Never heard any president just outright dismiss cries for help like this. Fuck this guy.

  • xyzzy@lemmy.today
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    15 hours ago

    He also thinks “affordability” is a new word. Again, because he’s never had to use that word his entire life.

    Then there’s this, about energy prices:

    While the national average cost for a gallon of regular gasoline has remained lower than last year, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found the average retail price of electricity has risen faster than inflation in 26 states in the past six months, according to The New York Times.

    Data centers. I’m telling you, this is a sleeper issue. They’re going up like wildfire for AI. If Democrats came out hard against these local sweetheart deals that tech companies are extracting from city councils in exchange for bribes, it would be a winning issue for them.

    These companies get tax breaks to build them, the electricity to power them is paid for by the community, they consume water, they create no jobs besides temporary out-of-state construction jobs, and they privatize all the profits.

    Often the terms of these deals are secret because of NDAs, but either way they try to keep these deals secret. Even if it’s discovered, the city councils just ram approval through over the objections of the community.

    This is a progressive issue that I think red voters would cross the line to vote for, because the Confederates have gone all in on wealth extraction by these companies, and the residents hate them.

    • crystalmerchant@lemmy.world
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      14 hours ago

      I’m in the energy tech world, and lemme tell ya holy shit it is hard to get through a conversation these days without saying the word datacenter.

      This gets a lot of attention in my world. Load growth from AI data centers causing upward rate pressure because utilities fund new grid capacity by wrapping the capex into the rate base.

      • Riskable@programming.dev
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        13 hours ago

        We need a simple regulation that mandates that all data centers must power themselves with renewable energy.

        It’ll fix sooo many issues. Not the water thing but that’s a region-specific problem. Not everywhere has water shortages and not all data center designs use shittons of water (even AI data centers).

        • wavebeam@lemmy.world
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          11 hours ago

          I am really uneducated on this, and my source is fairly unreliable (my Trump voting father and city councilor), but I’ve heard that the central Oregon data centers for Apple and Facebook are cooled with wastewater intake from the nearby municipalities. The angle on that was that it’s not wasteful to clean water sources. If it’s true, that seems like a decent solution?

        • theneverfox@pawb.social
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          13 hours ago

          I like that idea a lot

          Plus with water, we can just say fuck you, you don’t get to run the tap constantly for cooling, it’s a total waste of clean drinking water. Build more solar panels and figure out a less insane way

    • C4551E@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      10 hours ago

      We’re going to have the best Affordability. I have some of the best Affordability experts on my side, which by the way the Democrats hate, because they’re still mad that I won the election fair and square, which would actually be my THIRD term by the way, if they hadn’t stolen it for Sleepy Joe Biden last time, and I hrrrhjhbbbbb. hhh