of piss. How do you think any of the VR headsets work? SLAM is compute expensive, and runs at ~30hz, sensor fusion is the only way to give a smooth experience.
Online calibration is actually the hard part, even then its largely solved.
