Yay Texas the business-friendly state. As if billionaires aren’t raping the planet and all of us hard enough, the lone star state is always looking for way to pump their penises just a little bit bigger.
The red run deregulated Texas Oblast allowed this shit. Kiss the water supplies and eventually the local economy good-bye.
It’s all worth it if my plastic “made in China” hula dancer arrives in time so I can put it on my cars dashboard. /s
Net zero doesn’t mean lowering pollution btw. Net zero means essentially cancelling out any pollution by planting trees, buying carbon credits, etc. It’s possible to be the biggest polluter and also net zero as a company. If that actually helps the planet is another story.
Most “we plant a tree for every _____” things are just scams. They plant the trees, sometimes as monocrops that could never become a healthy forest, and usually without monitoring the trees or guaranteeing their survival into at least early-maturity.
Yep, and many of them just never plant any trees at all.
Trees get too much credit. It’s plankton in the ocean that absorbs like 70% of all co2
Don’t plankton mostly release that back into the atmosphere when they die though? Trees sequester it underground as roots and above ground as wood (assuming it doesnt burn, which is an increasingly ambitious assumption)
Well, as long as trees magically suck pollution out of the atmosphere in extremely high numbers, and sequester it for at least a few million years, that should be fine
Otherwise, we’re probably fucked.
In case it was not your intent to point this out with sarcasm, for anyone reading:
-
not all forests are created equal: new growth forests are simply not as good at long-term burial of carbon.
-
carbon sinks only work so long as the carbon stays sunk, so if a tree dies and rots before it’s buried, all of that carbon just goes back to the atmosphere, except a lot of it is now methane, which is MANY times worse than CO2.
-
this means that it is possible for a poorly - managed tree to actually be an effective carbon source for the purpose of greenhouse gas emissions, rather than a sink, since a single molecule of methane can do the damage of a hundred molecules of carbon dioxide.
-
the largest carbon sink on earth is not the forests, but the ocean, and that carbon only really has two ways out: back into the atmosphere, or buried at the bottom in the calcareous ooze. Now if you really want to understand how fucked we are, read up on the following:
- Carbonate Compensation Depth (see how it relates to the amount of calcareous ooze being buried in the ocean)
- Methane Clathrate Hydrate
- Permafrost Methane
-
i dont trees can safely do it fast enough. also its mostly co2 , pollution is a different matter. Also algae, phytoplankton make half of the carbon capture as well, a net benefit when they become marine snow and sink to the bottom of the ocean.
And we gotta be negative. Net 0 is a nice milestone on the way to build a future for our children.
It would also be in stark defiance of Amazon’s stated climate goals, which center on reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.
That’s not lost on the tech giant. But as Amazon spokesperson Margaret Callahan told the NYT, the “world looks different now than when we co-founded the climate pledge.”
What the fuck? They looked at the world recently and said “yeah, climate change isn’t as much of a problem as it was before”?!?
No, they looked at the blatant corruption from Fatboy McKiddieFiddlers regime and figured, “eh, what’s the point of pretending to give a shit. No fucker has got the balls to stop us from fucking thing up.”
“current gov allows us to do anything so we don’t care anymore because that,'s cheaper”
They mean politically, they can get away with this now without blownack, they never gave one single shit about the climate
The same company that will same day deliver a single tube of toothpaste to my door doesn’t care about carbon emissions? What?
On one hand that sounds bad, but if that delivery driver is dropping off enough things in one run that would have been individual people driving to a store, does it balance out?
Or maybe “eh, it’s fucked anyways, let’s make red line go up”.
It’s those pesky Canadians again, it’s all their fault for mismanaging the fires, not the fact we are cooking ourselves alive.
Don’t forget to use your paper straws people! It’s the average person that causes harm to the climate, not businesses. Maybe we should give them more tax breaks.
And don’t forget to vote for the lesser evil party that will allow amazon to build just a dozen of these enormous datacenters instead of even more
You’re going to be surprised when you find out who consumes what businesses produce…
“Yet you live in society, curious.”
Not only that, actively consume products and blame the creators of the products for the consequences.
I don’t know, if you actively are reducing your shopping from amazon and try to stay away from their products, I wouldn’t call you a hypocrite for criticising them. And many people now a days are doing just that, so you can’t really assume right from the start that a person is being hypocritical.
Amazon is a seller, they don’t manufacture almost anything, but that’s beside the point. It’s not about the individual. I can blame either BP for drilling for oil, or the millions of people who refuse to:
- drive an EV
- ordering the more expensive but locally manufactured products that don’t need that much transportation
- vote for walkable cities and public transportation
- simply consume less stuff
That would require introspection, and maybe accepting responsibility. It’s easier to live in a world that the BP’s CEO is the bad one and me and all of my friends are blameless victims.
Billionaires can only burn so much oil with their private planes and yachts, they don’t consume 100 million barrels per day.
Retrospection is always nice and needed and consumption habits definitely need to change. However there is something to be said of someone who single handedly and deliberately pushes the world towards more and more unsustainable consumption habits because they are playing the world like they are playing a game of monopoly. Imagine opening a supermarket chain in a town with local shops and driving others out of business by creating unfair competition with very low prices (by providing goods from countries with lower wages and questionable production standards). Sure you can also blame the local consumers for being selfish and not owning their community but in some cases people actually have to choose between cheaper grocery prices vs other essentials. And now in this case you are comparing someone who is being selfish because it becomes a matter of providing yourself and your kids with basic necessities vs someone who already has billions but is driving even less sustainable consumption practices because it makes them more money. To me it is clear in this case on whom the bigger part of the blame falls to. Educate people and ask them to do retrospection yes but as long as people like billionaires exist, they will actively look for ways to exploit the system. So they should not exist.
Billionaires can only burn so much oil with their private planes and yachts
Everything aside, if someone is personally consuming yearly the fuel equivalent of hundreds of people, I can still call them a much more selfish person even though on a grander scale that particular impact is negligible compared to totality of commercial flights.
Anything from futurism.com should be immediately questioned.
Remember that Stargate SG1 episode where they find themselves into a huge underground facility that is under attack by external forces. Jack O’Neill accepts to pilot one of their drones to help defend the complex from a wave of bombers and is infuriated to learn that the attacker’s bombers were manned while he believed they were unmanned.
spoiler
At the end it turns out the facility was actively poisoning the entire planet, threatening to wipe out all life and the “attackers” were simply the people of the rest of the world trying to stop it.
That is what the Amazon data center is to me.
Don’t tempt me to rewatch all of SG1 again >.>
You mean don’t tempt you with a good time?
A key thing there is that the bunker dwellers were at least eugenicists if not outright Nazi analogues and they were deliberately killing everyone outside as untermensch, it wasn’t just a callous side effect of their facility.
Which episode is this, this might get me into SG1
The one with Odo in it!
Season 4 episode 2
!Evil!< Odo!
Tap for spoiler
Add a spoiler warning!
Good idea
always the fascist…
I need to watch it. I’ve never seen it. I’m too young I guess.
BUT it was ALSO create THREE whole jobs so it’s WORTH it!
Imagine the local government decides they can’t pull water anymore. Like several nuclear reactors having to shut down due to low river levels recently.
The picture of facility in vast desert is baffling.
It doesn’t need to be so, the asshole billionaires just don’t give a single fuck about anyone but themselves. They don’t even care about their kids.
They have enough money for generations of their children to live as untouchables. They don’t need to care about their kids.
they wouldn’t be able to do shit if we didn’t enable them to do it; point the anger at the right place.
What womam would want to have sex with those old pedos anyway?
It is safe to say im done with amazon deleting my account now I will not support them anymore I worked there and saw how bad workers are treated and used to order stuff from them often im done with them period.
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
can we use some patriot missiles for something patriotic?
If the U.S. blew this up, I’d concede that the U.S. actually does help the world from time to time.
How do you think they’re clearing the native residents off the land?
It’s in one of the sunniest places in the US too. 6.0 kWh/m²/day of solar irradiance. There’s even already a relatively large solar farm in the same county.
Wait, it does not run on solar, even partially? JFC.
edit: yep.
Amazon has confirmed its investment in a massive gas-burning power plant in Texas, meant to supply up to 7.65 gigawatts of energy to a planned data center in Pecos County. Should it come online as planned, the plant’s 35 turbines would be allowed to spew 33 million tons of CO2 a year, the NYT notes, which would easily make it the largest single fount of emissions in the country.
It would also be in stark defiance of Amazon’s stated climate goals, which center on reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.
🤦
Does greed know no end in this country?
7.65 GW × 24 hrs / 6 kW/m2/day = 30.6 km2 of just solar panels, just for this one data center
The solution isn’t solar, the solution is don’t build it
it does know an end. in fact, the end just pled guilty to stalking ending in death in new york.
It‘s universally known by now that new mega data centers are generally powered by gas. And it‘s the same everywhere in the world. Destroying them and prohibit exorbitant wealth are measures that are long overdue already. We genuinely do not need all that calculating power. Not for this high of a price.
No, we really don’t.
If I were king they could run data centers with solar and fans. No outside power, no outside water.
You realize they are for sifting through the massive amount of surveillance data using AI right? They aren’t for ChatGPT. They are for categorizing and watching every person on the planet 1984 style.
that’s my biggest worry, more data centers won’t lower the cost of LLM tokens.
The only reason they want so much compute power is to have AI agents watching and annotating everything flock cameras see.
not just license plate readers (a raspberry pi could handle that). but everything.
My paranoia is that in 5 years, if you protest, the police will come to arrest you with a long list of every “crime” you have committed: driving holding you phone, no seatbelt, a recipt flew out of your pockets… a long list of petty meaningless violations.
and they’ll have that list for everyone.
They are already unpopular now. Wait till the pigs dive even deeper in popularity.
They might convince the general population that the first amendment is not worth exercising, and instead we all neet to contemplate military style resistance.
Nobody apparently wants to bring trouble to themselves as long as there is still anything left to hope for. However that calculus can change once the powers that be engineer a life even more glaringly worthless than it already is. Lots of people are quiet quitting or not having children already. That trend will accelerate even further.
If ice killing random people on the street, on camera, multiple times, didn’t cross that line, a random construction site won’t do shit.
Just imagine the number of misclassifications…
Do you have a source for this?
Running an LLM is significantly less resource intensive than training it, and all indicators are that these data centers are being built to keep up the breakneck pace of companies racing to create AGI.
They’re literally buying up all the computing resources so that we can’t get any.
We will all have to communicate though walled gardens on dumb tablets.
They can quickly summarize vast amounts of text looking for any “undesirable” patterns using LLMs.
We will all have to rent computing time from them.
This is the point, this has been the point for a long time, it’s just that LLMs were the perfect storm of “impressive to rubes” and “resource hungry”. Micron has already eliminated its consumer brand, Crucial. Hell, Peter Thiel (the Palantir guy) goes around giving talks about how “being against AI is the antichrist” just to make sure that all the remaining brainwashed sheep fall for the ruse.
This shit is not hard to see. They want to own our future entirely and they want us to pay them for the privilege.
Capitalism was a fucking mistake.
The future of this planet is a desert wasteland. They can rule over the fucking ashes. Nothing beside remains.
all indicators are that these data centers are being built to keep up the breakneck pace of companies racing to create AGI
Amazon? Nah, it has commercial interest in this, not scientific*.
Also, MAGA is pushing this like crazy, and destroying the planet in the process. For the next 10 years there’s by law practically no regulation wrt anything AI.
That said:
keep up the breakneck pace of US-American companies racing to create
AGImore AI, or ELLM = even larger language modelsThis affects the whole world, esp. if other governments (looking at EU) simply swallow the narrative hook line sinker.
Fuck This Shit
* If you say they are chasing AGI you mean that they are willing to make decisions that will further that goal, not just further profits. And I do not believe that for one second.
I didn’t mean to imply it was scientific, any more than what OpenAI is doing is scientific. It’s all commercial.
I’m not sure what the rest of your comment is supposed to mean. They are chasing AGI. That doesn’t mean they’ll create it, of course, but that’s what they’re aiming at.
Nono, I’m sticking to my statement. If you say they are chasing AGI you mean that they are willing to make decisions that will further that goal, not just further profits. And I do not believe that for one second. I also don’t believe AGI is anywhere in the near or even medium future for us.
That said, they might say that they have such lofty goals.
I’m not going to dwell on this much longer, but your mistake is that AGI is a lofty goal, and not driven by greed.
This thing is 7.65GW. The largest solar array in the US is 900MW and uses 4600-5000 acres. The scale to do this on solar alone is bonkers, but not impossible.
You would need to at least 4x provision it which means a 30GW solar array, and 156,000 acres, before getting into battery storage for non sunny times.
It’d be nice to use some solar absolutely, but this is better suited to nuclear.
Edit: And if you aren’t storing / over provision to store, then you still need the peak output from another source anyway and these things likely always run near peak as they are constantly in use, so the size of the non-solar source doesn’t reduce, only its output during the sunny day time hours. So you end up with 7.65GW of natural gas still, but maybe they also build a 1GW solar farm on the side.
Nuclear power run by a publicly traded company worries me.
Because there will be shareholder value vs. safety trades.
Probably shouldn’t be run by them i agree, but they could fund it and go into some agreement to purchase its power.
So don’t build it. It needs too much power.
Maybe Trump and Denmark can cover the ice in Greenland with solar cells. That’s about 434,000,000 acres
At that scale you aren’t using batteries, you are pumping water into a hydroelectric dam.
At this scale everything is bonkers. The hoover damn is 2GW.
That severely limits where you can place it, probably more than solar. Now you need all that extra water, and height differential that can be at that scale.
I know this will be buried but it seems Ai isn’t worth anything really if these giant complexes are the price. Just straight up monetarily, who benefits?
These companies are all racing to dominate the market. Eventually one will win, largely through government contracts. Then all the infrastructure will be used to further propagandize, kill and spy on us.
looks like they are aiming for most govt contract= mass AI surveillance as a constant influx of profit, while they saw commercial use as a total failure, since nobody wants to pay for it, and the growing resentment against AI.
Fossil fuel companies. Waha natural gas prices are super depressed in that area so it would be a big boon to the pricing environment there.
The company benefits by convincing investors that is still growing and innovating. If investors think they are still growing their stock prices go up. If their stock prices go up then they can use their stock as an asset to borrow against or as a form of payment in lieu of cash. Stock is particularly useful to a company as a medium of exchange because they can just make more. But they can only do that without tanking the value if people are buying, and they can only keep people buying if they think the price will go up, and the only thing the price will go up if they think the company is going to become more profitable in the future.
This is basically Cory Doctrow’s argument in his latest book.
