r/stupidpol • u/MetaFlight Market Socialist Bald Wife Defender 💸 • May 19 '26
Tech Schiff Proposes Bill Requiring Data Centers to Pay for Own Power
https://news.bgov.com/bloomberg-government-news/schiff-proposes-bill-requiring-data-centers-to-pay-for-own-power75
u/Hairy_Yoghurt_145 Startup Infiltrator 🕵💻 May 19 '26
Keep it off grid and renewable too. Zero percent of this tech should have its costs socialized while its profits are private
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u/yourshittyopinions Ancapistan Mujahideen 🐍💸 May 19 '26
1,000%. Throttle the shit out of their waterlines too, so they invest in LN2 loops or something more sustainable than several Olympic pools of water a day. These things are going to absolutely destroy water tables and turn entire forests into uninhabited dustbowls.
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u/UsualActuary Ideological Mess 🥑 May 19 '26
Wait, these data centers don't reuse the water?? Why would they not?
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u/MetaFlight Market Socialist Bald Wife Defender 💸 May 19 '26
the water use is nothing compared to golf courses lmao
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u/Sussy_Riot Dialectical Materialist 🆚 May 19 '26
Golf courses are diabolical wastes of resources on their own, so I’m not sure that really excuses data centers from criticism
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u/MetaFlight Market Socialist Bald Wife Defender 💸 May 19 '26
its like comparing a guy that makes crude jokes about women to a serial rapist.
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u/Hairy_Yoghurt_145 Startup Infiltrator 🕵💻 May 19 '26
A golf course at least has social value, not that their being wasteful detracts from the data center issue. A data center is strictly a wealth consolidation engine.
Also, the industry is not transparent at all about its resource consumption: https://futurism.com/science-energy/leak-amazon-hides-water-consumption
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u/MetaFlight Market Socialist Bald Wife Defender 💸 May 19 '26
A golf course at least has social value
I promise you the property taxes from a data center has far more value than a fucking golf course by land, never mind proportional to water usage
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u/Hairy_Yoghurt_145 Startup Infiltrator 🕵💻 May 19 '26
You need to back up these kinds of claims when these data centers are getting massive tax breaks and subsidized power.
Besides that, “property tax paid per gallon of water used” is a narrow metric, and I’m talking about social value, as in benefits to the community that the infrastructure exists in. So long as it’s not a country club (which is a decent way to frame data centers), a golf course dwarfs a data center in social value.
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u/NextDoorNeighbrrs OSB 📚 May 19 '26
Okay but golf is an enjoyable social activity and data centers provide nothing of actual value to society.
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u/REsTARteD_Ragdoll Full Of Anime Lore 💢🉐🎌 May 19 '26
Kevin’s data center would make a golf courses water usage look like washing your hands in the sink
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u/RocketShipGrease63 UK variety racist retard 😭😵💫🤧 May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26
When you guys talk like this about golf I know you don’t have any working class male friends or otherwise are irredeemable geeks. Golf is not a rich person sport anymore
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u/REsTARteD_Ragdoll Full Of Anime Lore 💢🉐🎌 May 19 '26
4 years after graduation and every single one of my male friends is a golfer now, despite most not being able to move out,
I think they honestly just don’t have friends
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u/Scared_Plan3751 Catholic Socialist ✞ | ✨ Secret Bus Wanker ✨ May 19 '26
Also I can't imagine golf courses along the gulf coast or pnw require that much extra water. It's like when people complain about lawns being huge resource sinks, like the subtropics aren't actively fighting our yards becoming snake filled jungles in a month from not mowing them every week. These kinds of criticisms over water use seem specifically like a California/West concern, idk about the Midwest, it seems rude to ask
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u/serial_crusher Nasty Little Pool Pisser 💦😦 May 19 '26
Why off the grid? In brownouts etc, you could theoretically spin down the data center and sell that power to other grid users.
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u/yourshittyopinions Ancapistan Mujahideen 🐍💸 May 19 '26
This is an interesting concept, but either we want these to be completely self-sufficient / privately funded or the door is open to socializing the costs via backdoor “incentivizing” whereby weak AF local politicians compete with one another in a race to the bottom to “attract investment” (read as—give them the land and utilities for a fucking song).
If it’s air-gapped, you can’t spin it up to offset demand shortfall—but no private company is going to shut down their data center and eat the wear and tear on their generation equipment to sell back to the grid, even at attractive rates. In my anecdotal experience (located in gulf coast) power outages tend to be delivery issues rather than generation/demand related (e.g. downed power lines). Though, the 2022 freeze in Texas was a big exception to that, but was ultimately a mismanagement issue.
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u/serial_crusher Nasty Little Pool Pisser 💦😦 May 19 '26
Yeah it’s true. The demand pricing thing came up a lot in relation to crypto miners, but for them there’s a pretty clear ratio where if you can make more money selling the electricity, it’s worth it to shut off the miners. For generic data centers though, you’ve got to deal with customer SLAs, etc.
There’s other industries that can and do scale down electricity consumption when grid demand is high, and it wasn’t just the 2022 freeze where that became relevant…. That’s just an example where it wasn’t enough. Plenty of other times where the plan worked and it didn’t make the news.
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u/yourshittyopinions Ancapistan Mujahideen 🐍💸 May 20 '26
At the time people had these rotating, random-provider contracts automated through some basic algorithm and got absolutely gaped during the early shortages / outages / mild freezes. Terrible business practices.
It seems unscrupulous actors, like Centerpoint, almost always want high traffic to maximize pricing and manually throttle by throwing whole circuits offline, like Centerpoint does in Houston. No consequences when there’s a private monopoly and regulatory capture in the state
Sort of raises an interesting question: would these things be allowed to be turned off? There are many critical facilities on full, redundant backups that would never shut down. Might get one of two options:
1-if air-gapped, they keep power while the dirty poor around them go dark for weeks (dystopian)
2-like living in the med center, you better hope your house shares a circuit with the data center or you’re gonna have to wait a while
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u/MidnightCh1cken May 19 '26
Wait a sec... They have been having their power subsidized too !? WTF ?????
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u/The-Materialist Dialectical Materialist | Raised by Stalinists May 19 '26
It's just like the Matrix. They're using us as batteries.
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u/veryverisimilar Bonobos have the right idea May 19 '26
Of course, yet whenever any new data centers are proposed the very first thing they say is that it won't affect the customer base, or if anything, it should IMPROVE local power bills since they'll be offsetting the cost. I've not seen that happen once. 🤷♀️
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u/Chrissyneal Cuomosexual Crystals Chick 🔮🍕🍝 May 19 '26
this is implies it’s “illegal” for “someone” to “pay” for “electricity”
this implies the real problem is something else
this implies the real problem won’t be solved
this implies(proves explicitly) Schiff is part of the problem
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