My understanding is that most new data centers don't use evaporation cooling these days, at least in water-sensitive areas. Hard to find solid data on this either way, though.
Of course, if you're using dry cooling, it uses more electricity, so hopefully you're using solar, not a source that uses evaporative cooling to produce electricity (if in a dry climate).
> Turns out the ISP did their usual ISP thing and failed to mark that I'd returned my modem when cancelling service a few months prior then told no one and sent it to collections.
Spectrum did this to me. They sent a single "hey, you owe us for this thing" email before sending it to collections.
Global population growth is still measured in the tens of millions. We're a ways off from launching anywhere near a meaningful number of people into space in terms of current terrestrial population.
> Why is this emissions fakery illegal? Ultimately it’s because pollution kills people. Are these people going to prison for killing people? Not exactly. They’re going to prison for killing too many people. If they had stayed within the limits, they’d still be killing people, just not as many, and it would be 100% legal.
Polluting is not a "rich person" crime. It's very much something normal/poor people do a lot, too. It's common for individuals to burn leaves. It's less common, but also an active problem, for them to burn piles of trash (including plastic, tires, etc.)
As an individual, I'm allowed to do a certain amount of pollution (some because it's legal, some because it's unenforced), and will get fined if I do too much, same as the corporation.
As an individual, at least you can make the argument that your activities result in far less than one death. What’s the appropriate punishment for one micromort? I don’t know the answer to that but it’s probably not too much.
Large polluters don’t have that excuse. I recall that diesel hate alone resulted in dozens or hundreds of excess deaths. How many people do compliant cars kill? How many does a coal power plant kill? And all 100% legal.
I moved a couple weeks ago, and was quite confused when--after repeatedly searching through every kitchen box--we were missing the flour, sugar, and pasta.
Turns out one kitchen box got placed at the bottom of in a pile of book boxes in the living room.
If you unpack in a day, it's no big deal, but if you spent a week unpacking, you may find yourself having to eat something other than spaghetti for lunch, which is normally fine, but not when you really want spaghetti and the lack of spaghetti merely makes you more determined to find it.
I put a colored sticker on each box, where the color corresponds to the room where the box should go. The destination rooms are marked with the same stickers during the move, so helpers have an easy time telling where to put each box.
In addition, I’m numbering the boxes, and when packing them keep a list mapping the numbers to what’s in each box. So when later searching for something, I know it should be in box number x. This can be helpful even years later when you don’t unpack all boxes.
I ended up buying spaghetti when I went to the store a couple days later, and now I have an abundance of spaghetti. But lunch that first day ended up being something else.
Ask that to any serf throughout history. You don't have to "prefer to be dead" in order to recognize that what is being asked of you fails to be worth what you get in return, and then be in a rational position to decide to default on what others frame you as being obligated to do.
> If what you're saying is true, why are we hearing about AI companies wanting to build nuclear power plants to power new data centers they think they need to build?
Well, partly because they (all but X, IIRC) have commitments to shift to carbon-neutral energy.
But also, from the article:
> ChatGPT is now estimated to be the fifth-most visited website in the world
That's ChatGPT today. They're looking ahead to 100x-ing (or 1,000,000x-ing) the usage as AI replaces more and more existing work.
I can run Llama 3 on my laptop, and we can measure the energy usage of my laptop--it maxes out at around 0.1 toasters. o3 is presumably a bit more energy intensive, but the reason it's using a lot of power is the >100MM daily users, not that a single user uses a lot of energy for a simple chat.
> not that a single user uses a lot of energy for a simple chat.
This seems like a classic tragedy of the commons, no? An individual has a minor impact, but the rationale switching to LLM tools by the collective will likely have a massive impact.
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