The EU is rather special in this regard. While the EU enacts those fines, none of those fines end up in the EU budget but will be handed down to the member states, who in turn have no say on the application of these fines.

Yes, that was already the appeal and Google lost in court. There is no regress to that. Google has to pay that fine.

Yes but its very dirty solar energy because rockets are very dirty and the amount of energy to lift all those arrays into orbit is substantial.

Projected cost targets from SpaceX, especially for Starship are only losely related to reality. Weight is what determines the minimal required energy input to lift something into orbit. Independently from SpaceX number magic. Volume, like I said, can be an additional bottleneck but never undo the above.

You do need margins not just for humans.

Building something the size of an (unmanned) space station for a single server rack, yes, it makes no sense. The energy needed to lift all that stuff into orbit, the comically inefficient cooling and never mind the issues of impact damage and radiation and inability to do any service (without huge effort) if things go wrong, all make this a pretty irrational idea.

Just put that server rack in Iceland with geothermal power and closed loop heat pump. But then the tech oligarchs would have to comply with laws and that is probably the reason they want it up in space. There surely is no technical reason for it.

It does make sense for the provider as those for a specific model provide a good measure for computational effort, for that doecific model. That doesn’t mean that token rate comparison between models give you a good picture.

It really is not. Companies operate on creating profit. Activities are judged on their ROI. Worth is not relevant for the ROI.

That gives you a heat rejection capacity of less than 140 kW (mind you, that is total heat rejection, incl. heat from the sun, support systems etc., only a part of that can be used to cool servers) So you settle for laughably low compute to keep radiator size somewhat reasonable, yet still massive and heavy.

Total Worth doesn’t matter. What matters is revenue and profit and that is the basis for the fine.

That space data center might end up dumping more waste into the oceans with all thise launches but certainly more into our atmosphere.

Via radiation into space. All you need is a radiator, the weight of a battleship (or worse). Yes, the idea is crazy.

Weight is always the issue with lifting stuff into space. Volume might merely be an additional issue.

You keep ignoring my point but let’s try it with a concrete example:

Sydney-Newcastle: ~190 km project length, incl. 70-155 km tunnels, covering both sides of the urban Sydney area, all underground.

So this project would include one of the most central and also challenging parts of a potential HSR network. Cost estimates are somewhat elusive but I found talk of 90 bn AUD. Now, there is a lot to unpack there.

First of all, when we compare that to the current project Lyon-Torino, technically not HSR but still designed for 220 km/h, comparable to the tunnel section in the Sydney-Newcastle plan. It comes also with 100 km tunnel (much of it an actual base tunnel) and 170 km of non-tunnel parts. Price tag: 11 bn EUR ~ 17 bn AUD. Or let’s look at the 55 km Brenner base tunnel, designed for 250 km/h, one of the longest base tunnels involving very tricky geology. Price tag is similar 8-10 bn EUR. So even if we compare the rough Sydney-Newcastle plan with very expensive and challenging cross-border rail projects, across the Alps, in other high income, high regulation countries, we are talking about multifold higher per km prices. How come? Likely for similar reasons as in the US or Canada, political and legal reasons. At least in the US, the overhead of any rail infrastructure project is enormous and overshadows the actual construction costs. Extreme bureaucracy, very pro-nimbyism laws and the requirement of minimal or even no negative impact on car traffic during construction. This can be seen when we are looking on the tunnel length in the Sydney-Newcastle corridor. What is commonly reported is on the very upper end of tunnel usage. There is a reason for that and that is also political and legal. While highways were bulldozed through urban areas, rail projects are are rather pushed underground on the entire length, not even using any existing corridor on any of it, until the very end of suburbia and even then. Now, one can debate of course pros and cons of that. There are good arguments for the tunnels, also for speed and operation but it adds a lot of cost. However, even if we don’t debate the tunnel length, the costs are astronomically high in comparison to projects in other high income countries, that are not part of the English speaking world.

PS: Even though your own video pretty much is all about the lack of political will and the requirement of it to be at least almost profitable. It also can’t manage without mentioning the oh so low Australian population density, when that does not matter at all. What matters is the corridor and in this corridor with pretty perfect distances of Sydney to Melbourne and Sydney to Brisbane there is a corridor population of 12 mio. That is perfectly fine for such an HSR corridor. I mean the report is contradicting itself when it is first talking about how Sydney-Melbourne is the second busiest aviation corridor in the world and then later talking about how there is no population for HSR, when the HSR would be highly competitive with aviation on such 3-4h corridors.

I am not downvoting for content but debating style. You started off with ad hominem and then added not a single ( or a few) well defined argument but a video with dozens one liner arguments that cannot be addressed without writing half a book.

But maybe I am indeed in the wrong instance for that and it is indeed a wrong expectation on my side.

So what? It depends on the kind of mobility impairment, if rail is suitable. Good rail and transit systems accomodate people in wheel chairs just fine, if you are impaired in other ways and can’t use a wheel chair you still got plenty of options. The Netherlands show that transit oriented cities are actually better and safer for people with limited mobility.

Yeah, thanks for confirming my argument. The video is pretty much bringing up the arguments I’d expect. But it really shows how weak they are when they complain about distances being too far when they are actually perfect for HSR and yes, it is enough if individual relations are close enough. That is how many HSR networks work.

But sure, Australia is the only country with mountains and suburbs. And kanguruhs are an unsurmountable issues for rail, but not for highways.

It all boils down to ideology. Weirdly enough it was not impossible to build inner urban highways though, which required much more space. But then, unlike road infrastructure, rail is required to be proftibale and that is why Australia remains underdeveloped and its airports overloaded.

Add to that wavering back and forth with financial support a generally hostile legal environment towards HSR projects and generally hostile laws to building important large national infrastructure, balooning costs on any infrastructure project. I would not be surprised if more money would have to be spent on bureaucracy and judicial things than on actually building that thing. That is not much different from the US where they need to pay multiple times more per km than in other Western countries with comparable corridors.

That’s nice and all but I was not talking about Fox News at all. Maybe have a look at who is posting what? Also, you where responding to a rhetorical question. I think you did not get the point I was trying to make there.

And now check for news about limit road access, bridge closures etc in all of Europe. There are plenty of those too? Indeed.

The Netherlands have not torn down their cities to the ground even if their cities were pretty car centric in the late 1960s. Of course If you cry for the failed city highway in Utrecht for example that has been replaced with a gracht and scaled down to a regular street, that transformation is a catastrophe for you.

Cities change over time, if you change them away from being car only, that doesn’t need dramatic sudden changes but can be achieved with gradual changes over time.

Also LA has not torn down or destroyed much of its city, just because it has rebuilt a rail transit backbone again (far from perfect or complete but quite substantial already)

https://noe.orf.at/stories/3360361/