Speaking from Norway: I can agree that order-of-magnitude 10 million USD is earnable in a lifetime. A wage of 100 k USD / yr isn’t absurdly high, and after 45 years that brings you to 4.5 million. So getting to like 10-30 million in a lifetime is still within what I would consider reasonably possible. At 100 mill. it’s getting pretty absurd though.
For what it’s worth, medieval (and other historical) societies in general had pretty high respect for women in childbirth. In was commonly seen as among the more heavy and challenging things anyone could face.
I don’t really have any big issue with the students self-regulating exam rule violations, but if it is to have any hope of working, the students would then also need to have supervisors at the exam, if only because it’s ludicrous to think that honest people that are focused on their own exam will be aware enough of their surroundings to catch others cheating, let alone call them out when they’re likely in their close social circle.
As the name implies, this was originally an “honour system”, based around individual students self-regulating based on an idea of honour. That probably worked well enough in the 1800’s and early 1900’s, but it sure as hell won’t work in a modern society that values “getting ahead at all costs” above near anything else (as the numbers show).
Wait? These people were having unsupervised exams with access to their phone and now they see that they need to do something? I mean, the numbers speak for themselves when 45% of students say they were aware of an “honor code violation” during their time as students. I was at uni for five years, and I literally don’t know about a single case of cheating on exams among my peers.
Seems to me that cheating was already rampant, they just found a new excuse to do something about it.
To be clear by the way: Our exam “supervision” literally consisted of some pensioned seniors that got paid to come in for a day to hand out exam papers, receive and archive your response, and otherwise just hang around in the exam hall so people wouldn’t feel safe just blatantly bringing notes or their phone.
Are people backwards here or something? You’re explicitly stating that you’re not defending them, and you’re completely right in what you’re saying. A company can have record revenues and record losses (negative profit) in the same period. That doesn’t mean meta and zucky are anything short of horrible, it means the headline is crap. An informative headline would be “<Company> reports <value> profits and announces <number of> layoffs”. Saying they have record revenues tells us exactly nothing about whether layoffs are justified or not.
Case in point: My buddy’s startup had record revenues this year, more than doubled since last year, if they keep going at this pace they’ll be bankrupt by this time next year, since their income is smaller than their wage expenses.
The heat you have available in a data center is pretty low-quality (cold) heat. If you’re not familiar with the field, a (very) basic introduction is looking at the Carnot efficiency: In principle, you could increase the pressure in the water with a pump, then let it evaporate, before extracting work in a turbine. Then, you condense the steam (by heat-exchanging with the ambient) before sending it back into the pump.
Now, if this process is ideal (frictionless pumps and turbines, perfect heat exchangers, etc.) we can figure out how much of the heat energy that can be converted to useful work (turbine output - pump input). Assuming the ambient (our cold side) is about 25 C, and the racks we’re cooling (our hot side) operate at around 100 C, we get a Carnot efficiency of about 0.2. That means only 20 % of the heat can actually be converted work. Again, this is the ideal case. It is not thermodynamically possible to get better than this. Realistically, you could maybe get 10 % or something.
So, bottom line: The racks aren’t really hot enough to extract meaningful work. A better proposal would probably be to build things like this in places that are cold and require heating, so that you could use the waste heat as a district heating source. In that case, you could more or less completely eliminate the need for other heating sources in homes (which are far too often electrical). Then, we would be using the electrical power (which is high-quality) for something “useful” (disregarding whether or not a data center is useful in the first place), and use the low-quality heat for what it does best (heating things to moderate temperatures).
I was initially talking about the total amount earned throughout a career. As a student I lived off roughly 10k USD/year (in Norway). Today I spend quite a bit more, but if my goal in life was to “get rich”, let’s say I could live off 20 k per year. Making ≈200k and paying 40 % tax (the ceiling in Norway is around there), I would still net 140k/yr after “cost of living”, which would bring me to around 5.6 mill (net) throughout a career.