People drank small beer in the Colonial era like it was Coca-cola. Popular among women and children especially.

What happened to American beer and ale and cider was a 20th century catastrophe known as Prohibition.

Despite our terrible beer, we have quite a few good cocktail recipes. Again thanks to Prohibition for that.

It makes no sense to spend more to tiptoe through costly incremental steps of infrastructure buildout buying stuff you crave to be rid of when you can hop right to the conclusion. Fuel is bad. You use it and then you need more fuel. That's a vulnerability to the fuel supplier, the logistics, the free market for fuel, changing government meddling. Fix it right once without fuel and be done with it for 30 years. It's not like there won't be another problem to solve the next day.

>as they are not allowed to use oil or coal

Or natural gas. No carbon. Carbon fuels amplify the already obscene thermal output by at least 2.5.

Also, none of them is dumb enough to go fission. The time to power is an order of magnitude greater than their expiration date if they don't have it. And their server and power costs are bad enough. They don't need to compound those expenses with the costliest source of energy available.

I don't see any reason to let data centers run their own wind mills, solar, and nuclear power on-site. Your justification that we (hand waves) used to do it is flimsy at best. That reasoning disappeared half a century ago when much of industry was connected to the grid. I mean seriously, why did my grandparents have to let the power company run 3 phase lines over our property if every factory could have just setup their own on-site power. Technically feasible, but such a stupid idea.

If you do most of your business in Ireland, then you're a foreign company. Cut them off from most federal contracts, require them to be double taxed on imports. Remove their access to US work visas (H1B). Those are for American companies.

If it is done fairly it isn't corruption. It's the self dealing and big enough to avoid consequences that is the problem

It is illegal to do it blatantly. But these companies try very hard to do it in a legal way.

If your profits are mostly in another country, then a reasonable law could treat your products and services as imports. Having tacking a tariff on MS office365 subscriptions would give actual American and European busineses a fair competitive playing field in their respective markets.

Image models take a lot more memory, as one would expect. If you want to run a text-only generative model for coding or knowledge, or as a database for all your books or manuals or whatever, that works great. Fits in 8GB of memory, has more than enough context for simple projects. The more memory and CPU you have, the better it gets.

You've just got the most expensive use case that takes a lot more hardware. It's still not actually out of reach per se (or it wasn't, before the price increases) but the outlay to start is much bigger.

You're right, it's NOT free, it's SOMETHING YOU ALREADY PAID FOR.

The really insane thing is that the USA spends more money per capita than ANYONE and still gets worth healthcare coverage and worse overall results, with lower life expectancy. There's even this effect where rich people don't get as good care as average people in other countries for a number of common conditions or procedures, because the whole system is so bad you can't even PAY for great service.

But that aside:

Solar is so gobsmackingly cheap, it'll pay for itself in almost zero time. The real cost is the grid, but generating enough power is so stupidly trivial it hurts. You put a solar panel out in a field and it collects electricity and that's the end of the story. You pay for that panel once every 20-30 years and it generates electricity for you. You don't dig things up out of the ground or fight wars, you just let it collect the electricity.

Technology Connections did an excellent video on renewable energy, and using just the figures for putting solar panels on corn farms that produce corn for ethanol and not food, his back of the envelope calculation was that you could produce 7700 TWh of electricity a year, which is considerably more than the 4100 TWh that the US grid currently produces.

The reality is there doesn't need to be any energy crisis at all. AI data centres don't even need to be an environmental problem, you can just hook solar panels and batteries up and run them and they'd even use less water than the corn fields that were displaced for the solar farm.

The whole discussion is ridiculous. More solar panels. Solar panels everywhere. It's effectively free. The only reason governments don't do it is so they can keep lining their pockets with oil and gas industry kickbacks.

Here's the video link to the right time stamp, if you want to check what I'm saying and review his math.

https://youtu.be/KtQ9nt2ZeGM?s...

AI companies have been caught lying to investors on numerous occasions. More regulation on data centers is the right action, not less.

In principle, a nation should not permit the private ownership of vital infrastructure. Such as the national grid or large scale power generators. Privatizing everything is a way for corporations to conceal everything, and pass their costs onto consumers and taxpayers. Public transparency of vital infrastructure ought to be a goal for any society, but there are some wrong-headed weirdos that scream "communism" any time we want to look at their books.

Power went out during a sunny day during peak demand. This isn't a base load problem, so throw some solar panels and wind turbines down. Takes about 1/10th the time to install and 1/20th the capital. Let's be efficient in how we build our infrastructure, but also do it in a timely manner.

I would rather build more high-voltage direct current (HVDC) that criss-cross the nation and provide a more durable backbone that also enables the trading of energy between large regions undergoing weather related demand. This is going to be a bigger bang for the buck than a handful of nuclear reactors, as those reactor sites will mostly be at existing sites and won't include the infrastructure improvements necessary to deliver the additional power out of their region.

And please don't build modular mini reactors. They cost more to operator overall and produce an exponentially higher amount of radioactive waste. As components wear tends to be high and those worn components become low-grade waste. It's also a Square-Cube law problem, in that a smaller vessel has more surface area for its volume. Every surface is an opportunity for contamination. For the most part, these modular reactors are an investment scam. They have some limited industrial utility, but you shouldn't bother installing one within 50 miles of a major metropolitan area, as there are far better solutions. (better = safer, cheaper, faster, cleaner)

Again, you were either eleven or you were living under a rock if you hadn't heard of the Transformers. Cuz if you had heard of it, you'd have known it was for kids and adolescents, and the female actress was there to keep the dads interested.

And that's exactly why we need to build more power infrastructure, particularly nuclear, and hand it all over to AI companies for free.

There is no spoon.