>> Industry sockpuppets often like to push statistics about closed-loop data centers
>> So I'm going make my own slew of claims, yet provide absolutely zero sources for said claims, I'll just present my opinions as if they're known fact
I responded to a lazy comment with a higher effort comment. I think I left the conversation better than I found it. Not sure which part you'd like sourced, but here's a paper I think does a good job of covering some of these topics
> While data center electricity use has been the subject of much investigation, data center water consumption is a less studied topic that is becoming increasingly important in the context of water scarcity and freshwater conservation, especially at local levels. Many data centers can consume a significant amount of water directly for cooling and space conditioning
> For example, Google's data centers in The Dalles consumed 355 million gallons of water in 2021, representing 29 % of the city's total water consumption
> Additionally, data centers consume water indirectly through the water used for electricity generation. This type of water use can be significant at the local or national level depending on the power generation technologies, power mixes, and electricity usage of the data centers.
Ah yes, the good 'ol "link to an article as proof of my claims, the article then contains multiple links to proof of the article's claims, and the multiple links, when followed, all end up leading to 404 pages with no content." Well, that convinces me.
Sure. They’re in the same category of wrongness as Zitron. If someone said they follow the newsletter of a guy who claims we’ll never have a recession again, I’d quietly note that.
They haven’t allowed a recession to happen since ~2009 when they massively inflated their way out of the worst of the last one. Learned to have the cake and eat it too.
The only problem is after a few rounds of this the currency becomes worthless, and we’re well on our way. Inflation is a major component of those numbers rising.
And that's when we pay off the national debt for pennies on the worthless dollar. The pro move would be to stop lending the US money, but that's not going to happen.
The US doesn't require that you lend it money, it possesses the global reserve currency. It'll take it from you via currency debasement. That's a world problem whether the world likes it or not. There is still no viable (realistic) alternative, and that includes the Euro, Yen, Yuan, gold, Bitcoin.
There are no lenders outside or inside of the US for $20 trillion in new debt over the next decade. Monetization is the only path. If you mean lend the US money in regards to holding or using USD (while it's being debased as it is now), then sure.
And if the world tries to shake off the USD, well, Iran & Venezuela (oil transactions assist USD dominance) would like a word. I'm not suggesting defending the USD reserve position via military action is moral, I'm suggesting it's certain to occur.
The US possesses the global reserve currency because everyone lends it money. If they didn't, it wouldn't. The USD is the global reserve currency because it's the one with all the lending!
while im not necessarily a doomsayer about a recession, im not sure any of these are adequate buttresses against one
the s&p doesnt tend to go down until a recession is either imminent or happening, and modern economic policy may even prevent that due to the vastly expanded wealth disparity
the unemployment rate isn't really the tool it once was--if you include two groups that count as "employed" by the US unemployment rate--people seeking full time jobs but working only 1-34 hours a week, and people earning below the poverty line (under 26k pre-tax anually), the functional unemployment rate climbs to 24.9%--higher even than any month in the post-covid period of 2022-2024 (inclusive).
yes, more small businesses than ever, but growth last year was almost non-existent. and it generally proxies vs able-bodied adults, which would have seen an increase larger than the businesses.
gdp is high but much of that is ai company shuffle and debt-to-gdp ratio is rising once again--now the highest it's been since the 2020 massive covid bump
birth rates are broadly down as well, likely stemming from cost of living, and birth rates do tend to predict recessions.
it's fine to point at numbers but they don't really mean anything in isolation
> First, the favorable impact of the artificial intelligence investment boom on economic activity and earnings will likely diminish significantly in 2027. That’s because what’s relevant for growth is how much investment is increasing, not its level. The increase in investment in 2026 will almost certainly be the peak. There aren’t sufficient resources — construction workers, electrical generation capacity, or chip manufacturing capacity - to increase investment by the same magnitude in 2027. Nor are the dominant hyperscalers likely to have the free cash flow and balance sheet capacity to sustain a bigger increase in investment in 2027 compared with 2026.
> Second, as the growth of investment spending slows, the growth in earnings of hyperscaler suppliers will falter, profit expectations will diminish and price-earnings ratios will shrink. The “picks and shovels” providers will suffer a double whammy - slower demand growth and profit margin compression. On the way up, higher demand leads to wider profit margins that sustain equity market valuations. On the way down, the outlook for earnings deteriorates quickly as the shortfall of demand relative to expectations is exacerbated by a collapse in profit margins.
> Third, as the investment cycle matures, the focus will shift to the returns that the hyperscalers are expected to earn on their massive investments. I suspect it will be difficult for the AI hyperscalers to generate sufficient revenue ($2 trillion or more per year) to generate the returns needed to justify an AI capital base that is likely to reach $5 trillion.
(I'd encourage you to read the entire piece, it was written by Bill Dudley, a former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and is too much to quote in its entirety)
I mean I wish you a lot of fun playing this discussion game online, but I kinda fail to see the point of it.
Someone could now of course say "hey, but are your sure that these are really the metrics we should be looking at?", which could then be countered with a "well of course! This is how one measures a recession, no?"
And that could go on forever, achieving absolutely nothing.
Yet with all what? AI stock pushing indexes high and US stock market being cheap because dollar lost 30% of volume in last few years so the whole world is trying to profit from short ride? Record low unemployment because gas and groceries are so expensive most people work 2 or 3 jobs just not to end up homeless? Democrats are going to retake because ballroom and gold arch does not affect gas or grocery price. They will retake because Republicans proved they are extremely soft on corruption. Not only they allow POTUS & Fam. steal billions from taxpayers, they are not stopping it and some even profit themselves. Dems will retake because we have a dangerous version of plutocracy mixed with socialism, where one person on the top (POTUS) unilaterally decides that US Government will take a free chunk out of Intel, or that 20 billion of taxpayers money will go to help Argentina or Brazil or Japan. That's why.
Ah, another post from this journalist, claiming that a company investing billions of dollars in this, literally designing their own chips for it, that already has experience designing and operating tens of thousands of bespoke satellites, just simply didn't think to figure out how to power/cool them. Surely this journalist, with no engineering degree, that has never worked any job in their entire life other than writing opinion pieces and tech reviews, has this all figured out better than the company does.
On Lex Fridman recently DHH was enthusiastically bragging about how he was letting AI generate C++ that he intentionally wasn't even looking at, he was treating it as a pure black box and just submitting the output.
The root cause underlying all of that is the simple fact that the average person just isn't intelligent enough. They fall for the grift, they fall for the advertising, for the manipulation, the propaganda, the echo chambers, the emotion, the hate, they fall for it all. They're either unable to see it or escape it or both.
With the internet connecting everyone together, giving you direct, immediate, access to billions of people from the comfort of your own home, of course there's going to be classes of people working to siphon money (or power) from the unintelligent into their own pockets, rather than doing the hard work of actually producing value for their civilization.
There's also no real solution to this.
Of course, educating people is a solution, somehow getting people to be more intelligent. But that's a slow, long, process, and the more I see, the more I realize just how commonly intelligent people still fall prey to the same things.
The only other solution I see is blocking access for the majority for either consuming information from or contributing information to the internet, which is a hard pill to swallow, and which has its own horrible, and mostly unsolvable issues.
In reality I see the anti-app sentiment as mostly a scheme to get more data into the cloud, more traffic that can be collected and spied on, less power and control for the user, and demonizing local computing and users having control over their data. A scheme to give companies and government more complete control over everything you do. Basically further enshitification of computing infrastructure.
"I almost sold a car today, but if I did, sure it would have been some income, but who knows when the next time I would sell another car would be? Why bother? It's rinse and repeat"
1) Political - The ideology/party spreading the doomerism promotes that they're the ones that can "fix it", if only you vote for them.
2) Adversarial countries, primarily China - Using the internet to convince members of western civilization to hate their civilization, hate their economic system, hate their history, hate their compatriots, adopt a no motivation defeatist attitude, etc., etc., and they can get our population to destroy itself from within without having to go to war with us.
Reject the doomerism, reject the negativity. Build. Invent. Create. Do your part to contribute to your civilization, to contribute to humanity, to move us forwards.
The people who build rockets and computers and the Internet are the good guys of history. We should do more of that. That statement shouldn’t have a political valence—people who subscribe to that idea can argue whether taxes should be higher or lower. But if you reject that concept you’re rejecting civilization itself.
It has a political valence when one party is campaigning on punishing and stopping them from building. "Should" is a meaningless word unless I have agency to change that, and I don't.
"The V-2 rocket (German: Vergeltungswaffe 2, lit. 'Vengeance Weapon 2'), with the development name Aggregat-4 (A4), was the world's first practical, modern ballistic missile and suborbital launch vehicle.[4] The missile, powered by a liquid-propellant rocket engine, was developed during the Second World War in Nazi Germany as a "vengeance weapon" and assigned to attack Allied cities as retaliation for the Allied bombings of German cities."
Nazi's are the good guys only when they work for the U.S.
How come you are not addressing the most obvious reason?
People hat the troll. From all around the political spectrums (well...maybe not on their far edges), people have been disgusted by what Musk has become and everything around him has became toxic because of it.
You don't have to make it about politics. It's just about being a morally civilised human.
3) Elon Musk has fascist leanings and many people don't want to live in a world where such a person has ever increasing wealth, influence and power. Especially since he has no qualms about using that same wealth and influence to subvert and distort elections, both domestic and foreign.
He didn't cut government spending, just ask the GAO. He did though go on a rampage to prove that brown people weren't worthy of the positions they held.
They're pretty well known for lawlessly purging bureaucracies of experienced, civil servants loyal to the rule of law, to make way for cronies and regime loyalists.
They're pretty well known for scapegoating and persecuting immigrants and minorities and "enemies within" - and engaging in political projects to imprison and/or eject them from the nation.
Musk didn't cut government spending. Legally, only congress can do that. They increased spending. 10s of billions of that spending has gone to towards a mass build out of prison camps where many people, citizens included, are being held in horrid conditions indefinitely without due process and without being charged with any crime. This seems to be a project that Musk supports.
You could do this misdirection thing on x but here, you'll find people who see through this tactics instantly.
Yes, he has cut expenditure but what has been critiqued was WHERE he did that.
USAID for example.
And yes, he did fail to save (much) money in the process and it will cost the US even more in the future because the loss of soft power, intelligence, etc. USAID alone provided is unmeasurable high.
And this is just USAID as an popular example. There are thousands of veterans who lost their jobs. Waste, fraud, or abuse are missing and what remains is a cringe clown rising his arm because he's so edgy and needs attention very very desperately.
It's so interesting to me that the whole "futurism" concept got co-opted into some sort of political propaganda machine. All the articles are negative hit pieces, they're all reductive, they're almost all political in nature. I used to go on the futurism subreddit years ago and it's all the same there. You'd think "futurism" would be about .. promoting new technology, ushering in the future, you know .. futurism. Not just another political propaganda outlet.
Futurism is a focus on the future. The future may be good or bad. Your desire to focus only on the upsides (for you) and not want to hear about the consequences, externalities, or dangers is one of the most "political" positions a technologist can have.
Do you hate reading most science fiction? Because the ratio of dystopic to utopic scifi is pretty unbalanced.
Yeah, I hate modern science fiction. It's almost all terrible. Sci-fi written in the time of actual ongoing world wars and the Cold War's constant threat of instant nuclear annihilation was far more optimistic, and far more imaginative.
Classic sci-fi was far from universally optimistic, it had more optimistic pieces than we do today but I'd still say on the whole it was more dystopia than utopia. Even for its own time, the original Star Trek was considered uniquely optimistic, though a large part of that is that its just much easier to write a good story where the setting itself provides the necessary challenges for a story to work, rather than an optimistic setting which rules out a lot of the usual challenges. Even Star Trek struggled, a good chunk of its stories are about encountering a race or civilisation without that utopia, turns out telling a good story without any conflict is pretty tough, especially a long running one.
But it does more generally reflect how society views technology as a whole too. People are generally a lot more pessimistic about new tech now, myself included, we've seen time and time again how its used to control or squeeze us. There actually was a Star Trek episode, "The Game" (season 5, episode 6) about an addicting device you could compare to smartphones (though the device in Star Trek doesn't spy on you to sell your every move to advertisers, missed a trick there), and that certainly wasn't supposed to be an optimistic look at technology, so you can see why things have gone the way they have.
Yeah for sure, science fiction used to be optimistic and utopian, like Planet of the Apes, Brave New World, Frankenstein, 1984, Earth Abides, The Martian Chronicles, A Canticle for Leibowitz, The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, and Island of Dr Moreau, We, Farenheit 451 ...
Recently I have read fiction where someone discovers a spaceship/artifact/portal/alien/mcguffin/etc and then they... get the mcguffin, get more stuff, get the girl, win. The plot is just a straight line.
they're boring.
Although not a straight line, any superhero movie. they're predictable and therefore, boring.
So I found the stuff that used to fill me with wonder, I shy away from. I don't want to watch another marvel hero.
I kind of wonder if non-utopia scifi, with reality and struggles and character development... is that the good stuff? doesn't have to all be dark forest or enshittification++ though.
You could just say “no” - it would save a lot of space, be about as polite, and way less annoying.
Sometimes people want to talk about science stuff without talking about human fallout and political implications. It’s perfectly fine to want an occasional break from those types of discussions.
Talking about "science stuff" without even mentioning the political and human implications is pointlessly incomplete. It's like trying to talk about a programming language without mentioning variables.
Everything is human and everything is political. To pretend that it is not is, in itself, a political stance.
Let's take the two pieces you put out there and just look at logical conclusions., because it's kinda hilarious to imagine you actually hold this actually-insane position.
1. Everything is political
2. Talking about something without mentioning political and human implications is "pointlessly incomplete"
Topic: "Anyone wanna go swimming?"
Normal people: "Sure."
You, apparently: "Are you aware of how water is unequally distributed throughout the world? How can we possibly discuss swimming if we aren't willing to discuss the political fallout? This is pointlessly incomplete."
Next panel, you're just researching local water table rights while everyone else is swimming and having fun
This is pretty contrived. Politics is as simple as “Janey and I really want to swim in the ocean” vs “I wanted to go to the lake by my house.” The politics are how that conflict gets resolved peacefully.
Nope, just showing how ridiculous it is to hold the position that everything is political. It's okay to just talk about things casually, dude. Chill out, it'll serve you well.
If your position isn't that everything is political, don't say it is. If it is your position, this is perfectly in line with what you stated.
Your strawman didn't show anything, except that you're unwilling to engage with other viewpoints in good faith and will immediately dismiss them as ridiculous instead of advancing actual arguments.
Why should we be silent over the obvious political aspects of giving Musk more government contracts? Just to please you?
Why should you be silent about it? Because it’s not the topic. How is this SOOOO confusing and difficult for you? Do you not notice how annoyed everyone around you is when you desperately try to ram politics into every single conversation you have in life?
Oh, you don’t really do that? You’re just being performative online?
Musk is one of the dumbest motherfuckers on Earth buddy. Just say you have no real argument and you're just upset at some strawman you thought you were conversing with.
That’s Italian futurism, which was a specific movement. I think the term was being used more broadly here.
Go find some Soviet space art, or mid century American “space age” stuff, or less dark forms of cyberpunk / cyber culture from the 80s and 90s. None of that is fascist yet all of it is popularly called “futurism.” I’ve even seen the term associated with solarpunk.
As popularly used it means more or less the idea of trying to use human intellect to build or create something fundamentally new, or roughly that. It’s not a precise term more of a vibe.
Mid century American and Soviet space art had transparent political purpose, as does solarpunk. Futurism is rarely if ever just "it's the future, and that's neat!". It comes with the inherently political baggage of "We got from where we are to the glorious future, by way of (ideology)". Star Trek is a great example of this.
That could be said about everything including things usually not associated with futurism like romanticism. Everything carries at least a little political baggage.
I was responding to what seemed like the implication that futurism was fascist.
>It's so interesting to me that the whole "futurism" concept got co-opted into some sort of political propaganda machine.
This was a very predictable outcome given the curcumstances.
You forget to mention the guy who was the posterboy for futurism literally decided to turn himself into a political machine circa 2018 or thereabouts against half of the country, apparently triggered by his inablity to cope with his child transitioning and the bruising of his ego when NPCs on the internet made fun of him for failing where they succeded (the scuba diver pedo incident is one example).
Prior to that, he was the second coming of Steve Jobs to the same cohort (pg even called him "Steve Jobs with no taste" on this forum at the time).
Tech should be considered with its political direction (or lack of) to be deserving of adulation. The Cold War dictated the Apollo program for Christ's sake. The whole thing was saturated in politics. The difference is that most people were united for the cause. Believe me, if the people running the Apollo program declared war on half the country it would have been remembered and popularized quite differently.
I'm sure Jewish German scientists had a reluctant admiration for whatever Wernher Von Brauhn was acheiving with the Nazi space program but it would be completely secondary to the fact that he was enabling the Nazi party to "win". No engineering feat could or should eclipse that fact.
Regarding Tech without taking into account the direction it's pointed at is ridiculously naive, whichever side of the political spectrum you are on.
It's not like Germany would have magically grown out of the Nazi party if only Von Braun kept on building cool shit.
That’s just a microcosm of everything. The culture war ate the entire public discourse to the exclusion of practical concerns and even coherent ideas. It’s all vibes and tribalism and bashing the other tribes, while the tribes themselves become increasingly incoherent in terms of what (if anything) they really mean or stand for.
I just turned it all off, though it makes me fear for the future. Feels like the early stages of societal collapse.
> Feels like the early stages of societal collapse.
Strongly agree, there is hardly any intelligent discussions with diverging opinions left anymore. People are too deep into their own propaganda, agenda, and echo chambers. Peak bullshit is near.
Okay but Musk himself deliberately and continuously uses his companies and wealth to participate in the culture war so it's no surprise it comes up when his companies do.
He could switch off and stick to building rockets and electric cars. It's very easy (notionally) to just not post on Twitter.
>> So I'm going make my own slew of claims, yet provide absolutely zero sources for said claims, I'll just present my opinions as if they're known fact
Well, you surely convinced me.