Yeah. It’s the same thing Uber did with pushing cab services out of business.

Not only that, but AWS is the real money maker for them. Not that retail and gaming and prime and whatever don’t also make boat loads of cash, but it doesn’t even graze AWS. The scale of these data centers is unreal and most of the internet runs on AWS.

I’m an industrial electrician with background on what they’re ordering and installing in terms of control panels and if you saw the weekly shipments it’d make you sick. And we’re only one supplier, they have others.

Like most of the US, we had a weeks long cold spell with average temperatures around 5-10° F. It started to really affect my psyche. It was followed by a sprout of really mild winter weather, getting up to 60°. It snowed a bunch last night but it’s supposed to warm back up this week.

I couldn’t even get up my street for most of the cold weather due to a foot of snow that wasn’t melting. So I was parking under a bridge and walking like 5-10 minutes each way thru the woods every time I went to work, which has been 7 day weeks lately.

I finally got some crucial insulating done at my house but there was some bad drafts and stupid shit I found behind the walls of just holes out to nothing. Which the house is right up against a story tall retaining wall so it was almost impossible to see from the outside. There’s like maybe a foot between the wall and the house.

This happened to me once but it was a nice lady with a little market outside her plants store that sold fruits and veggies. She was always so nice. One day I was walking by and out of the blue she was like “hey have a banana”

How to with John Wilson is one of the best shows that has a very simple premise. He basically just finds odd things happening around NYC and gives commentary, advice, and self-reflection, and is very funny.

What? The IO is digital inputs and outputs, analog inputs and outputs.

Then there’s power distribution and 24v DC device power (or 120v depending on application and often age), relays, contactors, timers, VFDs, etc. This is what the world runs on. Networking cables like that Ethernet are still part of it but a pretty small part. They just get plugged into all the PLC racks and any other device that needs it. Some of what I described can be replaced with automation and code, but only the very old legacy devices a lot of these old plants and mills still have around because they’re still functional…

Oh this here is my shit. You should see some of the steel mills we’ve worked on. Panels so old they just screwed them right into the stone walls, live busbars bent and snaking around in open air, fuck all for controls. Love it.

Fair enough

And most of the world runs on 240 or 220v, which is a higher voltage and allows for smaller conductors.

Idk, another factor is the US started their electric grid in the 1800s to the 1940s. It was the first in the world. Hard to stop once something is set as a standard like that. It’s like asking why they used lead and asbestos or built foundations out of stacks of sandstone rocks, all of which applies to my house haha. I’m sure in a few decades people will look back and question our use of plastics.

Heat dissipates easier in open air than in conduit, meaning the conductors can be undersized drastically compared to if they’re in conduit. Ever notice how the wires from the weatherhead are 2/0 awg, and on the poles and to your house (even after the transformer so same operating voltage), are way smaller? More like 12 awg on poles? The cost for the larger wire buried underground would be massive.

Also, as others have said, maintenance is significantly easier.

Yeah that was 11 years ago and I did the field service portion of that job for like a year, I was fresh out of trade school and working as a grunt for GE as a 22 year old. Until GE decided they were gonna move the business to Germany and Japan and shut down the whole factory.

It had its perks, I got a $75 per meal allowance and could put beer on it and shit. I let someone take over my room for the year back home and had basically no living expenses, just stayed in nice hotels in vegas and some rink-a-dink ones in the middle of the desert. It let me pay off all my loans in a year (which were only like $10k from a 9 month trade school thing)

Anyway I stuck with doin heavy industry electrical work for a while. Now I have a much cushier job doing testing, QA, a bit of design work when applicable, and field service for some absolutely massive electrical systems for steel mills. These things push 6-10k amps thru busbar systems we fabricate from scratch, and are all custom. I do work a lot of OT still but I have a way better work / life balance now

18 hours on a solar power plant in ~120° F heat replacing burnt up reactors and busbars in the inverters, covered in glycol which is like an antifreeze that is real sticky and somehow smells / tastes sweet (but is still gross af) so all the bugs are attracted to you and crawl all over.

He already replied to you saying his job is dangerous. He said he’s around hot and explosive shit all day. I’ve been in power plants and that’s the example I gave that some of them are not fucking safe. We built panels for this nuke plant and the guy was telling me you can’t touch some of the handrails because you’ll get shocked .

Really don’t care about how you feel about it because I’ve seen it with my eyes.

Weird hill to die on

I agree with your sentiment but it’s absurd to tell OP that his job is “very safe”. Until you’ve seen what heavy industry is really like, I’d refrain from commenting on it. I’m an industrial electrician and I’ve worked in steel mills, foundries, factories, power plants, etc.

It can truly be the wild west out there. Operators have a tough job in often sketchy situations, heavy machinery, around nasty chemicals and fumes and just the dirtiest grime. Mills fucking suck for example. We’ve been working on the Oswego plant in upstate New York which is the largest supplier of aluminum for Ford. It burned down, twice. There was a giant ass hole in the roof from the fire and like 12 feet of water in the basement from all the fire departments spraying where all the electrical equipment is. Then when they were fixing shit, another fire happened from someone welding on the roof.

This is an extreme example, but it is insane how the world works sometimes. I was 22 working on a solar power plant out west and the maintenance guys told me everything was locked out and off. I do a dead check and find 1000v on the busbar from a row of solar panels on some shit I was just about to work on. “Oh yeah that disconnect box is broke, we don’t shut that one off” was the response.

Safety and regulation can only get you so far unfortunately. Safety is always #1 all these places say but you really gotta be on and alert and conscious of what’s going on around you at all times. Injuries can happen in an instant