Episode 1303
The politics of public land / Nick Bowlin
Mar 3 2021
Utilities are increasingly reporting that energy demand is going up really significantly, that they're going to need to build more infrastructure, and that they're in fact having trouble keeping up with that demand. But the question is, why is the demand going up so much? That's what I try to unpack in my article. In the course of doing that, I find out that there's all kind of monkey business going on with projections about increasing demand. It is definitely true that energy required by data centers is. Gargantuan, but it's also not exactly clear exactly how much energy these programs use. That lack of transparency is legitimating all sorts of backroom deals between utilities and big tech that are leaving the public on the hook for increasing rates. Given how inflated everything is, from housing to food, the last thing people need is to not be able to afford to keep their lights on or to warm in their homes.
Ashley Dawson returns to discuss his new piece at the New York Review of Books, "The Costs of the Cloud: How much power does AI consume?" "The Moment of Truth" with Jeff Dorchen follows the interview.
Help keep This Is Hell! completely listener supported and access bonus episodes by subscribing to our Patreon.
Please rate and review This Is Hell! wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps the show ascend the algorithm to reach new listeners.
Follow
Weekly Mailing List
New interviews every Monday
Feb 21 2021
Posted by Matthew Boedy
Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.
My mom always said that one day I’d wake up fat. I don’t know why she said that, but she was right. What she didn’t say was that the forces of history would be responsible for my enfattening. I’m writing this on Fat Tuesday, known in Acadian French as “Mardi Gras.” This year my birthday came one day before Mardi Gras. I’ve been told I can celebrate my birthday all month, which would make this month, unofficially, Fat History Month.
At the dawn of Fat History stands the Venus of Willendorf. At the end lies Rush Limbaugh, dead of lung cancer. If we saw Fat History as a straight-line journey from Venus to Rush, things would look pretty bleak. Luckily we have many branchings of the paths, tangents and co- tangents, wendings and wigglings, complexities and convolutions, as we’ve come to the fractal array of fatnesses today.
In the past we had the proud obesity of prosperity. Today we have the shameful obesity of poverty. Such a contrast of fatness and what it signifies belies the rich buttery goodness of the truth. Nothing is ever as simple as it seems. Lizzo is a hot, shiny, body-positive rapping flutist, not flautist, while the comparatively slim, clownish Tracy Morgan suffers from diabetes. Fat and slim evoke reactions based on the mores of the moment. It’s amazing how short-term such judgments are, and how little time it takes for the advertising wing of the food establishment to steer collective values toward what they need us to desire.
We are a fickle hivemind, a hivemind easily led by the nose.
The slender young woman has been a sexy, lighthearted flapper or a waifish hippie chick, both of them out for good time; an anorexic or bulimic victim of her own neuroses; a drug addict, a slave with no will to resist; a poised, dangerously seductive model who’s also a spy, or a gullible, soft- hearted film star sucked in by seditious rhetoric and finally caught in a secret policeman’s trap.
But buried deep under layers of adipose tissue is where the golden woman resides – the matriarch. Mama Cass was everyone’s mother, nobody’s lover. Rotundity stabilizes a woman. It gives her a center of gravity. It makes her practical. While the wind might blow away the willowy waif, the large woman will anchor her house firmly to the ground during the hundred- mile-an-hour winds of a... read more
Feb 17 2021