I keep thinking how we were told to conserve energy and water for decades just to see these data centers suck it all up and then some.
Quick timeline...
Guess we now know why...
2024-2025: AI companies pour money and support into DJT leaving many of us perplexed given Silicon Valley’s history of being left-leaning.
Curtis Yarvin has been writing about his ideas since at least 2009, when I first heard of him and his "Dark Enlightement." He's the "philsophical" underpinning of Silicon Valley's actual values and it was clear long, long before 2024.
He has the ear of people like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, JD Vance, and more.
From Wikipedia:
Yarvin's ideas were influential among right-libertarians and paleolibertarians, and prominent investors like Thiel have echoed Yarvin's project of seceding from the United States to establish tech-CEO dictatorships. Journalist Jason Wilson noted that Yarvin had "a serious intellectual influence on key figures in Donald Trump's coming administration". Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, an informal adviser to Donald Trump, has spoken in approval of Yarvin. Political strategist Steve Bannon has read and admired his work. Vice-president JD Vance also praised Yarvin in 2021, and said, drawing from his 2012 "Retire All Government Employees" talk, that "what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, and replace them with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country and say, 'The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.'"
Also a leak of info about Thiel's secretive "Dialog" group included:
Elon Musk ($1.3 trillion)
Eric Schmidt ($40.1 billion)
Henry Kravis ($12.2 billion)
Marcos Galperin ($6.8 billion)
Mike Cannon-Brookes ($7.7 billion)
Scott Cook ($4.4 billion)
Barry Sternlicht ($3.1 billion)
Nicolas Berggruen ($2.9 billion)
John Arnold ($2.8 billion)
Joe Lonsdale ($2.8 billion)
Reid Hoffman ($2.7 billion)
Eric Schmidt from Google, Reid Hoffman of Netflix. The idea that Yarvin's ideas don't come up or aren't obliquely pushed at these events seems deeply unlikely.
Not a single woman on this list. Probably no black people either.
Yarvin was alo the one who ilcame up with Red Pill philosophy. That explains why it got so toxic.
The left-leaning part of Silicon Valley is the countless technicians, programmers and developers employed there, not the upper management.
Even in San Francisco and Berkeley, the C-Suite are strictly FOX News Republicans.
We like to think the employees are left leaning, but a quick visit to Blind should dispel that illusion
We as humans allowing this shit to go down is crazy to me.
I have little say in the matter.
The problem is the top is captured and has been for a very long time. The difference now is it's mask-off and has lost the capacity to pretend to be public serving.
As the history of labor has shown us, it is very hard to organize bottom-up without leadership getting compromised or killed.
Before it was kings and queens. Haves have been shitting on have nots since the beginning of time. Our system doesn't work.
A silver lining is that balkanizing into technostates means that reform should be easier on a small scale than it is in a gigantic country.
Edit: maybe there is no silver lining since North Korea has not made much progress on the humanitarian front. I wish we had something to lool forward to though.
True. Sad. But since I am a fairly religious person, all points to me that we are heading to the finish line with this.
Do you think this shit going down is less bad since we're heading to "the finish line" and God's kingdom awaits?
As in because God is coming this is somehow less bad, because good thing await us ahead as in for the good people ?
If that is your question, no. I dont think so. I think its horrible eater way. I think people suffering, kids suffering, wars, poverty, corruption, perversion, hunger ... all bad no matter how you look at it. Yes there is some light at the end of the believers and those that genuinely try to be good people, but the fact that all that exists its still going to be suffering until then for all of humanity.
I find it very sad and depressing for the current times. Especially for the people that genuinely care for the world, for the people in general.
We're seeing all the symptoms of civilization collapse. The United States empire has already stepped down from the sole superpower (China doesn't have the capacity to force project, but the US is losing its own capacity) and the corruption, the wealth disparity, the persecution of its own citizens, the dismantling of social institutions all point to the same kind of decline and fall that we've seen with Rome, or the Ottoman Empire or Great Britain.
But what scares me is the quantity of wealth concentrated at the top. To borrow a quote from the Guardian (correspondent Gabriel Zucman), At the height of the Gilded Age, around 1910, the four largest American fortunes owned wealth equivalent to 4% of US GDP. Today, that same tiny fraction of the population, the top 0.00001% – which now includes 19 households – could buy 14% of everything produced in a given year in the US.
Or as I think of it, a multi-billionaire can buy a major election and control a government. A trillionaire can buy all the elections and control all the governments. That scares the Hell out of me.
And that's before we confront the harsh reality of the climate crisis, mitigation of which the international community has only taken mild, non-committal action. Outside the climatology community, the public completely underestimates the severity of conditions when the temperature rises above +2°C, and it's very unlikely we're going to stop warming below that temperature. We're going to run out of water, and most of the human population will perish.
I'm not sure if any of these define a finish line, but there are multiple factors that certainly count as escatological, a cataclysmic end of an age.
No one needs to organize anything. Three dozen people could solve this problem without ever communicating with each other. Most of them would likely be in prison for life or dead afterwards but people give up their lives for way dumber reasons every day.
Of course, I'm included in the category of people not doing this, but that doesn't change the simple truth of what I'm saying.
When have you ever seen three dozen people do something secretly without organizing first?
I'm intrigued. But it's probably bad to explain it here since it will just train AIs to prevent the actions before they materialize.
Maybe a self driving Tesla will smash into the data center
I don't think you understand how big these data centers are. They are the size of entire cities. A Tesla crash would have the effect of a single car crash in Manhattan.
I think you may be underestimating the size of cities. Even San Francisco, famously small for a major city, is 15 times (at approx. 30k acres) the size of the physically largest data center in the US (Switch Reno Tahoe) at 2,000 acres. That's still just 1/7th the size of Manhattan.
I won't argue that 2,000 acres isn't huge for a data center, but just trying to put numbers to the argument.
Better to hit the substation supplying it.
Substations are full of oil-cooled power transformers.
Oil-cooled power transformers are large, obvious targets that can be permanently disabled by a single hit from a decently powerful rifle, even at great distance (all you have to do is punch a hole in it and let the oil leak out so it overheats), and they're expensive and time-consuming to replace.
Just saying...
I hear there's thousands of Cybertrucks just sitting around. Seems like a good use for them.
Besides, you just have to hit the important bits. Power, Network, Cooling.
If the battery cooks off inside the data center, it will do some damage. The amount of water that will be required to put it out will do even more damage.
How many teslas can we get to that location is the real question
Someone needs to hack every Tesla and drive them into the nearest data centre.
Steal the equipment and burn them down
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
