181–190 of 219 posts
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You're starting with an assumption that AI is, on the whole, a net positive for society. A lot of people would disagree.
Nuclear bombs and ICBMs aren’t a net positive for society either, but not pursuing them is bad geopolitical strategy.
At the end it's a facility that costs the locals and benefits non-locals. Even if AI is the truly greatest productivity booster, the benefits are still distributed over all its customers, and the environmental impacts are mostly local. It's like if someone is building a landfill in your hometown to bury the whole country's waste. Or it's like a factory that creates zero job.
The city councils know it, but the residents don’t.
The entire point of the last 10 years of Strong Towns was talking about municipal finance, infrastructure costs, and the insolvency of the American suburban town.
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> The fight against AI should just be about taxing token usage. What about self-hosted models?
You would purchase an AI tax stamp! Just make sure you’re being honest about your token usage. Or maybe we can have AI licenses! Sky’s the limit when you can just make up policy on the internet for free.
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how is AI an excuse when it can replace team of 10 people to 3? It is very efficient in doing menial jobs for sure.
So put those 7 "extra" people to work on something else.
The way it works in capitalist societies is that their employer fires them when it no longer needs them, and it's up to the individuals to find something else to work on. The doctrine claims that "the market" will find something for them. Which is true in a sense, although the specifics can be extremely dystopian.
If you want to put that responsibility for finding work on someone else, you have quite a lot of political work to do to convince people that it should be the way you propose.
At the end it's a facility that costs the locals and benefits non-locals. Even if AI is the truly greatest productivity booster, the benefits are still distributed over all its customers, and the environmental impacts are mostly local. It's like if someone is building a landfill in your hometown to bury the whole country's waste. Or it's like a factory that creates zero job.
The reason these data centers are getting built in place people don’t want them is because the towns are broke. The city councils know it, but the residents don’t. The entire point of the last 10 years of Strong Towns was talking about municipal finance, infrastructure costs, and the insolvency of the American suburban town. https://youtu.be/tI3kkk2JdoI
The entire state of Utah is not broke. Box Elder County is largely a rural community but it is also not broke.
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That's not true at all, they could: - impeach - pass new laws / revise old laws - hold real hearings - amend the constitution Now practically will this congress do so? No, but in principle they wield more power than the executive.
In the context of the current admin: - They have impeached already, multiple times. - Congress has no means of enforcing any laws they pass aside from trying to withhold funding. - Hearings are political circus at best with no real consequences. See: 0 US based Epstein abusers in any form of incarceration. - ah yes, amending the constitution. a very realistic and responsive option Since none of these are practical, t…
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If I'm in the room, yes. For me, AI is one, is the best handicap accessibility tool I've ever had. At a minimum, speech recognition is a higher quality, and second, it lets me write code again. I'm working on the third benefit, which is it helps me organize, helps my ADHD mind organize large chunks of random information. If you look around, you'll find the AI has made some significant improvements to medicine and eng…
> helps my ADHD mind organize large chunks of random information. I keep seeing this and I'm pretty envious! You must have a different form of ADHD than I do. For me, trying to use AI to build anything is terrible for my attention, it turns everything into a miserable slog because it's so hands off. I miss getting into flow.
AI helps me get into flow state because I can have a rambling conversation with a chatbot and work through ideas and what abouts. eventually it helps me forget to a place where flow is easier to maintain.
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If I'm in the room, yes. For me, AI is one, is the best handicap accessibility tool I've ever had. At a minimum, speech recognition is a higher quality, and second, it lets me write code again. I'm working on the third benefit, which is it helps me organize, helps my ADHD mind organize large chunks of random information. If you look around, you'll find the AI has made some significant improvements to medicine and eng…
I like this argument/reasoning more than any I've encountered so far. Thank you! Enabling the disabled is definitely a positive and this is a strong argument for the "pro AI" column.
I think one place we should apply this is to the financial system. Use it to detect fraud, tax manipulation games and Other b**** pulled by the 1%ers.
With luck, it might even help us find methods of reducing their influence and power.
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Except datacenters are actually very low environmental impact. As long as they provide their own power, they have MUCH lower impact than most farms would.
> As long as they provide their own power Key point doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Do all these data center buildouts include providing their own power? Seems like the answer is largely no. These companies expect power infrastructure to be supplied by the government, but also want lower taxes.
Looking at the controversial Stratos data center in Box Elder County:
Box Elder County baseline (before Stratos): 2026 General Fund revenue: $36.1M 2026 General Fund tax revenue: $21.1M 2026 Municipal Service Fund: $18.8M
Stratos (Phase 1): Power: 3 GW Revenue expected: $30M/year Revenue as % of existing county tax rev: 142%
Stratos (Full Buildout): Power: ~9 GW Revenue expected: $108M/year Revenue as % of existing county tax rev: 512%
Planned power details: - Box Elder says it will use natural gas from the nearby Ruby Pipeline. - MIDA describes it as dedicated on-site generation designed to limit demand on the existing grid. - The project ramps from ~3 GW in Phase 1 to ~9 GW at full buildout.
I'll acknowledge that the MIDA structure is not a normal county tax bill and comes with explicit energy-rate discounts, but given that the county could hit 500%+ of its previous tax revenue, I think that's a very easy deal for the county to make.
Data sourced from: https://www.midaut.org/stratos
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In the context of the current admin: - They have impeached already, multiple times. - Congress has no means of enforcing any laws they pass aside from trying to withhold funding. - Hearings are political circus at best with no real consequences. See: 0 US based Epstein abusers in any form of incarceration. - ah yes, amending the constitution. a very realistic and responsive option Since none of these are practical, t…
I don't disagree with you, and I think you might have misunderstood me. I think Congress could start clawing these back, but I agree, right now they have no effective power, which is why I called them a "eunuch congress."