Episode 1277
Ad hoc, end of year.
Dec 17 2020
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
Dec 17 2020
Posted by Matthew Boedy
Welcome to the year-end Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.
Caveat Ω: The following is satire, or, at worst, a joke. It is neither an earnest account, nor a call to action, nor should it be taken as an excuse for any authorities or their paramilitary proxies to molest or prosecute the writer and/or his, her, or their confederates.
CaveatsTM. Brought to you by yosephus®. Do you like education? Do you like grapes? Do you like water-based spar varnish? Do you like the Bermuda Triangle? Yosephus®.
Can the dead return to life? I know this is more of an Easter question than a Christmas question, but I have to ask because I plan on killing numerous people during and/or slightly prior to the upcoming Revolution, or war for independence from capitalism, and I want to be sure they can’t seek me out from some vantage point in the world of the dead – a mountaintop, or a ziggurat, perhaps – and thus locate me here in the living world, pierce the numinous veil, inhabit some corporeal structure of flesh, bone, and tendon, and do me an injury in payback. It really would spoil my plans, or at least disrupt them terribly.
My plan – and this is just between us – is to commit a few well-chosen assassinations first, either in the first few weeks of the war, or in the weeks leading up to it. This latter option is more difficult to plan for, but if everything we did in following our bliss were easy, it wouldn’t be bliss, would it?
And this particular segment of the plan is not such a worry. No one’s ever gone wrong committing an assassination. I mean, there are the celebrated disasters we’re familiar with from the lurid press – the Kennedys, Lincoln, Caesar, McKinley, King, John Lennon, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and such – but those are the sensational, tentpole assassinations, the splashy affairs.
Your run-of-the-mill assassination is just too run-of-the-mill for the tabloids (and they’re all tabloids these days) to bother with. The Russians, USA, and Israelis get away with them all the time. Israel just did one in Iran a couple weeks ago; Putin just denied an attempted one ten hours ago, and no one even got their hair mussed in consequence. I can hardly imagine anyone but an aggrieved bureaucrat even giving their desk so much as an angry fist-pound. And I think I can muster enough proof of Jewishness to qualify for Israeli citizenship –... read more