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There are two simultaneous problems that I've come to understand with datacenters and the people that live in their proximity: 1. Somehow the public is always
by oooyay 5mo ago
There are two simultaneous problems that I've come to understand with datacenters and the people that live in their proximity:
1. Somehow the public is always left holding the bag for increased transmission costs despite the cause of the increase being a single (or short list) of outliers.
2. The residential public, as is tradition, is always asked to scale down for industrial demand.
How can we imagine expanding a system that results in both of these outcomes? That, to me, seems to be the thing to fix first.
- Noaidi 5mo agoThe idea that capitalism off loads the cost of externalities onto the unwitting public is nothing new. This is just the most recent and obvious version. Air anbd water pollution are the old ones. They make the pollution and the public pays for it with superfund sites or increased health care costs. The solution is having the consumer pay for the externalities when they use the product. But this would make AI so much more expensive. When you use AI you are exploiting other people. Just keep that in mind.
- jshen 5mo agoI think it's people that do that, not capitalism. This happens in every system that has existed in human history.
- tadfisher 5mo agoAbsolutely not. The default economic system is anarchy, also known as sharing and mutual aid. You see this even in the reddest of US states, where disaster victims help each other, and a huge pastime is sharing food via potlucks. But all evidence points to anarchical/egalitarian cultures as the baseline mechanism of human organization from prehistory. Externalities don't exist in anarchic systems, because there is no hierarchical separation between producer and consumer. You can't push off costs to some members of the community when they have equal power to retaliate in kind, and there is no incentive to do so.
- catlikesshrimp 5mo agoHaiti is in Anarchy. All sharing and mutual aid is shadowed by resource and power struggle. It is even worse than communism and fascism.
- Noaidi 5mo ago> Haiti is in Anarchy This is what people say when they have no idea what people mean by the POLITICAL system of Anarchism (Libertarian Socialism). Anarchism, the political system, is not "chaos". That is propaganda that started during the 1930's. If you want to learn about it, real the Anarchist FAQ. (I have a degrees in American History and Economics if that matters). https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-editorial-collective-an-anarchist-faq-full https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-ed...
- CamperBob2 5mo agoYeah, and communism has never been given a fair shake, either. For that matter, neither has laissez-faire capitalism. At some point, you need to accept that your favorite "-ism" has an impedance mismatch with human nature.
- tadfisher 5mo agoAnarchism means "without hierarchy". This how humans organized until the populations of sedentary agricultural communities exploded. I will argue, and keep arguing despite downvotes, that anarchism has the least impedance mismatch with human nature out of every system, because it was the status quo before civilization became the norm.
- jshen 5mo agopretty sure humans had hierarchy from the beginning.
- sieabahlpark 5mo ago
- catlikesshrimp 5mo agoThe last two sentences are drawing downvotes to an otherwise sensible comment.
- Noaidi 5mo agoI agree. But is it a false statement?
- mindslight 5mo agoIt's the tired pattern of absolving the direct bad actors (the corpos themselves), as well as corrupt regulators who give them a pass, in favor of diffusing the responsibility onto individuals. If we're talking about collective action to solve the problem, it should be more of the form of demanding regulation that directly stops the bad actors, rather than this nonsensical fallacy from the same vein as "voting with our wallets".
- jmyeet 5mo agoTransferring wealth from the young and poor to the old and wealthy is the entire purpose of our government. This is now the endpoint we are bouldering towards: the bottom 90% increasingly have nothing left to steal or exploit. And just like an algal bloom that eventually runs out of oxygen and dies, this is where this system and our society unravels.
- therobots927 5mo ago*Transferring wealth from the poor to the rich
- scoofy 5mo agoNo... we are specifically transferring it from the young. This is happening across the west. Once birth control was created, we kicked off a ticking time bomb of a crisis by not actually changing our social safety nets, with fewer young people paying to support an much larger number of older folks. At the same time, our entire housing shortage is designed to enrich the homeowners by protecting the value of their property at the expense of the young who live with a zero-sum shortage, when previous generations could typically buy a home at, or near, the cost of construction. We need to be honest that while yes, we are transferring wealth from the poor to the rich, we are also transferring wealth from the young to the old.
- jjav 5mo ago> 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 https://www.populationpyramids.org/generations/united-states
- scoofy 5mo agoIt'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.
- TitaRusell 5mo agoThe 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.
- butvacuum 5mo agonothing ever trickled down. philanthropy is not trickle down, and the gates foundation has to be one of the most critical I know of.
- paradox460 5mo agoCarnegie at least built libraries
- onlypassingthru 5mo agoWell, MacKenzie Scott seems to be doing her best but she's the exception.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- cute_boi 5mo agoHow will this be fixed when the public doesn’t have any power to make changes, and politicians are bribed—i.e., lobbied—by all these companies building data centers?
- PieTime 5mo agoThis is the same issue for water in California as well. Growing water thirsty crops in a desert to use an allocation while average people are asked to conserve.