how can they get away with this? Are data centers not paying their bills?
The way utility rates are set allows them to spread costs onto residential ratepayers instead of bearing it directly.
What? That doesn’t make any sense.
It’s essentially supply and demand. If the data center is willing to pay more, then everyone has to pay more. I hate it.
Places like data centers don’t pay the same rate that individuals do though. They get an industrial rate.
Basically they cut them a break so they can fuck you. The supply is more More than enough and the only demand that increased was from corporate interests.
It is like Obamacare. You have a person who smokes, gets drunk, eats a lot of sugar, don’t exercise, you pay for their bill through hiked premiums, and overutilization. Hopefully, that sinks in.
Tiered pricing would help.
It does
The more you use, the cheaper it is
And all we get in return are chat systems that make up bullshit facts. I mean, I don’t disagree that they can actually do some useful stuff, too. But the proportion of the public that benefits from them in any meaningful way is tiny compared to the cost to the rest of us. I hope a tornado lands on Elon’s gas-powered monstrosity in, where, Tennessee, I think? Destroy that shit, please.
Unlike this place, I bet most people out there actually enjoy Google’s AI summaries. I mean, it’s almost the Wikipedia article verbatim, but if you just need to know what a thing is, they actually save people time
And in return, they drive traffic away from the sites that collect the information in the first place, causing the sources to lose revenue.
In the case of Wikipedia, it saves them money
It saves them money in the same sense it saves every other information source money, it reduces traffic. But just like other sites can’t serve ads without traffic, Wikipedia can’t prove its worth and ask for donations without traffic. Eventually, people will start asking themselves why they need to support Wikipedia when Google’s AI tells them everything they need to know, unaware that Google’s AI can only do so because it scrapes Wikipedia without paying for it.
