Earlier quoted context omitted.
Humans are bad at solving problems before they need to be solved.
Not having a reliable power source sounds like a here and now problem.
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50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers
111–120 of 164 posts
Re: 50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's people that do that, not capitalism. This happens in every system that has existed in human history.
Absolutely not. The default economic system is anarchy, also known as sharing and mutual aid. You see this even in the reddest of US states, where disaster victims help each other, and a huge pastime is sharing food via potlucks. But all evidence points to anarchical/egalitarian cultures as the baseline mechanism of human organization from prehistory. Externalities don't exist in anarchic systems, because there is no…
Ok so you’d win a community upstream on a river and you build a dam and hive off the water
Downstream 500 miles away another community loses their water source
Those externalities still exist
Re: 50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers
#113There are two simultaneous problems that I've come to understand with datacenters and the people that live in their proximity: 1. Somehow the public is always left holding the bag for increased transmission costs despite the cause of the increase being a single (or short list) of outliers. 2. The residential public, as is tradition, is always asked to scale down for industrial demand. How can we imagine expanding a s…
The reality is that these data centers make money for billionaire douchebags.
And unlike the billionaire douchebags of yesteryear they don't invest in the local economy. NOTHING IS TRICKLING DOWN In fact our modern billionaire douchebags love talking about how much they hate humanity.
Re: 50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
That isnt the slam you think it is. https://truthout.org/art/mister-gotcha/
Isn't this just a false dichotomy in web comic form? Implying that there are only two options, full participant or complete withdrawal from society, as a means of suggesting that one cannot apply morals to how one chooses to engage with society. But in reality, there are many many ways to engage in society, some more or less ethical/moral than others, and one is free to criticize individual choices. Even if we consid…
The comic is pointing out how absurd that false dichotomy is.
Re: 50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers
#115Prosperity is closely correlated with energy availability. Can we please build some power plants?
Sure, ETA for a nuclear power plant is ~15-20 years from now, wind is ~5-10, solar is 2-6, natural gas is 2-4 years. Data centers take 18 - 24 months. Even if build out for power infrastructure needed had started when the demand became apparent (which, it’s not clear that it has done). You should still expect electricity costs to inflate due to the ~100GW of additional demand that has been announced, because there is…
Fine! So let's get started then! I don't care about data centers. I don't care about AI. Maybe it's here to stay, maybe it's a passing trend. I care about humans, and human prosperity.
Human prosperity - ours and our grandchildren's - is to a large degree determined by how much power we produce. So let's get started producing more.
The best time to have built a power plant was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.
Re: 50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
The last two sentences are drawing downvotes to an otherwise sensible comment.
I agree. But is it a false statement?
It's the tired pattern of absolving the direct bad actors (the corpos themselves), as well as corrupt regulators who give them a pass, in favor of diffusing the responsibility onto individuals. If we're talking about collective action to solve the problem, it should be more of the form of demanding regulation that directly stops the bad actors, rather than this nonsensical fallacy from the same vein as "voting with our wallets".
Re: 50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers
#117This is like the movie Chinatown, where people were fighting over water, but now it's all about electricity. It sounds like Lake Tahoe residents kicked the can down the road and didn't care about electricity for so long that now they have to pay the piper. I think it's entire just that they have to bear the costs of their own electricity.
Eh, not really. Few years ago everybody was talking about the inadequacies of our aging electricity distribution infrastructure and how it was a shame it wasn't being fixed and the risks it entails. Now folks are wailing about the terrible AI come for our electricity and how awful the burden of the upgrades are. When the upgrades were for solar they were good, when upgrades are for AI they're bad. It's almost like pe…
Why should locals be happy that someone is building AI data centers?
I can understand it for the country as a whole. AI is a last desperate gamble for the US to stay relevant and fight of China. But then maybe the federal government should start paying for it.
Re: 50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers
#118just as a thought experiment, say you're an entrepreneur, how would you solve this problem? whether it AI, Data Centers, EVs...I'm seeing this problem more and more, we need more energy/power. I'm curious to see what others think are possible viable solutions.
This isn't a problem that can be solved by a clever entrepreneur. This is what government is for. When you have a shared resource that everyone needs, government is the best option for making sure its distribution is fair. We already know how to solve this: make transmission owned by the government, make generation free-market. Cities do this already. The city of Santa Clara owns all the transmission, and then buys p…
And ironically (not really), this setup is more market competitive. Instead of having transmission owned by 1 maybe 2 companies who also monopolize generation, you get a government who just buys the power as cheap as people can make it. There are better incentives on the government owned transmission than on a company owned transmission.
Re: 50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's people that do that, not capitalism. This happens in every system that has existed in human history.
Absolutely not. The default economic system is anarchy, also known as sharing and mutual aid. You see this even in the reddest of US states, where disaster victims help each other, and a huge pastime is sharing food via potlucks. But all evidence points to anarchical/egalitarian cultures as the baseline mechanism of human organization from prehistory. Externalities don't exist in anarchic systems, because there is no…
Externalities don't exist in anarchic systems
Neither do computers.
Re: 50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Haiti is in Anarchy. All sharing and mutual aid is shadowed by resource and power struggle. It is even worse than communism and fascism.
> Haiti is in Anarchy This is what people say when they have no idea what people mean by the POLITICAL system of Anarchism (Libertarian Socialism). Anarchism, the political system, is not "chaos". That is propaganda that started during the 1930's. If you want to learn about it, real the Anarchist FAQ. (I have a degrees in American History and Economics if that matters). https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-ana…
Yeah, and communism has never been given a fair shake, either. For that matter, neither has laissez-faire capitalism.
At some point, you need to accept that your favorite "-ism" has an impedance mismatch with human nature.