Discussion
US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters
techblueberry: Wait a “pledge”? What are the legal protections of a “pledge”?Claude:“To your main question — is a pledge a legal document? Generally, no. A pledge is a public commitment or statement of intent, not a binding legal contract. The agreement doesn’t appear to carry any concrete, binding commitments. There’s no penalty mechanism or enforcement structure the way a contract would have.“
thejazzman: considering how we uphold treaties im not sure the terminology matters one way or the other
SpicyLemonZest: I don't think there's any mechanism in US law for anyone to make a binding promise about terms they plan to include in contracts they might sign with unspecified local governments in the future.Congress could pass a new law requiring it, of course, but I think we all understand that this would not accomplish the administration's real goal of letting Trump prove he's the specialest boy and everyone has to give him what he wants.
AdieuToLogic: Using Claude to provide a legal definition of "pledge" is unconvincing at best.> What are the legal protections of a “pledge”?To answer that question is to first agree upon the legal definition of "pledge": pledge v. to deposit personal property as security for a personal loan of money. If the loan is not repaid when due, the personal property pledged shall be forfeit to the lender. The property is known as collateral. To pledge is the same as to pawn. 2) to promise to do something.[0] Without careful review of the document signed, it is impossible to verify which form of the above is applicable in this case.> A pledge is a public commitment or statement of intent, not a binding legal contract.This very well may be incorrect in this context and serves an exemplar as to why relying upon statistical document generation is not a recommended legal strategy.0 - https://dictionary.law.com/Default.aspx?selected=1544
glaucon: | Congress could pass a new law requiring it, of course, but I think we all understand that this would not accomplish the administration's real goal of letting Trump prove he's the specialest boy and everyone has to give him what he wants.... plus it would require "tech firms" to actually modify their behaviour and that would never do.
cs702: "The invisible hand" of free markets has become truly invisible...
techblueberry: Wait, we know it’s not your definition, because it’s inapplicable.
Freedom2: I'd be cautious about using Claude, given that they're designated as a supply chain risk by the US Government. Why not use the approved and officially certified ChatGPT instead?
fulafel: Does it include externalities (co2 emissions)?
XorNot: I'm assuming there's a missing /s tag there.
AdieuToLogic: > Wait, we know it’s not your definition ...Of course it is not "my definition", as I cited the source of it.> ... because it’s inapplicable.Take that up with law.com.
mcs5280: Non-binding and voluntary = a bunch of lip service
mattas: Pledges are somewhere between a pinky swear and a high five.
retrochameleon: Your answer is less useful and thought out than the Claude response. Claude actually answers the question in the context in which it's being asked.
AdieuToLogic: > Your answer is less useful and thought out than the Claude response."Less useful" is subjective and I shall not contend. "Less thought out" is laughable as I possess the ability to think and "Claude" does not.> Claude actually answers the question in the context in which it's being asked.The LLM-based service generated a statistically relevant document to the prompt given in which you, presumably a human, interpreted said document as being "actually answers the question". This is otherwise known as anthropomorphism[0].0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropomorphism
drak0n1c: Most forms of company civic greatness in the past were essentially pledges, much of the time unspoken. It's certainly possible, we don't need to be cynical.
7thpower: Even if the pledges are in good faith, people are being naive about how utilities work.The general goal for utilities has been to pursue the next “thing” and work toward some sort of regulation to lock in demand, which can be used as a lever to seek price increases and consolidate.If there’s margin to be had, the utilities will find a way, and prices will go up either way.
powerpcmac: The only people who believes corpo jackoffery these days are either boomers or people investing their remaining money in big line go up
h4kunamata: This is USA so we all know that those techs companies won't pay a cent back at the end, but the population will.
lurk2: You can just use a traditional search engine for this. I have no interest in reading your LLM output.
magicalist: > Most forms of company civic greatness in the past were essentially pledges, much of the time unspoken.You're looking at the the conditional the wrong way. You want to look at how often pledges lead to "company civic greatness" (or even, you know, anything net positive) to start guessing at the value of a given pledge.
deaux: Strange downvotes for a relevant question.
miyoji: You can read the actual pledge at [0]. The executive order regarding it is at [1].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...
techblueberry: The thing about the old days is, they’s the old days.And yes this particular group of professional liars provide every reason to be cynical.
staticman2: Your goal seemed to be to fact check Claude. I'm not sure why your failure to do so should be taken up with law.com?Law.com's first definition is inapplicable. That leaves us with the second definition, which says nothing about whether a pledge is legally binding.
AdieuToLogic: > Your goal seemed to be to fact check Claude.No, this is not my goal. My goal was to illuminate that Claude is a product which produces the most statistically relevant content to a prompt submitted therein.> I'm not sure why your failure to do so should be taken up with law.com?The post to which I originally replied cited "Claude" as if it were an authoritative source. To which I disagreed and then provided a definition from law.com. Where is my failure?> Law.com's first definition is inapplicable.From the article: The pledge includes a commitment by technology companies to bring or buy electricity supplies for their datacenters, either from new power plants or existing plants with expanded output capacity. It also includes commitments from big tech to pay for upgrades to power delivery systems and to enter special electricity rate agreements with utilities.[0] > That leaves us with the second definition, which says nothing about whether a pledge is legally binding.To which I originally wrote: Without careful review of the document signed, it is impossible to verify which form of the above is applicable in this case. 0 - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/04/us-tech-comp...
warkdarrior: There are no such things as CO2 emissions in this administration. Your AI chatbots will be powered by clean coal and you'll enjoy it!
washadjeffmad: Fingers crossed spit shake
behringer: The AI slop is still slop in any context.
dolphinscorpion: As long as they promised. Their word is golden
analog31: While we're at it, water use is another externality.
madhacker: Trump helping tech bros sell more data centers. A pledge is moronic. You pay for what you use since time immemorial. Don't need to redefine existing words with new meaning.
bpodgursky: 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.
adrianN: 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.
bitwize: Some towns in my state are already complaining about the noise from turbines supplying on-site power to a data center that's been built here. They're keeping people up at night. I'm broadly supportive of a "techie go home" movement.
dsl: 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.This absolutely cannot backfire. /s
simianwords: What’s wrong with this?
ipaddr: Price of power goes up and the local people are not connected to the benefits. You might think they will receive a lot of money in taxes but you would be wrong because they have tax breaks.
sparky_z: Why would adding a new supplier to the market cause the price of power to go up?
burnt-resistor: Sound and particulate pollution too.
burnt-resistor: Like trickle down economics? Fool me once ...
otterley: I find the whole thing a little odd. They’re basically pledging to pay their electricity bills. So what? So does every business.Saying they’re going to pay for generation and transmission adds little. That’s already baked into the charges! It’s like saying they’re going to finally pay for the farmers to grow the produce and the drivers to get the produce to market when they buy apples--as though spontaneous generation and teleportation was ever an option.
simianwords: They are pledging to not only pay for their own bills but rather increase the supply of electricity itself. This will reduce retail electricity prices.This mean retail consumers are paying less for electricity than what they would have paid if not for the pledge.
ZeroGravitas: An actual problem was them trying to avoid paying.They'd ask the utilities to make Gigawatts of energy available over the next two decades and the utilities would say "No problem, just sign here and agree to pay for us building out the grid to support that".Then the AI companies said "No we only want to pay for energy if we actually use it, if we go bust or decide not to use the energy in a couple of years we want you to charge all the others consumers to recoup that cost".No idea if that's addressed here. I'm assuming not.It was never clear if that reflected uncertainty about future demand or of they just like shifting costs and risk onto other people whenever possible.
podgorniy: What if they pay own bills (why is this even a subject of discussion?), increase supply (formally), but electricity prices still go up anyway? Just curios if scenario from my descrition even possible...
simianwords: that could happen because the demand could rise even more.
erpellan: Making charcoal releases CO2 though? How does that help with carbon capture?
stevefan1999: Stealing from the people; enriching myself
yanhangyhy: It feels like ordinary people are becoming increasingly unnecessary. With AI, data centers, and big corporations, they don’t really need ordinary people anymore apart from their own employees. Capitalists only need robots and artificial intelligence to serve them, and ordinary people could just be put in zoos for display.
DeathArrow: >Capitalists only need robots and artificial intelligence to serve themThat doesn't make sense because robots and AI won't have money to buy goods and services.
myrmidon: Because on-site powerplants owned by datacenter operators are not "just another supplier".The threat is: This "datacenter power" disincentives buildout of "free" powerplants (by eating up significant demand at very low margins thanks to basically vertical integration); this slows down buildout of "normal" infrastructure (possibly both grid connectivity and power), and the electrical energy market becomes worse for consumers than it is now.I personally think all of this is very speculative for now, but allowing industry to rely on the grid (which they still would!) while almost exclusively "buying" their own power is a risky proposition from a consumer perspective.
soulofmischief: Not to mention the danger of energy production, even nuclear, becoming resource-constrained to the point where datacenter power plants leave no room for municipal plants. We're seeing it happen with consumer hardware; make no mistake on who will get preference.
cyrusradfar: /s this guy gets it. Thank you, finally speaking my language
campuscodi: I've read so many of these pledges before.... tl'dr: no, they won't
throawayonthe: oh well if they pledge it's okay then!
rob74: They have a cute mascot, so it can't be that bad: https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/lifestyle-buzz/meet-coal...Actually, the tweet quoted in the article is firmly in the "you can't make this $%&/ up" category...
wolvoleo: True but they will focus their market on the every enriching 0.1% that will have all the money.
fragmede: People have already hooked up Stripe accounts to OpenClaw instances, so AI's currently buying and selling goods and services.
mr_toad: They’re pledging to do what they were doing anyway. No one with any sense is building large data centers and assuming the grid will supply the energy.
KptMarchewa: The capitalists realized that if they literally starve the working class there will be revolution. But if they produce enough so they can sustain (barely) rest of the people with 1% output while they consume 99%, it will be okay.So don't worry, you'll have basic ~~income~~ soylent green.
deadbolt: We're all gonna end up paying for this and everyone involved knows it.
beloch: Public investment yields private dividends.
AngryData: You don't HAVE to make it into charcoal, but it will take up way more volume if you don't and contains tons of volatiles like methane that will come out and may make the ground less stable to simply bury with dirt as it partially rots.Theoretically you could harness some of those volatiles for some energy production, but at the very least use those volatiles to heat the wood and make it charcoal for basically free.
nDRDY: Methane is a significantly more effective GHG than carbon dioxide!
AnthonyMouse: > Wait a “pledge”? What are the legal protections of a “pledge”?That's the boring part until you look at what they're promising to do.It's not as if existing data centers were getting power by sending a masked rogue to climb the utility pole, tap the lines and bypass the electric meter. Paying for electricity is the thing they were going to do anyway.Likewise, paying for "new generation capacity" is the thing they were probably going to do regardless, because colocating large data centers with power plants saves the expense of power transmission which lowers their costs.And as the article alludes to, the real question is when? In general you can build a data center faster than you can build a power plant, which is exactly the reason data centers can cause short-term electricity prices to increase. They temporarily cause demand to exceed supply until supply has time to catch up. So on the one hand the whole issue is kind of meh because it was only ever going to be a temporary price increase anyway, and on the other hand having them build power plants at the same rate anybody else is building power plants doesn't actually change anything or address the temporary shortfall. (If you really want to solve it, find a way to build power generation capacity faster.)And then it doesn't matter if you can enforce the promise because they're just promising to do things they were going to do anyway.
mr_toad: > And as the article alludes to, the real question is when? In general you can build a data center faster than you can build a power plant, which is exactly the reason data centers can cause short-term electricity prices to increase.Musk is bringing turbines in on trailers. They’re not even bothering with permits. This is getting really wild west.https://electrek.co/2026/03/03/elon-musk-xai-data-center-und...
bob1029: We should be focusing on how to build large turbines and transformers more quickly. A lot of transmission projects are blocked on equipment. There are warehouses full of photovoltaics that we cant use because of other industrial bottlenecks. We can build an entire PV plant before we can obtain a single custom transformer for a substation.
mr_toad: > For a personal loan of moneyThe seven are doing some fancy accounting to pay for their data centers, but I don’t think Larry, Sergey and others are taking out personal loans.
mentalgear: Oh the "pledges" - tell me again how the Billionaire's Giving Pledge - the ultimate "pinky promise" of the 1% - is going?Launched in 2010 by Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, and Warren Buffett, it was sold as a historic shift in philanthropy. Fast forward to 2026, and the data suggests it’s been more of a "Wealth Preservation Society" than a massive wealth redistribution event.This will be just as trustworthy. We need laws - not merely rhetoric pledges !
staticman2: This is exhausting. Claude read the article.Said article is not about a loan backed by a security agreement. That eliminates law.com definition 1.Law.com definition 2 is silent on whether pledges are binding.Thus ended your research.I don't know why you care if Claude.com is authoritative. Law.com isn't either, the authoritative legal references are paywalled. A law dictionary, as we've demonstrated by law.com's second definition's vagueness, isn't necessarily even the correct reference to consult.Your failure, I suppose, is that you provided worse information than Claude. I suppose you should have typed "Don't cite Claude please" and moved on.
nixass: Can I pledge to pay taxes?
bdangubic: move to northern virginia - the capital of data centers - and see what happens to your energy bills…
harimau777: Isn't that contradicted by the fact that data centers are increasing electric prices in the areas they are built? It seems to me that either the data centers are drawing power from the grid or the utilities are gouging people. Either one should be stopped.
adrianN: Charcoal is like 80% carbon and the tree extracted it from the atmosphere.
nDRDY: Are you suggesting we cut down trees and bury them to save the planet? For me, this idea marks the departure from reason and into crazytown.When our civilisation is excavated in 500 years, they are going to say we were as crazy as all of the others.
adrianN: I suggest it’s easier to leave to carbon in the ground in the first place. Carbon capture promises are unrealistic. But if you want to go with charcoal it’s probably best to get wood from coppicing.
harimau777: I don't think it's necessarily unreasonable. As I understand it, the lumber industry has optimized the ability to grow massive amounts of fast growing pine as quickly as possible. So this isn't suggesting that we start clearcutting forests, it's suggesting that we start growing massive amounts of lumber with the explicit purpose of converting it to charcoal and burrying it.
NegativeK: > The tech companies don't really have any issue payingIt reduces profit.
ourmandave: Fear not citizen! Ya boi Elon got you covered with the new Megablock.Ta da! It's 3 Megapaks wired together with a transformer. Now that's innovation.See? Without billionaires, who would save us from billionaires?Tesla’s Megablock: Breaking the Transformer Bottleneck https://www.rebellionaire.com/post/tesla-megablock-transform...
throwaw12: > The agreement is meant to help mitigate concerns that big tech’s datacenters are driving up US electricity costs for homes and small businessesExactly 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
Joel_Mckay: Much like the price of RAM, SSD, and GPU. The ballooning data-center energy consumption costs have already broken the middle class economic-loop Westinghouse electric drove in the 1950s. Some are seeing their utility bills double.People are not voluntarily going to build things that make less profit.It is a suckers bet assuming the unscrupulous will grow a conscience. =3
NoLinkToMe: I've seen Musk note in an interview that at year-end the bottleneck will not be CPU/RAM etc, but electricity. And new powerplants are backlogged for years.That's why he wants to go into space (10x solar potential because you don't have a day/night cycle, no clouds, no dust/rain, no temperature loss, no orientation issues, and no atmosphere reducing solar).To me it seems ridiculous, for one because sending 150kg to space costs about $500k, and this is about the weight of a solar installation that costs $800 to install and generates about $1000 worth of electricity across 20 years at utility wholesale prices.But suppose it was cheaper and viable, and earth-electricity was indeed capped, you could argue (if you believe the hype) that developing AI is an existential arms-race objective for US/China.But from what I've understood that's just not the case at all. Something like 170+ coal plants are scheduled to be decommissioned, and the average coal and gas plant runs at 40-50% of capacity, because wind/solar is eating their lunch (cheaper marginal $ per kWh). i.e. there is so little demand that these plants keep using less capacity and shutting down superfluous plants.You'd think if experts believed electricity was going to be a bottleneck, that venture capital / AI companies, or even traditional capital, would be buying up plants or signing guaranteed-usage contracts. But it doesn't seem to be the case.
Propelloni: LOL, they just introduced QoS into the electricity grid.
dathinab: which means nothingbecause no one believes there are legal consequences if they don'tand there are a lot of ways to doge it even if there where a reliable government in placelike 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).
thegreatpeter: So you believe Microsoft will start opening up coal plants again and not nuclear?
thegreatpeter: So what’s the solution? No data center? Let the current landscape of power companies operate as is?
dev1ycan: Everything that the white house says atm, they do the opposite.
throwaw12: Let's make some assumptions first:1. DCs must be built anyway2. 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 applyAlso BigTech is not going to build the power generation plants, it must be built by existing processes to minimize impact on pricing
tomrod: Grid overload if they produce too much base load.Interconnection expenses.Same issues as with mining and large industrial clients generally.
dathinab: 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).
dathinab: it actually is a bad idea if you look into the detailstrees aren't just carbon, they are bio mass/nutritionand if you constantly remove bio mass you sooner or later run into issues(Which we already do in some places, e.g. when over using fields (see US dust storms), or with some managed Forrest getting increasingly more unstable not just because of warmed climate but also because of removing dead treas leading to an interruption of the natural nutrient recycling (and insect habitats) leading to Nutrition deficiency in the long run.)but we do have working carbon removal technologies, they are just not cheaphence why you want companies to pay for them, it gives them a huge reason to reduce emissions instead
simianwords: so no companies should build anything even if they attempt to pay for the externalities. this is just nimbyism.
LunaSea: The same way Nvidia "pledged" $100B to OpenAI?
jmyeet: This is really a state law issue and there's really no solution for spiralling energy costs other than nationalizing utilities or otherwise making them into state or municipal entities, much like municipal broadband.Take the case of Duke Energy in North Carolina, which illegally raised rates too much. Utilities prices are supposedly regulated but utilities work around this by simply moving costs to things they can charge whatever for (eg transmission costs vs energy costs).The NC Court of Appeals ruled that Duke Energy's actions were illegal BUT there would be no refunds for customers [1], in part because lawmakers passed a law to allow them to do this retroactively [2]. Also, if Duke Energy had to repay customers they can simply raise prices to recoup those costs even though the money was improperly charged in the first place.So consumers will keep paying for the infrastructure to connect up these data centers and will keep subsidizing the ongoing energy costs.[1]: https://www.wcnc.com/article/news/local/no-refunds-for-duke-...[2]: https://sustaincharlotte.org/press-release-nc-lawmakers-over...
dathinab: Nuclear power is a pain to build and maintain and un-build once it gets to old to reliable run it (the later part is commonly overlooked in cost calculations).It is also a ~50 year investment.This makes it not very attractive for companies and is why most nuclear power is state sub-ventioned.Theoretically the US had something similar to a state bank to help companies to finance exactly such projects, but Trump/DOGE defounded it for publicity reasons which makes it even less likely for private nuclear power plants.Many "we will use Nuke" statements, rely on mini reactors to work well and be affordable. But AFIK pretty much all mini reactor projects it dead ends so far.So my guess it they will claim they want to use Nuclear and might even intend to do so. But in the end look at their balance sheets and go "nah, lets do coal/gas/oil". There probably will be some single public co-investment into a nuclear power plant which is also (and majorly) government sponsored.
jfengel: "Attempt" is doing a lot of work there. Companies are driven by a profit motive, and are practically required to renege on promises that are not legally enforced.In a different world they would have earned trust and deserve the benefit of the doubt. This is not that world.
cucumber3732842: >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.
cainxinth: Does a “pledge” have more or less weight than a pinky promise?
motbus3: 1y from here they will be talking how nuclear facilities are necessary
blitzar: I pledge to bear costs of energy I use.I was unaware it was optional.
chasd00: hah yeah that's pretty funny. "you can count on us to pay our electricity bill!" - tech companies.
Xunjin: “Socialize the losses, privatize the profits”.
ilovechaz: Of course it means a lot.AI companies are chomping at the bit to expand, and this, allowing them to advance at warp speed, is just what they need.Only ones against it are the TDS mental patients and the communists.What I love about this thread is that it makes it easy to build my filter of commies and anti-Americans. Thank you ycombinator forum!
FpUser: >"commies"Who are those may I ask?
soared: This sounds really cool and all government> 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.
Xunjin: The point of your whole argument is that “financial experts” are always rational and are not affected by bubbles, it took months from energy experts talking with media/investors to the Big Tech would start talking about “energy crisis”.In fact, Nadella publicly stated that he has a large amount of hardware in inventory that has already been purchased but cannot be utilized due to insufficient energy.
alphawhisky: 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.
kanddle: 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.
blitzar: my read was we should ... cut down trees, burn them and bury the ashes to save the planet
cucumber3732842: Look in the mirror.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.
blitzar: The MBA pencil pusher would pay a billion for 1 unit of electricity if it increased their market cap by a trillion. The margin is so fat and the percieved upside so great that 9 figure signing bonuses have been thrown around.Of course this will all change, but I doubt we will see tech companies opening power plants anytime soon with their associated balance sheet dragging 1% return on equity.
ModernMech: Depends, were their fingers crossed behind their backs or not?
testing22321: I covered my house in solar panels so it’s all irrelevant now.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.
koolba: We already charge different rates for things residential vs industrial water usage. Why not do the same hear and simply charge them more? The state could also impose a data center surcharge on their usage.
fulafel: Build and colocate the needed rewnewable (solar/wind/battery) capacity with the data centers and make them energy efficient by eg choosing cool locations.
Razengan: Wait a minute, so who else was paying the bills?
AdieuToLogic: 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.
trinsic2: 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.
Aboutplants: Most of these Data centers will be powered by Natural Gas, which flows from production through interstate pipelines, which already are fully subscribed meaning there isn’t any space left. As these data centers come online they will suck supply from these interstate pipelines, drastically increasing prices for all other forms of Natural gas usage (including residential power generation). This has a direct impact on prices for the end user and there is nothing that can be done in time to facilitate this from not occurring.Building pipelines is a long and arduous process and one that will not be done in time to reasonably accommodate the increase in natural gas demand presented by these data centers.
bpodgursky: Wrong, using grid power without adding capacity will result in tech companies paying more for electricity too. They want to add capacity.
drooby: 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.
PunchyHamster: Can't really do that for AI. What you gonna do, tax their use of scraped data ? How would even that be implemented ?
drooby: 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.
terminalshort: 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.
softfalcon: Are you absolutely sure they don't want us to add the capacity for them with a pathway for further government subsidies?Almost everything in tech has been subsidized in one way or another via tax avoidance schemes or outright lobbying and manipulation of the market.Why would this be any different?
drooby: 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.Non-rivalrous doesn't mean non-exploitable.
WarmWash: 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, but 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."
PunchyHamster: Many problems with it:* power generation is not local in most of the cases. You'd be still fucking energy market to anyone outside it* power is also used by companies people actually want. Even if household power cost wont chance thanks to that approach, the price for power for every single business around will increase.* similarly any other manufacturing business will cost more. In essence, the AI boom will reduce profit margin of every single business that has electric power as significant cost in the production. Which is a lot of industries."Making AI pay more for its useless power draw" is nice idea but it is pretty hard to realise. Unless we start outright denying connection to power grid but that's pretty dangerous political precedent to set.
phil21: > "Making AI pay more for its useless power draw" is nice idea but it is pretty hard to realise.And should never be a thing. It's not for others to decide something is useless. Let the market figure that out. It should simply be an even playing field, and in theory we already have the regulatory mechanisms to get that done. If the rates are currently able to be abused, that is entirely correctable.It should not matter if I want to build 1000MW of aluminum smelting capacity, or a facility that digs holes and fills them back in again - so long as I'm paying the regulatory rates that have been set to be fair across all similar power consumers.The bigger problem by far is that we spent 40-60 years not building anything. Eventually you run out of the previous generation's power capacity. Can only ride inertia and offshoring your industrial energy usage for so long. There are a lot of chickens coming home to roost in the next decade or three on this topic, electric grid was just pulled forward a bit due to the AI bubble.
baxtr: > if you don't assert collective ownership of the resource before private companies capture all the valueIsn't that how communism (should have) worked?
shimman: 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.
WarmWash: Democratize means to make something available to everyone.I suppose the root of the word is from democracy, everyone gets a vote/equal rights, but the meaning doesn't really have anything to do with politics or government...So to reframe my argument for clarity;I have a hard time coming up with an honest critique of why giving everyone incredibly cheap access (often free!) to incredibly powerful LLMs is somehow evil. And obviously these things are ridiculously popular. Average people seem to think they are fucking awesome, and anger seems to be mostly from gatekeepers that are relentlessly screaming that their gates are being bypassed for pennies.
shimman: No that is not what democratize means, how asinine. You aren't giving anything away for free, you're fucking the commons for monetary gain.I'm having a hard time understanding why you think it's okay for SV to steal from humanity then profit off of our knowledge? In which universe is this democratic? Why is this something we have to accept? I don't accept it at all, the vast majority of Americans don't accept it.This is just neoliberalism with flame decals.These things are CLEARLY NOT POPULAR, why do you think all the LLM companies are trying to force these tools through corporate mandates that have been falling? Why do you think LLM companies are chasing after lucrative corporate welfare in the form of government contracts lasting from years to decades?For a technology that sure billed as useful sure is struggling hard to find paying customers.Why do you think people are protesting data center buildouts? Why do you think the vast majority of Americans hate big tech and SV? Look at who the most hated people are in America, it's nearly all of big tech leadership.Get out of your bubble.I have never seen a product that has to have a company mandate to use it or lose your job. Usually products that are useful and productive don't need a company mandate for adoption.
drooby: 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.
abletonlive: > These things are CLEARLY NOT POPULARTime to leave whatever bubble you live in. These are some of the most popular apps on the market today. It's incredibly popular.
bix6: > anger seems to be mostly from gatekeepers that are relentlessly screaming that their gates are being bypassed for pennies.Sorry what? Authors are gatekeepers to what? Their books that they wrote and now will never get paid for cuz the LLM ripped it?
Imustaskforhelp: > 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 risksSir, does that sound familiar?> I get the gatekeepers are pissedNo, humans are pissed, humans just like how you and your family are humans too (well I sure hope so)
tomrod: You'll notice that I did not advocate against building and grid reconfiguration. Indeed, my company does microgrids. I do, however, believe strongly in being aware of tradeoffs.In short, I'm very much in favor of building the right solution to a problem.I am unsure what cognitively triggered an unhealthy response of "this is NIMBYism!" and would welcome a follow up comment to understand your train of thought.
BizarroLand: They're new and shiny, but hollow and empty. People like playing with them, seeing what they can do, but the glitz will wear off the moment they stop pumping more into it.The instant people feel like "AI" isn't fun, the whole thing dies.
baxtr: ok, fair enough. I think I misread your first comment.not sure if that would work in this case since all these companies scraped (publicly) available data? So with the right resources anyone could redo it?
pixl97: > vast majorities of the electorate would want to nationalizeLol, then you've missed how propaganda in the US has worked for the last 100 years. The wealthy have launched a continuous attack against the idea of nationalization/socialization to the point it creates a irrational Pavlovian response in huge portions of the population. Us the population have already lost a war we had no idea we were fighting to an enemy that plays a far longer game than most of us.
adrianN: Acid rain and smog are not much of a concern with gas turbines. The most problematic exhaust is probably nitrous oxide.
Arainach: Price doesn't matter. Using communal resources for private gain - without the consent of the creators even - is wrong, full stop. It's the same reason that publishers making billions selling access to scientific research that tax dollars funded is wrong.As to prices: look at power bills, RAM prices, appliance prices, and prices of anything with microchips. Consumers are paying a lot more than $20/month for this slop.
WarmWash: If it's slop, why do they pay for it?I mean, raise you hand if you have never paid for AI "slop", I see maybe a hand or two in this room of tens of thousands.It's a strawman to frame it as AI labs get everything and society gets nothing. Bruh, the fastest growing applications of all time didn't explode in popularity because they "offer nothing of value". I'm not giving you an argument, I'm giving you a reality check.
Arainach: Congratulations, you ignored all the substance in my post and focused on one word.
mistrial9: > gonna fuck over any endangered frogsExtinction is forever -- your frustration, and that committee process, does not compare directly to species extinction.
GuinansEyebrows: you care, and i care, and i think even the person you're replying to cares; that's great, but the people involved in the business of making these decisions treat them as a matter of procedure.as long as the boxes are checked, most public sector employees are not going to stick their neck out. it's steady work that pays all right and has great benefits (and even pensions sometimes). a lot of people in the public sector aren't willing to step out of line for "frogs" even when they should or want to.
cucumber3732842: The system optimized for these people.So you get some guy approving some megacorps project because "well it says here that they've tested the stuff and the liquid mercury is below the <cites EPA mumbo jumbo" and giving farmer Johnson the runaround on some land clearing because farmer Johnson's project isn't worth spending $30k on civil engineering to have someone use "the right words" to say "I'm not gonna muddy up the river" and while the guy in the office knows what farmer Johnson means, he can't approve the project without sticking his neck out and so he doesn't.It must be nice to live in a desert state where every 3rd parcel isn't "within regulatory range" of "wetlands" (most people don't know how expansive that word is).
GuinansEyebrows: trust me, this happens even in dense, deep blue places like Seattle and LA.
drooby: 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.
pixl97: There is no us, there is only you, by default.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.
drooby: No offense, but this comment makes virtually zero contact with reality.Our entire civilization runs on your "polite lie" of owning non-physical things. Patents, copyrights, trade secrets, licensing agreements, NDAs. Trillion dollar companies are built on the legal enforceability of intellectual property. The software you're using to type this comment exists because someone owns the code.Calling information "entropy" doesn't make contract law disappear. We decided collectively that people and institutions can own ideas, and we built the modern economy on that decision. You can argue that's a fiction, but it's a fiction that everything around you depends on.You can't invoke "universal laws of information" to dismiss public claims to training data while the companies training on it aggressively enforce their own IP. They patent their architectures. They copyright their outputs. They sue competitors for misuse. They clearly believe in ownership of non-physical objects when it benefits them.You don't get it both ways.
vibrio: (not intending ot be snarky, but this isn't my area of knowledge in the least.) Didn't the AI organizations 'get it both ways' when they trained on vast collection of works under copyright and then purely "own' the outcome?
drooby: That's not snarky at all, that's exactly the point. They did get it both ways.The comment I was responding to argued that ownership of non-physical things is basically a "polite lie" and that information is just entropy that belongs to whoever can capture it. My point was that the AI companies clearly don't believe that when it applies to them. They patent their architectures, copyright their outputs, sue competitors for IP violations, and lock down their model weights. They fully believe in ownership of non-physical things.But when it comes to the billions of people whose work they trained on? Suddenly information is free-flowing entropy that belongs to no one.That's the asymmetry at the heart of this. The rules around IP apparently apply when it protects their profits, but not when it would obligate them to share those profits with the people whose work made them possible. Which is exactly why the public needs to assert a claim now, before that asymmetry gets any more entrenched.
drooby: Addition:Also worth knowing: collective intellectual property already exists. ASCAP and BMI have been doing exactly this for decades. Individual songwriters can't enforce their rights every time their music gets played, so they pool their IP, license it collectively, and distribute the revenue. The problem they solved is almost identical to the training data problem. Each individual contribution is tiny, but the collective value is enormous. Applying this at the scale of the general public would be novel, but the underlying mechanism isn't. The concept works. It just hasn't been applied to training data yet.
GrinningFool: > 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.You're probably right -- except for the billions in massive PR campaigns that will be spent to successfully convince enough of them that it's in their best interest to let the companies keep ownership.This is in addition to the billions in PR already being spent to make AI palatable in spite of the societal and economic costs.
shimman: Their billions in PR isn't stopping people from rejecting data centers being built in their communities.What you have to understand about advocacy is that it's the worst form of politics and it only goes so far. Paid canvassers aren't convincing compared to actual humans organizing with one another.
pixl97: I mean, the AI companies want it this way, but the same laws of information apply to them too. They can patent whatever they want, but as we see other nations use their models to distill information to other models with almost nothing they can do about it.Patents, copyright, lawsuits are all post ad hoc actions which mean the milk has already been stolen. And it only works if the rule of law is something that is respected, that's not going so well lately.We are seeing this in that there is little to no moat between the models, nearly everyone with the needed compute seems to catch up pretty quickly. And when said rivalries cross national boarders the only solution to these problems quickly becomes violence.With how information works AI wins this game in the long run. Individual humans scale poorly and their ability to individually acquire information is a slow process. Looking at this on a company by company basis is not the proper way to show how the future with models is going to play out.
cucumber3732842: I never said it didn't.Something something the more numerous the laws...
Ajedi32: > No that is not what democratize means, how asinine.You're wrong, and are getting upset with GP over your own misunderstanding of the English language.> democratize (verb)> [...]> 2. [+ object] formal : to make (something) available to all people : to make it possible for all people to understand (something)> * The magazine's goal is to democratize art.https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/democratize
bgnn: > 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 [].AI has a great potential like this too..[] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease
NoLinkToMe: So why did Nadella not pour a few billion into buying the 50% capacity that the average coal/gas plant has spare, that they're not running due to insufficient demand?
hntway5994: >If it's slop, why do they pay for it?Fast food sells like crazy even though everyone largely agrees it's not the best. People aren't always rational with their purchases.
vibrio: Interesting analogy.
vibrio: This is interesting. As a naive user I’ve gotten the gut feeling of commoditization among the models. I assumed the data center capacity push is intended to be the differentiator but that still seems utility-like over time. (and the data centers in space concept seems like good PR and IR, but to me, technically… ambitious)
thecarbonista: Microsoft is already doing it with nuclear. So is xAI/X/Tesla, the cleanest and most carbon friendly company on the planet.
bakies: Laughable statementhttps://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/13/elon-mus... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/15/elon-musk...
thecarbonista: Yeah that article is pretty laughable.
bakies: Good one, shill
shimman: If they're so popular and so great, why are they struggling to make profit? Why are they struggling to show large returns? Why are they all trying to use the strategy of securing corporate welfare to enrich themselves?These things are enabling mass surveillance and human misery, maybe instead of constantly chasing the shiny and letting SV dictate the direction of tech in the US we start introducing public alternatives to this mess?Something tells me that if you gave $100 billion to a consortium of devs across the US they would come up with a better plan to enable technological flourishing rather than mass inequality.
abletonlive: > If they're so popular and so great, why are they struggling to make profit?Because they are optimizing for growth not for profit> Why are they struggling to show large returnsBecause they are growing their reach> Why are they all trying to use the strategy of securing corporate welfare to enrich themselves?"Securing corporate welfare" well this is one of those reject the premise things. They aren't doing that in any capacity that is different than any other company or sector.> These things are enabling mass surveillance and human misery, maybe instead of constantly chasing the shiny and letting SV dictate the direction of tech in the US we start introducing public alternatives to this mess?You're welcome to do that any time, you'll just find that your reality breaks when you realize people actually like LLMs and use them a lot. go ahead and do some basic research> Something tells me that if you gave $100 billion to a consortium of devs across the US they would come up with a better plan to enable technological flourishing rather than mass inequality.Yawn. You're speaking about the tech bubble but live in a bubble that doesn't match that bubble's reality. Developers love LLMs. Demand is ATH, we have less capacity to deliver LLMs than there is demand.How do you operate in the regular world when you're so unaligned with reality?Both apple and google's app store has LLMs as the #1 downloaded app "BuT thEy ArEn't PoPuLar EvErYbody HaTes Them".Maybe you should unsubscribe to your bubble subreddits or wherever you are getting information to form such a discordant understanding of reality. I don't think it's working for you.
ajam1507: 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.
terminalshort: The author is not fairly compensated in that case, but if you buy the book, he is. If you bought books and learned to code from them and then went on to go found a startup that ended up being worth billions, you don't owe that author one dollar more than you already paid him when you bought his book. That's more like the AI case here.
thecarbonista: Right back at 'ya, commie bot
mike_d: No they should not. They should donate that money to non-profit public utility operators instead.
terminalshort: Good. I want more power plants built, especially ones that don't emit CO2.
mike_d: You seem to be missing the point that they should be public utilities.Tech companies are exceedingly good at giving things away for free to get all the "market share" and then monetizing.
WarmWash: Considering that books have probably been the easiest thing to pirate for the last 30 years, and LLMs are probably the worst way to try and read a book free, I'm not sure why authors would be focusing their anger at AI.Many books you can even get free at a library....
jpetso: Free books for you as an individual, not free for the library and the city backing it. What's in your library still ends up paying authors (and their publishers).
mrguyorama: The point of turning the trees into Charcoal is to return all the non-carbon elements to the environment and remove any metabolic activity from releasing that carbon.The USA currently produces about 70 million tons of paper per year, which is about half carbon by weight. We produce about 2 gigatons of lumber per year, which is again about half carbon, all absorbed from the atmosphere.Unfortunately, we produce like 40 gigatons of CO2 per year. So we would have to scale lumber work dramatically. It's also not a clean industry itself, reliant on heavy machinery running on gasoline or diesel, and turning that wood into charcoal would require massive refineries.IMO more effective bets are figuring out how to artificially induce massive blooms of algae and plankton in parts of the ocean to essentially recreate the conditions that lead to the hydrocarbon deposits in the first place. There's some work on this right now, but like any massive engineering and ecological tampering, there will be tradeoffs and downsides. I also don't know how you prevent the dead plant matter from decomposing and releasing the carbon.
nDRDY: Algae blooms are typically the sign of something very wrong with an aquatic ecosystem (usually human-induced). This is in addition to the issues it causes in the rest of the local ecosystem by drastically reducing the light, nutrients, and oxygen available to other aquatic life.I can't believe these ideas are being seriously suggested. Is it a win if we reduce CO2 but make the planet uninhabitable for other reasons?
dathinab: it's an example for how environmental damages killed a lot of people not so long ago and people just "forget and ignore". I'm not saying it's the same kind of damage. It still is damage, and can kill.
ajam1507: Except the "person" reading the book is a corporation worth billions and you didn't get any money from them.
nDRDY: It's too controversial now, but one day we will recognise the current narrow-minded obsession with CO2 as the Western civilisation-wide doomsday cult that it is.
BizarroLand: I think this is literally the most head in own ass stupid thing I've ever read on the internet.
nDRDY: Quite the opposite - I'm asking people to take a wider view of the changes that humankind is making to the planet. Given those changes, a viewpoint that concludes with people asking for vast numbers of trees to be cut down, burned (or charred, at least), and buried has some fundamental problems.
BizarroLand: Your house is on fire. What is more important to you, putting out the fire or repainting the living room?
nDRDY: Putting out the fire, yet I get people telling me all the time I need to buy lots of shiny new things to save the planet!
xnx: > The best way I know is making charcoal and burying ithttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar, for those who have not heard of this.
