That logic is very short term and while comical isn't close to reality.

I hope you live a long and prosper life so you can see the consequences of this presidential term fully unfold.

I understand your point. And I agree on people without life changing fluctuations in currency will hardly understand that side of bitcoin value.

I've had friends in Venezuela for the past 20 years. They hold dollars, not bitcoin. You're both talking out of your ass.

Why does it take so long?

Aluminum smelters use the Hall-Heroult process, where alumina is dissolved in molten cryolite and reduced in massive “pots” which are large electrolytic cells. Each pot contains a carbon cathode lining that must be kept at around 950C during operation. If the pot cools down, the frozen electrolyte and solidified aluminum contract at different rates than the carbon and steel shell, cracking the lining.

Once it’s cracked, the pot has to be completely cleaned out and relined which takes weeks. A smelter usually has hundreds of pots so this alone takes a while as the liner and anything in it are basically frozen solid and need to be broken apart and torn out. Once relined the pots must be brought back up slowly and the chemistry balanced. The pots also draw a ton of power and are wired in series so they have to all be brought up slowly together (or in batches).

That assumes it was a clean shutdown with nothing else clogged up in the system. “Cleaning” in smelting means that the hardware involved needs to be replaced because it fused to molten metal while cooling down.

How much of this process is cleaning up from the previous run and how much is purely for starting up the process again? Does it make sense to clean up the system as soon as you can after shutdown, in preparation for restart, whenever that may be?

It’s one and the same. The sodium and other atoms from the molten cryolite intercalate into the carbon cathode structure and swell it by a few percent. Once in use, a cathode is held together by the steel shell and thermal equilibrium of the running pot. Once it cools the cracking is inevitable.

You also can’t fully drain a pot. You can siphon most of the aluminum and cryolite off but at those temperatures they behave like a proper liquid with surface tension and the metal wicks into the pot like solder instead of flowing with gravity.

The system is just build for continuous usage and any shutdown does major damage.

To keep it running at reduced capacity will likely be less expensive unless the war goes on for a very long time.

Fascinating, and what about the discarded hardware? Is it recyclable in any way?

Anything made of steel or aluminum is recyclable because they can just melt it down and easily separate the metals, but the carbon lining and anything nonmetal is basically slag afterwards. Aluminum, electrolyte, and random atoms seep in everywhere and destroy it.

The smelting process I described above is actually the more expensive process to used to produce aluminum from raw bauxite. Recycling aluminum is cheaper and a significant fraction of the world’s aluminum produced every year is from recycled feedstock (over two thirds in the US, last I checked). Same goes for steel and most other metals.

I'm sure, like any metal at an industrial scale, it is profitably recyclable. But that is beside the point. This is akin to asking: "My car's engine just threw a rod and is seized. Is it recyclable?" Hopefully you see in this analogy that the car (engine) costs way, way more than the sum of its parts (the constituent metals).

I'm not sure in this instance, but for industrial plants, the expectation is for them to run 24/7/365 without disruption. They're not designed to be turned off and then on again. When you shut something down, how do you "reset" it to a clean state so production can start again? Think about all the existing stuff still in the pipes, residual, etc.

forges are continuous processes - they stay hot while stuff goes in and out

if you make it cold, you'll have to do whole startup sequence again

Does anyone know about any good sysadmin advent?

I propose Advent of Outage: just pull a random plug in the server room every day.

How about something like

    while [1]; do kill -9 $((rnd * 100000)); sleep 5; end

Probably needs some external tool for the rnd function.

On a serious note, I just saw this: https://linuxupskillchallenge.org

Bash has a built-in RANDOM.

  while true; do 
    kill -9 $RANDOM
    sleep 5
  done

Or to kill running running PIDs each time

  while true; do 
    rnd=$(ps -e -o pid= | shuf -n 1)
    kill -9 $rnd
    sleep 5
  done

That's hardly an "upskill" imo. You would know almost all of it by running a linux server for a month or two

I haven't set up an advent event (maybe I should) but you can do yourself a challenge a day from SadServers.com

Electricity bill would be huge. Great heaters tho

Android users will at some point next year not be able to install software unless the developer has paid and registered itsef with Google, and Google has approved the developer and the software (for an uncertain amount of time).

That is not nice.

I'd like to see an android auto replacement, and them partnering with existing free phone approaches.

Two many xkcd already about creating new standards.

Flock can be used in a single line for example for cronjobs.

Flock -s file && script.

Pretty simple. (I forgot the argument, I think is -s..