251–260 of 329 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sweet. Start building TODAY and it will be done in nothing less than 20 years for nothing less than $20 BILLION. What should they do in the meantime?
Better than kicking the can down the road. Energy is effectively always going to be needed. In 20 years time the same response will be spouted, it will make you wish you did something 20 years before when it was originally discussed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sweet. Start building TODAY and it will be done in nothing less than 20 years for nothing less than $20 BILLION. What should they do in the meantime?
Sure, $1B for the plant and $19B for the lawyers. Korea and China build them in 4 years for about $1B each. This is entirely self-inflicted by people who are completely scientifically illiterate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It does matter. Screeching about datacenters when you cant get your polity to price energy correctly is not an issue with datacenters.
It’s not important who’s fault it is, it’s probably the politicians who were looking for short term gain that they can present as creating jobs or maybe even taking bribes to issue permits. It’s not that important who’s personally to blame.
If there was suddenly a bunch of people angry at plumbing because pipes had become expensive, and I found myself having to defend the dual benefits of fresh water and sewerage removal, I would likewise try and identify the root cause of pipes being expensive before crazed internet commentators tried to rip up important infrastructure.
My electricity costs 34 cent per Kw/h and I can’t afford solar panels or a renovation to air to water heating while the government insists we shouldn’t use oil / coal anymore nor logs or turf to heat our homes edit: I live in Ireland
That's 7x the cost that I pay in the Pacific NW. Where are you?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seattle is nearer 14c (13.75) and likely to increase over the next decade (because of nonsense like[1]). [1]: This alone will increase costs by something like 4c/kWh from these 70 year old dams: https://www.king5.com/article/news/investigations/skagit-riv...
Seattle now has variable rate. I pull most of my power at night, when it's 8c/kWh.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
not sure if you have enabled dead comments or not, somebodys comment was killed for calling you pedantic. anyway nose jobs and skin grafts are both done by a plastic surgeon; one of these procedures saves lives and the other doesn't. the argument is that the taxpayer should prioritize life saving over vanity projects. accusations of jealousy make it seem as though you have missed the point entirely, whether intention…
You're slicing that sentence pretty thin. I said "But once we stop doing things entirely because we are jealous of how some people use it" That's not jealousy, that's totalitarianism. I'm not going to let you do it at all because I don't like it. The "reason" is jealousy, the action is control. The electric grid and education are both a sort of commons. Once you start telling people how or if they're allowed to use i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There IS value being created, or people wouldn't use the tools. While I do think there is value being created, I think this form of argument is not as watertight as it appears at first glance. Humans are very capable of behaving irrationally. I think there is a lot of harmful, negative “work” being done by AI today. Creating fake videos for Facebook, running girlfriend bots, automated scams, etc. Even employees jus…
Theres no reason for AI hate to bleed over to Data Center hate. I really cant be stuffed defending AI. It either succeeds or it doesnt. But we get so much value from Data Centers and there's basically no one lauding them as an industry. Its like people waking up one morning and hating trains. Its like people just discovered they existed yesterday and hate them for no reason.
That doesn't mean we would benefit from expanding those industries by triple-digit percents just to increase the profits of multibillion-dollar corporations without some pretty strong justifications.
In this case, "data centers" don't benefit anyone in and of themselves. They are merely a container for, well, data. And compute. So the degree to which they benefit us depends entirely on what data is stored there or what is being computed there.
Thus, trying to separate "AI hate" from data centers is not merely unhelpful, it's effectively meaningless. The datacenters are the AI that happens within them. That's literally the only reason so many more are being built now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am going to assume based on the fact that the article is about Ireland, and Ireland uses the euro, the commenter is in Ireland
That makes it worse! A euro is worth about 10% more than a dollar. Ireland has a lot of oil in their power mix from what I'm seeing, so that makes a bit of sense. Maybe the high power cost is why they're deploying ~600GWh of new wind capacity per year for the last 15 years. Because at those rates the wholesale prices should be able to subsidize a lot of loans.
Just to be contrarian: what we're talking about is "electricity use from economic activity". This should be good for Ireland but they'll need to build energy capacity to keep up. It's misplaced to be angry about datacenters themselves. There IS value being created, or people wouldn't use the tools. Construction creates jobs, manufacturing the machines in the buildings is a huge global industry; the value people gain…
Yeah this is just completely wrong. Data centers pay sub-market rates for electricity (as well as getting tax relief, generally). Generally, they use so much electricity that more infrastructure needs to be built. Who pays for that? Not the data center. The utility's capex is spread across all customers (sometimes minus the data center). Then the utility needs to generate moer power or buy it from elsewhere. That's t…
Some of the assumption seems valid such as additional infrastructure cost. But I wonder if that is much of anything. I would assume the DC actually paying for the connection. If that is the case additional capex is not spread across consumer.
The other question is that DC provides a decent baseline for electricity usage. Generally speaking that is a good thing. So it is not an additional burden as implied here.
Third being DC is still paying for the electricity. It is not getting subsidised pricing. They may be getting discount wholesale price due to its volume. But it is not like they are selling at a loss while the rest are covered by consumers.
Generally speaking I don't understand why everyone is suddenly against DC. It may be an issue if power generation hasn't been able to keep up. But in most cases so far that is not what is happening here.