Three Mile Island, Soviet Bus Stops, and a Second Moon
Notes & quotes from recent reads, four for everyone and another four for paid AG supporters:
The Wonder Of Soviet Bus Stops
Quotes:
Herwig began his project in 2002, when he shocked by the price of a Ryanair seat from London to Stockholm to opted to make the journey by bicycle. To break things up he photographed something interesting every hour. “It wasn’t until I got into the Baltic countries,” he says, “that they jumped out at me. Within the first 50km of Lithuania, I noticed these peculiar bus stops everywhere…
Notes:
There’s something (probably many somethings) to be said for standardization and the economies of scale and predictability that come with (for instance) making basically all bus stops in a given region look and function roughly the same.
That said, we do lose a lot of personality and artistic potential when we opt for raw cost-effectiveness and functionality (with bus stops and other bits of infrastructure).
Running a Fine Dining Restaurant in a Recession
Quotes:
Guidara ensured that 95% of the cart budget was meticulously managed — he used MoMA’s name to get the gelato at a steep discount, and without needing to pay for the gelato cart. (The cart was paid for by Jon Snyder, owner of il laboratorio del gelato). Costs secured, Guidara went all-in on the spoons.
His gamble was an overwhelming success. One day, Guidara saw Glenn Lowry, the director of MoMA, buying gelato for a group of visiting curators. To Guidara’s deep satisfaction, the curators spent a moment admiring the spoons they held in their hands before digging into the gelato. These blue spoons have since become inseparable from the popularity of the gelato cart.
Notes:
An interesting look at some of the thinking behind running a restaurant (a business that can have thin margins at even the best of times) during a downswing in the larger economic cycle, and how that changes one’s priorities and approaches to making the business viable, short- and long-term.
Microsoft Deal Would Reopen Three Mile Island Nuclear Plant to Power AI
Quotes:
Pennsylvania’s dormant Three Mile Island nuclear plant would be brought back to life to feed the voracious energy needs of Microsoft under an unprecedented deal announced Friday in which the tech giant would buy 100 percent of its power for 20 years.
The restart of Three Mile Island, the site of the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history, would mark a bold advance in the tech industry’s quest to find enough electric power to support its boom in artificial intelligence. The plant, which Pennsylvanians thought had closed for good in 2019 amid financial strain, would come back online by 2028 under the agreement, according to plant owner Constellation Energy.
If approved by regulators, Three Mile Island would provide Microsoft with the energy equivalent it takes to power 800,000 homes, or 835 megawatts. Never before has a U.S. nuclear plant come back into service after being decommissioned, and never before has all of a single commercial nuclear power plant’s output been allocated to a single customer.
Notes:
This is fascinating, but of-a-kind with what’s happening at other decommissioned nuclear power plants around the US right now: anticipated higher energy needs (from AI, but also other purposes) are changing the math related to nuclear power in general, which in turn is making the expected costs associated with refurbishing existing infrastructure a little more palatable.
Supply Chain Terror: Explosions in Lebanon Raise New Security Alarms
Quotes:
IEDs created from pagers and walkie-talkies and reports of exploding solar-energy systems herald a possibly limitless front in future war, where everyday items can't be trusted.
Supply chain warfare is here to stay. And the targets are soft.
Notes:
This was a truly astonishing attack, in part because it was so focused and targeted (injuring and killing mostly members of a group the Israeli military and intelligence service don’t like, with relatively few bystander casualties) and in part because of how seemingly well-planned and calculated it was.
There’s also a sort of knee-jerk horror in hearing about exploding personal electronic devices, because it makes one think about one’s own smartphone blowing up, which is not a pleasant thought (but something that’s apparently becoming thinkable in some conflicts, now—though to be clear, these devices were laden with explosives, and it’s unlikely anything close to this could be done with just the batteries contained in most consumer devices; it required quite a lot of planning, and the interception of the devices in question so they could be augmented before arriving at their final destination).
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