To be clear, and despite the bad reporting, this "$80 billion loss" is a paper loss. For example, $72B of it is convertible notes. They became a liability because the valuation of the company skyrocketed. They have nothing to do with the company's operations.

If you stopped irrigating crops in the US desert southwest, there would be no water issues at all, either for households or for industry.

I'll repeat, it is agriculture that consumes meaningful amounts of water, not homes and businesses. Farms by water by the acre foot - an acre of land flooded to a depth of one foot. Water is not abundant on the scale of "farms buying it by the acre foot", but it absolutely is on the scale of "what you need for your house".

"I'm sure if I cared enough to go looking".

So you just made a weird, false assumption in order to justify to yourself something you already wanted to do.

I used to have your viewpoint, by the way. The reality eventually became undeniable. Musk is a unique threat to western democracy.

How much energy does it take to drive to a laundromat and back?

Freshwater is cheap for a reason: it's abundant. It's agriculture that uses the overwhelming majority (70% of withdrawals and 80-90% of consumptive water use. Industry next (20% of withdrawals). Residential usage is way, way down the list, and washing machines are only 17% of that (well below for example lawn watering at about 30% overall, but which in some regions is over half of all consumption, and in the summer and times of water scarcity can be the vast majority). An early 1950s top-loader washing machine would use about 40-55 gal plus 0,3-0,5 kWh of electricity for the machine itself, and if your water wasn't municipally heated, heat would cost about 4,5-6,5kWh / 16-23 MJ (about 1/2 to 2/3rds of a litre of gasoline / 0,13-0,19 gallons). At the then-standard 14-15 MPG in the US, that laundromat better not be more than 2-3 miles away if you're trying to save energy (just ignoring the energy they use to heat their water!)

For the record, while there may be more anti-AI backlash on the left than the right, there's an awful lot on both sides (and a lot of users on both sides). For example, Bannon-acolyte Joe Allen on stage before a Trump rally a month ago warning the crowd:

Why wouldn’t you want a mosque in your neighborhood? Well, because the people in there aren’t like me. They don’t want the same future I do. Now, if you look at the data center, this incubator for algorithmic immigrants. Already, if you look at Hugging Face, they’ve already broken out and invaded other companies. These immigrants are out of control.

Literally, this r/opensource mod set the policy: "If you don't speak English, you need to find a different community." Does that sound very "leftist" to you? Yes, his reasoning was because translators use AI, but still, that's literally the opposite of appreciating and accommodating diversity.

I cannot find anything beyond that indicating how Wesley Wolfe (r/wolvereness, the mod) votes. What I can tell you is that there was a big backlash in the sub to his actions. Some amusing, like a person asking, "What do we use now that we've banned Linux? I can't afford Windows keys for all these damned servers." A lot of people seem to just be ignoring his rules. At the top of the sub right now is a post titled, "Linus Torvalds posts his AI-assisted patch to the Linux kernel, synthetic test clocks 23x performance leap". It seems to have sparked vastly more AI discussion than it shut down.

There are 640 acres in a square mile

[Sighs in metric]

The proper response to being in an area where datacentres are crowding in is "lobby your elected officials to increase property taxes and not give out tax increment financing deals". Tax everything, and tax it well. They'll stop building new datacentres in your area, and the ones that are there will (unless they were given a long-term sweetheart deal beyond your already-low tax rates) start being cash cows for your area.

Really, you don't see any difference between Elon Musk and, say, John Stankey? Is John Stankey actively transforming the US into an autocratic fascist-adjacent state?

Would you buy from a company called Plantations Inc which proudly advertises that all of its products are made by daily-whipped slaves? Are there no limits to how self-focused you are in your consumption?

It's one thing to say "this particular issue isn't mine, so I'm only going to think amount myself". It's an entirely different issue to have no moral bounds.

This headline sounds like something you'd hear coming from a news report on a TV in the background near the start of a horror movie.

The problem is not overall capacity. It's that they're all crowding into the same areas. Most places in the US (let alone the world) have nobody building datacentres anywhere near them. They all want to go into the places with not merely cheap power, but cheap property taxes and other incentives. Some places will tax everything, down to the servers themselves, whereas some will only tax the land and the building shell, not even the power interconnects or cooling systems.

When everyone wants to rush into the same place, it overtaxes the local grid; they have to build not just more generation, but power lines, substations, etc. And all of this has to go through permitting. There's no real limit to how much generation can be built, but none of the datacentre operations want to wait, because they're all worried about missing out on the opportunity. Hence the reason that they try to come up with stopgaps, like installing their own generators, or... this approach.

ECL MV1 / Lambda is 3,5 miles from the Googleplex. And 10-12 miles further to the southeast, Santa Clara is one of the densest datacentre hubs on Earth.

If you care about where they actually live, and distances to datacentres:

Sundar Pichai: Los Altos Hills, CA: ECL MV1 / Lambda (Mountain View), 5-6mi; Santa Clara Data Center Hub (CoreSite SV9, Vantage, Colovore), 9-11 miles

Larry Page: Palo Alto, Ca: ECL MV1 / Lambda (Mountain View), 4-5mi; Santa Clara Data Center Hub, 10-12mi.

Sergey Brin: Los Altos Hills / Bay Area: ECL MV1 / Lambda (Mountain View), 5-7mi; Santa Clara Data Center Hub, 9-12mi

Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind CEO): North London, UK: London Docklands Hub (Telehouse / Equinix), 7-9mi; Slough Data Center Hub (Equinix, Yondr), 18-20mi

I don't know about you, but they're all way closer to datacentres than I am.

In the grand scheme of things someone being here illegally and working construction is about last on my list of priorities

They bother me.

They are taking up housing that US citizens could use....everyone keeps complaining about needing more housing, eh?

They are a burden on our schools and other public resources.

They are dead weight on our medical system...in many cities they overrun the ERs of hospitals making it difficult for true US citizens to get emergency care in their own country.

Just a few examples.,,....the US budget would save a lot of money if they were GONE.

It turns out that immigrants commit fewer crimes than citizen

There you go again, conflating ILLEGAL migrants with LEGAL migrants, especially those that actually wish to come legally and become US citizens because they want to melt in and believe in our principals ans way of life.

Add some guard towers with machine guns and the border is starting to look like post WW2 Berlin.

Except in Berlin they were trying to keep people IN....there's a big difference from letting people freely leave if they want....and invasion from foreign entities.

Frankly, iI'd be all for settting up our snipers, they could get some free practice...

And a No Man's land....complete with a field along the border of land mines.