There used to be no such thing as a woodworker. It used to be a number of different professions, such as the jointer, the cabinet maker, the planer, etc. now with modern tools it’s merged into one job
No this is apologizing for a fascist and suicidal regime. One day people will make this claim about Russia in their current Ukraine war even though it’s painfully obvious Russia is not seeking an actual diplomatic solution, and I will view them with the same distain as I view you now
> One day people will make this claim about Russia in their current Ukraine war
They might, it would be a sore excuse to nuke Russian territory or bomb Moscow a-la Dresden in 1945. The fact that Americans cannot imagine resolution to war without nuclear violence is exactly how Crimea was annexed and lost. If you ignore proportionality, then your adversary can test your patience and win every time.
This is why asymmetric warfare is so popular in Russia and China, and why it pisses off Americans so consistently. Nuclear weapons give nations a false sense of security, it doesn't protect you against subtle escalation like widespread corporate hacking, political blackmail, proxy conflicts, border harassment or industrial overmatch.
The complicating part to that is there's not the same Supreme War Council populated by militarists vs the Emperor split in modern Russia, there's just Putin. To match scenarios there would have to be an oligarch council in Russia pushing continuing the war while Putin put out feelers and that's not what's happening.
Also nothing about the anti-moral-bomb argument hinges on apologetics for Japanese actions just arguments that the bombs were unnecessary to achieve the end to the war. The only assumption is that there was some set of conditions and peace deal short of the two bombs that would lead to the emperor overriding the war council and surrendering.
Yes there was. They didn’t surrender, and the US intended to make it look like they had an enormous number of bombs even though the next was going to be weeks away
Even with the first bomb I wonder if they could have handled it a bit differently. Maybe scuttle a ship with it in the middle of the Tokyo bay, then drop a dud bomb directly onto the imperial palace with a warning painted on it. Seems like immediately after the bombings in hiroshima and nagasaki there was still quite a fog of war going on initially about what even happened. Making the sun appear in the middle of the tokyo bay would have been indisputable however. You'd get the blinding flash, the shockwave, the awe of the cloud, and everyone including everyone in government would not only witness it (anywhere with a window would have gotten the at least the flash), but survive, and do something about having witnessed it.
Of course 1940s thinking of the world was a bit less restrained when it came to the question of wasting a quarter million people in an instant. One wonders if the US felt the bombs were necessary to use with the war already won by that point to have sort of established precedent to use them in future conflicts. The quickness between targets would say as much as well: this is just another bombing run no different than an incendiary run a few days apart from another. After all, that's exactly what MacArthur intended to do in Korea. They were probably desperate to ensure their miracle weapon, one that took so much investment and effort and had so many careers staked in its success, would not end up like chemical weapons where it was verbotten to use even by the nazis.
I think you’ve made reasonable points. I think of it like this: the US was already firebombing Tokyo which was actually much worse than the nukes, they did likely see it as a continuation of the existing firebombing campaign
Yeah I don't think that comes up too much in the defense because it requires admitting the the US was already doing some pretty horrendous things to civilians outside the atomic bombs which is a rough datum to raise when you're defending dropping the atomic bombs. "Well it's good we dropped them because among the alternatives was a continued firebombing campaign." Kind of feeds into the argument that the very least the US weren't the the unambiguous Good Guys just the Better Guys in a lot of ways. (And lets be clear it's not exactly hard to be better than Imperial Japan....)
Train conductors should be automated, we have better things to spend government money on than make work jobs. LIRR pays conductors 200k. It’s theft at that point
Train conductors are valuable IF they have first aid and CPR training; maybe riot training. There are probably a few other things along those lines as well - but none of them have anything to do with running a train: all the train related tasks can be better done automated.
There are still some things in an airplane that an autopilot cannot do. There is nothing on a train in normal operation (as opposed to maintenance) that a computer cannot do - as evidenced by multiple trains around the world running without humans operators since the 1990s!
The long island economy is split between well paid public servants, NYC commuters, and the circular economy of driveway contractors and tile contractors in an arms race for the nicest walking surface.
There are no other jobs on the island that pay decently. Cutting edge engineering work will make you half of what it will in either the DC or Boston areas.
The conductors are highly paid in part because it's the local custom, and part because a third of the economy would collapse if that train stops running.
There are much worse things the government spends money on (or doesn't tax) than well paying jobs that play an important role in society. What do you think happens to that $200k? Do you think it just gets sent to the void? That money is spent on things like food, local businesses, rec sports and trips for family... and all that money gets spent again by those local businesses.
Meanwhile Boeing did enough stock buybacks from 2014 to 2019 to give every single boeing employee $200k... and when the 737 max crashes happened, the stock crashed back to pre buyback levels. THAT is truly sending money to the void to be lit on fire, money that could of been used to change the lives of thousands of employees and factory workers.
If screwing up gets me killed I want the person doing that job to be paid well and I want them to be held up to a high performance standard. I don't see how cutting pay for conductors is going to make anyone's lives better.
Or if we replace that well-compensated train conductor with automation I sure hope it's high quality stuff and not lowest-bidder slop.
> I don't see how cutting pay for conductors is going to make anyone's lives better
It's going to make passengers' lives better by making their train rides more affordable, allowing them to improve their lives by leveraging those funds.
Or, it's going to make shareholders' lives better by increasing their profits.
Either way, some people will benefit from it. The question is -- what is the real, practical tradeoff, and is the tradeoff worth it to the participants in the system.
Money, as a limited resource, means that money not spent on the conductor's wages can be spent elsewhere. In this hypothetical, fully automated trains can be run more frequently, so the money not spent on conductor wages means that the train comes every 5 minutes instead of every 15, and more stations.
It's going to make shareholder's lives better. And you better believe we're replacing conductors with lowest-bidder slop, that's the whole point. That's shareholder capitalism's playbook, it hasn't changed for the last 50 years.
What, you don't want to save a few bucks on a train ticket? Come on, you'll love it!
In my arguments on the internet, I think most people genuinely know nothing about the things they support and only follow existing tribalism. I think AI is often these people’s first experience with the evidence that it can easily share.
AI does not use much water. If you believe it does, like this article does, you have fallen for propaganda and lies, ironic in a post calling everyone using AI stupid.
The main cause of water fear mongering is that one woman’s well was dirty during construction of a data center. First construction is not the center running, and having lived on a well they get dirty for all kinds of reasons.
Is that supposed be a lot? That article states that all US data centers combined consume 450 million gallons a day, equivalent to 90 towns, which does not sound like very much.
I'm not the one here making assertions, I'm asking questions of the person making claims. I'll leave it to others to judge what is 'a lot' or 'reasonable'.
I don't think 'anyone who thinks X is Y' is a good basis for discussion, which is the real point.
> Approximately 80% of the water (typically freshwater) withdrawn by data centers evaporates, with the remaining water discharged to municipal wastewater facilities.
The electricity, air pollution and noise pollution are all from natural gas. Data centers aren’t loud, on site temporary natural gas turbines are. We can instead install solar and batteries and none of these will be issues. We already grow corn for fuel at 1/10th the land efficiency of solar so it’s not like we don’t have the land for it
I'm not talking about hypothetical possible futures in which people do the right thing. The datacenters that are being built right now and which are in operation right now use single-stage gas turbines, last I checked.
HVAC equipment can also cause a lot of noise pollution all on its own.
I feel like there's a huge political/economic opportunity in the US simply from getting government to shift subsidies from corn/ethanol to solar. Of course you also have to get buy-in from the farmers, but.
You could, you know, stop spreading deception about water usage if it bothers you so much when people call out deception about water usage.
At this point, I almost consider it trolling to bring it up: purposely throw in something incredibly stupid, and then throw a hissy fit when predictably called out on it.
You still have to grapple with the merits of their argument to find out if the indicator is correct or not.
In a world where everybody seems to be quoting grok with no further thought process you would think people would be more welcoming of someone who is "slightly wrong" on occasion. It's the strongest indicator that a flawed human being got their information not directly from a machine.
If someone is spreading deception, intentionally or not, then it's entirely within my rights to point out they are without engaging further. If they want to be taken seriously, they have to at least indicate that they are willing to self-correct in the face of direct evidence that they are wrong.
> If someone is spreading deception, intentionally or not, then it's entirely within my rights to point out they are without engaging further.
What is it with millennials and "rights"? It's a sincere question. People don't owe you anything and neither do you owe me anything, sure... so why do you demand another have a higher standard that you yourself hold to. I know you don't hold yourself to that standard because you would rather nitpick someone on a single inaccuracy then grapple with a very real issue (which you yourself would not appreciate if they did that to you). The respectable thing to do is to note the inaccuracy and approach the valid portion of the argument sincerely.
What you demonstrate is a lack of care for those around you, and a lack of care for what is actually true. You would rather "umm actually" then treat others with an ounce of respect. It's shameful and devoid of grace.
Maybe yours do, but all the CyrusOne date centers outside of Chicago smell like is grass and landscaping; they smell a great deal better than the car exhaust choked strip malls that dominate the exurban sprawl areas they tend to get sited in. I would much rather have one of those DCs as a neighbor than I would a Walmart.
As long as they can operate under capacity (for the grid) I don't disagree.
However I live in a much nicer area than Chicago and any Walmart, large mass of people, or DC would really destroy the PV as well as it would be an eyesore.
I don't really understand why so many just want to over industrialize so many beautiful places so that a corp. can sell the next gimmicky iteration of our "best model yet" which is just slightly slower and more expensive then the previous.
They're stinky? How? And how do they pollute water sources? A datacenter is a building filled with computers that uses water and air for cooling. What pollutants get "emitted" by a bunch of CPUs and video cards? No one seems to go into details.
There are certainly problems that can be crated by dumping heat into a body of water, but that's not the argument being made.
I'm willing to bet that a datacenter creates a fraction of the pollution of a similarly sized industrial facility such as a chemical plant, refinery, smelter, or steel mill.
It's mostly the emissions from diesel generators which many DCs use as it's far too expensive to ever shut them down. Often diesel generators are used to lighten the load on a power grid as well, so many DCs will run generators 24/7.
That source of power, since our grid is so outdated and struggles with the weight of these power-hogs, EVs as well as increased usage of AC during the summers create some dangerous conditions.
There is the risk of heavy metals getting into the water supply as the copper degrades but that will only be a problem down the line, that's prescient but not yet realized.
> I'm willing to bet that a datacenter creates a fraction of the pollution of a similarly sized industrial facility such as a chemical plant, refinery, smelter, or steel mill.
I agree; however I would not want a DC or a refinery, smelter or steel mill anywhere near my town. We have industrial districting for that reason, and because a lot of DC projects want to be put next to lakes and water sources, this causes issues for the residents.
In the case of one amazon data center, they were pulling in water that already had nitrates in it due to agricultural run off, but it wasn't enough nitrates to cause a problem for anyone until the data center came. It pulled in a massive amount of water, a lot of which was evaporated and that left behind water with very high concentrations of nitrates.
Normally, the nitrates would be filtered naturally and would mostly remain in the top layers of soil. Amazon pumped out 10s of millions of gallons of the vastly more contaminated water. It was so much water that it was forced much deeper into the ground. It was pushed deep enough to reach the aquifer which contaminated the water source for an entire community of 45,000 people.
Suddenly the water coming out of people's taps was polluted at 10x the federal level for safe drinking water. People got sick. Cancer rates spiked. Babies died. Amazon was forced to settle and pay out 20 million for water treatment and to dig new deeper wells for the community.
> I'm willing to bet that a data center creates a fraction of the pollution of a similarly sized industrial facility such as a chemical plant, refinery, smelter, or steel mill.
This is whataboutism. The existence of other bad things, or even worse things, doesn't make data centers good. They are a problem for the environment regardless of whatever else is also a problem and that's something that needs to be considered every time someone wants to build one. The companies who build and operate data centers should be held 100% accountable for the harm they cause.
It's helpful to put this number in context, although if the people you're talking to will do anything to avoid using the metric system, that becomes much more difficult.
Fortunately, now we have computers, which are great at unit conversion, so we can cut right through these feeble attempts at obfuscation. In non-medieval units, 10.9 billion gallons per year is 41.3 million cubic meters per year or 1.3 cubic meters per second. The river a few kilometers from me has a discharge of 22000 cubic meters per second (of fresh water dumped into the sea), so Google is the equivalent using 0.006% of the Rio de la Plata. Lake Superior contains 12070 cubic kilometers of water, which is 1.207 × 10¹³ cubic meters, also of fresh water, so Google's current use would dry up Lake Superior in only 290,000 years.
Google is mostly not very close to Lake Superior or the Rio de la Plata; a more relevant river might be the Sacramento River, which drains into the San Francisco Bay where Google was born, and it's much smaller than the Rio de la Plata. Specifically, its average discharge is 797m³/s, so Google is using 0.16% of the discharge of the Sacramento River. (But some of that is at datacenters far from California.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_in_California#Agricultur... tells us that agriculture in California uses 34.1 million "acre feet" of water per year (Americans will do anything to avoid using the metric system, especially when they're trying to be sneaky). In non-medieval units, that's 42.1 billion cubic meters, and per year, it's 1330 cubic meters per second, almost exactly 1000 times Google's use. Of that, 18% (240 cubic meters per second) is spent on alfalfa, or was in 02014, anyway.
One major difference is that you need fresh water, like the water of the Sacramento River, to irrigate crops, but you can cool data centers with salt water from the ocean. It's less convenient, because there are a variety of annoying things that happen with biofouling and corrosion, but that's what you'd do if hyperscalers scaled up by another factor of 100× so that their water usage became large enough to be environmentally significant.
But that doesn't happen until they have 100× the computing power they have today. So anybody who tells you AI datacenters are a major water user is lying.
Oil is not a single good. Different types of crude produce different products at various grades hence why diesel is so expensive in the US compared to something like natural gas
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