151–160 of 164 posts
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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.
nothing ever trickled down. philanthropy is not trickle down, and the gates foundation has to be one of the most critical I know of.
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> the old and wealthy The government will throw them under the bus in a heartbeat to keep power.
The government would, except that they tend to vote in much greater numbers than other groups, so keeping them happy is important to stay in power.
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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.
nothing ever trickled down. philanthropy is not trickle down, and the gates foundation has to be one of the most critical I know of.
Prosperity 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…
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What exactly am I supposed to do as a resident to change how a state government regulated utility operates? Please respond with something other than "Vote", which I already do.
1) Boycott the products and share the idea with others. 2) Show up to town meetings BEFORE these data centers come. 3) Organize! This is the most important. Yes, voting does not matter, but being a loud constituency does.
Re #2) I am a tahoe resident and these data centers aren't in my towns. They are far away. I'm not blaming the data centers for these problems, I just disagree with OP that "Tahoe residents kicked the can down the road". Many of us just go to work, take care of our families, and pay our electric bill. Just not sure how this is our fault.
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> fewer young people paying to support an much larger number of older folks The largest generation by population in the US is Millenials, second largest in Gen Z. https://www.populationpyramids.org/generations/united-states
It's very obviously not the total number of people that matters. It's the difference in the number of people being funded and doing the funding. The math is fairly straightforward: # of Boomers - Greatest Gen > Millennials - Boomers This means that Millennials will have a greater burden than Boomers did. Which means Millennials will live with fewer resources.
Presumably you're comparing people of working age contributing to social security vs. people in retirement receiving social security. That age can vary but let's pick 65 as a typical retirement age.
Here's another data source:
https://theworlddata.com/us-population-by-age/
There are 205.7 million working age adults vs. 61.2 million of age 65 and older.
From where do you get the "fewer young people paying to support an much larger number of older folks"?
It's weird to read an article about how AI is ruining Lake Tahoe, with a map illustrating the problem, when the map itself has the world's most generic "100% generated by Claude" UI ever. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the article using the Claude map. It's just deeply funny somehow.
I'd love for us to get away from this trope of ever-increasing umbrella categories that you are discouraged from criticizing if you participate in it, very commonly marked by usage of the term "funny"/"hilarious" to imply hypocrisy. The world is big and complicated. "AI" is the biggest umbrella category we have ever seen in modern civilization. There's nothing inherently wrong with criticizing AI while using AI. Ther…
That's especially the case for incredibly optional things like choosing to generate an AI image or buying from a company that the buyer says is immoral. (I don't include moving from a country in the incredibly optional category.)
I think hypocrisy is perhaps one of the most useful criticisms we have to evaluate others in terms of whether they sincerely hold the beliefs they espouse -- for example, if a politician or entertainer says "Everyone should not do x", maybe that's a sincerely-held belief that we should respect. But if we then find out that politician or entertainer was actually doing x, maybe it's not actually a sincerely-held belief we should respect their views about.
For US readers, like if said "Politician X is bad for Y reason" but we then find out the accusing party was actually doing Y, is there any stronger indicator about whether their espoused beliefs were at least sincerely-held, regardless of whether we disagreed with the view?
> And people are hypocritical!
"And people are " could be said about most other illegal or frequently-criticized behaviors -- and would especially be the case if the consequences for the other behaviors were only as bad as the "consequences" faced for hypocrisy. But that doesn't mean we should avoid criticizing those other behaviors for that reason.
This is an interesting problem. I have been wanting to dig deeper on some of the complaints around water and power. This one is unique though. Doesn’t read much like a problem so much with data center growth as it does with Liberty mismanaging their business/assets. For almost 20 years liberty acted as nothing more than a transmission operator with very weak agreements on power generation. They should have been figur…
If the residents of Tahoe owned their electricity provider, we wouldn't be having this problem. This was the norm up utnil the late 20th century and then we started selling off all the utilities for "efficiency". These public-private "partnerships" (or just straight privatization with a regulated industry) allow investors to keep profits while pushing losses onto the public. Private equity is getting into utilities b…
It's not just a Liberty Utilities problem. Other nearby utilities, like TDPUD are in the same boat, only buying electricity and not generating it, and they are publicly owned.
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It's very obviously not the total number of people that matters. It's the difference in the number of people being funded and doing the funding. The math is fairly straightforward: # of Boomers - Greatest Gen > Millennials - Boomers This means that Millennials will have a greater burden than Boomers did. Which means Millennials will live with fewer resources.
I don't follow this comment at all, sorry. Presumably you're comparing people of working age contributing to social security vs. people in retirement receiving social security. That age can vary but let's pick 65 as a typical retirement age. Here's another data source: https://theworlddata.com/us-population-by-age/ There are 205.7 million working age adults vs. 61.2 million of age 65 and older. From where do you get…
I worry that someone here who can't follow a simple a population delta mapping from one generation to another isn't exactly arguing in good faith.
>Presumably you're comparing people of working age contributing to social security vs. people in retirement receiving social security.
No, we are talking about the previous net contributors (vs receivers) -- that is Boomers vs Greatest Gen in the 1980s -- versus the current net contributors (vs receivers), e.g. Millennials vs Boomers now.
That number has gone down dramatically, and because of that, social security is effectively insolvent.
>Under the current structure, the Social Security Administration estimates that Social Security will pay full benefits until 2033, when it will be forced to reduce benefits by about 23%.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikepatton/2026/05/12/the-comin...
The reason why it's insolvent now is that the relative number of payment contributors to payment receivers has gone down dramatically. Today there are "fewer young people per old person" than there were in previous generations.
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That is not 100% true though. In Burbank, CA the power is city owned. https://www.burbankwaterandpower.com/
I didn’t say it was 100% true and there are exceptions. I don’t know the true distribution, but I’d wager the vast majority of the US is served by either a corporation or some non-government organization. Now I know and it’s 1/7 or about 15% of Americans have government or community owned power. [0] [0] https://www.publicpower.org/public-power