lordgilman

The Door by Magda Szabó has a humbling take on our interdependence and what we all owe to the people around us. I can't recommend the book enough to you all.

There is a global market for energy, a country X that would have bought from Iran but couldn't because of refinery damage has to buy it from someone else, pushing up the price at the margin for everyone.

There's a global market for energy. What you see at the pump translates into electricity prices in a slow and grinding process. Remember that most of our electricity is not generated from renewable sources! Three years ago Russia invaded Ukraine, that pushed up fuel prices and electricity prices have followed. Now, we have the Iran war and that will push up electricity prices even more. The issue here is that you do not understand these markets.

All of this applies to all construction of all types. There are already plenty of environmental regulations around buildings and their construction. Maybe these aren't being enforced, maybe the laws need to be stricter. I'm not an expert but it sounds plausible. But if that's the case, we have to fix those problems otherwise you're just playing whack-a-mole with development. When you specifically focus on datacenters and stopping datacenters it gives away that environmentalism is just a fig leaf for your actual goals.

My understanding is that they don't but there's a measurable amount of the population that thinks they can.

This just isn't how you model water use in a practical way.

- If you're going to attribute water use via electricity to data centers you need to be fair and apply it to the rest of the electricity users. And in the end, you're just raising everyone's baseline water consumption in proportion to their electricity use. Why not leave the baseline increase out and leave water use attributed at the industry level (datacenters vs coal plants vs solar plants vs ...)?

- Different kinds of electrical generation plants use different amounts of water. To get an accurate number for an electricity consumer you're backing out the mix of generation sources in your model. You've introduced complexity to your model and reduced the precision of the answers your model gives when you could just get simpler and better answers leaving it at the industry level.

- Suppose we had a place with genuinely scarce water. There is some level of water draw that's unsustainable; you can never cross that level because it'll damage the environment. If there's ever a risk of hitting that limit you're interested in all users of water (so you can correctly model how much draw happens when XYZ business or person leaves the state) pushing you back to direct attribution at the industry level. If you can't model the effects of each choice correctly how do you know the choice you made will fix the problem?

You're the one making the argument! You need to show causality instead of correlation.

True, but this function wasn't handed down to us from the gods, it can be shaped by training and RLHF processes. They still have a little bit of control over its output.

A backup generator wouldn’t be running 24/7?

I think we're in agreement, I was trying to dispute the GP's portrayal of the purges but maybe my intent was not clear.

The Zhou Yongkang incident happened over a decade ago, it happened in roughly the first year of Xi Jinping's tenure, Zhou Yongkang was a supporter of the also-purged Bo Xilai, and while he was still in power he ran the department responsible for internal security. I don't doubt the guy was corrupt but this is exactly the sort of target you go after if you want to maintain your own grip on power.

In StarCraft you can give individual orders to your initial group of workers (drones) instead of giving them one big group order. It takes only a few seconds for your drones to move to the resources so you only have a few seconds to click and give multiple orders.