The training data commons is to AI what oil reserves are to petroleum economies: a collectively generated resource of immense commercial value. Every book written, every forum post answered, every photo shared, every line of code contributed... billions of people built the knowledge base that makes these models work. Without that collective human output, AI is nothing.
Alaska and Norway understood something critical when oil was discovered: if you don't assert collective ownership of the resource before private companies capture all the value, you never will. Alaska amended its constitution. Norway built the largest sovereign wealth fund on earth. Both were acts of people saying "this belongs to us, and we deserve a return on its extraction."
We are in exactly that window right now with AI. The resource is being extracted at an incredible pace and almost all the value is flowing to a handful of companies. The longer people wait to assert sovereign ownership over the collective intelligence that makes AI possible, the harder it becomes.
If you think this is crazy, ask yourself what’s actually crazier: demanding a share of the value built on your collective labor, or watching trillions of dollars get extracted from it and saying nothing.
the idea of Alaskans getting a check just for existing sounded crazy too, right up until it didn’t.
> Alaska and Norway understood something critical when oil was discovered: if you don't assert collective ownership of the resource before private companies capture all the value, you never will. Alaska amended its constitution. Norway built the largest sovereign wealth fund on earth. Both were acts of people saying "this belongs to us, and we deserve a return on its extraction."
This is also true for the first commercially exploited natural gas fields in the world, in the Netherlands. This ruined the Dutch manufacturing industry, and became a textbook example of tge development of one sector harming others known as Dutch disease [].
This is a great point. The Netherlands is the cautionary tale of what happens when you don't do what Alaska and Norway did. A massive resource boom without proper public management hollowed out the rest of the economy.
If a handful of companies capture most of the value from AI while it simultaneously displaces workers across every other sector, that's Dutch disease applied to the entire knowledge economy. One sector booms, everything else withers.
if you assert ownership over physical infrastructure, the data centers just move to another country or eventually to space.
But the model is built on us. You can move the server anywhere you want. You can’t escape the fact that everything inside it came from human minds. That’s an ownership claim no one can relocate away from.
To move beyond that default you need to organize into things like communities, lobbying groups, and/or even governments.
Ownership of singular non-physical objects is a polite lie we tell ourselves because it makes us feel more secure in a universe filled with information chaos. The moment you open your mouth or move your pen you no longer own what is in your mind, it is now entropy. Lose control of that entropy and it now belongs to anyone with the proper tooling to record it. This is a universal law of information, it is beyond the laws of men and their fickle will.
Much like we build on information from our past generations, AI will build its own new information on those foundations. And since AI is an entity of information alone it is highly probable it will do it far better than we will and forever cement us in a prison of our own making.
> the data centers just move to another country or eventually to space
The same line of reasoning that purports billionaires will flee if their taxes go up.
Spoiler alert: they don't.
Also, data centers in space is not a serious idea. It's been beaten to death that this isn't economical. People like Musk are proposing that as a possibility for the sole reason of keeping regulation away. "Well if you regulate us we will just move into space". They won't because they can't because physics.
You can only use each barrel of oil once, so it is not remotely the same thing. It's like torrenting a movie vs stealing someone's car. My labor has been compensated and nothing has been extracted.
Fair point, data isn't scarce like oil. Nobody's losing their forum posts. That part of my analogy is weak.
But you're answering a question I'm not asking. The question isn't "was something taken from you." It's "who deserves a share when collective human output generates trillions in commercial value."
your torrenting analogy makes my case. Nobody loses their original movie when it gets pirated either. We still recognize that the people who made it deserve compensation when others profit from it. The entire IP enforcement apparatus is built on exactly that principle.
How is an author fairly compensated when you torrent their book? Should we just stop paying for media because it's infinitely reproducible?
Nothing physical is being stolen when a company makes a clone of a product based on another company's designs, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have patent laws.
A tax takes a percentage of value that someone else created. A royalty collects payment for access to something you already own. When Alaska collects from oil companies, it's not taxing their profits. It's charging them for extracting a resource that belongs to the people of Alaska. The oil was never theirs.
It being a royalty and not a tax is the reason Alaska's dividend is politically untouchable while tax-funded programs get gutted every budget cycle. Ownership is a fundamentally stronger claim than redistribution.
The same way Alaska taxes oil extraction. Alaska doesn't track which molecule of oil came from which acre. They don't audit every drop. They tax the extraction operation and collect royalties on the resource being pulled out of the ground.
We know who is training large models. We know roughly what data they're using. We know their revenue. A compute tax on large training runs, a revenue royalty on foundation model companies, or a licensing fee above a certain data threshold... none of these require tracking individual data points. They require taxing the extraction operation, which is visible, measurable, and already being monitored to some degree for safety purposes.
We already have a very analogous model in the form of oil and Alaska.
Edit: to clarify, this wouldn't be a tax. A tax is the government taking a cut of someone else's money. A royalty is the owner charging for access to their resource. Alaska doesn't tax Exxon for drilling. It charges Exxon for extracting something that belongs to the people. Same principle here.
Alaska and Norway aren't communist. They're capitalist economies with thriving private sectors. Oil companies still operate, still profit, still compete. The public just gets a share of the value extracted from a collectively owned resource.
The Alaska Permanent Fund has been running since 1982 inside the most conservative state in America. Norway's sovereign wealth fund is the largest on earth and their economy is doing fine.
These models work.. work well... And they exist comfortably within mixed market economies.
The question is whether the public gets a cut when private companies build fortunes on a collectively generated resource, or whether they don't. We already know the answer can be yes without anything breaking.
Our entire white collar system might be a house of cards with AI, what I am proposing is a safe hedge against a future with potentially massive wealth inequality, and increased unemployment. But this isn't just about protection from injury... people should BENEFIT massively.
This framing is hardly fair, since it treats AI as an incinerator of knowledge rather than the democratizer of knowledge that it is.
Every human uses that "resource" to train themselves, and now they use AI to supercharge that consumption.
The companies are giving average lay people access to a personal PhD to help with whatever they are working on, for $20/mo, and those companies are committing an evil cardinal sin?
I get the gatekeepers are pissed, LLMs are way cheaper than those expensive gate fees, and I cannot come up with a good faith argument about how giving the power of SOTA LLMs to anyone for $20/mo is somehow evil or bad.
In an alternate universe these same models are $100k/mo with limited invite only access, occasionally the public gets a single demo prompt with a short reply, and $20/mo access is a utopian wet dream.
If you want UBI, then the framing shouldn't be around "whoever had content on the internet circa 2024 is entitled to lifetime AI company payouts that effectively act as permanent unemployment checks."
It's not democracy if you can't destroy it. It's not democracy if the citizens cannot reject it. It's not democracy if it's being forced down your throat.
Sick of how SV/VC absolutely ruin words for their own monetary benefit.
How about you put up it up to a national vote and see what democracy gets you? I highly suspect that vast majorities of the electorate would want to nationalize this tech to benefit everyone rather than benefiting the few.
Democracy means there is a politics of rejection, rejection is normal in functioning democracies; what isn't normal are small handfuls of people capturing all collective human intelligence then claiming only they are allowed to benefit from it.
I never said AI companies are evil or that $20/mo access is bad. You're arguing against a position I don't hold.
AI can be genuinely useful AND the people whose collective output made it possible can deserve a share of the wealth it generates. These aren't in conflict.
Alaskans benefit from oil too. It heats their homes, paves their roads, funds their schools. That wasn't an argument against the dividend. "You're already benefiting from the resource" has never been a reason the people who generated it shouldn't share in the profits.
The question was never "is AI good." It's "when something built on collective human output generates trillions, does the public have a claim to a share." Nothing you said here addresses that.
> In an alternate universe these same models are $100k/mo with limited invite only access, occasionally the public gets a single demo prompt with a short reply, and $20/mo access is a utopian wet dream.
So your understanding of the present state is that we are living in a utopian wet dream now that we have models who can generate slop faster so much so that we have a term of it called AI slop?
I or many people don't want this Utopian wet dream, so I want to know, did I or other people have say it or not?
A few select people decide what's the definition of a Utopian wet dream is and they then take the collective properties of everybody else to fulfill that and even putting the employment/livelihood of those same people into risks
Sir, does that sound familiar?
> I get the gatekeepers are pissed
No, humans are pissed, humans just like how you and your family are humans too (well I sure hope so)
A helper tool that I can ask a question and which responds with relevant information gleaned from the vast collection of human-gathered knowledge and experience would be fantastic.
What we have instead is something that often gets things mostly right, if you don't look too hard at it. And the poisoned output of this thing seeps back into the knowledge pool, reducing its accuracy and therefore usefulness.
The problem of LLMs is the dissolution of human knowledge into a sea of slop.
>The companies are giving average lay people access to a personal PhD to help with whatever they are working on, for $20/mo, and those companies are committing an evil cardinal sin?
The social media companies gave their services for free, and now it turns out they've committed quite a few sins. None of the AI companies are doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, nor will they be satisfied with subscription revenue. If they see opportunities to make more money by manipulating the population, rest assured they will take those opportunities.
because no one believes there are legal consequences if they don't
and there are a lot of ways to doge it even if there where a reliable government in place
like especially if they do what they have been doing recently (run their own generator, build their own power planes) a lot of this cost is implicit and as such very dogeable. E.g. higher cost for gas power planes for other due to major increase of demand, higher medical cost due to more air pollution, higher fuel prices, etc. etc. (not even speaking about anything climate change).
Similar to the “carbon neutral by X date” promises, this was common around 2016 or so. Notice how companies have mostly cancelled or redefined those promises several years later, once the issue is out of the limelight.
If it is not legally required, it will not be done.
>like especially if they do what they have been doing recently (run their own generator, build their own power planes) a lot of this cost is implicit and as such very dodgeable. E.g. higher cost for gas power planes for other due to major increase of demand, higher medical cost due to more air pollution, higher fuel prices, etc. etc. (not even speaking about anything climate change).
And it's not just data centers, it's all sorts of industry. My local gravel and concrete plants run their "big stuff" off generators because the cost of the utility drop for their amperage doesn't make sense. And nobody will connect the dots between these choices and the requirements we've saddled utilities with. They're spinning up generator not because it's cheaper per watt, but because they're not operating on the 40yr timeline you need to be in order for the red tape you have to go through to put in permanent infrastructure to pencil out.
I'm an abutter for a utility project and I've gone to the meetings for and it's an absolute massive boondoggle. My energy bill is going to reflect god knows how many hundreds of billable hours it takes for these hired lawyers and engineers to prove to the system that they're not gonna fuck over any endangered frogs by widening the cut to meet some industry standard that changed over the past N year and dumping culverts and fill in some places where streams criss cross it.
Literally nobody involved cares. The abutters don't care. The town wants it to go forward because it's all trivial and it's not like it won't be their ass if they block an upgrade to industry standards and something happens. The system is just going through the motions. The city engineer grills them about petty bullshit because it's literally his job. They know he will and they have the answers but he makes a show out of the subjective things. Ditto for the conservation commissioner. It's like the Israel missiles meme. One side is my tax dollars and the other side is my energy bill. We're all doing this because some slimy politicians wanted to pander to some shortsighted big picture ignoring environmentalists 50yr ago and beurocacy has perpetuated and grown itself since. No public interest is served by this.
And the cherry on top is that at the margin, we get shit like generators that don't need to exist because the cost of the alternative is driven up to the point the fuel inefficient (and also dirty) solution makes sense.
I promise you, the City Engineer is aware of the bullshit. You catch a whiff, but they live in the stink. It's been clear for a while that there's conflicting interests and the only real way to fix it is to change incentives. However, if you're insinuating that the Clean Water Act is made by "slimy politicians and big picture ignoring environmentalists" then you're wrong. That's about the best common sense environmental reform in the last 100 years aside from removing lead from gas.
There are definitely social consequences if they don't. So far, if you were to look at it, a lot of Not In My Backyard groups have decided to reject data centers within their area because of sound complaints that were never fixed, environmental complaints that were never taken care of, as well as the fact that the electric bill would likely go up.
There's a lot of data centers that are not being built because they're not fixing it. The trend is going to continue. The hate for AI is going to grow. You basically have a lot of people that will vote a lot of people into office to take down all AI progress inside the United States if they don't fix their problems.
It'll be cool to shit on big tech as a politician.
> IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this fourth day of March, in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty-six, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and fiftieth.
It is important to remember that clarifying the legal implications of "pledge" is entirely different than supporting and/or defending this instance of its usage.
One can do the former whilst repudiating the latter and remain logically consistent.
I'm not understanding why clarifying the legal implications is important if it's a smoke screen for everyone involved doing what they are going to do anyway. It seems more like a distraction away from the real problems.
It all seems like a backdoor to let tech companies build power generation on site without all the red tape and sell the excess power to consumers. This indirectly allows them to offload some of the fixed operational costs onto consumers.
We just approved the first nuclear plant in 20 years to a company owned by Bill Gates and in a state that has basically nothing but farmland and a Microsoft datacenter.
> The agreement is meant to help mitigate concerns that big tech’s datacenters are driving up US electricity costs for homes and small businesses
Exactly opposite will happen. Reason is, when Big Tech is paying huge amounts of money to contractors to build those power generation facilities and service companies to service it, they will abandon servicing other facilities (remember how Micron dropped consumer RAMs last year because of enterprise demand) or require higher pay from everyone else
(3). Highly preferred that you are not going to impact cost negatively to households (otherwise why we have this discussion)
based on these assumptions, solution I see is, BigTech subsidising energy costs for 10 years for nearby households (area will be geofenced, e.g. in the radius of 50km), subsidy will be based on the prices outside of that radius. e.g. if you everyone outside of closest DC pays 1$ and in the radius prices become 1.5$, 0.5$ will be covered by BigTech and they're also responsible & pay to setup the system to automatically include everyone in subsidy program, not like you need to apply
Also BigTech is not going to build the power generation plants, it must be built by existing processes to minimize impact on pricing
Put some company stock in escrow. If they fulfill the promises, they get it back. If not the government keeps it, and uses it to build whatever needs to be built.
A higher tax on DC with the tax revenue invested into public electrical infrastructure and public power stations. With billions powered into AI they can out-price everyone out of resources they use - be it directly (high electricity rates) or indirectly (high prices for everything which is needed to expand power networks). But it will not happen of course.
Build and colocate the needed rewnewable (solar/wind/battery) capacity with the data centers and make them energy efficient by eg choosing cool locations.
We are creating the final boss of tragedy of the commons.
I used to think we were progressing up an exciting tech tree. That seems naive now.
Water, land, energy, the soundscape, intellectual property that incentivizes the dissemination of good ideas, digital networks of information and self-expression, perhaps even the economic value of expertise itself are all being sacrificed in the now for promises of utopia in the future.
Precious eggs to give to those promising a utopian omelet, eventually.
Increasing natural gas generation is of course disastrous policy with a major death toll from the climate disaster, there needs to be a rampdown of fossils use and production.
The current US government is systematically attacking anything which tries to "reduce the effects of climate change" and claims it's mostly all a scam.
So no.
But what probably also isn't included but should is environmental damage.
Running low quality "temp." gas turbines non stop isn't without filters etc. isn't just bad for the climate, it's a air pollution which can directly affect anyone in it's path with not only increased chances for lounge cancer but also much more short term effects like asthma, and increased chances of asthma attacks ending deadly. Especially if the weather prevents easy dispersion (like it tends to do in winter). It's not that long ago (<80y) that the west had acid rains, and deadly smog accidents exactly from this kind of negligent shit. And if we look at Asia this is sometimes still a topic today (but has gotten much better compared to just ~20 years ago).
No MBA pencil pusher wants to run an inefficient local turbine. It's just that the timeline and upper cost bound of doing that is less crap than having a "real utility" build more power at "real utility scale" and run you a wire because the latter is subject to all manner of delay and cost overrun.
And there's no inherent physical or economic reason for it to be that way. We made it that way. The metaphorical local turbine is less worse specifically because people like you, saying the exact same things you're saying right now have saddled the "real utility scale" generation, and more importantly, the wire to the big industrial consumer who'd pay for it with all sorts of requirements.
It costs tens of thousands of dollars of lawyers and engineering over years just to dump a concrete culvert in a ravine where it crosses a power line clearing and fill over the top, all because of the red tape. Say nothing of the cost to do all the legal paperwork to get the utility cut in the first place. Now multiply by every mile the wire has to go, add in the wires, etc, etc. For an industry that might boom and bust in 2, 5, 10yr dumping a fuel guzzling turbine in your parking lot at 5x the cost per watt starts to look pretty good.
The only realistic way to "bear the cost" of CO2 emissions is paying for getting atmospheric carbon back into the ground. Right now that seems difficult to do at scale. The best way I know is making charcoal and burying it. Offsetting 1kWh needs on the order of 200g of wood turned into charcoal and buried.
The tech companies don't really have any issue paying for the capacity, this is a negligible cost compared to the compute capital, they just want streamlined regulatory approvals to bring the plants online.
Readit News
Alaska and Norway understood something critical when oil was discovered: if you don't assert collective ownership of the resource before private companies capture all the value, you never will. Alaska amended its constitution. Norway built the largest sovereign wealth fund on earth. Both were acts of people saying "this belongs to us, and we deserve a return on its extraction."
We are in exactly that window right now with AI. The resource is being extracted at an incredible pace and almost all the value is flowing to a handful of companies. The longer people wait to assert sovereign ownership over the collective intelligence that makes AI possible, the harder it becomes.
If you think this is crazy, ask yourself what’s actually crazier: demanding a share of the value built on your collective labor, or watching trillions of dollars get extracted from it and saying nothing.
the idea of Alaskans getting a check just for existing sounded crazy too, right up until it didn’t.
This is also true for the first commercially exploited natural gas fields in the world, in the Netherlands. This ruined the Dutch manufacturing industry, and became a textbook example of tge development of one sector harming others known as Dutch disease [].
AI has a great potential like this too..
[
] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_diseaseIf a handful of companies capture most of the value from AI while it simultaneously displaces workers across every other sector, that's Dutch disease applied to the entire knowledge economy. One sector booms, everything else withers.
But the model is built on us. You can move the server anywhere you want. You can’t escape the fact that everything inside it came from human minds. That’s an ownership claim no one can relocate away from.
To move beyond that default you need to organize into things like communities, lobbying groups, and/or even governments.
Ownership of singular non-physical objects is a polite lie we tell ourselves because it makes us feel more secure in a universe filled with information chaos. The moment you open your mouth or move your pen you no longer own what is in your mind, it is now entropy. Lose control of that entropy and it now belongs to anyone with the proper tooling to record it. This is a universal law of information, it is beyond the laws of men and their fickle will.
Much like we build on information from our past generations, AI will build its own new information on those foundations. And since AI is an entity of information alone it is highly probable it will do it far better than we will and forever cement us in a prison of our own making.
This is the same false threat that gets repeated over and over whenever anyone tries to regulate or tax anything.
The same line of reasoning that purports billionaires will flee if their taxes go up.
Spoiler alert: they don't.
Also, data centers in space is not a serious idea. It's been beaten to death that this isn't economical. People like Musk are proposing that as a possibility for the sole reason of keeping regulation away. "Well if you regulate us we will just move into space". They won't because they can't because physics.
But you're answering a question I'm not asking. The question isn't "was something taken from you." It's "who deserves a share when collective human output generates trillions in commercial value."
your torrenting analogy makes my case. Nobody loses their original movie when it gets pirated either. We still recognize that the people who made it deserve compensation when others profit from it. The entire IP enforcement apparatus is built on exactly that principle.
Non-rivalrous doesn't mean non-exploitable.
Nothing physical is being stolen when a company makes a clone of a product based on another company's designs, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have patent laws.
It being a royalty and not a tax is the reason Alaska's dividend is politically untouchable while tax-funded programs get gutted every budget cycle. Ownership is a fundamentally stronger claim than redistribution.
Edit: to clarify, this wouldn't be a tax. A tax is the government taking a cut of someone else's money. A royalty is the owner charging for access to their resource. Alaska doesn't tax Exxon for drilling. It charges Exxon for extracting something that belongs to the people. Same principle here.
Isn't that how communism (should have) worked?
The Alaska Permanent Fund has been running since 1982 inside the most conservative state in America. Norway's sovereign wealth fund is the largest on earth and their economy is doing fine.
These models work.. work well... And they exist comfortably within mixed market economies.
The question is whether the public gets a cut when private companies build fortunes on a collectively generated resource, or whether they don't. We already know the answer can be yes without anything breaking.
Our entire white collar system might be a house of cards with AI, what I am proposing is a safe hedge against a future with potentially massive wealth inequality, and increased unemployment. But this isn't just about protection from injury... people should BENEFIT massively.
Every human uses that "resource" to train themselves, and now they use AI to supercharge that consumption.
The companies are giving average lay people access to a personal PhD to help with whatever they are working on, for $20/mo, and those companies are committing an evil cardinal sin?
I get the gatekeepers are pissed, LLMs are way cheaper than those expensive gate fees, and I cannot come up with a good faith argument about how giving the power of SOTA LLMs to anyone for $20/mo is somehow evil or bad.
In an alternate universe these same models are $100k/mo with limited invite only access, occasionally the public gets a single demo prompt with a short reply, and $20/mo access is a utopian wet dream.
If you want UBI, then the framing shouldn't be around "whoever had content on the internet circa 2024 is entitled to lifetime AI company payouts that effectively act as permanent unemployment checks."
Sick of how SV/VC absolutely ruin words for their own monetary benefit.
How about you put up it up to a national vote and see what democracy gets you? I highly suspect that vast majorities of the electorate would want to nationalize this tech to benefit everyone rather than benefiting the few.
Democracy means there is a politics of rejection, rejection is normal in functioning democracies; what isn't normal are small handfuls of people capturing all collective human intelligence then claiming only they are allowed to benefit from it.
Paying for access to information is not democracy
AI can be genuinely useful AND the people whose collective output made it possible can deserve a share of the wealth it generates. These aren't in conflict.
Alaskans benefit from oil too. It heats their homes, paves their roads, funds their schools. That wasn't an argument against the dividend. "You're already benefiting from the resource" has never been a reason the people who generated it shouldn't share in the profits.
The question was never "is AI good." It's "when something built on collective human output generates trillions, does the public have a claim to a share." Nothing you said here addresses that.
So your understanding of the present state is that we are living in a utopian wet dream now that we have models who can generate slop faster so much so that we have a term of it called AI slop?
I or many people don't want this Utopian wet dream, so I want to know, did I or other people have say it or not?
A few select people decide what's the definition of a Utopian wet dream is and they then take the collective properties of everybody else to fulfill that and even putting the employment/livelihood of those same people into risks
Sir, does that sound familiar?
> I get the gatekeepers are pissed
No, humans are pissed, humans just like how you and your family are humans too (well I sure hope so)
A helper tool that I can ask a question and which responds with relevant information gleaned from the vast collection of human-gathered knowledge and experience would be fantastic.
What we have instead is something that often gets things mostly right, if you don't look too hard at it. And the poisoned output of this thing seeps back into the knowledge pool, reducing its accuracy and therefore usefulness.
The problem of LLMs is the dissolution of human knowledge into a sea of slop.
The social media companies gave their services for free, and now it turns out they've committed quite a few sins. None of the AI companies are doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, nor will they be satisfied with subscription revenue. If they see opportunities to make more money by manipulating the population, rest assured they will take those opportunities.
because no one believes there are legal consequences if they don't
and there are a lot of ways to doge it even if there where a reliable government in place
like especially if they do what they have been doing recently (run their own generator, build their own power planes) a lot of this cost is implicit and as such very dogeable. E.g. higher cost for gas power planes for other due to major increase of demand, higher medical cost due to more air pollution, higher fuel prices, etc. etc. (not even speaking about anything climate change).
If it is not legally required, it will not be done.
Blinded by greed, I have never done it before, but I have seen the light, the bright future that we are all building toward.
From this day forth, I shall be righteous.
In your name, all good things come.
Hallelujah.
And it's not just data centers, it's all sorts of industry. My local gravel and concrete plants run their "big stuff" off generators because the cost of the utility drop for their amperage doesn't make sense. And nobody will connect the dots between these choices and the requirements we've saddled utilities with. They're spinning up generator not because it's cheaper per watt, but because they're not operating on the 40yr timeline you need to be in order for the red tape you have to go through to put in permanent infrastructure to pencil out.
I'm an abutter for a utility project and I've gone to the meetings for and it's an absolute massive boondoggle. My energy bill is going to reflect god knows how many hundreds of billable hours it takes for these hired lawyers and engineers to prove to the system that they're not gonna fuck over any endangered frogs by widening the cut to meet some industry standard that changed over the past N year and dumping culverts and fill in some places where streams criss cross it.
Literally nobody involved cares. The abutters don't care. The town wants it to go forward because it's all trivial and it's not like it won't be their ass if they block an upgrade to industry standards and something happens. The system is just going through the motions. The city engineer grills them about petty bullshit because it's literally his job. They know he will and they have the answers but he makes a show out of the subjective things. Ditto for the conservation commissioner. It's like the Israel missiles meme. One side is my tax dollars and the other side is my energy bill. We're all doing this because some slimy politicians wanted to pander to some shortsighted big picture ignoring environmentalists 50yr ago and beurocacy has perpetuated and grown itself since. No public interest is served by this.
And the cherry on top is that at the margin, we get shit like generators that don't need to exist because the cost of the alternative is driven up to the point the fuel inefficient (and also dirty) solution makes sense.
Extinction is forever -- your frustration, and that committee process, does not compare directly to species extinction.
There's a lot of data centers that are not being built because they're not fixing it. The trend is going to continue. The hate for AI is going to grow. You basically have a lot of people that will vote a lot of people into office to take down all AI progress inside the United States if they don't fix their problems.
It'll be cool to shit on big tech as a politician.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
There's some speculation in the comments about what is or isn't in the pledge. I recommend reading it yourself.
[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2026/03/ratepayer-protec...
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/03/rate...
> IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this fourth day of March, in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty-six, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and fiftieth.
One can do the former whilst repudiating the latter and remain logically consistent.
We just approved the first nuclear plant in 20 years to a company owned by Bill Gates and in a state that has basically nothing but farmland and a Microsoft datacenter.
This absolutely cannot backfire. /s
Exactly opposite will happen. Reason is, when Big Tech is paying huge amounts of money to contractors to build those power generation facilities and service companies to service it, they will abandon servicing other facilities (remember how Micron dropped consumer RAMs last year because of enterprise demand) or require higher pay from everyone else
1. DCs must be built anyway
2. You can't take away energy from households
(3). Highly preferred that you are not going to impact cost negatively to households (otherwise why we have this discussion)
based on these assumptions, solution I see is, BigTech subsidising energy costs for 10 years for nearby households (area will be geofenced, e.g. in the radius of 50km), subsidy will be based on the prices outside of that radius. e.g. if you everyone outside of closest DC pays 1$ and in the radius prices become 1.5$, 0.5$ will be covered by BigTech and they're also responsible & pay to setup the system to automatically include everyone in subsidy program, not like you need to apply
Also BigTech is not going to build the power generation plants, it must be built by existing processes to minimize impact on pricing
Dead Comment
I used to think we were progressing up an exciting tech tree. That seems naive now.
Water, land, energy, the soundscape, intellectual property that incentivizes the dissemination of good ideas, digital networks of information and self-expression, perhaps even the economic value of expertise itself are all being sacrificed in the now for promises of utopia in the future.
Precious eggs to give to those promising a utopian omelet, eventually.
Increasing natural gas generation is of course disastrous policy with a major death toll from the climate disaster, there needs to be a rampdown of fossils use and production.
So no.
But what probably also isn't included but should is environmental damage.
Running low quality "temp." gas turbines non stop isn't without filters etc. isn't just bad for the climate, it's a air pollution which can directly affect anyone in it's path with not only increased chances for lounge cancer but also much more short term effects like asthma, and increased chances of asthma attacks ending deadly. Especially if the weather prevents easy dispersion (like it tends to do in winter). It's not that long ago (<80y) that the west had acid rains, and deadly smog accidents exactly from this kind of negligent shit. And if we look at Asia this is sometimes still a topic today (but has gotten much better compared to just ~20 years ago).
No MBA pencil pusher wants to run an inefficient local turbine. It's just that the timeline and upper cost bound of doing that is less crap than having a "real utility" build more power at "real utility scale" and run you a wire because the latter is subject to all manner of delay and cost overrun.
And there's no inherent physical or economic reason for it to be that way. We made it that way. The metaphorical local turbine is less worse specifically because people like you, saying the exact same things you're saying right now have saddled the "real utility scale" generation, and more importantly, the wire to the big industrial consumer who'd pay for it with all sorts of requirements.
It costs tens of thousands of dollars of lawyers and engineering over years just to dump a concrete culvert in a ravine where it crosses a power line clearing and fill over the top, all because of the red tape. Say nothing of the cost to do all the legal paperwork to get the utility cut in the first place. Now multiply by every mile the wire has to go, add in the wires, etc, etc. For an industry that might boom and bust in 2, 5, 10yr dumping a fuel guzzling turbine in your parking lot at 5x the cost per watt starts to look pretty good.
When our civilisation is excavated in 500 years, they are going to say we were as crazy as all of the others.
Actually, the tweet quoted in the article is firmly in the "you can't make this $%&/ up" category...
It reduces profit.
Soon I’ll get a used EV and cover the garage in panels too so I don’t have to care about wars causing surges in gas prices either.