In New Zealand at least, a lot of this data seems to come from imagery; it's quite outdated, the cables are all missing and the voltages are pretty hit and miss. Cool project though.
The public source of this data (ArcGIS Feature Server account of Transpower) shows data last modified by Transpower in October 2025 for pylons and February 2025 for substations. At the rate of development of NZ, you wouldn't expect major changes to any of this data unless it's a major transmission upgrade project identified years in advance in hundreds of public announcements and documents.
Not just America. People are stealing copper in very rural areas in my country; in many cases the price they get is hardly paying for the petrol to drive there. We have a whole team now in my company dedicated to repairing damage from copper theft, it's rampant.
I have a job that deliberately runs at 2am and 3am... to update the time in a bunch of really old PLCs for DST. And check that every other device on my telemetry network has correctly updated its time.
And this reminds me of the time that my colleague put DB15 on a whole bunch of drawings, and we ended up with DA15 connectors instead of DE15. If I see DB9 on any drawing that comes across my desk, it will be corrected.
I use both DA-15 and DE-15 all the time in my line of work, and I am fastidious about using the correct terminology on all my drawings. Manufacturers are ironically some of the worst at getting this right.
I don't really follow bitcoin, but last I checked over 75% of block confirmations came from the top 3-5 mining pools. That seems a hell of a lot more centralized than the traditional finance system.
> That seems a hell of a lot more centralized than the traditional finance system
Most countries/systems have one central bank, even if we assume there are only 2 mining pools and they "control the network", wouldn't a central bank still be more centralized?
Besides, the mining pools don't "own" the network, anyone can participate, which kind of makes the whole "more centralized than a central bank" argument kind of weak.
Right, but bitcoin is global, not just for one country. And while anyone can participate in theory, in practice the big mining pools always get their first. And if a quorum of mining pools gets together, they can fork the blockchain or do all sorts of other shit. Without those mining pools confirming transactions you can't even spend your bitcoin. As a functional currency, I just can't see how this is any better, like in any way. Probably why it hasn't actually become a functional currency and is just a traded commodity that everyone is hoping like hell won't crash and burn one day.
Forking the blockchain is impractical. You need enough compute power to maintain both forks for some period of time, which means you've effectively halved your compute power. And all that gives you is the power to double spend, after which one fork's transactions are "revoked". This is not a huge problem; regular financial transactions also get revoked (e.g., chargeback). The amount of compute needed to protect transactions for, e.g., half a day (which is much much shorter than the potential chargeback interval) is basically impossible.
> do all sorts of other shit
There's not much shit they can do, without breaking the fundamental cryptographic primitives that make it work. They can't steal money. They can double spend, as above, or they can delay transactions with a probability proportional to their ownership of compute, integrated over a period of time. If they own 80% of the compute, and they really really don't want you to perform a transaction, then they can block it for 10 minutes with 80% chance, 20 minutes with 64% chance, 30 minutes with 51%, an hour with 26%.
Compare that with Visa which has blocked transactions it doesn't like (e.g., porn) for years.
And even this blocking is economically disincentivized. If you want to get a transaction through and the "mafia" don't want it, you can offer a higher transaction fee. Either the "mafia" will have to accept your transaction, or give up the enticing fee to someone else. Transaction processing is a free market.
And compute dominance is something that needs to be maintained indefinitely. Obtaining compute dominance does not guarantee future dominance (unlike with proof of stake systems, which is IMO one reason why proof of work is superior).
> And if a quorum of mining pools gets together, they can fork the blockchain or do all sorts of other shit.
This is a common misunderstanding. Miners do not have power in the system. Anyone can fork Bitcoin, but when people want payment in Bitcoin, they won't accept ForkedBitcoin regardless of the number of miners shilling it. Meanwhile mining money will be left on the table for anyone who wants to enter mining of the original Bitcoin and at greater mining profit.
The traditional finance system is that a single central bank, owned by a cartel of rich banks- chase, jpm, etc-- issue the currency, charge us to use it and get first dibs on the benefits of monetary inflation -- google "cantillon effect".
The now much more diverse mining space is much better than completely centralized in one entity current system.
And bitcoin community has a way of working to fix weaknesses wherever they find it... there is active campaigns to diversify mining, as you pointed out those are pools-- and pools are being made obsolete. behind those pools are thousands or tens of thousands of mining operators, of all sizes, as it's viable at industrial as well as individual scale-- many use it to heat their house for less than the alternative, the earnings don't have to cover the full cost to be beneficial to people.
Googling "Cantillon Effect" gives suprisingly few results. Out of the top five results, two are Bitcoin-related, one is Reddit, and one is the Wikipedia page of Richard Cantillon himself.
The top comment on /r/AskEconomics is:
"The cantillon effect doesn't really exist in any significant capacity. Central banks nowadays announce their actions well ahead of time, that means before the actual expansion of the money supply, people know this expansion will happen, and markets price in that expansion. So there really isn't much benefiting from being "early".
Beyond that there really isn't much empirical evidence on the cantillon effect to exist in any significant capacity."
Since I know little about this topic I'd appreciate HN's view.
Cantillon's essay is not terribly difficult of a read and the "Cantillon Effect" has to be the least interesting part of it. It and Smiths Wealth of Nations are both free on the web and well worth the read.
OP mixed the "central bank" as an unique one (it doesn’t exists, although MFI could be representative for the west) and the multiple national ones (FED for the US). They arguments doesn’t hold as the national ones creates money and the are much more numerous and diverse in interest around the world than the ~5 bitcoin pools mentioned ahead.
The FED is quite powerful and US strongly influence many other banks but that’s by situation, not by design.
evem tho unique starts with a vowel, we say a unique, not an unique, I guess because it's pronounced like "younique", long u. Short u would still be an tho. As in, "An understanding"
the "does" in "doesn't" absorbs subject-verb the conjugation, does is now the verb that needs to agree with the subject, it. Exists returns to it's infinitive (unconjugated) form, exist.
"They arguments doesn’t hold" typo they ought to be the, those or their, not sure what you meant. Since arguments is plural you want don't, not doesn't, alternately "the argument [singular] doesn't hold"
'national ones creates money' subject verb agreement again, either one creates or ones create
"and the are" s/the/they
"bitcoin pools mentioned ahead": ahead doesn't quite apply to comment threads, like on a road you have cars in front (ahead) and in back (behind), but with comments it's above and below, because you scroll up and down, not forward and backward. You could also say aforementioned referring to something mentioned earlier.
Nonsense. While thousands of commercial banks are formally shareholders of the 12 (not one) Federal Reserve Banks,
> the "ownership" of the Reserve Banks by the commercial banks is symbolic; they do not exercise the proprietary control associated with the concept of ownership nor share, beyond the statutory dividend, in Reserve Bank "profits." … Bank ownership and election at the base are therefore devoid of substantive significance, despite the superficial appearance of private bank control that the formal arrangement creates.
Yes I have seen OpenGL applications refuse to start with AMD cards in some circumstances due to a bug in the AMD drivers, but never had a problem on NVIDIA cards
Am grid engineer. You nailed it. It can get incredibly complex modelling this stuff, and reading all the armchair observers banging on about 'single points of failure' is amusing.
My professor did that for Bonneville Power Administration. I worked on a tiny piece of his modelling software. A short writeup of it https://ciex-software.com/fmcmx.html
Oh yeah. These posts are the limit of my knowledge. Real-world power plants, switchgear, and grid management is way way more complex! And if you want to talk about "hard real time requirements".... it doesn't get much harder or real time than keeping the grid going :)
Thanks to you, the operators, and the linemen out there keeping it all going. When it works correctly no one notices.
I imagine there was some sort of cascading failure involved, as in the transformer tripped, but this then overloaded another circuit which then tripped, or there was a power swing that was unsustainable, then you get over\underfrequency tripping off load and generators... this can get quite complex quite quickly in power systems, especially smaller systems found on islands.
yea same boat. I've always wondered what normal depth perception looks like. On the plus side, it is fun to challenge people to wear an eye patch and play table tennis or some other activity and see how bad they are when they haven't developed monocular depth perception cues.
