5 ms·

The best outcome for all of us is for tech companies to get into power. Tech got into telecom (dark fiber, undersea cabling) and provide free services (youtube,

The best outcome for all of us is for tech companies to get into power. Tech got into telecom (dark fiber, undersea cabling) and provide free services (youtube, gmail, etc), which used to cost a lot historically. Everyone had to shell out a few hundred dollars/month just for phone calls (billed per minute) and txt messages. Now, we are at a point all communication is free. We can do video conferences with upto 100 people worldwide for free. If tech companies get into power and break down the regulatory capture of utilities, they can make money off of energy storage and virtual power plants while providing free power for people.

VoodooJuJu 2y ago
[flagged]
- fieldcny 2y ago
  But always always with Mus-informed grand intentions of changing the world for the better. All we need is another market to solve every problem! It makes everyone with power and money happy, they love markets because they are experts at fucking everyone every way possible. Thats how you build inter-generational wealth!
staplers 2y ago
all communication is free My internet and cellular bill say otherwise. Edit: OP's comment is almost nonsensical I feel it might be AI. "Traditionally youtube would cost hundreds of dollars"??
- saulpw 2y ago
  Communication is not quite "free", but it is effectively unmetered. Compare with pre-internet communication, where "long-distance" calls (outside your area code) were billed per-minute. An hour-long conversation with your boyfriend who lived an hour away? $5. Across the country? $10. Across the world? $100. For data, Compuserve charged $5/hour for access, regardless of whether you used 300bps or 28.8kbps. So a 1MB download could cost anywhere from 50 cents (28.8k at night) to $10 (2400bps during the day). And that was in addition to the cost of having a phone line in the first place, not to mention the hardware--a decently fast modem cost several hundred dollars, and needed to be replaced every couple of years as the tech was improving relentlessly. A service like Youtube with on-demand streaming video of just about any content you can imagine would certainly be worth hundreds of dollars a month. Hell, cable television with 50 channels was $30-50/mo (or more depending on whether or not you splurged for HBO/etc), and that was whatever grab bag of content they decided to include. Remember too that all these are 1990s prices, so you need to at least double them to account for inflation.
  - AStonesThrow 2y ago
    > Communication is not quite "free", but it is effectively unmetered. Yet we're in a conversation about data centers, and our concept of "unmetered communication" only refers to one end of the line. What does it cost companies and orgs to communicate with us? What does it cost them to keep a server operational, functional and sending data to us? It's "free and unmetered" for you to watch YouTube, run yt-dlp, put up your ad blockers and PiHoles, but what cost for everyone but you? I would also consider time/effort costs in communicating. Compare having a rotary-dial phone, the ultimate "thin client", with a general-purpose computer or smartphone. How much time and effort do we put into fiddling with them, upgrading them, fixing settings, troubleshooting whatever communication software is on top of them? Newspapers cost us $0.25-$1.50, but that's a highly subsidized cost like riding public transit.
  - staplers 2y ago
    it is effectively unmetered My $30 data cap fee says otherwise.
- tpmoney 2y ago
  Relative to the beginnings of the internet, your current internet bill is closer to "free" for communication than just about any other time in history. In 1996, AOL introduced their "unlimited" dialup plan. For a mere $19.95 / month, you too could browse the information super highway at a blisteringly fast 56kbps. At today's prices, that would make it $40 / month. But that was their unlimited plan. In 1995 AOL charged you $9.95 for 5 hours and the $2.50 per hour after that each month. Assuming you wanted 24/7 access like we all do these days, AOL would have cost you ~$1,800 per month, or ~$3,700 / month in today's money. Even assuming you don't want 24/7 access, the average internet user today supposedly spends 6 hours a day online[2]. Even at that rate you're still looking at ~$435 / month (or $898 / month today). And that was just your access costs, you still needed to pay for the phone service. According to the FCC[1] you could expect to tack another $20 / month on to those costs, just for your local phone service. And all of that would have probably been enough to service one user online at a time. If you wanted multiple people in your household to be online at the same time, you at a minimum are going to want multiple phone lines, never mind the additional hourly access charges. [1]: https://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/Reports/FCC-State_Link/IAD/ref97.pdf https://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/Reports/FC... [2]: https://www.independent.co.uk/advisor/vpn/screen-time-statistics https://www.independent.co.uk/advisor/vpn/screen-time-statis...
hyperdimension 2y ago
I believe Microsoft is currently doing just that, reserving the output of Three Mile Island. The article was here on HN around a week ago. I don't necessarily see anything wrong with that, and I can see the communication of demand changes back to generation being useful to those running the plant(s).
- atomic128 2y ago
  Microsoft commits to pay somewhere between $100/MWh and $140/MWh for 20 years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41601443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41601443 Microsoft's commitment allows Constellation Energy to restart the 819 MW nuclear fission reactor at Three Mile Island. This reactor operated without problems for approximately 45 years and was switched off in 2019. The other reactor at Three Mile Island (880 MW) melted harmlessly in 1979 due to operator error. That reactor will never be restarted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident Clean baseload power is extremely valuable. Nuclear fission is the only clean baseload power source mature enough to be widely adopted. Today there are 440 nuclear fission reactors operating in 32 countries. Having used fission reactors for 70 years, we know how to build them and operate them at 95%+ efficiency (https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity). For example, Vogtle 3 and 4 have been operating at 100% of their capacity. In contrast, solar and wind are not baseload power solutions. They are intermittent and unreliable, fundamentally weather dependent. If you have battery backup sufficient for time T and the weather doesn't cooperate for time T+1, your data center is offline. Furthermore, even a day or two of battery backup eliminates the cost advantage of solar and wind. As a last resort, fossil fuel backup plants can be built, but building them is costly and using them is dirty. See Germany's power grid for an embarrassing real-world example. Solar + wind + batteries is an intrinsically unreliable, unacceptable solution. Please see Yann LeCun's comments, reflecting Meta's view on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41621097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41621097
  - pydry 2y ago
    >solar and wind are not baseload power solutions. They are intermittent and unreliable. Being 5x cheaper more than makes up for that though. None of the viable modes of storage (pumped water, hydrogen, batteries) are expensive enough to make paying 5x per kilowatt hour worthwhile any more. If you roundtrip solar and wind via hydrogen stored for months and back into electricity again (the most expensive mechanism), it's still cheaper than every single kilowatt hour of nuclear power delivered on the sunniest, windiest days. It really is difficult to overstate just how mind bogglingly expensive nuclear power is. Unless it's used to cross-subsidize the military nuclear industry it just isnt worth it.
sirsinsalot 2y ago
Yes yes because the solution to the myopic God complex of the tech industry is more of it. Wow. Really chugging the coolade.
- janderson215 2y ago
  “Oh, just great. That what we need…more engines. These egomaniacs are going to ruin the world.” -sirsinsalot in 1898
  - sirsinsalot 2y ago
    I rest my case regarding the cult thinking.
    - janderson215 2y ago
      The jury has deliberated and demands that you pay my legal fees.
      - fieldcny 2y ago
        Jury decides to change their verdict after being algorithmicly sentenced to 90 days in jail for using the wrong exit in the court building as they were being released from duty by the court officers. CEO of VerdictAI is quoted as saying “shit happens, if they have any value as humans they would have enough money to get out of this, so the AI must be right. One must not lose sight of the fact that we have freed Americans from millions of hours of manual labor with our InmatesAI volunteer workforce.”
        janderson215 2y ago
        Maybe I’m making assumptions a rather than making an inference, but this seems like the perspective of somebody who wants to stop development of future technology altogether because of bad actors. I’m not saying there aren’t concerns, but risks can be mitigated and precautions put into place to prevent catastrophes. Stopping development because of valid concerns is not the right move. It’s not even the right move to stop developing weaponry which has a stated goal of causing direct harm to other humans. There are people in the world who will attempt to do these things and much more dangerous things recklessly and with far worse intentions than making money, and if those people get technological and military superiority over The West, the world will look very different than it does today. There are a whole lot more ways the world could be worse than it could be better. The current world order is not ideal, but think about what the actual long term outcome is if The West stops.
madeofpalk 2y ago
The big tech companies are already “into power” - they (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, etc) are constantly investing in power projects close to their data centers and manufacturing hubs.
pydry 2y ago
It wasnt tech companies that "got into telecoms", it was telecoms that overbuilt infrastructure which tech companies later bought up for a song when the bubble popped. This is a "workable strategy" only if you can find a sucker to eat the losses.
kortilla 2y ago
>Everyone had to shell out a few hundred dollars/month just for phone calls (billed per minute) and txt messages. Now, we are at a point all communication is free. Not sure where you are but where I am you still have to pay for cell phone data plans and internet to the house.
onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
I imagine they will just finance their own small nuclear reactor plants probably through power purchase agreements in whatever states which will allow them to do so. Those states will be where the new data centers and jobs go. They're not going to build a second grid, or power plants for everyone else. That's an awful business. These companies are in good businesses. They don't want to get into an awful business. There's so much wealth to be created given the multiplier these SMNR companies are likely to have. And the tech companies will invest in the SMNR companies they purchase power from. Some of them are already invested. Hopefully, they'll have enough scale that whatever they need to do makes it cheaper for the grid at large.
- RayVR 2y ago
  I think this is what you are saying, but to clarify, they will not own the power infrastructure. Execs from Google and Microsoft have already said this[0] Microsoft have already entered into an agreement with Constellation Energy which pays to restart one of the reactors at three mile island. This comes with a 20yr purchase of the power from that plant. There aren't many usable and idle nuclear power plants sitting around. It's extremely likely, as you point out, that states will soon be competing for jobs by offering land for both data centers as well as new power plants. The best estimates I've seen but new construction of nuclear plants at 5-7 years. If this could safely be sped up then I assume big tech is already working to make it happen. Of note, there are already some third parties/regulators working to stop big tech from capturing large shares of existing power generation[1] [0] https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insights/latest-news/electric-power/061824-google-microsoft-will-not-invest-in-new-nuclear-plants-but-support-technology-officials https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight... [1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/amazon-data-center-nuclear-power https://spectrum.ieee.org/amazon-data-center-nuclear-power
  - onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
    In South Korea, they can complete SMNR in 24 months: https://www.constructionbriefing.com/news/who-is-building-small-modular-reactors-and-how-long-will-it-take-/8026100.article#:~:text=The%20South%20Korean%20government%20claimed,power%20plant%20built%20on%20site https://www.constructionbriefing.com/news/who-is-building-sm....
aguaviva 2y ago
The geometric decreases in cost that you cite (in terms of communications and SaaS) are due primarily to Moore's Law. Unfortunately there is no similar law affecting power generation costs. If tech companies got into power, the inevitable result would be that they embrace and extend the regulatory capture of utilities, with the explicit goal of maximizing their profit at the expense of human needs. As well as of course the evisceration of as much pesky environmental regulation as their lobbyists can get their hands on, to the extent that it serves as an impediment to this paramount goal. Their philosophical stance on these concerns and tradeoffs has already been made palpably clear, in any case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41552642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41552642 From everything we know so far, these people definitely will not do the right thing without the swift and exacting application of a very heavy stick.
- nostromo 2y ago
  Solar has its own Moore’s Law called Swanson’s Law which shows that solar has been decreasing geometrically in price. In power generation there is little appetite for innovation from producers since they are either monopolies or government agencies. So instead all innovation has been going to local generation like solar and wind.
  - aguaviva 2y ago
    Good points.
- notTooFarGone 2y ago
  >As well as of course the evisceration of as much pesky environmental regulation as their lobbyists can get their hands on As if any tech company would build anything but solar. You don't need to bend the rules here and you don't need too much storage either. You just need cheap land, a fuckton of solar to get your peaks to your base consumption and you already do 60% of energy renewable. Anything above that is battery storage and more land. It's such a no brainer in cost and from an operations PoV the only thing that is easy enough to go into power.
bcrl 2y ago
Telecom is not more affordable today than it was in 1990. Back in 1990 the private phone line we shared at home for a family of 4 primarily to support connecting to local BBSes and the internet cost $20/month, or roughly $48.65 in 2024 dollars. That $20 was enough to be able to send and receive email through Fidonet and UUCP, download software and connect to the local Freenet for internet access. Today's telecom spend is on the order of $250/month once a cell phone, landline (since there is no cell phone service here) and internet connection are all included. That's pretty much a factor of 5x increase in telecom spend required for a family of 4. Sure, we can do a lot more, but it's not cheaper when directly compared to the historic cost of telecommunications services. I don't think tech getting into power will make things better. Just look at what is happening in Texas and other parts of the world: grid operators have to pay bitcoin miners to turn off their farms when grid capacity is overwhelmed, which drives up cost for everyone. Depending on where data centers are located, construction of new transmission lines becomes necessary. All this increases the baseline operating cost of the grid. Personally, I don't want more AI generated content or timelines powered by AI driving toxic engagement because it gets more clicks. The "improvements" we're seeing now are beyond the point of diminishing returns. Tech will abuse any externalities that exist worth exploiting, and society will end up paying for it.
- Clamchop 2y ago
  Handwaving away all the additional utility seems unfair to me. These pipes are a lot fatter, more accessible than ever before, and there are many more ways to use them. Working from home, eliminating shopping trips, telehealth, video calls, online banking and bill pay, podcasts, maps, music, gaming, the list goes on and on. If you're "cord cutting" and not paying for cable TV anymore, then you likely still come out ahead even after folding a couple of streaming services into the mix. If all you have are 1990 expectations, then you should be able to make do with something for about $50/mo, maybe less. Either a cheap phone plan, or entry level internet and VOIP. And it'll still be leagues more useful. That private phone line you shared could only be used by the one computer in the household, if there even was a computer, which more often than not there wasn't, and when it was online, you couldn't take phone calls, which was more of a problem than now, because it was 1990. And we don't live in fear of our telephone bills like we used to. We don't charge long distance, by the minute, or per text. Data caps are annoying, but they're not life-changingly expensive, and hey, if you're living it up like it's 1990, you'll never get anywhere close to exceeding them anyway.

VoodooJuJu 2y ago

[flagged]

fieldcny 2y ago
But always always with Mus-informed grand intentions of changing the world for the better. All we need is another market to solve every problem! It makes everyone with power and money happy, they love markets because they are experts at fucking everyone every way possible. Thats how you build inter-generational wealth!

staplers 2y ago

all communication is free My internet and cellular bill say otherwise. Edit: OP's comment is almost nonsensical I feel it might be AI. "Traditionally youtube would cost hundreds of dollars"??

saulpw 2y ago
Communication is not quite "free", but it is effectively unmetered. Compare with pre-internet communication, where "long-distance" calls (outside your area code) were billed per-minute. An hour-long conversation with your boyfriend who lived an hour away? $5. Across the country? $10. Across the world? $100. For data, Compuserve charged $5/hour for access, regardless of whether you used 300bps or 28.8kbps. So a 1MB download could cost anywhere from 50 cents (28.8k at night) to $10 (2400bps during the day). And that was in addition to the cost of having a phone line in the first place, not to mention the hardware--a decently fast modem cost several hundred dollars, and needed to be replaced every couple of years as the tech was improving relentlessly. A service like Youtube with on-demand streaming video of just about any content you can imagine would certainly be worth hundreds of dollars a month. Hell, cable television with 50 channels was $30-50/mo (or more depending on whether or not you splurged for HBO/etc), and that was whatever grab bag of content they decided to include. Remember too that all these are 1990s prices, so you need to at least double them to account for inflation.
- AStonesThrow 2y ago
  > Communication is not quite "free", but it is effectively unmetered. Yet we're in a conversation about data centers, and our concept of "unmetered communication" only refers to one end of the line. What does it cost companies and orgs to communicate with us? What does it cost them to keep a server operational, functional and sending data to us? It's "free and unmetered" for you to watch YouTube, run yt-dlp, put up your ad blockers and PiHoles, but what cost for everyone but you? I would also consider time/effort costs in communicating. Compare having a rotary-dial phone, the ultimate "thin client", with a general-purpose computer or smartphone. How much time and effort do we put into fiddling with them, upgrading them, fixing settings, troubleshooting whatever communication software is on top of them? Newspapers cost us $0.25-$1.50, but that's a highly subsidized cost like riding public transit.
- staplers 2y ago
  it is effectively unmetered My $30 data cap fee says otherwise.
tpmoney 2y ago
Relative to the beginnings of the internet, your current internet bill is closer to "free" for communication than just about any other time in history. In 1996, AOL introduced their "unlimited" dialup plan. For a mere $19.95 / month, you too could browse the information super highway at a blisteringly fast 56kbps. At today's prices, that would make it $40 / month. But that was their unlimited plan. In 1995 AOL charged you $9.95 for 5 hours and the $2.50 per hour after that each month. Assuming you wanted 24/7 access like we all do these days, AOL would have cost you ~$1,800 per month, or ~$3,700 / month in today's money. Even assuming you don't want 24/7 access, the average internet user today supposedly spends 6 hours a day online[2]. Even at that rate you're still looking at ~$435 / month (or $898 / month today). And that was just your access costs, you still needed to pay for the phone service. According to the FCC[1] you could expect to tack another $20 / month on to those costs, just for your local phone service. And all of that would have probably been enough to service one user online at a time. If you wanted multiple people in your household to be online at the same time, you at a minimum are going to want multiple phone lines, never mind the additional hourly access charges. [1]: https://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/Reports/FCC-State_Link/IAD/ref97.pdf https://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/Reports/FC... [2]: https://www.independent.co.uk/advisor/vpn/screen-time-statistics https://www.independent.co.uk/advisor/vpn/screen-time-statis...

hyperdimension 2y ago

I believe Microsoft is currently doing just that, reserving the output of Three Mile Island. The article was here on HN around a week ago. I don't necessarily see anything wrong with that, and I can see the communication of demand changes back to generation being useful to those running the plant(s).

atomic128 2y ago
Microsoft commits to pay somewhere between $100/MWh and $140/MWh for 20 years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41601443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41601443 Microsoft's commitment allows Constellation Energy to restart the 819 MW nuclear fission reactor at Three Mile Island. This reactor operated without problems for approximately 45 years and was switched off in 2019. The other reactor at Three Mile Island (880 MW) melted harmlessly in 1979 due to operator error. That reactor will never be restarted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident Clean baseload power is extremely valuable. Nuclear fission is the only clean baseload power source mature enough to be widely adopted. Today there are 440 nuclear fission reactors operating in 32 countries. Having used fission reactors for 70 years, we know how to build them and operate them at 95%+ efficiency (https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity). For example, Vogtle 3 and 4 have been operating at 100% of their capacity. In contrast, solar and wind are not baseload power solutions. They are intermittent and unreliable, fundamentally weather dependent. If you have battery backup sufficient for time T and the weather doesn't cooperate for time T+1, your data center is offline. Furthermore, even a day or two of battery backup eliminates the cost advantage of solar and wind. As a last resort, fossil fuel backup plants can be built, but building them is costly and using them is dirty. See Germany's power grid for an embarrassing real-world example. Solar + wind + batteries is an intrinsically unreliable, unacceptable solution. Please see Yann LeCun's comments, reflecting Meta's view on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41621097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41621097
- pydry 2y ago
  >solar and wind are not baseload power solutions. They are intermittent and unreliable. Being 5x cheaper more than makes up for that though. None of the viable modes of storage (pumped water, hydrogen, batteries) are expensive enough to make paying 5x per kilowatt hour worthwhile any more. If you roundtrip solar and wind via hydrogen stored for months and back into electricity again (the most expensive mechanism), it's still cheaper than every single kilowatt hour of nuclear power delivered on the sunniest, windiest days. It really is difficult to overstate just how mind bogglingly expensive nuclear power is. Unless it's used to cross-subsidize the military nuclear industry it just isnt worth it.

sirsinsalot 2y ago

Yes yes because the solution to the myopic God complex of the tech industry is more of it. Wow. Really chugging the coolade.

janderson215 2y ago
“Oh, just great. That what we need…more engines. These egomaniacs are going to ruin the world.” -sirsinsalot in 1898
- sirsinsalot 2y ago
  I rest my case regarding the cult thinking.
  - janderson215 2y ago
    The jury has deliberated and demands that you pay my legal fees.
    - fieldcny 2y ago
      Jury decides to change their verdict after being algorithmicly sentenced to 90 days in jail for using the wrong exit in the court building as they were being released from duty by the court officers. CEO of VerdictAI is quoted as saying “shit happens, if they have any value as humans they would have enough money to get out of this, so the AI must be right. One must not lose sight of the fact that we have freed Americans from millions of hours of manual labor with our InmatesAI volunteer workforce.”
      - janderson215 2y ago
        Maybe I’m making assumptions a rather than making an inference, but this seems like the perspective of somebody who wants to stop development of future technology altogether because of bad actors. I’m not saying there aren’t concerns, but risks can be mitigated and precautions put into place to prevent catastrophes. Stopping development because of valid concerns is not the right move. It’s not even the right move to stop developing weaponry which has a stated goal of causing direct harm to other humans. There are people in the world who will attempt to do these things and much more dangerous things recklessly and with far worse intentions than making money, and if those people get technological and military superiority over The West, the world will look very different than it does today. There are a whole lot more ways the world could be worse than it could be better. The current world order is not ideal, but think about what the actual long term outcome is if The West stops.

madeofpalk 2y ago

The big tech companies are already “into power” - they (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, etc) are constantly investing in power projects close to their data centers and manufacturing hubs.

pydry 2y ago

It wasnt tech companies that "got into telecoms", it was telecoms that overbuilt infrastructure which tech companies later bought up for a song when the bubble popped. This is a "workable strategy" only if you can find a sucker to eat the losses.

kortilla 2y ago

>Everyone had to shell out a few hundred dollars/month just for phone calls (billed per minute) and txt messages. Now, we are at a point all communication is free. Not sure where you are but where I am you still have to pay for cell phone data plans and internet to the house.

onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago

I imagine they will just finance their own small nuclear reactor plants probably through power purchase agreements in whatever states which will allow them to do so. Those states will be where the new data centers and jobs go. They're not going to build a second grid, or power plants for everyone else. That's an awful business. These companies are in good businesses. They don't want to get into an awful business. There's so much wealth to be created given the multiplier these SMNR companies are likely to have. And the tech companies will invest in the SMNR companies they purchase power from. Some of them are already invested. Hopefully, they'll have enough scale that whatever they need to do makes it cheaper for the grid at large.

RayVR 2y ago
I think this is what you are saying, but to clarify, they will not own the power infrastructure. Execs from Google and Microsoft have already said this[0] Microsoft have already entered into an agreement with Constellation Energy which pays to restart one of the reactors at three mile island. This comes with a 20yr purchase of the power from that plant. There aren't many usable and idle nuclear power plants sitting around. It's extremely likely, as you point out, that states will soon be competing for jobs by offering land for both data centers as well as new power plants. The best estimates I've seen but new construction of nuclear plants at 5-7 years. If this could safely be sped up then I assume big tech is already working to make it happen. Of note, there are already some third parties/regulators working to stop big tech from capturing large shares of existing power generation[1] [0] https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insights/latest-news/electric-power/061824-google-microsoft-will-not-invest-in-new-nuclear-plants-but-support-technology-officials https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight... [1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/amazon-data-center-nuclear-power https://spectrum.ieee.org/amazon-data-center-nuclear-power
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
  In South Korea, they can complete SMNR in 24 months: https://www.constructionbriefing.com/news/who-is-building-small-modular-reactors-and-how-long-will-it-take-/8026100.article#:~:text=The%20South%20Korean%20government%20claimed,power%20plant%20built%20on%20site https://www.constructionbriefing.com/news/who-is-building-sm....

aguaviva 2y ago

The geometric decreases in cost that you cite (in terms of communications and SaaS) are due primarily to Moore's Law. Unfortunately there is no similar law affecting power generation costs. If tech companies got into power, the inevitable result would be that they embrace and extend the regulatory capture of utilities, with the explicit goal of maximizing their profit at the expense of human needs. As well as of course the evisceration of as much pesky environmental regulation as their lobbyists can get their hands on, to the extent that it serves as an impediment to this paramount goal. Their philosophical stance on these concerns and tradeoffs has already been made palpably clear, in any case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41552642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41552642 From everything we know so far, these people definitely will not do the right thing without the swift and exacting application of a very heavy stick.

nostromo 2y ago
Solar has its own Moore’s Law called Swanson’s Law which shows that solar has been decreasing geometrically in price. In power generation there is little appetite for innovation from producers since they are either monopolies or government agencies. So instead all innovation has been going to local generation like solar and wind.
- aguaviva 2y ago
  Good points.
notTooFarGone 2y ago
>As well as of course the evisceration of as much pesky environmental regulation as their lobbyists can get their hands on As if any tech company would build anything but solar. You don't need to bend the rules here and you don't need too much storage either. You just need cheap land, a fuckton of solar to get your peaks to your base consumption and you already do 60% of energy renewable. Anything above that is battery storage and more land. It's such a no brainer in cost and from an operations PoV the only thing that is easy enough to go into power.

bcrl 2y ago

Telecom is not more affordable today than it was in 1990. Back in 1990 the private phone line we shared at home for a family of 4 primarily to support connecting to local BBSes and the internet cost $20/month, or roughly $48.65 in 2024 dollars. That $20 was enough to be able to send and receive email through Fidonet and UUCP, download software and connect to the local Freenet for internet access. Today's telecom spend is on the order of $250/month once a cell phone, landline (since there is no cell phone service here) and internet connection are all included. That's pretty much a factor of 5x increase in telecom spend required for a family of 4. Sure, we can do a lot more, but it's not cheaper when directly compared to the historic cost of telecommunications services. I don't think tech getting into power will make things better. Just look at what is happening in Texas and other parts of the world: grid operators have to pay bitcoin miners to turn off their farms when grid capacity is overwhelmed, which drives up cost for everyone. Depending on where data centers are located, construction of new transmission lines becomes necessary. All this increases the baseline operating cost of the grid. Personally, I don't want more AI generated content or timelines powered by AI driving toxic engagement because it gets more clicks. The "improvements" we're seeing now are beyond the point of diminishing returns. Tech will abuse any externalities that exist worth exploiting, and society will end up paying for it.

Clamchop 2y ago
Handwaving away all the additional utility seems unfair to me. These pipes are a lot fatter, more accessible than ever before, and there are many more ways to use them. Working from home, eliminating shopping trips, telehealth, video calls, online banking and bill pay, podcasts, maps, music, gaming, the list goes on and on. If you're "cord cutting" and not paying for cable TV anymore, then you likely still come out ahead even after folding a couple of streaming services into the mix. If all you have are 1990 expectations, then you should be able to make do with something for about $50/mo, maybe less. Either a cheap phone plan, or entry level internet and VOIP. And it'll still be leagues more useful. That private phone line you shared could only be used by the one computer in the household, if there even was a computer, which more often than not there wasn't, and when it was online, you couldn't take phone calls, which was more of a problem than now, because it was 1990. And we don't live in fear of our telephone bills like we used to. We don't charge long distance, by the minute, or per text. Data caps are annoying, but they're not life-changingly expensive, and hey, if you're living it up like it's 1990, you'll never get anywhere close to exceeding them anyway.