And if anyone finds out you have that money, they treat you differently because generally
At $1B I’d assume the person and any close family members would be at risk of kidnapping/ransom. I would imagine billionaires all have to hire and pay for private security.
Right, I addressed that. It doesn’t be a complete net zero replacement. DCs are going to be built. Any offset is an improvement on the status quo. Building on the landfill isn’t just about the electricity, its about reducing water consumption, land use, and impact on residents.
A single new datacenter in the pipeline from Amazon is going to consume above 7000MW.
That size of DC is the exception not the rule. Its the largest DC ever prospose in the USA. The currently largest built DC in the world is only 1000MW
There isn’t undesired water or electricity sources available at anything like the scale the AI companies want though
This is my second followup reply to the same circumstances described:
Lake Boehmer is a roughly 60-acre body of water in west Texas that sprouted from a former oil well that’s been allowed to leak since 1951. It produces 642 gallons of toxic salt and sulfured water a minute. It is undrinkable and simply spilling out on the ground. A 100MW datacenter consumes 367 gallons per minute, so not quite half of what is coming out of the ground every minute. Additionally the existing 60 acre lake can also be drawn from to increase the water consumption. There are also almost no one living out there meaning it would not impact the quality of life of residents.
West Texas is also the home of some of the largest wind farms in the USA producing 11.431GW of electricty. Wind, unlike solar, also has 24/7 generation, which more fits the model of a data center for power consumption. Solar could also be installed to supplement during daylight ours of course.
There is also lots of unused land out there. There are a number of datacenters already going up in west Texas so the know-how to build them already exists locally too.
There isn’t undesired water or electricity sources available at anything like the scale the AI companies want though;
A solution doesn’t have to be 100% perfect to be an improvement.
Lets take an example of what I would consider a fairly advanced Landfill energy management site. Columbus Ohio SWACO (Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio) operates a commercial landfill gas (methane) recovery operation. Today that methane powers the municipal buses, garbage trucks, and snow plows (in winter). Excess beyond the city needs is fed back into the natural gas pipes and sold at commercial rates to residential, commercial, and industrial customers. They’ve been operating this successfully for 11 years already.
The operation currently produces approximately 3,800 MBTU of methane daily. A high efficiency methane power plant (at 50% efficiency) would generate 557 MWh of electricity daily from that. More than half a terrawatt of electricity is certainly in the small to medium sized DC.
Further, the landfill produces 26 million gallons of leachate waste water. This is only a fraction of the water an Open Loop cooling system uses, but its a current waste produce, and its already onsite in the exact same location as the landfill gas which potentially could be used to offset other water usage.
Again, its not a perfect replacement for the land, water, and power, but its a very significant offset. A number of Ohio landfills are doing much the same as Columbus, and some are even supplementing with PV solar overtop of the landfill. If a DC was built on the Columbus landfill, the roof and remaining land could be covered with solar PV, and the recovered landfill gas stored during high solar production hours allowing even more gas available for electricity generation in the non-solar hours.
The article touches on this but just barely. The demographic time bomb is potentially even worse.
China’s ageing population has been driven by a mix of factors, including rapid urbanisation and the effects of the controversial one-child policy, which was in place from 1980 to the end of 2015.
This means that a single adult child would be responsible for supporting 2 aging parents, and a married couple would be supporting 4 aging parents. This also assumes that the grandparents are already passed. If grandparents are still alive it could mean one set of adult children could be responsible for supporting potentially their own parents (4) and their parents parents (8) for a total of 12 adults being supported by 2 adult offspring. On top of that, the adult offspring could be supporting children of their own. This is a significant burden and one only solved by time and greater fertility rate among younger adults. With this burden, that works against an increased fertility rate exacerbating the issue.
I’m actually saving a ton of money and because my landlord is checked out and lives far from here he’ll never know we have a portable washer in our apartment.
Why would your landlord have a problem with a portable washer in your apartment? Is there language written into your lease prohibiting it?
While I consider myself pro nuclear, there is something that gets forgotten everytime this conversation comes up.
The problem with nuclear isn’t that the waste is impossible to handle, it’s that humans are too short sighted to follow through with it.
Thats not even the biggest problem with nuclear power as the waste angle, at scale, will hit us decades in the future. The more urgent problem hitting us now on even on existing deployed nuclear plants is cooling water.
The byproduct of nuclear power generation is lots AND LOTS of waste heat. You have to get rid of this every second to continue to produce electricity. This is why nuclear power plants are typically built next to a large body of water. However, with reduced water supplies in reseviors theres less water to use for cooling nuclear plants. A double whammy is with climate change increasing temperatures, the water that remains is already hotter than it was, meaning it can carry away even less heat.
If a plant can’t get rid of its heat it needs to curtail (reduce) electricity production. This isn’t just theoretical. Its happening now in 2026 to existing power plants:
Hungary - Aug 2026 Hungary plans to shut down only nuclear power plant amid drought
Romania - Aug 2026 Nuclear power plants are being shut down as Europe’s drought becomes an energy crisis
France & Switzerland - Aug 2026 Droughts cause nuclear power plants in Europe to reduce output
At the time when Europe was experiencing its worst heatwave is recorded history, many European reactors had to be turned down or off. 2026 isn’t the first time this has happened either, you can go back in the last 5 years or so and see many reports of nuclear plant curtailment because of lack of cooling capacity (cool water).
When we know global temperature are rising, it looks like this will just get worse. How can we say nuclear is the future when the conditions for it working well are already declining?
It’s a not given that one copied the other. They could be independently developed and converge to a similar design simply because they happen to target similar objectives and requirements.
Its possible, but not very likely.
Keep in mind the USA is not above copying another nation’s spacecraft.
Here’s the Russian MiG-105 they first flew in 1976 in atmospheric tests (it never flew in space):
Australians recovered a scale model from the sea that Russia launched in 1982:
Here is the NASA mockup from 1990 for the USA’s HL-20 derived from NASA reverse engineering the recovered model:
Here is the private US company Sierra Space’s current vehicle under construction Dreamchaser derived from NASA lifting body research currently scheduled to fly to space next year (delayed):
I wonder if there would be more public tolerance if new DCs were targeting land that would otherwise be considered horrible. I’m thinking places with historical industrial pollution unsuitable for other residential or commercial space.
How much complaints would happen if a DC was being built on top of a garbage landfill, bonus points if the DC taps the landfill for its methane to power the DC (many landfills simply burn off the methane in a flare wasting the energy)?
Would the public be against a DC being built on an old industrial complex polluted with mercury and PCBs? (the power question would still need to be answered)
I believe this is fixed now, but how about in historical Flint Michigan where the water being delivered was too polluted with lead to be consumed. A evaporative cooler in a DC wouldn’t care about that type of pollution.
How about near productive natural gas fields where a certain amount of excess ethylene is burned, and if there is still too much ethylene, the well production has to be halted. If DCs could take that excess ethylene to burn it, it would make the natural gas field productive again.
In short, instead of targeting GOOD land, GOOD resources, have them target UNDESIRED land, water, and power sources.
Removed by mod
Tf is a token?
If you plugged this question into an LLM here’s how it would be broken into input tokens:
BOS (Beginning of Sequence) | Tf | is | a | token | ? | EOS (End of Sequence)
So this sentence would be 7 input tokens into an LLM. The sentence before this one, which is my response, would be 15 output tokens. The big LLM providers charge you per token used (usually the 1000 tokens used). Some LLM providers charge one price for input tokens and another for output tokens.
Here’s how that translates to actual dollars to you. Here’s an price list from Oracle Cloud, a large company providing LLM service. Lets take the Google Gemini 2.5 Pro LLM model hosted at Oracle Cloud:
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Generative AI - Google - Gemini 2.5 Pro - Input Tokens - Text, Image, Audio, and Video less than 200K input tokens = $1.25/1,000,000 tokens
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Generative AI - Google - Gemini 2.5 Pro - Output Tokens - Text Output less than 200K input tokens = $10/1,000,000 tokens
So your input question would have cost you $0.0000175 and my single sentence response to you would have cost you $0.00015.
Some LLMs (like those discussed in the article) separate each letter as a separate token for processing as input. In that case your same question in one of those LLMs would be 13 tokens instead of 7.
Removed by mod
This is why, fundamentally, class must be the basis of our analysis.
Do we? The high ideals vs the practical application go to the heart of the problem with tankies vs socialist. To quote Standord Beer, “The purpose of a system is what it does”. We can absolutely talk about class as theory, but the end goal of the theory isn’t simply logical analysis, its the resulting system that arises from it. I reject the notion that good socialist theory always will lead to authoritarianism. So the problem can’t be the theory, but instead the execution.
The more important bit is the liberal conception of free speech and assembly, vs. the Marxist understanding. “Free speech” does not exist. Speech is always dominated by the ruling class of society, in capitalism private media is the dominant force and squeezes out everything in opposition.
I think you’re referring to Marx’s historical observation was that free speech was restricted to those that could disseminate their voice (because of ownership of capital, press, media broadcast). I don’t believe that he was aligning with your assertion that it [can never] exist.
In socialism, capitalist speech is censored. The same applies to association and assembly.
That’s also a wrong reading I believe. Marx was talking about restricting speech *as a means to gain power in a regressive system, not as an ongoing means of control of the populous at-large forever.
I would also guess I’m correct in saying you do not support existing socialist states, which you label as “authoritarian.”
Lets remove the ambiguity here. You’ve named a total of one state in your post in this thread you identify as socialist: Cuba. What other nations exist on your list of described socialist states, which you also contend are not authoritarian?
The reason I described “tankies” as such is because this is something both “tankies” and non-“tankies” can agree “tankies” do.
I disagree. I’m not a tankie. The authoritarian angle is my commonly understood distinction between a socialist and tankie.
What is “authoritarianism” as a method of government?
I’m not sure I have a full definition, but off the top of my head:
Marx himself was subjected to these things and spoke out against them. This is what bothers me about tankies is the hypocrisy the embrace of authoritarian regimes and pointing to them as examples good examples of socialism. I’m not naive enough to believe a government needs to be 100% perfect in all their ideals or execution of matters of state, but the trend lines should lean more away from authoritarianism than toward them.
First, I promise I’m not trolling, but I do disagree with your conclusion.
In that “tankie” is largely a pejorative used to describe those that support existing socialist states
Perhaps coincidentally, but the “tankie” moniker is added to those who support authoritarian regimes that many times contradict socialist values. I find value in a number of socialist approaches, but I reject authoritarianism as a desired method of government.
For all their faults, IBM has treated Red Hat and Hashicorp better than Broadcom has treated VMware.
“On-prem” is the Enterprise IT antonym term of “cloud”, as in public cloud, aka hyperscalers (AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI).
article: The S&P 500 won’t bend its rules to let SpaceX in early
“In a Thursday news release, the index provider announced it was holding firm on all three contested criteria — the one-year waiting period before new listings can qualify, the requirement for demonstrated profitability, and minimum public float thresholds — regardless of how large a company may be. ‘Exceptions to the financial viability, seasoning, and IWF requirements should not be granted solely based on market capitalization,’ the company said. The decision preserves existing methodology without alteration.”
If you’re willing to share more…
What facet of IT? Software Dev, Architecture, Networking, ops, DB, storage, Security?
I can say we’re in a bit of a down cycle on the Infra side. Still getting new jobs, but fewer, and the technology partners are evolving a bit. Broadcom stabbing its customers in the back has been good for business for orgs that want to migrate away.
I don’t have $10m, but I’ve found it has become easier to be more given the more I have. My foundation is safe. My bills are paid. I have some money left over. I can now much more easily look outward to see where I can help others knowing that helping others doesn’t put my own future at risk.