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Comment by gchamonlive | Hacker News Reader

Although your comment is acid, I think this bears truth

> Maybe Leo should focus on finding a way to disconnect western society from their current cult-of-progress delusions?

It's too weak of a rhetoric from the highest representative of the Catholic church to call for regulations, but the alternative is to call for a transition from capitalism itself. Nothing that grows inside economic doctrines that only value constant growth at all costs can be safely regulated, regulation being only a makeshift solution.

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Capitalism is clearning having a moment atm but as far as I know nothing about capitalism demands permanent growth. Capitalism is about private ownership of the means of production (and a complicated system of laws that allow ownership of abstract concepts, like futures contracts). Its the people who always want more - usually the ones who already have the most, and this has been the case since the first kings.

If the way capitalism works is by responding to the excesses of a few with unbounded growth and destruction to meet that demand, isn't that also an issue with capitalism itself? Capitalism does not demand permanent growth if you only define it by private ownership of the means of production, but in reality, it seems like the supply and demand dynamics result in some extremely inefficient allocation in relation to the masses just so a few can have their riches and, apparently, their massive water-hogging datacenters for SOTA LLMs.

Water hogging? Show me the data. This is a lie that the socialist continue to peddle. It’s a very sticky idea completely resistant to facts. Data-centers use 48m gallons a day in the USA. Total water consumption is 322 billion a day. So 0.015% of water use. Golf courses use 30x that and Almonds 80x that.

Okay, those are the global stats, but what about local impacts? Water is often a local resource, not a country-wide one, so the impact of a large datacenter will often be much higher around it. For example, we have some datacenters gobbling up 10% of all the water consumption of a town (https://www.waterverge.com/news/data-centers-ai-water-consum...), with most of that coming from potable water supplies. That's considerably higher than the global stat you provided of 0.015%, and that affects the entire town.

That, and also local heat generation. Data centers heat up neighborhoods from miles away. (https://interestingengineering.com/science/data-center-phoen...)

The total water usage of the largest concentration of datacenters in the world is only using 10% of the water consumption of the county, about half of which is non-potable reclaimed water that would otherwise be dumped into a river [1], and you think this is a bad thing?

1: https://www.loudounwater.org/commercial-customers/reclaimed-...

Capitalism is about giving power to the people with the most capital. Obviously they will use that power to give themselves more capital. If not, their power will be taken away and given to people who did, since they'll have more capital. This is an inseparable part of the system of capitalism.

> Capitalism is about private ownership of the means of production

No, Capitalism is about Capital and it's multiplication. Means of production are just a tool for Capital to multiply.

Are you serious? Have you seen how much environmental damage the old Soviet Union has done? Do you think it's that simple: "capitalism bad"...?

Proper systemic improvements are possible, and having markets is a good way to allocate resources and efforts.

You call for nuance but then jumps to the assumption that a transition from imperialist capitalism necessarily means a return to soviet communism?

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