I tell people I'm avoiding substack because of the Nazis, but really it's because I know that if I give them a credit card, they will give $5 to Iglesias.
Obviously, if we can fix TSA, we just require everyone flying west to bring a couple of quarts of water with them.
I read recently in a thing I can't now find that ML power demands produce spikes of unprecedented scale and suddenness, such that, in any other industry, the consumer would be required to alert and clear usage with the utility in advance.
Part of the reason that I'm a good-but-not-great blogger is that I'm generally unwilling to read dumb shit.
3 may be thinking of this? https://www.utilitydive.com/news/data-center-activity-has-exploded-in-ercot-spiking-grid-reliability-risk/752780/
The OP seems to be suggesting that the government of Texas has no way to limit the amount of water industries use? No permits or anything? Seems odd.
5: That wasn't what I read, but yes, that describes the phenomenon.
I believe there's a state board and a water plan, and it's extremely deferential to corporations and well-drilling.
I'm still fond of Yggles. In fact I do pay for his substack. But his strength is also his weakness, he's always reaching to say something a bit surprising. But like with the old slate pitches, sometimes it is exceedingly dumb.
If you keep giving him five dollars, he'll never improve.
8: If I were going to pay for a substack, it would be Krugman's.
He'll probably spend the money on alcohol, but then that's what I do when people give me money.
I doubt Y. explains it anywhere near correctly, he's gone way up his ass over the years, but I do believe it is correct that water is not the issue with AI; its use is immaterial for overall planning purposes.
Here's a more quantitative look at it.
I'm still fond of Yggles. In fact I do pay for his substack. But his strength is also his weakness, he's always reaching to say something a bit surprising.
I don't pay for his substack, but I do have some fondness for Yggles and I think Chard Orzel put it well*
I find Yglesias weirdly fascinating, as he tends to produce Takes that often seem to be engaging with something real in ways that I find sensible (or at least congenial), but he nearly always includes a couple of small elements that are just Wrong in ways that suck all the attention away from whatever valid points he's making.
I think he has a surface-level point that the staggering amounts of money** being spent building data centers and that should allow for a fair amount of using money as a way to solve problems, and there should be a way to solve the water problems given enough money.
That said, I find myself becoming more contrarian-contrarian. Oddly reading Abundance and then seeing much of the discussion about it has made me more sensitive to the fact that, when it comes to real-world-problems theoretical solutions are not the same as real-world solutions. Somebody has to actually bridge the gap to make it happen and that's not easy or frictionless.
* The whole post is good, and I was thinking about sending it in as a guest post but the quote seemed on-topic here.
**
The scale is staggering. Over the four years 2024-2027 we now expect to see more than $1.8 trillion spent building not bricks-and-mortar but rather generator, wire, silicon, plywood, concrete, pipe, and steel data centers worldwide. The hyperscalers and others are each pouring tens of billions of dollars into new facilities globally, in a frantic bid to secure the computational horsepower and energy infrastructure needed to train and deploy ever-larger natural-language models. This is not your garden-variety tech cycle; it is a capital expenditure arms race, and the urgency is driven less by exuberant optimism for future profits than by a defensive fear--fear that failing to provide customers with the lowest-latency inference and the highest-quality training will mean irrelevance in the next platform transition.
It does seem like data centers could be more of an issue with power supply - if a manageable one. They're taking up some of the surplus from newly generated clean power and possibly contributing to the persistence or reopening of some fossil fuel plants.
My electric bill was $360 last month. That's a new high.
12/13: I asked a local water prof about the data centers, and he said that our water sources can handle 1-2 data centers on closed loop systems, but definitely not 7-10 data centers on evaporative systems.
Here the limiting factor seems to be water, not electricity. It's easy to build wind farms and solar panels.
* Edwards aquifer, some surface water sources, ARWA, and some others
We must protect the Ogallala aquifer.
16: Mine was like $700. I put money in a special savings account for utilities every month so that I build up the account during shoulder seasons when I don't have to spend a lot on gas to heat or electricity to cool.
I really want networked geothermal, because the prices for air source heat pumps are ridiculous. I have friends who have an expanded ranch (I.e. not a large house by any means) who spent $1100 month on electricity last winter.
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Sherrod Brown is running for Senate. I love him and was very sad that he lost, and if he can win where nobody else can, then great. But I'm a little worried about not putting someone younger in.
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has made me more sensitive to the fact that, when it comes to real-world-problems theoretical solutions are not the same as real-world solutions
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice...
"They're taking up some of the surplus from newly generated clean power and possibly contributing to the persistence or reopening of some fossil fuel plants."
From heebie's link, the main issue seems to be that the Texas government hates renewables and is passing new laws to subsidise fossil fuel generators or even just force people to build them.
$700! We're running central air at 74 degrees in a three bedroom house during a heat wave.
We actually have a huge number of wind farms and a rapidly growing solar system, as well as the fracking stuff. The Texas government is doing a few things:
- loving on fracking for being part of the good ol boys network
- passively allowing wind and solar to grow and thrive
- Giving Trump-style lip service that's completely unhinged from reality on these topics
Interesting - I run AC to 72 degrees (much of which time ends up being peak hours on my plan, 4-9pm), 1200 sq.ft. apartment, but my recent bill in sky-high California was only $141.
Probably the biggest differential is my nannystat knows when I'm out of the apartment (regular working hours) and automatically turns the AC off then.
I am also in one of the few regions that has not been going through a heat wave.
Our combined water/gas/electricity was $355 in July. It was an unusually less hot July, though, and we have municipal utilities, so I feel like that's on the low side.
22: I don't have central and the mini splits were too expensive, so we have a bunch of portables with dual inverters and socks insulating the hoses.
Google says that PA rates are around 12 cents a kWh. Lowest in MA is 15 cents but closer to 27 is average.
https://electricityrates.com/massachusetts/massachusetts-electricity-expensive/
Utility bills are a major political issue here. Gas delivery fees went up this winter too.
Our water bill is through the roof. But that's because of decades of deferred maintenance and poop in rivers.
It remains heartening how utility-scale battery storage making solar power usable much more of the day-night cycle is rapidly turning from potential to reality. On the California grid dashboard, on the first Wednesday in August, 2022, daytime peak power supply (at any moment) from batteries was 2,507 MW. In 2023, it was 3,795; in 2024, 5,480; in 2025, 11,166.
The town next to me is municipal lighting. They have cheaper energy and better service. Another town also has municipal electric, so the rates are lower but they have charges to subsidize electric charging stations and the like.
The website I linked blames it on state deregulation in 1997.
Holy shit, these electric bills are nuts! When did US energy become so crazy!
I thought my Italian bill was too high at 90-120 euros a month. The real kicker is my gas bill which topped out at 800 one month during the winter. But by next winter I should be in my new home with solar and geothermal heating/cooling (actually, ground source heat pump if anyone is feeling persnickety about definitions).
MWRA water is more than some of the other areas. I pay for water but have a septic, so no sewer.
29: this company's battery-based induction looks so cool to me. to https://copperhome.com/. It used to be eligible for a tax credit. You can put induction in where you previously had a gas range without having to upgrade your panel because of the battery.
31: My gas was $500 post Ukraine war. The first year was even crazier, because the house really wasn't insulated.
BTW, Yggles tackles electricity and data centers today. I'd love to give a pithy summary, but it's a pretty meandering post that mostly seems to say this is hard but we can probably figure it out.
the house really wasn't insulated
oh god, I vaguely remember a winter in an uninsulated apartment in Jamaican Plain. Mostly repressed the memories - too painful and expensive.
35: We had the Mass Save energy audit guy come out and use his laser gun. He thought we had insulation, but when he drilled a small hole, we realized there was none in the walls, just reflective foil. The older houses (19th century and pre- 1930's) I grew up in were better insulated. The 50's were a bad time in that way, because they seemed to believe that they could have nearly unlimited cheap energy forever.
So many of you are way more indulgent if Yggles than I am, if that asshole were hit by a bus tomorrow the world would be vastly improved and so would the prospects of the Democratic Party.
My local transit system is important to me and under attack. If people start to feel like they need to defend themselves against buses, it's going to be worse.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice...
Here's what I would say -- I used to think that there was value in writers pointing out positive-sum solutions. I knew that not all of them would be practical or would scale, but it seemed pro-social to put energy into highlighting, "it would make life better if we could figure out how to do X at scale." I really believe that there are many good ideas in the world which are known, in some circles, for which the largest impediment to wider adoption is simply that there isn't enough leadership or attention to expand them.
I still believe that, I've also become very impatient with a style of writing in which gestural ideas are offered as a way to avoid having to engage with other people's concerns.
I think Yggles does some of both promoting genuinely useful ideas (we could use more attention towards strategies to reduce the cost of transit projects in the US) and also hand-waving at real problems.
What provides more value or, if neither has value, which does less harm?
Yggles substack
Vs Ezra's Times column and podcast?
Yggles is a reprehensible human being. Does no one remember his justification for the deaths of thousands of Bangladeshi factory workers? I'd drive that bus myself.
We're down to one car and it works because we're on a bus line.
41: I'm not going to defend the specific comments, which were callous and for which I believe he's apologized. But, in terms of the broader point that economic growth generally leads to overall improvements in health and safety I was genuinely surprised to look up and find that the gap between the US and Bangladesh in estimated average healthy life expectancy fell over 90% between 2000 and 2021. You don't have to think Yggles deserves any credit for the fact, but it really does look like whatever Bangladesh was doing has been working.
So many of you are way more indulgent if Yggles than I am...
I find the extent to which he drives people crazy a bit perplexing, but it's true I have a soft spot for him because I've been reading him for 20+ years and he reminds me of the young, carefree days of the Old Blogosphere.
What provides more value or, if neither has value, which does less harm?
The Substack is occasionally provocative but can be a bit monotonous, as you'd expect from a single writer producing daily takes. Ezra Klein's podcast is very good when he has an interesting guest, but I don't listen to every episode, especially not the episodes where some Heritage fellow comes on to explain what the sane version of the New Mercantilism would look like. I read Klein's column sometimes, but I usually just find myself nodding along---I too am a reasonable liberal.
as you'd expect from a single writer producing daily takes.
He seems to have a small team of writers?
Recently Ezra Klein had a podcast episode articulating the generational schism within Judaism around Gaza, and for me, it was one of those heady experiences where you're so relieved to have smart people articulate all the swirling thoughts you've had on a topic.
If a small team of writers gets hit by a bus, public transportation will be in lots of trouble.
My electric bill this month is $200. Gas is about $100 (much higher in the winter of course). Water/sewer is a flat rate of about $125 a month.
Yggles is a reprehensible human being.
Yggles is a hot take slinger whose heart is generally in the right place but is bad at affective empathy and sometimes shows poor judgment in what he chooses to pop off about.
I'm not going to defend the specific comments, which were callous and for which I believe he's apologized.
I went and read 13, and I'm irritated by it. The argument is, "Eating meat is a massive waste of water, so chill out about data centers."
Getting people to eat less meat is a huge intractable problem! If this dude has practical suggestions on how to make headway on that - in a world where environmentalism gets coded as feminine and voting for Trump is coded as strong and masculine - then by all means, share them.
Otherwise, human behavior is causing severe water shortages with no good solution, and adding in data centers should be done carefully, with regards to the actual world we live in. Two dozen rushed data centers in Phoenix and Austin isn't that.
Yes, but to me the takeaway was data usage (well, AI usage) is several orders of magnitude lower than American beef-eating - not just lesser.
I read recently in a thing I can't now find that ML power demands produce spikes of unprecedented scale and suddenness, such that, in any other industry, the consumer would be required to alert and clear usage with the utility in advance.
Yes, the link in 5 describes this issue (common for industrial loads) from the engineering side. From the economic side, the way utilities typically handle it is to charge extra fees, called "demand charges," for very large loads with the potential for rapid spikes, to compensate for the utility's need to keep excess generation capacity in reserve to handle the spikes. Data centers should be paying those charges.
I would rather have AI die completely than cut down on my meat consumption.
52: But not regionally, necessarily. I mean, some places make both beef and data centers, but data centers in arid places are still a problem.
I'm happy to cancel beef production, but it's much harder to reverse established industries than it is to set smart precedents in new ones.
I haven't seen any indication that the data centers aren't paying demand charges like any other industrial customer, to be clear. They're probably a significant portion of their operating costs. To me that is another indication that this whole AI deal is probably not economically sustainable.
45.1 I've also been reading him since his Harvard undergrad days, he used to be interesting but he's been poison for some years now.
50 was me.
He seems to have a small team of writers?
I'm not paying close attention, but I think every week he personally writes 3-4 pieces and has 1-2 pieces by guest writers, one of whom is usually an intern. The majority of the newsletter is his writing.
He had his hooks in to the Biden administration with his horrible advice and look where we are now.
47: Heard that too and thought it was good. Al Franken is also moving a bit on that stuff. Frank Foer of the Atlantic drives me bonkers.
59: missing the Biden administration, despite its milquetoast mediocrity, terribly?
They funded buses for non-homicidal purposes.
54: So, you'll give me your burger when I pry it from your cold, dead hands?
And the Harris campaign, bigly. Don't get your meaning VW, a friend is leaving here and I've been out to the pub with him and had more than a few.
66: Mostly that I want to kill AI, but yes.
I find it unnerving that Drudge is making more sense than The NY Times on DC right now.
68: How do you kill the undead?
I've been reading Yglesias and Klein forever, and I think they are both dumber than they were when they had just come out of college.
But Yglesias is worse, and I have a theory: Writers tend to mirror the level of their audiences, and the people who choose to read Yglesias on substack are dumber than those who read Klein in the NYT.*
*Except for the people who post here and read Yglesias. You people are awesome!
I'm inflated because my readers are all smarter than me.
51: finasteride in the water, also solves baldness.
So as a vegetarian opposed to AI, should I start eating meat to take water away from the AI data centers?
If you were to do that, beef would make the most sense as by far the thirstiest meat (as currently cultivated).
Wait, why is everybody hating on Allen Iverson? Guy's been retired for like 15 years.
He's barely six feet tall. How much water could he drink?
> Getting people to eat less meat is a huge intractable problem!
Hm I don't think this is true at all. There are plenty of ways to get people to eat less meat, ranging from anti-meat or pro-vegan advertising campaigns to pressuring governments to levy taxes to technological solutions like meat alternatives. They're not instant cure-alls but putting effort there is way higher-leverage than focusing on datacenters. Even social media posting about it helps a tiny bit.
But instead people social media post about AI datacenter use because it's more in vogue and they don't want to get into arguments with their meat-eating friends.
And because we actively hate the companies pushing AI. Mostly because we actively hate the companies pushing AI.
What companies/what pushes are you thinking of?
I view every big tech company as a problem, some of them actively evil.
The key thing with meat consumption is that you don't actually need anyone to consume zero meat to make progress. More people eating less meat is more important than convincing a few people to consume zero meat.
I thought the big data center people were Facebook, Tesla, Palantir, and Amazon. Those are all actively working to destroy American.
Tesla is a bit player as data center construction goes, I think. xAI is doing more.
Palantir makes less than half a billion a year, evil to be sure but nowhere near the scale of the Big Five. I'm not sure they actually build data centers - they're supposed to be involved in the Stargate joint venture, but not a primary partner.
I was wrong about my electric bill; it was $795 last month but that's $55 less than July 2024.
If you're building a bunker, I'm going to assume you're not a man of the people.
83: I meant huge and intractable specifically in the context of a Trump administration and American population who voted for him. Getting Harris voters to dial back their meat consumption under direction from a functional federal government is not the same task.
But instead people social media post about AI datacenter use because it's more in vogue and they don't want to get into arguments with their meat-eating friends.
idk, the data center conversation is super concrete around here. Like "who purchased land in the ETJ vs out of the ETJ?" "are they going to get their water from the sneaky corrupt Crystal Clear or are they drilling wells, or what?"
There's also plenty of vague fearmongering; I'm overstating things.
I personally am super concrete and specific when I talk about local data centers!
I've decided the fearmongerers have been right often enough to just go with it as long as they attack up.
You can guilt people into eating less meat regardless of who the president is. It might even be MORE effective when the president is bad! And you can research meat alternatives regardless of who the president is (unless you are an academic lab and your funding gets cut).
You could do like that Danish zoo and guilt people into giving their old pets for zoo animals to eat.
I looked it up. They say "pets", but they don't take cats and dogs.
Takes that often seem to be engaging with something real in ways that I find sensible (or at least congenial), but he nearly always includes a couple of small elements that are just Wrong in ways that suck all the attention away from whatever valid points he's making.
This sounds like a description of a trolling technique.
Anyway, I'm sure there are things Yglesias is right about and things he's wrong about but I don't see how when he's right he has any particular insight that makes his writing worth reading vs others who are also right about the same things. Especially if they're less wrong.
I don't have any current examples because I don't read him or almost anyone else on lots of topics these days. But I wouldn't turn to him first to read about housing or transportation policy if I got back to reading about that. And certainly not at all if I wanted to read about party politics.
Cutting beef subsidies in the US would be an easy step, and would be fiscally helpful also.
Similarly, 50% tariffs on Brazil.
*Except for the people who post here and read Yglesias. You people are awesome!
why thank you...
BTW, this wasn't detailed about AI but I found this economist (Mark Blyth) refreshingly no bullshit: AI is an odd technological distraction while climate tech is the future and the US is doubling down on a carbon economy, which will leave it in a strange technological/economic cul-de-sac:
https://mastersofscale.com/is-it-economic-halloween-in-the-us/
Would that have been on NPR? I heard some big thing on how China basically introduced their version of Biden's bill a decade ago, and has a huge headstart on climate technology. That the key to minimizing the disaster will be if they can make it cheap enough to flood developing regions with renewable energy before non renewables get there. I felt weirdly optimistic.
Jesus, Heebie. You find out about this now?
And their policies look almost nothing like Biden's.
The thing I learned about China is that their navy is crashing into itself.
Clearly because their jibs are not properly cut.
I did put "Chinese ships or aircraft open fire on a foreign ship or aircraft somewhere in the South China Sea" in my 2025 predictions, IIRC. As so often I underestimated how stupid things were going to get.
I think their coast guard crashed into their navy, technically.
Anyway, yes, PRC totally dominates PV, EVs, batteries, and supply chains for production of those things. Also strong positions in wind and hydro and power grid equipment (on the latter expect a massive price war against the ROK soon, if it hasn't started already).
I'm helping the ROK because I bought a new Samsung before the tariff war gets worse.
They also make gaming phones with cooling fins and stuff. If the pokemons get demanding.
The big improvement of this phone is that it has sides you can grab.
The pokemons and Civ VII are locked in a fierce battle for my attention.
I haven't heard good things about Civ VII and have stayed away so far. (Plus, I'm still getting a lot of mileage out of VI.) Is VII any good?
I only installed the updates about a year ago, so I'm still getting used to that.
Jesus, Heebie. You find out about this now?
I have an international correspondent who I trust to keep me updated, so I'll go yell at him.
More seriously, I did know about it in a piecemeal way, but it had fallen off my radar and this piece was a nice bright spot of news in a grim year.
I don't pay for Yggles substack, but I do pay for Cartoons Hate Her, and enjoyed her podcast with Yggles more than I thought I would.
I won a satisfying victory in the Water Court last week. It's a venue that rewards history nerds. OK, they all do, but water maybe more than the others.
There would certainly be enough water for data centers to help people write bullshit blog posts if only we stopped using it to produce food.
We got rooftop solar installed a couple of months ago. I wanted to get it done before Trump kills the tax credits -- coal is just so much manlier. Anyway, I have an app on my phone that tells me how much electricity we're generating at any given time, day, month, etc.
At least using a bunch of water for data centers to run AI isn't quite as dumb as using a bunch of water for data centers to mine crypto.
The thing I learned about China is that their navy is crashing into itself.
So pretty much like our navy then.
enjoyed her podcast with Yggles
I've been enjoying his podcast with Brian Beutler who pushes Yggles from the left (I'm not a paid subscriber but you can hear most of it for free). For example the latest episode about how Democrats are and should respond to Trump's plan to use federal forces for law enforcement in D.C. is interesting. I don't necessarily agree with Yggles' position but he's not smarmy about it; he isn't saying "this is obviously true and only partisan hacks would disagree" instead he's saying to Brian Beutler, "I know you'll hate this, and I don't like it either, but here are my conclusions and try to convince me that you have a better idea." -- https://www.politix.fm/p/home-invasion?publication_id=2118966&post_id=170803414
Cross posting as more appropriate to this thread:
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Did you guys see Josh Marshall's respect of a memo leaking U Chicago's plans to shut down language departments? Notably, Classics and German. They mentioned employing ChatGPT to do language instruction or otherwise outsourcing it.
I know that the destruction of the University of Chicago is a basic tenet of Halfordismo, but this would not be the way to do it.
It could all be a fake, but it feels very similar to what's happening where I work - cheapening the product offered by a non-profit while trying to capitalize off of the brand - and the enthusiasm for AI is so bananas that part of me believes this.
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I'm super-excited about AI for language instruction. Giving a personal English tutor to people who don't have access to schools or teachers or other English speakers around them would be a huge win for some of the world's poorest people. AI is already helping a little (e.g. Duolingo has some AI features), but it contribute way more when voice models get better.
431: maybe, that's not terrible as an adjunct, but the idea that we don't need people to study and do research on foreign languages because it can all be outsourced to AI (is there a Near Eastern languages chat bot?) is bonkers.
What does a "Great Books" program do after deciding that the classics aren't important?
134 to 133 on a recursive loop.
Of course Leo Strauss could only read English and spoke with a West Virginia accent.
> is there a Near Eastern languages chat bot?
Not sure exactly which languages you mean but the major chatbots all know Arabic/Turkish/Persian/Hebrew etc. pretty well, probably sketchier on the less-spoken ones.
Someone needs to explain to me the difference between "writing down a language in a dictionary/grammar guide" and "writing a chat bot in a language." Like, epistemology-wise.
138: Is there a chat bot that will teach you jow to understand ancient Near Eastern texts? I'm not talking about dictionaries or whatever.
139: That is a good point, question. I find the idea that humans are unnecessary for scholarship in ancient languages deeply offensive.
"I know you'll hate this, and I don't like it either, but here are my conclusions and try to convince me that you have a better idea."
This sounds like a description of a trolling technique.
This sounds like a description of a trolling technique.
I can see how my description would make it sound that way, but he's talking to an old friend, so that isn't the vibe.
130: Can you provide any links about this? My google skills don't seem to be up to finding anything about classics and German in particular; only about the Dean of the Humanities setting up 5 committees to make rushed decisions over the summer when no one is around to critically assess any proposals.
I think the link should work if you don't have Bluesky.
I'm actually surprised that we haven't seen the government offer millions of dollars to an elite university to create the Donald J. Trump Trumpartment of Trumpeting Trumped Up Charges Against Trump's Enemies.* Maybe they'll move in with the glorious history of MAGA research programs and curricula once they've fully broken a university. They clearly love the prestige of the elite schools and want to turn them to their own ends.
Never mind that by the end of Trump's first term people were turning down presidential awards.
*Maybe that's just Yale Law.
142: Yeah, the link in 144 is what I saw and it was re-skweted by respected by Josh Marshalll
Here is Bill Kristol's link to Chicago's own press.
https://bsky.app/profile/billkristolbulwark.bsky.social/post/3lwcv5bzhv227
If it's all BS rumors, then great.
But it also appears that the University of Chicago made some very unwise, leveraged decisions to expand its real estate footprint which left it particularly vulnerable.
Follow my rabbit hole: how many British prime ministers have had French surnames?
Unless the Frenchness is hiding under the noble titles.
how many British prime ministers have had French surnames?
John Major, Neville Chamberlain, Stanley Baldwin, John Russell, Robert Cecil, Spencer Perceval, William and George Grenville, and Robert Fitzroy.
Surprisingly few, actually, given all the business about the Norman Ruling Class.
What is surprising is how many have had Scottish surnames. Cameron, Blair, Douglas-Home, Macmillan, MacDonald, Law, Campbell-Bannerman, Balfour - that's eight out of 27 since 1900. (And I suppose one should include Brown as well?)
Also I would question whether "Fitzroy" is a French surname. It is in mediaeval French, but it doesn't originate in France like, say, "Rumbold" or "Montgomery" - it originates in mediaeval England, where it was the surname given to royal bastards. In his particular case it's from the seventeenth century, because his great-grandmother knew Charles II.
It's got to be the spelling but I would have taken "Balfour" for French.