A lot of these types of AI complaints feel like blaming a pothole for cracking your windshield in half even though you've been driving around with it full of chips and micro cracks for years. It's certainly exacerbated the issue to a point where it's impossible to ignore now but the warning signs have been there for years- utilities and municipalities failing to secure power and water resources for future residents, companies engaging in mass layoffs only for the stock prices to climb. AI adoption aggravated the symptoms, the root causes remain the same.
50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers
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Re: 50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers
#62just 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.
I'd come up with a variety of ways to interfere with the placement of datacenters, and I'd sell them as a service to people who don't want a datacenter to interfere with their access to water or electricity. This would be, hopfully, absurd enough to make the government realize that they need to step in and make my business model irrelevant.
Re: 50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers
#63Earlier 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…
GP comment was basically verbatim from first 2 panel, with slaves replaced with decent wages.
Point being, you can complain about thing, even if you are forced to interact with said thing.
Re: 50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers
#64It will be hilarious if Google built a data center in Nevada only to run Incline Village out of power (where Sergey Brin pretends to live as a tax dodge).
> where Sergey Brin pretends to live as a tax dodge It's not just Brin who lives there. The median wealth of that town is at least 10x everywhere around it. It's the closest city in Nevada to the Bay Area. Back before California changed the law, if you had stock options you earned in CA and then moved to NV before you sold them, you could avoid paying income tax. Or if you sold your company. I know multiple people wh…
It's not just personal wealth either, Apple uses a shell company in Reno, NV to tax dodge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braeburn_Capital
Re: 50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why ? Many country have public generation without any shortages.
And do those countries have large and rapidly growing demand? A free market is the only reliable way to respond effectively to changing demand signals. Economic central planning always fails over the long term.
> Economic central planning always fails over the long term.
So do businesses - capitalism has business failure built in and expected. Private industry in energy has failed the public dramatically at times. Economic planning works in many respects - lots of places do fine with roads, energy, healthcare, water, gas, other transport infra (airports, subways, etc.).
The question is, which tool does what well, and how do we apply them? Private industry is good for rapid innovation and development, and for keeping things off the public ledger - smartphones, etc. It isn't good when failure isn't an option, such as police, water, ... look at hospitals, for a current example.
> central planning
These are bogey scare words - what is central about it? It's not a 5 year plan for the entire economy of the entire country.
Re: 50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers
#66This 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.
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.
Re: 50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers
#67It'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…
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Re: 50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers
#68A lot of these types of AI complaints feel like blaming a pothole for cracking your windshield in half even though you've been driving around with it full of chips and micro cracks for years. It's certainly exacerbated the issue to a point where it's impossible to ignore now but the warning signs have been there for years- utilities and municipalities failing to secure power and water resources for future residents,…
The difference is whether the government or the people are complaining then, right?
Or do you have something else in mind?
To me it's a classic "commons" problem. All our wealth in the end comes from extracting common resources and "making the best" of it.
Whether "the best" is to sustain population levels or to maximize private capital is a political question.
As of now, demanding things like free access to clean water is considered ideological and misguided by many people, maybe even "extreme".
Re: 50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers
#69This 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.
I've noticed there's a pattern of behavior with folks living in the forested parts of California where they expect everyone else to subsidize their impractical choice on where to put a house. Extreme wildfire risks? let everyone else shoulder the cost, don't deny our fire insurance. Power delivery infra costs (and associated risks, see wildfires)? don't make us actually pay for this, we're all in this together guys!
This is a good point when it comes to issues with "taming" the free market.
Re: 50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers
#70A lot of these types of AI complaints feel like blaming a pothole for cracking your windshield in half even though you've been driving around with it full of chips and micro cracks for years. It's certainly exacerbated the issue to a point where it's impossible to ignore now but the warning signs have been there for years- utilities and municipalities failing to secure power and water resources for future residents,…
> utilities and municipalities failing to secure power
To be fair, it's not as if they didn't often try to build more power.
As it turns out, most people don't like having a massive fuel-burning power plant near their homes. Now they don't even like having solar panel fields near their homes. These people often are the same kind to show up at city hall or public utility board meetings and raise a fuss.
Now, are they doing it and returning to houses that take a crapload (I do believe that is the technical term) of energy to heat and cool because of out-of-date windows, insulation, and HVAC controls? Maybe. Are they sometimes also the same people who hated the idea of phasing out incandescent bulbs? Probably. But either way, that power source ain't getting built.
> and water resources
Kansas City, St. Louis, Omaha, Des Moines, Milwaukee, Chicago, the Twin Cities, Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and Columbus all sit on major rivers or massive freshwater lakes and aren't in a desert climate. We could do something with that.