It's easy to point to the NYC plant as an example. The whole article reads like a libertarian hit piece "regulation is da evillll! We're so oppressed. Government can't do anything right."

I wonder though: how much of the increased cost is due to genuine improvements and maintenance?

It is worth noting that urban decay in the 70s, 80s, and 90s led to a huge backlog of deferred maintenance. (That, and human laziness in general.) We're constantly hearing stories along the lines of "a water main dating to the 1800s burst....It was never meant to hold up to this." Today lots of cities are painfully (and expensively) working through that backlog, either because leaks/breakage have forced the issue, or because they're finally realizing that those pipes in the ground were never meant to last forever.

We're also hearing stories about how storm sewers overflowing cause sewage plants to overflow into waterways. This used to just be accepted practice ("well shit...it's shit!"). Now, because we'd like to actually be able to use our rivers without catching e coli, and because climate change makes downpours more common, municipalities are starting to separate storm sewers from sanitary sewers.

Speaking for myself, my household water bill is never more than $50/mo. (It was about $30/mo until recently, when the city took out a massive bond to...replace all the old pipes, upgrade the treatment plant, and better manage storm water.) For every one of me, there's some household spending 3x as much each month to average $100/mo. Who is using that much water?!

Still, in my opinion, worth every penny. I've been to places where you couldn't drink the water, and places with no indoor plumbing at all. I really don't mind paying for what I've got.

You may not have bought it, but you certainly have paid for it - probably a lot more over the last 10 years than if you had bought something out of pocket. Verizon isn't offering you a phone "for free" out of the goodness of their hearts - they're doing it to make a profit.

I'm not sure how that's relevant. We're talking about punishing companies (social medial, beer, tobacco) for their actions that harm people. Compensating consumers isn't necessarily the point. The people who are harmed aren't necessarily even the consumers of the products: a drunk can kill with their vehicle, second-hand smoke harms anyone nearby, social media has fomented civil wars!

And just because states may have frittered the tobacco settlement money, I don't see that as an argument to not hold social media accountable for their ongoing malfeasance.

In other words: this is why we can't have nice things.

I would also highly recommend The Water Knife, which itself has extensive references to Cadillac Desert.

In short, it's not like folks haven't seen this coming.

We did the same with tobacco. The tobacco companies deliberately manipulated their product for maximum addictiveness, buried their own research on the harms, targeted advisements to children, lied to the public and Congress, and eventually got nailed to the tune of $200B for it.

After year-over-year cost increases without any improvement in service (speeds, coverage, etc.), I got sick of Verizon's BS and jumped ship for an MVNO. My cost for comparable service is now 1/3 of what it had been. My only regret is that I didn't do it sooner.

I always buy my devices outright and bring them to the carrier, having learned the hard way decades ago that purchasing a device from the carrier is always a bad deal in the long run.

I wonder if Alex Karp is one of those who contends that a declining (or even stagnating) population level will mean the end of civilization, as a lot of tech bros subscribe to these days. If so, that is one place where mass immigration can help - there's no shortage of useful people in this world.

Oh, he doesn't want those people? Well, I guess he can still hang with the pronatalist, Gilead-coded nutjobs in Silicon Valley.

This story has been up for a long while now, and yet in that time it has garnered just a handful of comments, mostly about trolling and pr0n.

News for nerds, indeed.

Well, good luck expanding electricity supply with that option. Last I heard, the lead time on new gas turbines is 5-7 years. Solar and batteries can go from green field to exporting power in ~1 year.

And let's not forget, the Trump administration has forced certain aging, un-economical, more-heavily-polluting coal plants to stay open and running, rather than letting them be shut down and decommissioned.

Come on! "From a certain point of view" was right there!

Ugh, I only wish.

And, alas, the cost of his prison stay will eliminate those recouped funds.

It is one contemporary measure, principally in the area of AI/LLM. You don't have to like it, but anyone on Slashdot these days ought to recognize it.

One could quantify this deal in terms of (peta?)FLOPS, except that may not be a meaningful unit for this use case. The FLOPS, as used by Top500 for instance, is typically defined for 64-bit (double-precision) float operations [ref]. AI/LLM models practically never use double-precision. Some training uses float32 (increasingly less these days), but almost all inference (running models after training) is performed using reduced precision (16- or 8-bit float).

As soon as Cerebras puts out a press release saying "We'll be supply ### petaflops of compute", the pedants on Slashdot would start frothing about how Cerebras is cheating the metric, because Cerebras might mean float8 precision, thereby "gaming" things to get a 8x multiplier.