That actually is how it is for everyone--except Texas because they were gullible enough to allow themselves to be talked into doing it the dumbest way.

Please share with us details of how this magical bidding process works.

"cost you more money than they generate"

This is a reminder that electrical companies in the US are allowed to have a monopoly in an area because they are classified as public utilities, meaning their rates are set by government commissions and their profit margins are capped. The matter of "price isn't a consideration, so long as they're getting electricity to customers and satisfying the oversight committees.

If it weren't for this, quite a lot of rural areas would be sitting around in the dark.

...when they're poorly designed by people who probably shouldn't be allowed to design building-sized facilities, sure. But once again, the vast and overwhelming majority of sites only have generators for emergency backup if the grid fails because that's always more expensive than a hookup to the local grid (who will always be able to produce electricity for less because their infrastructure is massive in comparison, and more efficient).

Some may ask, why do they have these generators when they also have UPSes? Because people shopping for data center space aren't going to pay for hosting in a facility that only had 99.9% uptime last year, when everywhere else managed to keep the lights on 100% of the time.

My thinking is that the reason that particular narrative gets pushed so hard is because most of the people who can be encouraged to histrionics by complete strangers don't even know enough to understand what they're reading. They'll see a data center say it pumps two million gallons a day without understanding the significance of closed loop (meaning it's the same 100 gallons or so running around in a circle all day long) and decide that very large number scares them, so it must be bad and "closed loop" must not actually mean anything. Nevermind the perpetual shroud of fog this would create if they were evaporating two million gallons of water. This makes those people unusually insulated against the truth, even if they have doubts and go looking for it.

Meanwhile, every data center is going to report the largest number they can because customers who are not casuals will think the bigger number means a better equipped and thusly more professionally-run hotel for their expensive computers to stay in.

Untrue and disingenuous. The "high-paid" people aren't in the data center because that's the whole freaking point of data centers. A place where the computers they require can exist without them having to lay hands on them all the time. ...but without data centers, no one's getting paid to know how to manage highly-redundant large scale systems because that's going to go towards maintenance of the self-hosted facility they'll need to pay for running just to get to that point.

Also, i f your company is letting new hires make purchasing decisions in the range of $10,000-$25,000 per 4U of space, your company is not long for this world.

That is entirely unsupported by fact. Closed loop systems that use glycol is the norm. There are no hidden cooling towers waiting around the corner to touch your no-no square.

This is absolutely not the place to be making up or even repeating fanciful nonsense, because here there are lots of people who actually know something about data centers and data center operation.

That is wildly inaccurate. Unless you live in Texas (because they were stupid enough to change this) your local public service commission sets the rates you pay for electricity. They do this based on operating costs and planning. There is no "demand-based" increase in costs, in part because this is one of the reasons they're a public utility--so the people don't get priced out of something considered essential or squeezed dry by capitalism run amok in a monopoly market. It's highly unlikely that anywhere has a PSC so horrible at their jobs that an upgrade to infrastructure is going to result in a significant increase to customer costs for more than the time it takes to burn off the one-time cost of infrastructure upgrades, and they should already be budgeting for upgrades because their human customers just keep having sex. It's been going on for quite a while.

Claiming the cost of water has "only recently" become relevant is simply disingenuous. Partly because in excess of 80% of data centers use closed loop glycol systems that need refilling far less often than the radiator in your car. It takes substantially less water than goes a small swimming pool to fill them, and once they're filled there's no more water "use". By and large it's only the poorly designed sloperators (which should probably just be made illegal) that are using evaporative cooling, so the actual reason "the impact of water over-use was an external cost" was that the toilets and the break room sinks don't use enough water to matter, and the rest of the system would be hard-pressed to lose more water in a year than flushing all the toilets once.

That makes it extra insane that the current witch hunt is operating with an almost complete absence of facts. The vast and overwhelming majority of data centers operate with closed loop cooling systems that are a about half ethylene glycol and half purified water. They require topping off by only a very small amount, if they require it at all.

Thinking that this adds significantly to a water crisis is like becoming irate about someone putting in a kiddie pool. ...except the data center doesn't get dumped out and put in the garage and has no need to be refilled.

"well documented"

The howling of the unwashed illiterates on social media does not count as "documentation", even by a little bit.

If they're not really selling games, then the gamers aren't really pirating them, either.

Wait, so it's now the phone's responsibility to keep the user from doomscrolling? What the heck happened to simply exercising a little self control?

Also, selling this for $500 is probably going to not go well for them.

They won't have to. Companies have spent big money and lots of research time just trying to keep children from cheating at video games with less than stellar success. This will be no different. The moment this starts to be a thing sites check, kids will be trading "hax" on discord and what have you that make the system report whatever they want it to.

So, we're expected to believe the insurance companies were paying GM twenty million for that data out of simple curiosity?

If they were simply doing aggregate metrics, the data wouldn't have involved the driver's names. That's a thing one should definitely not be including when one has already been telling the victims it won't be shared.

It seems more to me like the data brokers were interested in paying GM a bit of money because to the data broker it "would be cool" if their customers could literally purchase a map of a their target's comings and goings, in addition to every other bit of data they hoover up. But hey, clearly it's not an Orwellian surveillance state if the gov't has to pay a small subscription fee for it.

Dude, if you can find a copy of The Doomsday Book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Book_(film)) the most powerful part of the anthology is basically exactly this. See also specifically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It's probably one of my top five favorite things in my video collection of speculative fiction.