If they rescinded that lease, then Trump's so called reasoning actually becomes valid. The US does actually have a geopolitical/strategic/military interest in being able to operate from and around Greenland. The reason this entire activity is a farce is because the US can already do that.
It's clear that Trump acts alone in foreign policy - formal channels and structures can barely check him. However, informal resistance still appears to exist. Trump apparently still takes into account the vibes of the people he surrounds himself with into account. In a haphazard way yes, but it's clear that Trump can be swayed to some degree by those around him.
The Trump administration is not a unified bloc, and there are likely many elements that see annexing Greenland as ridiculous. However, if they lost access, then they would be forced to concede that there was something actually valuable to gain.
The author pays £0.07/kWh off peak, but can export at £0.15/kWh. The author paid ~£7500 per powerwall which has ~13.5kWh capacity. Assuming full charge/discharge every night, you can make ~£1.08 per day, which works out to about 19 years to pay back.
Utilities normally consider disincentivizing this type of behavior from residential customers as one of the factors when setting their export pricing.
To be clear, NASA has an entire field center dedicated to rocket testing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stennis_Space_Center). This is where everything gets tested now. You may remember the "green run" tests of the SLS - those happened at Stennis.
Stennis didn't exist at the start of the space race or Apollo. Marshall is colocated on Redstone Arsenal, a legacy of parts of NASA being bootstrapped out of the Army ballistic missile program. Marshall had test stands because that era of NASA (aka von Braun) sought to colocated engineering, prototyping and test.
One challenge with continuing tests at Marshall is that... it's actually really close to population centers. Large engine tests would be ridiculously disruptive. There are comments in the Ars article noting that people living in Huntsville could hear the demolition work.
Yes, the replacements for this equipment has been around for a long time. The Propulsion and Structural Test Facility was built at Marshall in 1957 and used for design testing of the Saturn engines, and by 1966 the A1 test stand was built at Stennis, to perform production qualification of Saturn engines. And unlike the PSTF, the A1 and A2 test stands at Stennis have been maintained over the years, and continue to be functional today most recently being used to test the new RS-25 engine design that the SLS will use when we are out of SSMEs.
While the power draw might be high in absolute terms, the surface area is also quite large. For example, the article's estimates add up to just 2000mm2 for the Epyc chip. For reference, a Ryzen 9950X (AMD's hottest desktop CPU) has a surface area of about 262mm2, and a PPT (maximum power draw) of ~230W. This means that the max heat flux at the chip interface will almost certainly be lower on the Epyc chip than on the Ryzen - I don't think we're going to be getting 1000W+ PPT/TDP chips.
From that you can infer that there shouldn't be the need for liquid cooling in terms of getting the heat off the chip.
There still are overall system power dissipation problems, which might lead you to want to use liquid cooling, but not necessarily.
Now normally, in a commercial or residential installation, as an owner you don't need to pay for cost of property. But as a utility (or government, or whatever), if you need to offer loans to get these installed, then those loans act a lot like property acquisition costs.
There are definitely factors that can tip things in favour of such an approach (for example, if your land acquisition fees are particularly high for whatever reason, or you really really want a distributed grid), but I suspect that it's this fundamental aspect that keeps utilities from trying to push residential solar.
I think there is a lot of profit to be made for maintenance, initial installation and being the one to provide the loan.
But you're right, utility companies already own the land and have a monopoly - introducing something that would make it pretty easy to undercut and decentralize the power grid isn't that appealing.
> Samsung is officially stepping in to shut down the panic. The company has firmly denied reports that it plans to kill off its consumer SATA SSD production. In a direct statement, a spokesperson made it clear: the rumors are false, and Samsung isn’t going anywhere.
I believe HPV16/18 were considered the highest risk (in terms of causing cancer), even amongst all the other high risk HPV strains. In the intro, they state that prior to the start of the vaccination campaign 74% of cervical cancer cases in Denmark were HPV16/18, and the other 26% from the non-vaccine HR HPV strains. Following through to the referenced paper, in their study they found 20.5% of overall patients had HR HPV, with 5.4% and 2.4% with HPV16 and/or 18. However, for cancer cases, they found that 40% of cases had HPV16, and 33% had HPV18 (note that multiple simultaneous strains are possible).
There's a lot in the paper to summarize, but I think it makes a reasonable argument that HPV16/18 are especially high risk, and that "simple" replacement of the 5% HPV16/18 with another 5% of any of the other HR HPV strains would be beneficial. The linked paper suggests up to 74% (depending on your assumptions) reduction in cancer with "simple replacement".
I don't really have time to read it all, but the basic idea is as you said - the cost-benefit ratio is off. Basically expanding from something like the current case, to vaccinating up to 45 year old will avert an extra 21k cases of cancer (compared to the base case of 1.4 million) - so about an extra 1.5% cases averted, while the direct vaccination costs are estimated to increase from 44 billion to 57 billion (+29%).
The current guidance says "do not recommend" plus "consult your doctor". You should read that as "blanket vaccination as public policy is cost inefficient in that age range" not "you as a 45 year old should not get the vaccine categorically".
For the HPV section specifically, there were at least two major omissions.
First, in his table showing autoimmune adverse effects, he has chosen to crop out the next column in the table containing the control conditions - which show very similar rates of adverse effects to the vaccine condition.
Secondly, when discussing negative efficacy in the case of existing persistent infection, he only quotes the data from one of three studies that the linked report covers. The linked report indeed covers the negative efficacy in study 013 as an area of concern. However, study 015 (which had roughly twice the number of total participants as study 013) showed no real evidence of negative efficacy. When all 3 studies are pooled together, the point estimate still says negative efficacy, (at ~-12%), however the error bars are quite wide.
Why this is tragic, is because these two omissions do actually point to failures in public communication about the vaccine. For example, the control condition in the Merck trials were a mix of saline injections (this is the traditional placebo), as well as injections with just the adjuvant (AAHS). This is less standard, and raises legitimate questions about why Merck used an adjuvant as the control, instead of just saline. There a cynical/conspiratorial angle to this question, which I think would be directionally correct.
The second omission is because I think there is a reasonable question of "are there extra risks associated with getting the HPV vaccine while having an active persistence infection", even when taking into account the different and larger study populations within the original trial data. Once again, I think the idea that both companies and public health agencies don't want to deal with a vaccine that requires testing before hand is true. I also believe that on a population level, even if there was a modest increase in risk in that specific subgroup, it makes sense to implement broad vaccination campaigns.
That said, I think the unwillingness of public health agencies to engage with this tricky area of communication and education creates these types of opening for anti-vaccine messaging. If you want a sense of "conspiracy" - here's a random review study - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8706722/
Notice that when reporting results, the groupings for HPV status at enrollment time are "naive" and "irrespective" - the "test positive" grouping isn't broken out.
It's clear that Trump acts alone in foreign policy - formal channels and structures can barely check him. However, informal resistance still appears to exist. Trump apparently still takes into account the vibes of the people he surrounds himself with into account. In a haphazard way yes, but it's clear that Trump can be swayed to some degree by those around him.
The Trump administration is not a unified bloc, and there are likely many elements that see annexing Greenland as ridiculous. However, if they lost access, then they would be forced to concede that there was something actually valuable to gain.
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