birb_cromble
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User ID: 3236
birb_cromble
1d ago
I'm not going to argue the numbers because you're correct, but I have also seen specialty teams flown in from Texas to handle that maintenance. The actual number of locals doing maintenance post construction is pretty low. The number of people getting their foot in the door to even get the training is even lower.
There's a broad attempt by the pro data center contingent to act like these things are comparable to an old tool and die, or rolled steel mill. They're not even close.
I'm not even against data centers per-se. I'm against the fact that the people building them are functionally pillaging rural communities and doing a half-assed job of it at the same time. They're cramming them in tents, for Christ's sake. I might even be willing to tolerate that, if our local politicians weren't so venal and craven that we can't even extract tax revenues from them.
birb_cromble
1d ago
I know exactly one person in real life who has loudly and repeatedly claimed to be pro data center this year.
He drove out to Memphis to record a video about how great Colossus was going to be for the community. He never distributed the video and he hasn't publicly spoken out in favor of them since.
BTW why so much hate for data centers specifically?
This new construction is qualitatively different from previous data centers that leaned more toward CPU workloads or storage. Additionally, many of the reasons that cause locals to dislike them have as much to do with the slapdash nature of the construction as the data center itself.
The gas turbines sound like a Geneva convention violation. The construction equipment fucks up the roads going into and out of the construction sites. The owners get sweetheart tax deals that negate the property tax arguments. The ongoing "jobs" they create are usually something like eight security guards working part time for $18/hour with no benefits.
If you live in San Francisco or Chicago, that all probably sounds great. If you live a couple of miles away, it sucks.
birb_cromble
3d ago
birb_cromble
3d ago
Good point. I hadn't considered his age.
WM does more than just residential pickups, but it's all trash. I've had some shares for years because they've historically been low volatility and offer a good dividend.
birb_cromble
3d ago
Is this a riff on "it's already priced in", then?
birb_cromble
3d ago
Would you mind elaborating on your rationale for any of these? I'm particularly interested in Costco.
On one hand, I get it. The hot dog is the only truly inflation-proof asset.
On the other hand, a multiple that high assumes some pretty massive future returns, and I don't see how Costco pulls that off without some bonkers expansion, and the last retail consumer staple company that tried that was Target, and the bet didn't pay off.
birb_cromble
3d ago
What do you think is an appropriate P/E for the following companies? I was looking at them this week and I was a little surprised at how things have crept upwards this year.
- Costco (currently 46x)
- Walmart (currently 37x)
- Waste Management (currently 32x)
- Sysco (currently 23x)
- TSMC (currently 30x)
- Airbus (currently 37x)
- Coca cola (currently 27x)
birb_cromble
4d ago
As somebody who lives near a few data center build outs, this would be a massive improvement over the current stance from the builders and municipal governments, which is "go fuck yourself, peasant".
birb_cromble
4d ago
I do think the water usage thing is probably the most strawmanny of the worries, but it is probably the most visible
It's the most visible specifically because it's the weakest argument. It's a specialized variant of nutpicking. It's the same reason that people constantly (and intentionally) conflated marginal conspiracy theories with reasonable ones during COVID. If you're dunking on 5g graphene mind control arguments, you don't have to look too hard at the lab leak hypothesis. If you're dunking on a math error from Empire of AI, you don't have to talk about the noise, or the utility costs, or the municipal NDAs and corruption, or the blatant disregard for zoning and environmental laws, or anything else that's going on right now. You can just call that person "low IQ" and move on.
birb_cromble
4d ago
anyone in the data center space running open-loop cooling?
Evaporative cooling still sees extensive use, but in the last eight months many of the hyperscalers have realized that it's not worth the ill-will that it generates. The balance may change over time for the better.
It seems genuine to me.
You're probably not going to get much buy in to that stance here. Most of the readership skews urban, wealthy, and technocratic. They don't view the negative externalities as real problems.
The Chinese interference theory is a convenient way to avoid having to confront those externalities without asking why nobody's crying out to have Fort Mason Park paved over and converted to a data center using "temporary" gas turbines for power.
It's very similar to the "Russian election interference" narrative from 2016. Sure, you can probably dig and find something, but Facebook ads for Sexy Bernie coloring books do not a complete explanation make.
birb_cromble
4d ago
How would you rate starship troopers?
I don't even think the director read the book. The two pieces really don't share anything but a name. The movie is fun, though.
birb_cromble
4d ago
How did, say, Hitchhiker's Guide and Princess Bride pull it off whereas other adaptations didn't?
Making a good adaptation is hard. Making a faithful adaptation is hard. Making a good adaptation that is faithful to the source material is a Herculean task.
Faithful adaptations are hard because when you shift medium, you lose tools that are available to the source material. The easiest example is a book written in first person. Even if you try to approximate that experience in film with tools like narration, you lose the immediacy of the written experience. This is why Stephen King film adaptations almost universally suck, for example.
At the same time, making a good adaptation is hard because you run straight into the problems of Hollywood filmmaking. Writing about things is cheap. Putting them on a screen requires money for fim crews, sets, special effects, actors, insurance, and God only knows what else. At the same time there are extensive pressures at every level for people to "put their mark" on the property, which is compounded by industry-wide disrespect for a lot of fiction (see: The Witcher).
To get both, you need a talented, obsessive individual with a ton of industry clout, fuck-you money, and a willingness to put his own ego aside in service to the original property. Good luck finding many of them.
birb_cromble
4d ago
like the gun rights
Were the gun rights positions normal for the time? I've always understood 1940-1990 to represent the nadir of pro gun stances in the US.
birb_cromble
4d ago
It's amazing how many problems time can solve.
birb_cromble
4d ago
Why do you think visual media, specifically adaptions, have declined in quality over the past decade?
I have a vague theory that it's because the writer's room is now part of the establishment.
The 1950s and 60s are generally considered to be the golden age of sci-fi. A lot of the writers during that period were some form of communist at a time when it was not a good idea to publicly be a communist. (I'll get to Heinlein. Take your hands off the keyboard and let me finish.)
Heinlein is an interesting case, because he also had some fairly controversial and unorthodox opinions for the time - just in the other direction.
The 1980s and 1990s are generally considered to the the golden age of syndicated network TV. The writers at the time were disproportionately into gay rights at a time when it was not a good idea to be publicly into gay rights.
There's also the area of literature and film outside of samizdat in Soviet Russia.
In all three of these cases, a large contingent of writers were activists in times when being an activist carried real and significant negative consequences. This had two impacts on writing quality:
- Creativity happens under constraint, and blacklisting was a major constraint.
- Activists who couldn't exercise nuance and write good stories first got weeded out.
These days, the writer's room aligns with the broader mores and taboos of the neoliberal elite. There's no risk, and anybody who has opinions that go against the grain get self-policed before they can produce popular content.
In the absence of risk, the stories don't have selective pressure forcing them to be nuanced and well written, so we get what you describe instead.
birb_cromble
5d ago
In all seriousness, the last time I needed to build muscle for a role, I had to cut my carb intake and up my fats just to get the required calories inside a reasonable volume. How married are you to those macros?
birb_cromble
6d ago
2700 calories is only two pounds of good cheese. What's the problem?
birb_cromble
6d ago
I've had contractors in the past who lose motivation if they already have all the cash.
He also didn't want it all up front for reasons he didn't explain, but I'm not going to fight him on it.
birb_cromble
6d ago
Spending is $2,317.45 lower than this day last year. My contractor is running behind schedule due to the non-stop rain, so we're splitting up payment between now and September. He's happy because he gets some cash up front, and I'm happy because I get to spread out the impact a little.
birb_cromble
7d ago
The reason is somewhat different for both, but both share a disconnected quality compared to the city at large. I'm not a Pittsburgh native, but both neighborhoods stand out for that fact whenever I visit.
Greenfield is fascinating because it's a large residential area, but it doesn't really have much in the way of shops, or services, or public transit. It's almost like the construction of 376 caused the city to forget its existence.
Swisshelm Park only really has one entrance or exit. Bounded as it is by the river and the park, you might forget that the rest of the city is even out there.
birb_cromble
7d ago
Are you planning to cover Swisshelm park and Greenfield at some point?
Most of the ones around me are neocloud providers, and they contract out the security.
I wonder if that's part of the disconnect in the conversation here - different companies could well be handling things very differently.
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