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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Someone else has mentioned M-Disc and I want to second that. The benefit of using a storage format like this is that the actual storage media is designed to last a long time, and it is separate from the drive mechanism. This is a very important feature - the data is safe from mechanical, electrical and electronic failure because the storage is independent of the drive. If your drive dies, you can replace it with no risk to the data. Every serious form of archival data storage is the same - the storage media is separate from the reading device.

    An M-Disc drive is required to write data, but any DVD or BD drive can read the data. It should be possible to acquire a replacement DVD drive to recover the data from secondary markets (eBay) for a very long time if necessary, even after they’re no longer manufactured.




  • Absolutely, a single hospital for an entire country would not work. But also, small clinics on every street corner would not work because none of them would be able to support more complex/expensive functions like surgical wards, FMRI or biochem labs. The hospital needs to be scaled so that it can support those things, but then it only makes sense for it to serve a larger community because it’s going to need a large staff and a substantial budget - so it needs to be at least locally centralized.

    As you said, there’s a critical size.



  • If everything is completely decentralized then it essentially means that each person is providing for themselves… including basic services like water and waste processing. Centralizing these things makes sense, they’re more efficient when operated at scale, and there are significant benefits to task specialization. And frankly, you don’t want decentralized medical care - you want big, modern, well-funded hospitals with the latest technology, which means centralized locations and management.

    Decentralizing services doesn’t make sense. Individual residence solar panels are substantially less productive than large-scale solar plants. Services like energy, water, medicine and waste handling should be concentrated and publicly funded - but then that means you need to collect public funds and then decide how to use them, and that means government. The larger the public project is that you want to build, the larger the government around it has to be.