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RIP. For those who haven't seen it yet, he was interviewed in the HL2 20th Anniversary Documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCjNT9qGjh4 (intro and chapter 1 at 13:40)

The UK regulator introduced the Interruptions Incentive Scheme in 2002 to encourage distribution networks to reduce customer interruptions and minutes lost. It triggered a large wave of investment in network automation (remote switching, auto reclosers etc.)

So basically the difference between 9s is investment/cost.

At least here (Canada), utils push all of their costs to end-users & IIUC have an incentive to have high capex/low opex networks because of regulated return.

As a Canadian residential electrical customer, we pay a lot in base fees from what I hear relative to US customers. Sure it's more reliable, but tbh, it's not worth spending much to get 5 9s (5 mins of downtime a year) vs 4 9s (50 minutes/yr). Heck, even 500 minutes/yr would be fine for me.

But commercial/industrial users won't feel the same way, and managed to successfully spread the cost of adding 9s among users that largely don't care.


Btw, at least for Ontario and Quebec, current average downtime is below 4 9s, and quite close to your quoted 500m/yr time.

Ontario's Energy Board has a dashboard (https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiNmY1YjU0NmUtMTJhYi00N...) that says in 2023, total average outage time was ~5hrs (and that's somewhat typical of the last 10ish years).

Hydro Quebec says that in 2023 (https://www.hydroquebec.com/data/documents-donnees/pdf/hqd-0... FR sorry) the average downtime was ~4.5 hours.


Its the same in the US. Except for texas which does some slightly more innovative things. Its really hard to do anything else than overbuild, Texas was strongly criticized for underbuilding its network when there was an ice storm a few years ago.

Look at that new shade of red. The tasteful vibrancy of it. Oh my God...it even has a gradient.

We see your American Psycho reference and are pleased.

Have people forgotten the authoritarian tendencies of the 1997–2010 Labour governments? This is nothing new.

Savile Row has existed since 1735, predating the founding of the USA by 41 years.


Not in equities (the LSE is basically on life support), but still doing well in areas such as FX, insurance and clearing.


"Sends other UNIX boxes to /dev/null" is one of the best Apple ads from that era: https://brainmapping.org/MarkCohen/UNIXad.pdf


What is with the spacing there? "UNIX........boxes". Very un-Apple.

But damn I miss this era of Apple. Great ad.


That ad was a two-page spread in printed magazines. The extra spacing was to account for the binding not laying flat.


I have showdead enabled in my profile and I sometimes see new users that are shadowbanned (i.e. their posts/comments are automatically "dead"). If it's not spam or low quality, I'll vouch for them.


There's a good video from Asianometry (Lessons from Intel's First Foundry): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Y9LWYmVQu0

If you're an Intel foundry customer, you don't want your design or IP leaking across to Intel's product team, who might be a competitor.


But the IP is already "compiled", or if you want to isolate even further, separate just the mask making process. What could be learned from masks?


> What could be learned from masks

That's like asking what could you learn from building plans ...


> If America wanted EULV fabrication, it had to be organized and funded by the state.

The DoE funded initial research in to EUV via the national labs and EUV LLC back in the 90s. The IP was licenced to ASML, whilst Canon and Nikon (the leaders in lithography at the time) were blocked.


People in government in the 90s made a good call, and we haven't done anything since then to ensure it actually played out, until the post WW2 world order was already extremely unstable.

We have had multiple rounds of "why are we paying for any of this?" In our federal government since then.


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