I feel like we need more social equality to advance technologically rather than gadgets. The idea that only the elites and rich can conjure technological wonders is just so demonstrably false and not needed in this moment of history.
Uplifting everyone ensures that we'll be that much more likely to find the next Mozart or Tesla or Torvalds or whoever, if we give them a chance.
But yes, better to acknowledge how capital can be better utilized. You can probably give away free school lunches for an entire generation of children with that $10 billion in Louisiana, or you can give it to Zuckerberg to get slightly richer.
Becomes abundantly clear which one is better for societal advancement.
Well this is about one state, Louisiana, and not the entire nation but nice to know that one single Meta project can provide a nearly 55% of the total costs of for a national welfare program that would unleash 100s of billions in economic value (well fed kids, become well fed students, which become productive workers).
Definitely a waste of capital and a mismanagement of funds if we continue to allow companies like Meta to make these types of projects when you yourself say that these projects are definitely within reach of feasibility and costs.
Paris Marx is writing a book on data centers, so you might get your chance yet! If you want to read about it now tho, he does cite all his sources and transcribes the episodes.
Great podcast, highly recommend it. Paris Marx is writing a book now on data centers. Between him and This Machine Kills it feels great to finally find some high quality tech journalism.
I think you should focus on things you can enforce. For example, in Austria companies are required to provide certain information in job ads (eg. salary range, weekly hours, type of contract) and it's trivial to enforce because you can see if the information is there or not. I'm not sure if it helps with ghost job ads, though.
I think realistically the only way you could enforce this is to legally required registration of job adverts with the government (you register the advert, you receive an ID; anyone advertising jobs without a valid ID is heavily fined), and then also require companies to register the outcome of the advert (internal hire, external hire, withdrawn, etc.).
Then it would be possible to actually identify suspicious behaviour, and you could publish stats about companies' hiring practices so candidates can avoid them etc.
They would have to register them otherwise they could very easily fake the data afterwards, and you wouldn't be able to fine people advertising jobs without IDs. Nobody would have a record of all the jobs a company had advertised.
then it would just be like real estate with off market listings where companies have a black market hiring pool and then just do the legal loophole steps of registering before "officially" posting and immediately hiring their desired candidate... which would probably have the shady side effect of making the policy "look efficient" without actually solving the job search problem.
For this analogy to hold, wouldn't there have to be some way to withhold all people from applying to a job? Why would a company want to do this if it just increases the cost of hiring? What is the benefit to paying more for a workforce when you can just hire people normally.
The alternative could be like a $2000 fine per listing violation. To make it worthwhile to enforce, offer half the fine as a tax credit that can be claimed anonymously after an investigation.
I'm unfamiliar with off market real estate listings (not a thing in the UK). Can you describe what you mean more?
The point is if a company fills 80% of its job postings with internal hires then that's highly suss and can be investigated. I don't delaying advertising would change that?
I use to work for a company that got around this by posting the job ad physically outside our offices doors. We were 5 stories in a WeWork space. Probably illegal but I doubt the company cared.
I’ve driven through The Dalles. It’s a very small town. A search shows a population of 15,000 and declining annually.
It’s also right on a big river. The article you linked said that Google was spending nearly $30 million to improve the city’s water infrastructure so there are no problems.
Talking about this in terms of percentages of a small town’s water supply while ignoring the fact that the city is literally on a giant river and Google is paying for the water infrastructure is misleading.
That's because it's a large industry and nobody lives there. This pattern appears all over the place. The paper mills in the pacific northwest consume large multiples of the water used by their little towns.
That's not the point, the question was whether an apartment building would use the same amount of water and clearly an apartment would consume substantially less water.
No, the question was whether "the same size space of apartments" (i.e. apartment buildings occupying the same land area as the datacenter) would use more or less water than the datacenter.
Under reasonable assumptions, the apartments would use more water.
- Google's datacenter complex in the Dalles covers ~190 acres.
- Typical density for apartment buildings is 50 units/acre, meaning you'd have 9,500 units on 190 acres.
- Average household size in the US is 2.5, so the 9,500 units would have a population of 23,750.
- According to the original article, per capita domestic water usage in the U.S. is 82 gallons per day, meaning a total water consumption of 710M gal/yr for the apartments. And this doesn't count the substantial indirect water usage you'd need to support this population.
- The Google datacenter uses 355M gal/yr (per the Oregonian article).
- 710M > 355M
Now, it would be somewhat ridiculous to replace the entire Google datacenter with apartment buildings in a rural town with declining population, but that was the original question...
If you replace the area of that data center with apartments, as the question suggested, it would add half again to the local population, which could indeed use 30% of the city water.
I'm not understanding the logic. You want to add more population to the city? That doesn't seem fair but I'll concede I may not understand the point you're trying to make.
Assuming that the population is the same in the city and you just move residents into an apartment complex. I don't understand how you would get the same water consumption, am I missing something? Evaporative cooling is extremely water heavy and these facilities also have the normal HVAC you'd expect. Everything just seems to point to more water usage not less.
Why would this be worse than the current situation of private actors accountable to no one controlling this technology? It's not like I can convince Zuckerberg to change his ways.
At least with a democratic government I have means to try and build a coalition then enact change. The alternative requires having money and that seems like an inherently undemocratic system.
Why can't AIs be controlled with democratic institutions? Why are democratic institutions worse? This doesn't seem to be the case to me.
Private institutions shouldn't be allowed to control such systems, they should be compelled to give them to the public.
>Why would this be worse than the current situation of private actors accountable to no one controlling this technology? It's not like I can convince Zuckerberg to change his ways.
As long as Zuckerberg has no army forcing me, I'm fine with that. The issue would be whether he could breach contracts or get away with fraud. But if AI is sufficiently distributed, this is less likely to happen.
>At least with a democratic government I have means to try and build a coalition then enact change. The alternative requires having money and that seems like an inherently undemocratic system.
I don't think of democracy as a goal to be achieved. I'm OK with democracy in so far it leads to what I value.
The big problem with democracy is that most of the time it doesn't lead to rational choices, even when voters are rational. In markets, for instance, you have an incentive to be rational, and if you aren't, the market will tend to transfer resources from you to someone more rational.
No such mechanism exists in a democracy; I have no incentive to do research and think hard about my vote. It's going to be worth the same as the vote of someone who believes the Earth is flat anyway.
I also don't buy that groups don't make better decisions than individuals. We know that diversity of thought and opinion is one way to make better decisions in groups compared to individuals; why would there be harm in believing that consensus building, debates, adversarial processes, due process, and systems of appeal lead to worse outcomes in decision making?
I'm not buying the argument. Reading your comment it feels like there's an argument to be made that there aren't enough democratic systems for the people to engage with. That I definitely agree with.
> I also don't buy that groups don't make better decisions than individuals.
I didn't say that. My example of the market includes companies that are groups of people.
> We know that diversity of thought and opinion is one way to make better decisions in groups compared to individuals; why would there be harm in believing that consensus building, debates, adversarial processes, due process, and systems of appeal lead to worse outcomes in decision making?
I can see this about myself. I don't need to use hypotheticals. Time ago, I voted for a referendum that made nuclear power impossible to build in my country. I voted just like the majority. Years later, I became passionate about economics, and only then did I realise my mistake.
It's not that I was stupid, and there were many, many debates, but I didn't put the effort into researching on my own.
The feedback in a democracy is very weak, especially because cause and effect are very hard to discern in a complex system.
Also, consensus is not enough. In various countries, there is often consensus about some Deity existing. Yet large groups of people worldwide believe in incompatible Deities. So there must be entire countries where the consensus about their Deity is wrong.
If the consensus is wrong, it's even harder to get to the reality of things if there is no incentive to do that.
I think, if people get this, democracy might still be good enough to self-limit itself.
