Take Our Money and Shut Up
Ftfy.
I swear editors aren’t even trying these days.
Shut up and take our money: Amazon plows $1B+ into quashing datacenter dissent
Submitted 22 hours ago by chobeat@lemmy.ml to technology@beehaw.org
Comments
ech@lemmy.ca 19 hours ago
PatheticGroundThing@beehaw.org 4 hours ago
Isn’t it a reference to that Futurama line? It still works.
ech@lemmy.ca 2 hours ago
It is and it doesn’t. The bit is Fry telling someone to stop selling him on something and giving them money blindly, which isn’t what’s happening in the article at all. Flipped, it’s someone paying another to shut up, which fits perfectly and is something an editor should be able to figure out.
sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyz 17 hours ago
Jesus christ. Tax wealth! Holy hell our gov’t is shit.
t3rmit3@beehaw.org 22 hours ago
It’s hilarious they are like, “but golf courses are worse!”
Yeah. Get rid of them too.
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 21 hours ago
Where’s the protests over golf courses though? Why are you showing up to an Anti-AI protest, but not organizing one for golf courses?
This is the biggest thing that’s pissing me off about these anti-AI for environmental reasons folks. People are literally getting into giant SUVs to drive to anti-AI datacenter protests, then stopping off to get a steak to cook for dinner on the way home.
The amount of fuel they just burned, and the amount of energy and pollution beef production generates for that steak are quite literally orders of magnitude worse for the environment than AI datacenters.
Yet nobody is protesting combustion vehicles, or even oil and gas companies at this point, and very few people choose to not eat meat (and even a lot of those don’t do it for environmental reasons).
Rational people worried about the environment, pollution, or water usage would target the worst offenders. Yet here they are protesting in massive numbers for something that’s less than well under 1% of global energy use.
t3rmit3@beehaw.org 6 hours ago
You’re looking for the populace as a whole to have some kind of sit-down, coordinated evaluation of what has maximal climate impact, but that’s not how protest movements work.
Small groups can be tactical like that. Large protest movements have to seize on whatever momentum happens, when it happens.
If people were out there protesting golf courses, I’d be there too, and I’d be encouraging it, but I’m not going to waste my breath as someone with zero meaningful platform trying to foment a mass protest movement out of thin air.
And there’s something more important to this movement than just directly addressing the environmental impact of datacenters, which is the anti-large-corporation sentiment it’s feeding (both from, and into). That is very important for climate action, because large corporations are the ones with the largest climate impacts. And I’m not sure if you’ve been going to any protests, but there are definitely signs at all of them protesting oil and gas companies.
MajorMajormajormajor@lemmy.ca 21 hours ago
While you are absolutely correct, all those other industries are well established, ai and datacentres are relatively new to the scene. It’s much easier to stop something that just started, then stop something that is already established.
Additionally, protesting one doesn’t make protesting the other impossible. Education is an effective tool to reach people. “Are you upset that datacentres waste x amount of water, well then oil and gas wastes 10x amount. Let’s protest those as well.”
Ashtear@piefed.social 18 hours ago
The clothing industry is also orders of magnitude worse, and insanely wasteful. But no, it’s only now people are suddenly up in arms about water consumption.
I’m not with you on energy use, though. It’s already over 5% in the US, and we don’t even know how bad it is in data-center-dense Texas (which means it’s bad), in a state with an already notoriously unreliable energy grid. Still is the case sometimes that politics is local.