Post #57212
2025-12-12 18:38 UTC
Replies (7)
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@avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 2025-12-12 19:52
When unemployment is low in the construction sector, we can’t have them pay. When they pay, they’ll outbid for workers who were previously building homes and public infrastructure. We’d either have to outbid cloud for these workers, or we’d pay by having higher housing prices and crumbling infrastructure, which incurs other social costs. Real resources are finite.
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@Usernameblankface@lemmy.world 2025-12-12 19:54
Yes. They can build their own sources of power of their own choosing. Or put more resources into doing data centers more efficiently, their choice.
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@Antaeus@lemmy.world 2025-12-12 20:12
Agreed.
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@SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 2025-12-12 20:13
Then they will build coal plants.
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@aramis87@fedia.io 2025-12-12 20:56
Make the data centers build their own power plants. Then they get all the risk and all the reward. Make them put the power plant right next to the data center, that way they're not stressing out the rest of the grid. And that way the exact same community that gets the benefits of hosting the data center also gets the environmental costs of the power plant.
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@Artisian@lemmy.world 2025-12-13 01:39
I find the different ways places answer this question really interesting. By this, I mean the systems we’ve had in place, the committees and applications and rules, for power providing the whole time. It is interesting because power is a privately owned monopoly that we regulate to the extreme; so we get all sorts of weird relationships and arrangements. Now we see them all getting stress tested.
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@Cethin@lemmy.zip 2025-12-13 12:56
It’s actually not as simple as that, assuming they’re connected to the grid. Power transmission is costly too, which needs to be accounted for, not just the power consumption/generation. Them being off-grid also isn’t really reasonable because they’d need a lot of redundant power sources and backups, which would be better as part of the grid. They should still be paying for all this, but estimating the real cost is non-trivial.