We're all gonna end up paying for this and everyone involved knows it.
Public investment yields private dividends.
US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters
71–80 of 265 posts
Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters
#72It feels like ordinary people are becoming increasingly unnecessary. With AI, data centers, and big corporations, they don’t really need ordinary people anymore apart from their own employees. Capitalists only need robots and artificial intelligence to serve them, and ordinary people could just be put in zoos for display.
>Capitalists only need robots and artificial intelligence to serve them That doesn't make sense because robots and AI won't have money to buy goods and services.
The capitalists realized that if they literally starve the working class there will be revolution. But if they produce enough so they can sustain (barely) rest of the people with 1% output while they consume 99%, it will be okay.
So don't worry, you'll have basic ~~income~~ soylent green.
Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters
#73oh well if they pledge it's okay then!
They’re pledging to do what they were doing anyway. No one with any sense is building large data centers and assuming the grid will supply the energy.
Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters
#74It feels like ordinary people are becoming increasingly unnecessary. With AI, data centers, and big corporations, they don’t really need ordinary people anymore apart from their own employees. Capitalists only need robots and artificial intelligence to serve them, and ordinary people could just be put in zoos for display.
>Capitalists only need robots and artificial intelligence to serve them That doesn't make sense because robots and AI won't have money to buy goods and services.
People have already hooked up Stripe accounts to OpenClaw instances, so AI's currently buying and selling goods and services.
Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters
#75[flagged]
Using Claude to provide a legal definition of "pledge" is unconvincing at best. > What are the legal protections of a “pledge”? To answer that question is to first agree upon the legal definition of "pledge": pledge v. to deposit personal property as security for a personal loan of money. If the loan is not repaid when due, the personal property pledged shall be forfeit to the lender. The property is known as collate…
> For a personal loan of money
The seven are doing some fancy accounting to pay for their data centers, but I don’t think Larry, Sergey and others are taking out personal loans.
Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters
#76We should be focusing on how to build large turbines and transformers more quickly. A lot of transmission projects are blocked on equipment. There are warehouses full of photovoltaics that we cant use because of other industrial bottlenecks. We can build an entire PV plant before we can obtain a single custom transformer for a substation.
Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters
#77[flagged]
> Wait a “pledge”? What are the legal protections of a “pledge”? That's the boring part until you look at what they're promising to do. It's not as if existing data centers were getting power by sending a masked rogue to climb the utility pole, tap the lines and bypass the electric meter. Paying for electricity is the thing they were going to do anyway. Likewise, paying for "new generation capacity" is the thing they…
> And as the article alludes to, the real question is when? In general you can build a data center faster than you can build a power plant, which is exactly the reason data centers can cause short-term electricity prices to increase.
Musk is bringing turbines in on trailers. They’re not even bothering with permits. This is getting really wild west.
https://electrek.co/2026/03/03/elon-musk-xai-data-center-und...
Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Making charcoal releases CO2 though? How does that help with carbon capture?
You don't HAVE to make it into charcoal, but it will take up way more volume if you don't and contains tons of volatiles like methane that will come out and may make the ground less stable to simply bury with dirt as it partially rots. Theoretically you could harness some of those volatiles for some energy production, but at the very least use those volatiles to heat the wood and make it charcoal for basically free.
Methane is a significantly more effective GHG than carbon dioxide!
Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters
#79Does it include externalities (co2 emissions)? Increasing natural gas generation is of course disastrous policy with a major death toll from the climate disaster, there needs to be a rampdown of fossils use and production.
The only realistic way to "bear the cost" of CO2 emissions is paying for getting atmospheric carbon back into the ground. Right now that seems difficult to do at scale. The best way I know is making charcoal and burying it. Offsetting 1kWh needs on the order of 200g of wood turned into charcoal and buried.
Are you suggesting we cut down trees and bury them to save the planet? For me, this idea marks the departure from reason and into crazytown.
When our civilisation is excavated in 500 years, they are going to say we were as crazy as all of the others.
Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your goal seemed to be to fact check Claude. I'm not sure why your failure to do so should be taken up with law.com? Law.com's first definition is inapplicable. That leaves us with the second definition, which says nothing about whether a pledge is legally binding.
> Your goal seemed to be to fact check Claude. No, this is not my goal. My goal was to illuminate that Claude is a product which produces the most statistically relevant content to a prompt submitted therein. > I'm not sure why your failure to do so should be taken up with law.com? The post to which I originally replied cited "Claude" as if it were an authoritative source. To which I disagreed and then provided a def…
This is exhausting. Claude read the article.
Said article is not about a loan backed by a security agreement. That eliminates law.com definition 1.
Law.com definition 2 is silent on whether pledges are binding.
Thus ended your research.
I don't know why you care if Claude.com is authoritative. Law.com isn't either, the authoritative legal references are paywalled. A law dictionary, as we've demonstrated by law.com's second definition's vagueness, isn't necessarily even the correct reference to consult.
Your failure, I suppose, is that you provided worse information than Claude. I suppose you should have typed "Don't cite Claude please" and moved on.