> t's interesting because I think that varies widely from person to person and from job to job. The guy standing on the corner in the 95º heat with the "NEW HOMES >" sign isn't doing it for the love of the craft. Ditto for people picking tomatoes.
There’s two ways to look at “that person picking tomatoes,” though. One is, “they’d be happier doing nothing”, funemployment, whatever. The other is, “they’d be happier doing something fulfilling.”
I think the author would agree that drudgery is an effective distraction from existential malaise. Despair, in a sense, is a luxury that the desperate cannot afford.
I’m of the (possibly unpopular) opinion that ~80% of these new data centers are never going to see the light of day.
None of the economics or supply needs of these things make any sense. The water is generally not there, electric transformers are next to impossible to acquire. I just read about one in Utah that’s supposed to be 2.5x the size of Manhattan?? https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/933687/u...
I could be wrong, but I think a lot of this was planned by software guys who are used to brute-forcing their way through “impossible” problems. But those were software problems, where the limits are mostly theoretical. In the world of atoms, limitations are real.
Neither transformers or water are the limiting factor, cash is. Right now the big 3 are taking all their profits and building data centers. If there's not an ROO they'll stop.
Transformers aren't so complex that production can't increase. Most water is used for agriculture and right now the data centers can pay more for it.
Yeah, Disney, the company that recently tried to bankrupt several novelists by claiming that when they bought Star Wars, they didn't put themselves on the hook for respecting contracts that Lucas signed. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/sta...
Disney has never given a single f*ck about that reputation, but the chiefs who agree to these acquisitions never had to care about that.
One of the most frustrating things about getting older — besides all the fun stuff that happens to your knees and hair — is the fact that younger generations just take what has been normal their whole lives and say “yes this is the normal state of affairs.”
We used to have laws and limits regarding media ownership. One company couldn’t own every radio station in most of America. Distributors couldn’t own studios. Etc.
Disney should never have been allowed to buy 538 in the first place. ABC, possibly…? But Disney shouldn't be allowed to own ABC!! (And if you’re left-leaning, you can’t pin this mess on the “corporation-friendly” Republican Party because it was Bill Clinton who put his signature on this mess!)
The state we’re in is not normal and it wasn’t necessary and we don’t have to just live with it if we don’t want to.
> (And if you’re left-leaning, you can’t pin this mess on the “corporation-friendly” Republican Party because it was Bill Clinton who put his signature on this mess!)
I would argue Clinton's presidency moved the Democrats from a center-left party to a center-right party, given its platform of welfare reform and free trade at the expense of labor rights and the social safety net.
Yeah, we've only had 3 dem presidents in 30 years and they all collectively moved the dial a certain way. That's an entire generational upbringing of leadership that's a dim shadow of what Carter, FDR, and the ghost of JFK managed to do for its people.
Neoliberal ideals are really good at keeping a machine running in the direction it's already going. And we arguably needed that with Biden for a short spell. It's never going to change the direction of the machine, though. And we're heading off a cliff
“These results are not applicable to typical buildings, where outdoor-to-indoor air exchange already removes volatile organic compounds (VOCs) at a rate that could only be matched by the placement of 10–1000 plants/m2 of a building's floor space.[2]
The results also failed to replicate in future studies”
You’d need a forest in your room to see a proper change. There was a whole discussion in the Indie hacking scene on X on that topic around 1-2 weeks ago
and why the people most prone to praising it are ones who mostly write emails all day.
“Wow, this is very, very good at my job, which must be a difficult job because it pays well and I'm a smart guy. Imagine how well it will work for the dum-dums.”
Speaking of “worse on purpose,” I immediately tried to subscribe to this site’s RSS feed — none. Unthinkable on any blogging platform for most of the past twenty years.
There’s two ways to look at “that person picking tomatoes,” though. One is, “they’d be happier doing nothing”, funemployment, whatever. The other is, “they’d be happier doing something fulfilling.”
I think the author would agree that drudgery is an effective distraction from existential malaise. Despair, in a sense, is a luxury that the desperate cannot afford.
reply