Hey, I think ai can be a useful tool and I use both cloud hosted and local models.

The ecological impact is god awful.

Datacenters run on fossil fuel turbines to meet demand when there isn’t enough capacity on the grid or just 24/7 because the residents of the nearby municipality said they don’t want brownouts.

Fundamentally ai datacenters transform expensive to transmit electricity into cheap to transmit data, financializing what was previously a relatively insulated commodity whose pricing and production reflect local demand into a globally traded commodity whose pricing and production reflect global demand.

If you don’t have a background in the history of industry and environment: that’s bad news for the environment (and anyone who relies on stable power rates).

Production of ai computing components requires mining rare earth minerals and phenomenal amounts of power. This is the same process with nearly the same inputs as the production of general purpose computing parts (if you leave off the increased rare earths needed to mitigate electromigration in single digit nanometer processes!) but the increased demand has already brought more fabs up to meet it meaning more use of resources and energy in production before the first kilowatt of inference is run on those chips.

Turbine blades for datacenter generators are also limited by production and are currently years out for delivery. These are components produced by advanced aerospace manufacturing shops which use massive amounts of energy to shape alloys of metals that have to be yanked out of the ground and smelted into some esoteric type of steel or aluminum first.

So even without the water concerns datacenters have tremendous impact on the environment.

But the water concerns are legitimate. Swamp chillers divert flowing water into the air where it is blown anywhere but where it would have flowed. Which is fine if you aren’t downstream of one I guess.

All this is to say: if you don’t care about the impacts you can rationalize that however you like, but they exist.

There isn’t a comparable service.

If you don’t need what mullvad is selling then there are others out there but the landscape is hard to navigate if you don’t understand what you’re there for and how to choose what you give out.

Systemdeez nuts

Whatever’s around. Some writable filesystem.

Rsync and cron

I don’t care about whatever argument you’re having. It’s extremely inaccurate to claim Americas entry into ww2 was diplomatically motivated when Japan was taking by military force islands that had been part of an extractive zone contested by them and America. It’s literally two imperial powers low key fighting over their periphery then one goes PISS NUKE INCOMING.

Again, I do not care about whatever argument you’re having. If anything I want you to be able to integrate more information into your understanding of imperialism. It’s really hard for us as westerners to do that when so much of the groundwork of our historical understanding is jingoism and great man and it’s good you’re interrogating your own ideas.

Also you should probably start with the Spanish American war as your American point of entry into imperialism (you say here “global interventionism” but idk wth that means.)

Hey I don’t have time to do a whole infodump style reply but off the dome Washington profited immensely from the revolutionary war because he was a land speculator and the us needed to get into ww2 so it could stop the empire of japan from taking control of all the island territories it chased Spain off of.

I wouldn’t personally call the first example imperialism because you gotta make a distinction between Byzantine and American somehow and the one from imperialism the highest stage of capitalism seems appropriate and answers a lot of questions but the second one is literally imperialism by any definition you wanna call it.

Also even if you fully reject Lenin’s work you gotta grapple with the historical facts that the eastern states didn’t really create a program of mass import of raw materials from the western expansion states and complete control over the western states government to the detriment of the people who lived in them to the extent that the nation they represented did to the Philippines for example. The distinction between imperialism and colonialism for the modern age helps with that and fits many other modern examples, most notably israel. Israel isnt doing imperialism to Palestinians, they are doing colonialism.

Regarding Americas western expansion I am compressing a million pages of history and some really powerful counterexamples into a did they didn’t they statement here and I know that.

Like I said I don’t have time to do the other two without referring to a bunch of books to get my claims perfectly exactly irrefutably correct on the (no offense intended) Redditor instance.

Yes it is.

You’re way off.

There were fuel economy requirements for c4c, your trade in had to be low mpg and your new purchase or lease had to be higher mpg. So it was never econoboxes. In fact they changed the rules in the middle of it and blacklisted a bunch of engine and model combos so you couldn’t get the rebate if your trade in was good enough on gas.

If a person was coming in to get the c4c money then the dealer had to record the vins to prevent fraud. They made a system in some of the vin check websites that made it so you could look up and make sure you weren’t being sold a salvage car like after Katrina. There was still a really small amount of insane bullshit but it was one of the first times back then that you could get a free title check across state lines instantly and online.

When a dealer gave someone the c4c money they had to record what title it was for and destroy the engine and body. So there was only the car salesman who’s employer wouldn’t be footing the bill for the payout standing between some prospective buyer correctly recognizing it was their one chance to get more for their trade in than any dealership would ever give them being way more willing to sign an onerous lease and signing off on putting reliable vehicles like the box Cherokee and blazer (and f150 and 1500 and and and) on the conveyor belt to being destroyed.

And c4c cars never got scrapped. They were destroyed and then junked. After the most expensive part was destroyed as a requirement of the program the yard that did the job had 180 days to destroy the body. American scrapyards aren’t like European or Asian ones where the car is disassembled into its component parts that each get tagged and put on a shelf in a big warehouse, they drag the car out into a field and let it sit there. A car with no usable engine isn’t even worth handling because it’s taking up space that one with an engine could occupy. It’s not even worth putting in a spot because you have half a year to get some value out of the accessories that weren’t damaged in the engine destruction process (no water pump, no manifolds, no radiators or oil coolers, when the engine blows its seals externally it might even take out the alternator!) and the interior before you gotta move it on. Better to never mess with it in the first place.

Even if none of that were true and it wasn’t actively destroying the parts, engine and chassis availability for two decades of vehicles people could have been driving for dubious environmental and economic gain, c4c specifically incentivized the poorest drivers to take on debt in order to juice the economy. It was fucking evil.

No and it should be limited to only bot posts.