Splurge for me, conserve for thee.

Same with water in CA. Industry uses >80% of water in the state and the focus is on 30 second showers and bullying citizens because their representatives have been captured along with their press in the profit machine.

You're absolutely correct - just taking the opportunity to add some hard facts:

587,618

That is very little considering it's about the size of any other mid-Western state.

So: "This AI data center will use the energy of half a million households" - doesn't sound much better.

I read something about natural gas powered power plants; not sure if it's this one specifically.

Because unfortunately this is not the only gigantic climate destroyer AI thingy planned/built.

Why is this guy saying a datacenter generates energy? It does literally the exact opposite.

Is that true, though?

But this proposed data center is so big, it would have its own dedicated energy from gas generation and renewable sources, according to Collins and company officials.

The "depending on how you count" probably refers to the renewables.

Why is this guy saying a datacenter generates energy?

It's less absurd than it sounds and requires understanding how modern data center facilities that are being deployed by big tech actually work and run at a facility-wide and systemic level. They do generate this energy, they just proceed to use it. Notice he says roughly a gigawatt of energy, which is nowhere near the gross need for the facility as per the article.

Most modern data centers built in the past few years, especially those that are "campuses" as described, have on-site power generation solutions. Sometimes this means classic oil/coal/gas generators on the property, sometimes it means more involved and nuanced situations. What Lehane is telling the AP here is that, of the energy consumed by the new data center as a whole, "roughly and depending how you count," 1 gigawatt comes from such sources. The article clearly states the center is set to deploy at 1.8 gigawatts consumption scaling up to 10 gigawatts over the lifespan of the facility. Presumably these are on the same time scales and everything. Frankly, for an AP article this was written quite poorly and the exact meaning of most this information isn't very clear. I don't think that's Lehane's fault implicitly. Just seems like bad reporting.

People have this image in their heads of these big data centers opening up and just like, sucking up all the power from the local grid due to their demand and this is what causes things such as blackouts. This is mildly incorrect. The negative effects of these data centers' power demands is less to do with them "overloading" public grids and more to do with the market economy of energy. You get blackouts because all the energy they can't generate themselves on-site must be acquired somewhere else. They can walk up to the local power companies and buy energy just like any private citizen can. They often get discounted rates compared to the plebes, too. You end up with blackouts because the energy companies don't give a shit who they sell their product to, they just care that it sells. When companies like Microsoft, Nvidia, or OpenAI roll up with significantly more capital and resources than anyone else in the local economy, they're easily able to out-compete even the entirety of the local domestic power demand. That's what causes blackouts.

No one wants to talk about this because it's easier to just say braindead shit like "fuck datacenters/AI/big-tech/fuckingwhateveritis" so you can feel like you're "on the right side" than it is to acknowledge the long line of people in both the public and private sectors who had to rubber-stamp personally fucking the average person for us to even get to this point. Does big tech suck absolutely, fat, stinking donkey balls? For fucking sure. Are they anything more than a symptom of a much more entrenched societal rot? Nope.

misinformation about declining birth rates

What misinformation? Every expert on the subject is agreeing that we're at or below replacement rate.

I mean my opinion is if your plan is to take away everybody's healthcare, collapse the economy, close public schools, and decrease quality of life in general, plus do all these other crazy things that put the mother's life at risk, why would it be a good idea to encourage as many new births as possible?

Also, I know n=1 but I really wanted to have another kid last year, but put it off specifically bc of the crazy laws Republicans started passing that put maternal health at risk. Honestly, I'm relieved I didn't bc the economy has also gotten so bad since then and everything is so uncertain. Now when I read stories about brain dead women being forced to be kept alive to carry a fetus and give birth it makes me wonder if I'll ever want to risk having another baby.

I think it's dishonest to pretend that current birthrates in the U.S. at least aren't in part a reflection of many women's fears about giving birth during such a chaotic time.

I wasn't referring to the US in particular, but global birth rates.

science.org/content/article/po…

Edit to add: I'm in no way commenting on the situation in the States, just clearing up a potential misconception I see very frequently, which is that the global population is still booming, when we should already be worrying about the opposite.

I have seen impulsive gaslighting and malicious classified spill out of every one of these ai. Straight up doing verbal abuse.

Edit: I'm gonna go on. I forget what I was talking about, but I was connecting various facts and asking about Epstein stuff. It immediately and repeatedly classified it as non serious conspiracy, and after pressing, presented facts backing 4 out of 5 of the things it said was crazy, and there have been books written saying the exact same thing.

Bob and Doug, from Second City television.

Didn't want anyone to think it was cultural misappropriation or rocking and our neighbors to north. If there ever was a truer hoser than musk I'm not sure who it is