Actually yes. They did vote for this.
If a salesman misrepresents his product in any way of form, he gets called a swindler, faces potential legal consequences, and the people who bought his product are called “victims”.
If a politician does this, it’s just “business as usual”, and his voters were supposed to do enough research to make the correct choice.
Well, I mean…Not for nothing, but Texas being one of the reddest states there is, and even being willing to double it down by heavily gerrymandering themselves for Trump worship, means that they did vote to serve their deep state and oligarch overlords. Which is quite ironic for the small government party. And that’s coming from me, who believes in the potential of AI for humanity in the long-term, but only if used responsibly and not at the cost of people’s quality of life to satisfy the corrupt elite.
But then again, irony is in their DNA, starting with all their preaching about “keeping kids safe”. Speaking of which, Trump files where? I need to check if Epstein’s name comes up in those.
During the 1986-1992 California drought, we were informed in the San Francisco Bay Area region that water service prices were going to go up unless we conserved strictly.
They said this to a bunch of California hippies, on account that we were in California.
So we way got on board. We stopped flushing. Any water that was rendered non-potable we’d repurpose for watering plants or filter it for second use. Japanese naval baths (weird tiny bowl seats and a sponge, used in the Imperial Navy, WWII) got popular so people were keeping clean via a tenth of normal water usage.
We conserved too much according to the water department and they raised prices anyway.
This sparked some investigations (by journalists, since investigative journalism was still a thing then) and found that agriculture got water for much cheaper, and was still using it once before flushing it (now laced with pesticides) out into the sea. Needless to say, we conservationist hippies were livid.
It’s still a problem, as the utility companies routinely lobby our congress and governor (and Newsom may know how to be a California liberal, but he’s still a Dianne-Feinstein-style ( / Nancy-Pelosi style) money-grubbing neoliberal. He just has game, especially when opposed to far right idiots. The setup in Monster’s Inc (power crisis in a city where scream is the principal power source) was inspired by the Enron fraud affair leading to rolling blackouts and Texas siphoning off California’s general fund. And our governments from Schwarzenegger (who I will never forgive) to Newsom are in the pocket of PG&E. (I’m on SMUD now and my bill is conspicuously less.)
Also, according to Climate Town, the Sauds own a lot of California farmland, where they grow alfalfa to import to the mid-east to feed their cows. Alfalfa crops are one of the most water hungry, and is one of the big ways beef is driving the climate crisis (and towards a massive food shortage and global famine!) and the water tables, to which they have access and first-tap rights, gets lower every year. 🕙
So I suspect that the Texas AI centers are getting water at a cheaper rate than private homes. Maybe it’s something to get active about.
Actual interesting question:
How much energy and resources would we save by simply slowing down AI response time? A lot of the time you get an instant response from an LLM, and sure, it looks impressive, but most of the time you don’t need it that urgently.
The majority of energy consumed is for training the AI models, not providing output from those models.
This means the resource consumption is not tied to usage and prompts. Also it means resource consumption to train models is temporary, relative to the model.
Oh ok. So they’ll put the water back once the models are trained?
That’s irrelevant to what I was responding to - the question being asked had an incorrect context and I was correcting it.
That is how water use works, yes. The water goes back into the environment and is later reused.
Also, there’s a good chance the AIs are not being trained in the same facilities that they’re later being run in. Different sorts of work is being done.
If AI centres need so much cooling, why are they building them in Texas in the first place?
Lack of regulations of all kinds
If you live in Texas, leave.
I wish… We get over a thousand new residents a day. It’s awful.
Stoopid Texans. You’ve got the guns, start using the things. If they need cooling, maybe aerate a few blocks of servers for them.
This but just the Microsoft logo lol
