jimray
Me, an idiot: “So, kids, by setting the thermostat a little lower and eating less meat, we’re doing our part to make the world more sustainable” VCs, very smart: “We just raised $100 billion dollars from the sovereign wealth funds of three petrostates to build the world’s largest AI supercomputer. It uses as much power and water as Guatemala and the primary use case is for management consultants to autogenerate powerpoints for justifying mass layoffs.” 234 comments
Marek
@jimray @rstevens Or monkeywrenching! Or here is one from the CIA itself:
Vulcwen | Tessa
@jimray It seems the real lesson that history teaches is that to get away with crime, you need to do crime at geopolitical scales.
jimray
I am in no way clever enough to make up that bit about petrostates funding AI, it’s an actual thing on this, the worst timeline https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/19/business/saudi-arabia-investment-artificial-intelligence.html
Isocat
@jimray Up to now, I've grumbled about guilt trips over individuals failing to pretend-recycle every last scrappet of plastic, while corporations get to play 3-card Monty buying and selling (at profit) 'credits' rather than cleaning up their messes. Everything about this what you've linked is _much_ worse.
jimray
Marc Andreessen: “And another thing! We would’ve solved climate change in the 70s if the pesky environmentalists hadn’t killed nuclear power!” Also Marc Andreessen: “I’m proud to announce we’re working with one of the most brutal, repressive, corrupt regimes in history to help them launder their oil money on a computer that uses ⅛ of the global electric supply to generate ransom notes.” 
Lars Marowsky-Brée 😷
@jimray You _definitely_ could raise a couple hundred mil for that if you phrased it as "Virtual AI Companion for Management Advisors to aid in sustainably optimizing workforce allocation and operational expenses" 
Biorreactivo
Janne Ojaniemi
@carolannie @graywolf @yogthos @jimray EU is very much a capitalistic society. Just one with stronger social safety nets than USA. 
Wildduck
@yogthos @Janne_O @carolannie @jimray too bad we can only think to lessen social spending whenever there's a little budget crisis but never raise the taxes on the very wealthy 🙃
Carolannie
@Janne_O @graywolf @yogthos @jimray The EU is much more socialistic than the US, with a much more constrained capitalism. So the choice isn't capitalism vs "communism a la Pol Pot". It easily could be between pretty unconstrained capitalism such as we experience in the US or constrained and regulated capitalism with a good social structure. The note about Russian threats isn't relevant to this
Janne Ojaniemi
@carolannie @graywolf @yogthos @jimray I’m in Europe, Finland to be exact. And what you are calling socialism is just capitalism with social services. Private business is still very much the cornerstone of the economy and society as a whole. 
Johan | PD1JMB
@Janne_O @carolannie @graywolf @yogthos @jimray Pretty big strikes at the moment right? And a right-wing government that doesn't like that 😈 
SQU∄▲KY P▲Nᐊ▲K∄S
@carolannie the EU doesn't have socialism, they at best have social safety nets with a capitalism economy. Workers don't collectively own their work places, people aren't guaranteed home ownership, food still has to be bought by selling ones labor to someone else. Many EU countries have health care for everyone but that alone doesn't make it socialist.
Rebecca Cotton-Weinhold
Erik Haugen
Erik Haugen
Amici Nybråten 🇵🇸 🇺🇦
The examples of communism-inspired evil totalitarian deeds are not difficult to come by, but there are some very important counter-examples as well. 1) The decolonization of Africa was made possible by communist support, 2) Cuba has historically and continues today to make available large quantities of medical professionals for poor countries, 3) the communist movements were hard-hitting pioneers in the struggle against overt western racism
Amici Nybråten 🇵🇸 🇺🇦
I think more generally though, with the collapse of properly communistic projects (China certainly isn't one), what the world today has lost is an alternative and stark comparison with which to challenge states to curtail the worst of capitalist's tendencies. The collapse of communist projects ushered in a new era where inequality has dramatically risen in western societies and social progress in education, health, and overall well-being has been slow and lagging. 
Plsik
@graywolf @yogthos @jimray Of course, neoliberal brutal capitalism and totalitarian brutal communism are not the only options available. Capitalism is much more regulated in Europe than in the US. And there are much more socialist countries within Europe, like the Scandinavian ones. Of course, according to the neoliberal theorists, it must collapse in the next year, five years at most. They have been saying that for decades.
Erik Haugen
Sally Strange
SQU∄▲KY P▲Nᐊ▲K∄S
@graywolf state capitalists sometimes called red fascists are not communist despite what they want to call themselves. Communism even according to Marx(whose theories they claim to follow) is a classless, stateless, and moneyless society. Not a single one of those things are true in any country that calls itself communist, they do however have a rich ruling class, a state run by that rich ruling class, and market economy owned by the ruling class. ie state capitalism.
Amici Nybråten 🇵🇸 🇺🇦
There are libertarian versions of communism. In historical examples they were militarily overpowered by soviets and fascists during the Russian revolution and just before WW2, in today's world you don't have anything quite like it, but you have anarchist-inspired movements in Rojava and central America Some version of anarcho-communism is the only way imo. If you're curious about the ideas, you should read or listen to the first 3 chapters of Kropotkin's "The Conquest of Bread"
Reinhilde Bjornsdottir
@jimray This is what I mean for blaming the cattle for the actions of Exxon-Mobil. 
PaprikaPink
@jimray 1000% this! Getting us to turn on each other over what kind of light bulbs we use or whether we bike enough or what we eat is their favorite means of keeping us too divided to take real action to stop them from destroying the planet. "Real action" as near as I can figure is comprehensive legislation with strong enforcement. Or idk guillotines maybe? 
M.S. Bellows, Jr.
@paprikapink @jimray I believe this is why the fictional environmental activist George Hayduke habitually tosses his beer cans out the car window. Focus on the REAL harms, not the roadside beautification crap the System distracts us with. (Also, beer cans back then eventually rusted and disappeared.) 
Jason Petersen
Bart: “so individual action can’t make a difference?” Homer: “ah ah ah! Individual action can’t make a _positive_ difference” 
Carolannie
Souvlaki Space Station 🛸
@carolannie @jimray   
RodneyPetersonTalentAgency
Those don’t call those motherfucking sacks of shit, of which Taylor Swifts father is one, Vulture Capitalists for nothing.
RealFinoxy
Niall in Raglan :laserkiwi:
Petra van Cronenburg
@jimray The idiot is definitively not you. And there's also the question of responsability and integrity where the petrostates fail.
frog
@jimray Talking of facts, you did. You say: some person talks about bad "A", but listen, bad "B" is much worse. This _is_ #Whataboutism. If you need to know why you should avoid this: in extreme, it would justify murder, because there are other murders. BTW, I follow your arguments in part, but not your conclusion.
jimray
@frog the non-joke version of my toot was “I feel like a total idiot out here trying to effect positive change with my personal actions when giant systemic forces are negating the positive changes of millions if not billions of people” that’s not whataboutism it’s just an observation that billionaires pairing up with Saudi friggin Arabia exert disproportionate power over life on the planet. And I would therefore be justified in murdering them.
Rebecca Cotton-Weinhold
@jimray I would not call "destroying the society I live in and the planet I live on" smart. I think these destructive VCs just hate their kids, possibly themselves.
Patrick H. Lauke
@jimray exactly this... the biggest trick they play on us is to make it a personal responsibility thing, when it's a fundamental systemic problem that needs to be tackled
Erik Haugen
@jimray It's sort of baked in that individual efforts like reducing consumption don't work to help climate change. I mean, you should turn off the lights or whatever and buy less anyway, for other reasons. But don't kid yourself: it just makes the power you didn't use cheaper for someone else to use. 
Codhisattva
@thepoliticalcat @jimray concentrated wealth is also concentrated impact. One VCs decision can save or destroy the world. 
peachfront
it's hard to laugh when the joke is this on the nose... everybody involved in creating crypto and AI should be in prison, or at least all of their assets seized, these products burned up every bit of progress made in saving energy & carbon all of us performed for decades & for what? nothing anyone needed or wanted, purely for the sick egos of the super rich  
Rūdolfs Mazurs
@jimray @peteriskrisjanis Mmmm, that is some proper doomer shit right there. Keep feeding that existential dread!
Martin Ueding
@jimray Funnily for me it went the other way around. When I did physics research, coal was burnt to power the supercomputer. Now I work for an AI company which uses only renewable energy to power the Nordic data centers. Quite the improvement regarding climate change. 
pixx
@jimray I get the frustration, but IMO it's worth pointing out that 20 million people in first-world countries reducing their energy consumption by like 10% would still have a massive impact, too. In fact, I'd point out even more so that these changes that a lot of us are making to our habits are _even more important_ in light of the people with centralized power using it to make things worse! 
Extra_Special_Carbon
@jimray And this is why I don’t judge. So long as they acknowledge the problem, we can work for our own conscience. The burden doesn’t come from average humans.
David Blodgett
@jimray gosh it does put things into perspective. Pissing into the wind to put out a wild fire. 
PhDog 🇮🇪
You did the "__, an idiot:... ___, very smart" thing like you were telling a joke, but then just said what each party actually says.
Cheryl Platz :verified:
@jimray yeah a startup came calling about an AI company that helps companies “optimize staffing”. The recruiter seemed so optimistic about the impact until I asked “can you tell me what your strategy is to ensure this isn’t used just to displace a lot of humans?” Siiiiillllleeeenceeeee 
thinker
@jimray Well said. This is precisely why I hate it when they want to ram this nonsense down our throats about our carbon emissions when a country like China alone is pumping out more pollution in one day than most of the average population will make in a lifetime. Think about all those thousands of factories making anything from plastic bags to clothes, to bicycles, to toys, to gadgets, to carpets etc. You name it, there is a pollution heavy factory making it and spewing PILLARS of smoke...
Shaula Evans
@jimray I can't stop thinking about this dynamic. For me, it's about me rinsing off ostensibly recycleable packaging and lugging the bin to the curb, while totally exhausted, so I can at least "do my part"... while billionaires fly around in private jets. Confession: the incandescent rage I feel might be what's actually warming the planet.
Alex M. Dunne
At some point, we'll realize that AI takes doubly too much energy to operate & to cool, so we'll just put them in satellites orbiting the planet and powered by the sun. 
Glenn Fleishman
@jimray @darius The hugest thing today is to not give in to despair *and* also eat the rich. We should both strive for reasonable individual efforts and destroy the infrastructure that allows like 28% of globing warming to happen through methane leaks and other simple bullshit byproducts of unregulated capitalism (and, also, dictatorships).
Jonah Stein
@jimray Just remember that "Carbon Footprint" was a concept created by a UK PR firm working for BP Petroleum to shift the conversation away from capitalism and toward individual responsibility for global warming, which they branded Climate Change. 
Rob Fahrni
@jimray I feel ya, Jim. We all have to keep pushing and digging! I know it can be discouraging, I get down quite a bit. ❤️
Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn
@jimray The VC massively cancels out an individual consumer. That being said, if a billion people all ate less meat, they would have an enormous impact. Companies produce a lot of CO2 to create products and services that consumers buy and could just decide not to buy, if they wanted. I know it is a depressing conclusion, but ultimately, most of the people around me do not *want* to consume less. They hope carbon capture will work out so that everything can go on unchanged.
John Brophy
@jimray Just started reading 'A Friend of the Earth' by T.C. Boyle and was hit hard by this line on page 1. "...the woman who routinely chained herself to cranes and bulldozers and seven-hundred-thousand-dollar Feller Buncher machines back in a time when we thought it mattered..."
CarlataAgain
@jimray @mastodonmigration 
Seasonal Stompy Robot
Yeah, what really matters is charging a correct price for carbon. Then everyone will make the right choices. Some people will still fly for vacation, or eat meat, or whatever. And maybe they compensate by taking the train or biking for their commute. The challenge is: the "correct price" for carbon is currently something like 6x the market price...   
aroom
@jimray we don’t need to oppose Individual action vs Collective measures
farhaven 🇪🇺
@jimray Me, an idiot: "Maybe I shouldn't take the car for this trip, it's bad for the environment after all." Taylor Swift: *boards her private plane* |
Gregory's Server
@jimray we really need to get into crime