emushack

I think I have a different idea of "valuable". Rural communities need connectivity for sure - but we also need reliable radio astronomy for a whole host of reasons - space weather forcasting, terrestrial weather forecasting, scientific advancement.... without radio astronomy, there wouldn't even be satellites to put cat videos on!

Because "POOR PEOPLE" have so much stuff! Why do they have so much stuff if they're poor!

https://youtu.be/Al5E3KbIfeo?t=24

I mean they should really be more frugal. Having a refrigerator is clearly a ridiculous luxury.

I'm saying it's blaming the victim to assume the problem is that they aren't frugal enough.

So if I don't eat the bones too, I'm leaving nearly a whole dollar on the table? Damn. I can't believe it! I could be saving even more!!! I'm such an idiot.

And yet, the very study you linked to concluded that despite 5 years of research on the topic, it still isn't clear what the actual causes are. But you know, I definitely think your arm-chair reasoning probably contains the one true reason.

Research has mostly focused on explaining the paradox at a household level. Farrell and colleagues reviewed the literature pertaining to low- and middle-income countries and focused on the bigger picture, that is, analyzing the issue at an individual, household, community, and country level. They proposed 5 context-mechanisms factors that could modify the association between an individual’s food insecurity and obesity risk: affordability of energy dense, processed foods, quantity & diversity of food consumed, spatial temporal access to nutritious food, interpersonal distribution of food and non- dietary behavior. Nevertheless, affordability of energy dense foods was identified as the main mechanism since the authors had limited evidence to support the other mechanisms (26). Other authors have proposed that social support can also play a role since they found that food insecure women who reported lower levels of social support were more likely to be obese (28)

You know, you make such a good point here. The easiest solve for this is for the fat poor people to simply eat rice & beans. That will surely fix both problems.

It's still victim blaming.

Did you really just compare human beings to wild animals who hibernate?

LoL! https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000FF1101 Current price/lb for chicken is $4.23. But of course that's from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, soooo.... can't trust that can we!

My childcare + healthcare is nearly 3x my house payment.

Wow. I'm at a loss for words with this comment.

So, in case you aren't from America, you might not know this: the food that is the cheapest also happens to be the food that is the least nutritious. Americans who are poor cannot afford fresh vegetables, fruit, meats and gym memberships. They can afford cheetos.

It is quite the spurious correlation to say that obesity causes hunger. Just wow.

Well clearly the solution here is to eliminate the USDA entirely. 1 in 7 is an outrageous statistic and it will not be tolerated.

Yeah! And they could sell their refrigerators too! They use way too much electricity. <eye roll>

Yeah that's right! If you simply say that this syncs to all my devices, it papers over, or abstracts if you will, the complexity of: secure enclaves/TPMs, symmetric sync keys wrapping asymmetrically encrypted passkeys, resident keys that support backup, keys that do NOT support backup, how biometrics are used, etc. etc.

With a password, I can write it down on a piece of paper and put it in my safe.

One of these systems is not like the other.

And then we can compress all of that into a single piece of plastic and call it the Ident-i-eeze.

"You lost me the moment you mentioned iCloud". At least that's the way the majority of people I know react to this line of thinking. The "cloud" is still mysterious and complicated to a good number of people. Passwords are easy to understand.

Good luck convincing commission-based sales people of this.

I'm going to just leave this here for those of you who use Macs.

https://kagi.com/orion/

I was once told by "the architect", and I quote, "put blinders on. I will tell you when to take them off.". The context was I was asking about the why.

Looking back on it, yeah it absolutely felt like I was being told to stop thinking.

If you want to voice opposition there is a petition here: https://resist.bot/petitions/PXVZXD

Yep. And at the same time, it's the residents that are asked to conserve. Meanwhile, we let data centers off the hook when it comes to conservation?

When I drive around my town, I can't drive more than a few blocks without seeing a sign about Stage 3 water restrictions. For residents. Just doesn't seem fair.

What I'm struggling to understand is why so many are working so hard to let big tech off the hook when it comes to developing better technology for power and cooling systems.

You're right that it is tangentially connected. But that doesn't mean we should let them off the hook.

My personal experience with suffering from water scarcity: Taking a loss on a crop of corn because the farm at the front of the ditch took more water than they were supposed to take. That same year, a ditch rider was threatened at gunpoint.

When your own personal livelihood depends on another business playing fair with water, these kinds of stories hit different.

It absolutely is a resource issue. It is also very much also a political issue.

Cities in my area have to buy their water. The sources of water are limited and finite. Data centers also buy it from the same sources.

I'm lost. How is a bigger business unable to tolerate higher opex in a space that is famous for economies of scale?

Have you ever suffered from water scarcity? Because I've lived it. This is a facile argument. Data centers are standing on the backs of so many others while at the same time using their piles of cash to force them to do more with less. And their argument about why is because the technology is so life changing and amazing.

It's so sad that money and power blind people when there are viable technological alternatives available.

Good thing there are so many investors throwing billions of dollars at AI then! Maybe they should put that money to use coming up with better cooling systems.

Putting a price on it does not solve it because the entities that compete for the water with the data centers are out-matched financially. How is a city that has a budget that is constantly dealing with budget cuts supposed to pay more for water than a multi-billion dollar company? Taxing it does not solve it either, because there are so many incentives to writing loopholes into the tax code.

They don't even have to use water - there are alternatives. The solve is changing behavior of the leaders in this greedy industry.

Exactly this. This is a major issue in my region right now, central Texas. Data centers are going up in some of the most drought stricken areas of Texas, and since it is hot and dry, they want to save money on cooling by misting. This uses precious fresh water that would have gone to support the overwhelming growth of local cities. So now everyone who lives in the area is paying more for water service because the cities are competing for water with the data centers. Guess who has more lawyers and money?

I still don't understand why more attention is not being paid to oil immersion cooling! https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10101126

It's corporate greed and an unwillingness to face the external consequences of demand for compute. Just because misting is cheaper doesn't make it automatically better.

I was thinking the opposite actually. https://www.sciencealert.com/swearing-is-a-sign-of-more-inte...