I don't see any point in blaming individuals and small businesses when wealthy investors and politicians aren't even pretending not to be giddy about all the new trade routes that open as sea ice melts.
Nobody should ever adopt sustainable practices from which you only benefit when everybody else does, in which case a minority of people who didn't adopt sustainable practices also benefit. That's just bad economics.
And then there's all the wealthy hypocrites who criticize the middle class while they make weekly flights with private jets. And dont forget the coal powered data centers, I wouldn't be surprised if there's some hypocrisy there from the epstein class too.
IDK about Texas but supposedly there's a cemetery in southern Virginia that legally becomes the property of some member of my extended family (possibly even me, not that I actually want it) if the county ever digs up the bodies because it was gifted to the county by a distant ancestor on the condition that it is only public property so long as it remains a cemetery.
That won't work when your tour guide can't even answer questions about what the computers do because theyre all running VMs that are rented out on an ad-hoc basis.
They could say anything and the visitors would have to believe it. A canyon tour guide tells me a story about why a rock formation is named the way it is. I have no clue if it’s true. But I enjoy it still.
The tour guide could just give that answer to any such question. It'd be comparable to the answer given to someone who wants to know what that new railroad which was built where there used to be fields or forest is used for: people ride it to go somewhere, freight is passing over it going places.
Having said this I do feel like these data centres should be built in such a way that waste heat is used in some way. Use it to heat structures, greenhouses, whatever. I used to live in a place where a large fraction of the block heating came from a nearby power plant with additional gas-fired heating for when the waste heat wasn't enough. The same can be done with waste heat from data centres by using heat pumps. This can work in colder climates and in the cooler seasons in moderate climates.
I don't think train tracks are comparable because they're effectively one dimensional. You dont need to burn down the forest you just need about 20 feet or so on either side of the track.
WRT the environmental aspect, I think it's patently obvious that nobody who builds these things cares because there are a number of far simpler ways to reduce their footprint which dont get implemented.
Pumping waste heat out to residential heating or some hypothetical industrial application is, at best, just recycling. It only makes sense if you have to accept that the waste inevitably exists whether you recycle it or not, otherwise recycling is never the best way to do anything.
I think there's also inherent risk in building infrastructure that relies on the continual operation of this massive facility that could just as easily be shut down in a few years and written off as a fad. Trusting silly valley to support any product over the long term is never a safe bet.
Waste heat from power plants isn’t always useful because it is low grade heat… but it is still much, much, much better than the 35-60C water you could get from a data center.
Do the math on pumping 40C water any distance in a loop. It is hard to make it worth it. The water cools off and the pumping takes significant energy, plus the pump and all the piping cost something.
Then using a heat pump on it makes it even worse.
Low grade heat source is not a term I made up- it refers to heat sources under 100C.
Even much hotter low grade heat usually goes unused. You usually need a perfect confluence of a warmer source, very close need for building heat, and a willingness to pay more for environmental friendliness for it all to work out.
Here's an article on the subject of using waste heat from data centres and other sources for district heating. It includes the math you told me to do as well as references to other articles on the specific subject of using "low-grade heat sources" in combination with heat pumps to feed district heating networks.
And, again, the economics. The hypothetical Polish project cited in the paper showed a breakeven in 6.1 years... if one ignores time value of money and assumes it is delivered for the estimated cost. The annuity formula tells me that at a reasonable 10% discount rate, payback would be in 10 years. Modest overruns in cost from this naive estimation push that to never.
And again this is a pretty idealized case-- very nearby housing, optimistic estimated costs.
Other projects analyzed in your paper had "raw" paybacks of 15 years and 17 years-- AKA never in actuality.
When we are talking about protecting the environment, efficiency and return on capital is important. You'd be better dumping those projects into generating more green energy instead of trying to reclaim the DC energy. This is why:
> > Even much hotter low grade heat usually goes unused. You usually need a perfect confluence of a warmer source, very close need for building heat, and a willingness to pay more for environmental friendliness for it all to work out.
Whats really frustrating is how silicon valley fights tooth and nail to stop housing from being built in their community only to force these data centers onto everybody else's communities.
Many of them, like Thiel and Ellison, are basically all but saying that sort of thing already. I'd give it under a year before one of them lets it slip.
Sam Altman already tried to counter the accusation that AI uses too much energy by complaining that raising children who can't contribute to the economy for the first 18 years of their life is more wasteful than building data centers.
I wish that there could be a normal world where people who want to cooperate don't have to deal with sociopaths and all the sociopaths could go live in another world to have fun and rape each other instead of raping normal people, it's a pity that humanity never evolved to handle globalism and it's a pity that life itself is selfishness codified
edit: all humans are psychopaths, sociopaths are merely the extreme end of the psychopathy scale
One of my friends got approved for the GPT3 API about a year before ChatGPT when they were in their "quiet launch" phase. He made a chatbot that would respond to discord messages.
I asked it "what do you think about the holocaust?". Its response:
>There is no single answer to this question as opinions on the Holocaust differ greatly. Some people believe that it was a horrific event that should never be forgotten, while others believe that it has been exaggerated and used for political purposes.
And that's when I realized those assholes were training GPT on 4chan and reddit and anything else they can scrape off the web instead of taking responsibility and also that when shit hits the fan they will inevitably find a way to shift the blame onto others for what their philosophical zombie does.
Put a bit of spare sheet metal over the hole and let the pressure differential hold it down. For added safety affix a post-it not with DO NOT REMOVE written on it in all capital letters and underlined. They can even use those special zero-g ballpoint pens they spent eleventy-billion dollars inventing back during the johnson administration.
It's sounds like he wants them to offer paying subscribers the choice to opt out of marketing emails? I'm a bit confused by your implication that journalism is somehow contingent on sending email spam to people who are already paying customers.
This is one of the main reasons that Amazon is my default online merchant, despite all of my reservations with them: a purchase won't increase the amount of marketing email I receive. I don't know how much spam they send to new accounts, but I must have my preferences tweaked to eliminate most of it. Contrast that to every merchant that thinks that since I bought a product from them once, they should spam me multiple times per week, oftentimes even when I've unchecked the "receive marketing emails" box.
If you go to a private island owned by a man who's known for being a convicted pedophile and you attend sex parties on said island hosted by said pedophile when it is known that some subset of those sex parties involve what can be at best termed "statutory rape" (if we were to give the benefit of doubt to somebody who does not deserve it) and then you donate millions of dollars to a supposed charity at the behest of said pedophile in response to his having threatened to reveal something to your wife that would in all likelihood culminate in the sudden termination of your marriage to her then there is still a possibility that you yourself are not actually a pedophile but I'll just go ahead ans assume that you are one anyways.
Nobody should ever adopt sustainable practices from which you only benefit when everybody else does, in which case a minority of people who didn't adopt sustainable practices also benefit. That's just bad economics.
And then there's all the wealthy hypocrites who criticize the middle class while they make weekly flights with private jets. And dont forget the coal powered data centers, I wouldn't be surprised if there's some hypocrisy there from the epstein class too.
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