That's why I suggest a mitigation to the increases for industry based on local employment. Data centers employ very few people per-Killowatt and so contribute a lot less to the local economy compared to those other industries.

It would make sense in conjunction with an employment based mitigation. Data centers employ very few people once operational (they're not called lights-out facilities for nothing), so no mitigation. Major manufacturer provides many steady jobs, more mitigation for them.

Of course, things get complicated. There are mini data centers being set up in people's back yards where the waste heat warms the home owners house. That doesn't employ a lot of people but gets effectively double use of the energy for at least a good part of the year, offsetting other energy use, so it should see some form of mitigation as well.

The bigger question though is how long until the data centers are abandoned? The big AI companies and their investors are operating at a loss as they jocky for market share and train ever larger models. But will people actually find the AI useful enough to pay for it once the investors start demanding their ROI? Will managers come to realize that they might be better off hiring people suffering schizophrenia with frequent psychotic episodes?

That people still don't realize they have a ruling class.

Your Masters want this and they are going to get it.

One of the old bugaboos with the right wing is the idea that you work the first 3 months of the year for the government.

But we know about half of the money in any given country goes straight to the top . 01%.

Nobody ever talks about the 6 months you spend working to pay for Bill gates's yacht.

Meanwhile my tax dollars paid for healthcare for people who couldn't afford it. I had a neighbor who had a kid that was only alive because my tax dollars and everybody else's paid for a surgery they need it. Pretty minor stuff but they'd be dead without it. Single mom with a $15 an hour job no way she could afford even a routine surgery like that.

The people at the top have class consciousness but us working stiffs do not. Down here in the trenches it's every man for himself.

Steve Lehto has a good video about this.

In Michigan the Lemon Law applies to problems that 'reduce the value to the consumer'.

Some people are attempting to return their cars over these popup ads. IIRC it was GM that was much more aggressive but I might have that detail wrong.

End to end encryption, for a toilet? Frankny I do not want a TOILET to connect me "end-to-end" with anybody. They're doing it wrong.

Time to pull up the sheet on IOT. Not only has it gone up it's own backside, now it's trying to go up ours too.

This pattern keeps re-emerging.

Online payment systems want your bank login details.

Facebook was infamous for scraping your IMAP account for contact information.

etc.

The implications for security are so severe I wouldn't mind if this were illegal, but certainly it should be legal for banks or cell providers to terminate online accounts of people who share their credentials, no matter if - or especially if - they are with other large corporations. How many times has T-Mobile been hacked in the past two years?

If an account holder wanted to download a data export and upload that to another provider I don't really care so much. It's the near mandatory sharing of credentials that is just such a terrible habit to normalize.

And yes, greybeards, we know you've never heard of apartment rental agencies only accepting Venmo for rent.

How about "hit", the most common word used to express the concept.

> So you can drive it but you cannot look at it?

Is there a difference between riding on a rocket and giving Russia the technical knowledge to build a thousand of them?

Personally I think Russia could figure it out if they wanted to but that's not why the rules are in place.

> Was he just being a rocket geek?

90% likely but the 10% difference is why there are rules that cannot be broken.

He signed up for obeying the rules, so it was a dumb move.

> "conserve energy! Ditch your tungsten! Go LED!" ... or the Planet will die in Hellfire!

( "you may be in a psyop when..." )

FWIW I replaced the warm white LED's in one quarter of my rooms with incandescents last week. Turns out current LED's contribute to diabetes.

It's been 20 years since I switched to CFL's and LED's and I was genuinely surprised how different (and really good) it feels to sit under a 200W incandescent.

The crazy thing is 20 years ago my lighting usage was over 2KW for my house whereas my entire house is now 1.4KW, typically, but the electricity bill has quadrupled while the usage fell in half so really it's an 8x.

Hence my investment in solar infrastructure. The society is collapsing in slow-mo; the AI datacenters are just exacerbating the problem of not being able to scale. They framed Nixon for impeachment over Project Independence, so this isn't an accident.

If this were a factory that needed huge amounts of water but there wasn't enough water for the factory the permit would simply be denied.

Notice how AI, datacenters, and electricity gets a special exception to the societal norms.

Partially it's the transhumanists who have a religious fervor in bringing about their AGI God, but part of it is just dumb bureaucrats who can't understand how anything, including Econ 101, works. Or they're just bribed, which happens to be a highly profitable technique.

if they win they become God-Kings who's slightest whim is made real to the limits of human civilization.

If they lose they just go to their graves insanely wealthy.

There is a *very* small chance they get thrown out of a window or poisoned by a Stalin or a Mao, but it's very, very unlikely. They have their own private armies to protect them.

Yeah, and when that bubble pops in a few months customers will look at them side-eyed.

We can't have those because they wanted to sell chicken meat to Germany after WWII.

No, really, Fat Electrician has a good video on it.

(our government is just a loony bin now)

It'll be about 3-5 years but more or less.

That's how long analysts think the AI build out will last. It's why nobody is building more capacity.