> and it increases electricity costs for the region
This doesn't need to be true. It would be both possible and reasonable to mandate subsidy by the datacenter as part of any deal so that costs don't go up for anyone else.
Yeah, that's what I've been thinking. If we charged twice as much money per kilowatt-hour for datacenter electricity compared to residential, it feels like the net revenue for electricity could be roughly the same to the power company, but then it wouldn't be nearly as annoying for the residents of the town having their prices spike way up.
Or, you know, the AI companies could actually supply their own power like I keep hearing tech bros mention is coming soon.
Possible and reasonable don't guarantee anything with big businesses. Around 2008, Atlanta had a major drought, and as the local government asked the citizens to conserve water, Coca Cola was bottling up the local water and sending it out on trucks. When the citizens complained, the government said it would cost too many jobs to stop the bottling.
You are engaging with a straw man that is literally the opposite of what I said. I said it would be possible and reasonable to mandate it, not intentionally look the other way, and not cross fingers and hope for beneficence.
You're still not engaging with what I said. Please see that "this government chose not to mandate" has zero relevance to whether a government mandate would be possible or reasonable.
I said "[datacenters] don't need to [increase electricity costs for others]. It would be possible to mandate...".
I said that because the person I was responding to said "a datacenter increases electricity costs for the region".
It CAN increase electricity costs for the region. It does not NEED to increase electricity costs for the region. And PREVENTION of increasing electricity costs for the region CAN be done by government mandate instead of hoping for profiteers to do less profiteering.
What this particular city council did with this datacenter is neither an inherent property of datacenters nor of city councils.
I wonder if the best way, and something that might be more likely to pass, is something like "progressive pricing".
Like the first N kilowatt hours are the regular price, and would cover the average case for most people (I don't know what the average amount of electricity used by a person is but the power companies absolutely know). Then the next M kilowatt hours are an increased price, and keep going as energy spikes up.
I think this could work just because this is how income tax works. Somehow that managed to get passed by congress and state legislatures.
> I am also saying that they will never choose to do it
If this article were posted when this campaign was just starting, this would be a top HN comment. Unfortunately, lazy nihilism runs deep in tech circles.
It seems like both of you have thoroughly missed the context of my subthread.
If your goal is to point out that people make choices, well, you're in the wrong thread branch and want to instead reply to a different part of the same message that I replied to. Because I never said or implied that they don't. Quite the opposite in fact.
Here is the context of my subthread, extracted, in two parts:
Part 1, the framing.
> "I don't know if [elected officials think a wrong thing about datacenters] or if it's kickbacks."
You see, the kickbacks option is already there. We all already understand that it could be kickbacks. Therefore bringing it up further would just be silly. I certainly have no reason to say that kickbacks aren't a possibility. The only part we need to address is OP believing that [thing is wrong].
Part 2, the [thing].
> "I'm pro-progress, but a datacenter brings approximately nothing to the local economy. It doesn't employ any noteworthy number of people, it doesn't generate any real tax revenue, and it increases electricity costs for the region."
That distills to:
> "a datacenter brings approximately nothing to the local economy"
That statement means either:
A (haven't): datacenters have in the past only ever brought nothing (and therefore they will in the future only ever bring nothing)
or
B (can't): datacenters cannot bring anything other than nothing (and therefore they will in the future only ever bring nothing)
And they're both wrong. A is wrong because past behavior does not imply future behavior. And B is wrong because in fact they can.
Two things can be true at the same time. Sugar substitutes can be bad for you and still be less bad for you than the equivalent sugar.
It's been shown over and over again that sugar consumption significantly increases obesity, metabolic syndrome, cancer, strokes, cardiovascular disease, chronic inflammation, high blood pressure, bad cholesterol, and probably more things that I'm forgetting. Natural sugar advocates absolutely love to ignore and forget this.
Anything talking about the harms of sugar substitutes needs to always be in relation to the harm definitively known to be caused by equivalent sugar intake. This article does not do that. It only pretends to in a very misleading way.
> In some randomised controlled trials (typically lasting 4-12 weeks) substituting other sweeteners for sugars did admittedly result in lower weight gain. But a number of large, long-term observational studies have found the opposite: people with higher consumption of sugar substitutes—some of whom may be using these to replace sugar in their diets—end up putting on more weight than those who consume the least.
These two statements are orthogonal to each other but they're misleadingly positioned to trick you into thinking otherwise.
Claim A: People who consume sugar substitutes instead of sugar gained less weight than the people who consumed equivalent sugar.
Claim B: People who consume more sugar substitutes in general, with zero relation to equivalent sugar replacement, had more problems than people who consumed less sugar substitutes. But this says absolutely nothing about what health problems would occur if those people had instead consumed sugar equivalent to the greater sugar substitute intake.
People who consume more sugar also experience more health problems than people who consume less sugar. The question is whether consuming sugar substitutes is worse than consuming the equivalent sugar, not whether consuming sugar substitutes is worse than consuming no sweetener at all.
Not to mention the problem of lumping all sugar substitutes together as though biochemistry is a function of flavor perception.
All ingredients should be regulated for public health and safety. That means sugar too, but where are all the articles titled "Are sugars healthier than the substitutes? We share some bitter truths"? Eh? Eh?
Intel basically benchmaxxed their compiler optimizations. They used detailed knowledge of the benchmark to make their compiler generate machine code to do better on the benchmark in a way that was not beneficial for non-benchmark scenarios.
I assumed as much, I’m just wondering what exactly they did. For example IIRC some phone company would detect that a benchmark was running by checking for the program name, and then allow the clock to boost higher (increase thermal limits) if it was a benchmark (like you could literally avoid the cheating behavior by changing the name of the program being run).
I also want people to read out loud like they talk. Many people assume a special reading voice that drones huskily with diminished tonal variation, and it's unpleasant to listen to.
I'm struck by all these independent announcements saying "look at our new model that we only spent $N Billion in acquisitions and hardware time to build and operate that's just like those other ones but this one is ours." Because if any of these companies would simply pool resources and work together, and if the government actively participated in providing funds, they'd be able to accelerate AI so much faster. It all feels incredibly wasteful. But I guess that's communism or something.
Competition often foster innovation. Why are they innovating so fast and spending so much money? Because they don’t wanna get behind. If there was no competition at all then there would be much less reason to innovate and spend resources.
So does cooperation in any framework that values public good over pure obedience to an inherently-abusive late stage capitalism. I know that's passé in a world where the US government no longer believes in funding science, and yet.
Competition is also inherently wasteful. And if you're talking about wasting a few K or a few Mil here or there, fine, whatever. But here we're talking about waste on the order of trillions of dollars at the end of the day.
This doesn't need to be true. It would be both possible and reasonable to mandate subsidy by the datacenter as part of any deal so that costs don't go up for anyone else.
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