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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Any hard drive can fail at any time with or without warning. Worrying too much about individual drive families’ reliability isn’t worth it if you’re dealing with few drives. Worry instead about backups and recovery plans in case it does happen.

    Bigger drives have significantly lower power usage per TB, and cost per TB is lowest around 12-16TB. Bigger drives also lets you fit more storage in a given box. Drives 12TB and up are all currently helium filled which run significantly cooler.

    Two preferred options in the data hoarder communities are shucking (external drives are cheaper than internal, so remove the case) and buying refurb or grey market drives from vendors like Server Supply or Water Panther. In both cases, the savings are usually big enough that you can simply buy an extra drive to make up for any loss of warranty.

    Under US$15/TB is typically a ‘good’ price.

    For media serving and deep storage, HDDs are still fine and cheap. For general file storage, consider SSDs to improve IOPS.


  • Yes. But my point is that the IRS has a process for declaring and paying tax on income that you got illegally, whether it’s from being a mobster or working without the right visa.

    Capone didn’t follow that process, so got done for tax evasion.

    These illegal immigrants are paying their taxes, and therefore a) they aren’t exposed to prosecution for tax evasion, and b) the IRS won’t rat them out to ICE.


  • SomeoneSomewhere@lemmy.nztoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.world"Freeloaders"
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    14 days ago

    While immigrants in the country without authorization do not have Social Security numbers, they can file taxes using an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, or ITIN.

    Reports about 3m people file using an ITIN each year, and the number of people expected to legally use them is very small.

    Also says they see about $12B more paid into social security by illegals than paid out.

    As Al Capone found, the government is would rather you pay tax on illegally earned money.




  • PV inverters often have around 1-2% losses. This is not very significant. You also need to convert the voltage anyway because PV output voltage varies with light level.

    Buck/boost converters work by converting the DC current to (messy) AC, then back to DC. If you want an isolating converter (necessary for most applications for safety reasons) that converter needs to handle the full power. If it’s non isolating, then it’s proportional to the voltage step.

    Frequency provides a somewhat convenient method for all parties to know whether the grid is over- or under- supplied on a sub-second basis. Operating solely on voltage is more prone to oscillation and requires compensation for voltage drop, plus the information is typically lost at buck/boost sites. A DC grid would likely require much more robust and faster real-time comms.

    The AC grid relies on significant (>10x overcurrent) short-term (<5s) overload capability. Inrush and motor starting requires small/short overloads (though still significant). Faults are detected and cleared primarily through the excess current drawn. Fuses/breakers in series will all see the same current from the same fault, but we want only the device closest to the fault to operate to minimise disruption. That’s achieved (called discrimination, coordination, or selectivity) by having each device take progressively more time to trip on a fault of a given size, and progressively higher fault current so that the devices upstream still rapidly detect a fault.

    RCDs/GFCIs don’t coordinate well because there isn’t enough room between the smallest fault required to be detected and the maximum disconnection time to fit increasingly less sensitive devices.

    Generators are perfectly able to provide this extra fault current through short term temperature rise and inertia. Inverters cannot provide 5-fold overcurrent without being significantly oversized. We even install synchronous condensers (a generator without any actual energy source) in areas far from actual generators to provide local inertia.

    AC arcs inherently self-extinguish in most cases. DC arcs do not.

    This means that breakers and expulsion type fuses have to be significantly, significantly larger and more expensive. It also means more protection is needed against arcs caused by poor connection, cable clashes, and insulation damage.

    Solid state breakers alleviate this somewhat, but it’s going to take 20+ years to improve cost, size, and power loss to acceptable levels.

    I expect that any ‘next generation’ system is likely to demand a step increase in safety, not merely matching the existing performance. I suspect that’s going to require a 100% coverage fibre comms network parallel to the power conductors, and in accessible areas possibly fully screened cable and isolated supply.

    EVs and PV arrays get away with DC networks because they’re willing to shut down the whole system in the event of a fault. You don’t want a whole neighborhood to go dark because your neighbour’s cat gnawed on a laptop charger.















  • The actual eruption happened in 2019. It was big news locally when it happened, and there has been a slow trickle of further reports like this one.

    It wasn’t a particularly big eruption; the fact that people were on the rather small volcanic island when it erupted is what led to the deaths.

    The efforts towards a prosecution have been long and slow because it’s probably going to be a real mess:

    • Adventure tourism including visiting active volcanoes is inherently dangerous.

    • Did the scientists get the volcano risk levels wrong?

    • Which entities should get criminal blame? Island owner, tour providers, tour transport providers (boats), and/or the various regulators?

    It sounds like that’s all sorted and they’re into sentencing on those that were found guilty.