I recently watched a video about the first electronic synthesizer. It was built in 1897, and was housed in the basement of an entire city block in NYC. Several decades later, and it would fit in a suitcase, with far more functionality. It worked, but it was huge and unwieldly, to the point of being completely impractical. It needed to wait until the technology caught up to it, and made it a truly viable instrument, and not just a concept.

Data Centers are like that 1897 synthesizer. It works, sure, but at what cost? It’s expensive in every way, from the building costs, the energy costs, the environmental costs, etc. We have a concept and a prototype, but not a truly viable product yet. Maybe in a decade or two, with a proper goal in mind, we can get there, but right now, Data Centers are just that big, dumb synthesizer that takes up a city block.

I spent a summer in college working in a piano store. It was totally empty 90% of the time, and my job consisted mostly of keeping it from burning down until people came in for piano lessons after school.

They were the local Bosendorfer dealer, so I had lots of time to play a full size concert grand all summer, the one with the 8 extra low keys at the bottom. It was such a smooth playing instrument, that it nearly ruined me for all other pianos. After playing that Bosendoerfer, a mere $50,000 piano felt like a toy.

Waterworld was a flop that got a reappraisal, and is now considered a pretty cool movie. It was really a victim of a critical wall that was against it from the start. That happens with some movies.

Babylon is another. That’s going to get a reappraisal at some point, and become a cult classic.

Showgirls is going through a reappraisal, and people are starting to see it differently. It was a Paul Verhoeven movie, of course it was great.

They remade Dune, and somehow managed to make it worse.

A buddy and me were the first in our circle to get an apartment after college, so we became the meeting place. It wasn’t a party house, we drank beer, and smoked weed, but it was calm and quiet, and the old folks below us never complained. They were frequent visitors, as a matter of fact.

People would start showing up around 8. My buddy and I managed different record stores, and we were into all sorts of music, and we had ALL the latest promo recordings, so usually we had a ball game on the TV with no sound (for our buddy Mark, who loved sports), while we listened to music, smoked, and talked. There were usually a dozen people, guys and girls, all ages, right up to old folks downstairs, sometimes. He’d had a stroke, and he could understand everything, but couldn’t converse, beyond random curse words, which he would deliver with either exasperation or disbelief, which we all thought was hilarious, and so did he and his wife.

At 11:30, we’d watch Johnny Carson’s monologue on the TV, and at midnight wed switch it over to two episodes of Twilight Zone. After that, everybody went home.

That was our ritual about 3-4 nights a week for a couple of years, until everybody started to scatter as they found jobs in different places. We’d go out now and then, but only because we weren’t going to meet any new girls hanging around our apartment. Going out often meant moving the party to someone else’s place for the night.

We couldn’t afford to go out to party much, but we always had a better time at home with our friends, especially since there were no threats of judgemental parents, RAs, etc. Our first real taste of true adult freedom was sweet enough to keep us happy.

The only problem is that the newer, safer nuke plants are going to be built and managed by the same old Sociopaths, who will cut every corner they can, bribe inspectors, exploit their employees, lobby for losser regulations, etc.

I’m just saying it’s a huge genie, already out of the bottle. Good luck getting control of it now.

I’ve been a solar advocate for decades. You got the sun giving off free energy all the time, and all those roofs and parking lots that could be covered with panels to capture that free energy, what’s the problem?

Oh, yeah, the Free part. American Capitalism doesn’t like the sound of FREE.

It doesn’t matter. I’m NEVER buying a car from that psychopath, at least not until he’s been imprisoned, and his companies nationalized (we paid for them, after all, they’re ours), and most of the profits gone to the workers who built it, and the remainder to a government account to fund social safety nets.

Yeah, we can do hard stuff, too, and maybe we should start doing the hard stuff here.

We spent decades having to deal with other countries and our oil policies, and it’s been a nightmare of wars, embargoes, etc. Now that we can go down a completely different energy path, why shouldn’t we keep it inhouse? We need to work with other nations, but we don’t have to voluntarily line up to be totally economically enslaved to another country for the NEXT wave of energy.

I just saw a video on the first music synthesizer. It was built in 1897, and took up the entire basement of a city-black sized building. It was huge and useless, but it worked. Over the next 75 years, technology improved, until it could fit into a suitcase, and be carried around.

The concept and the tech existed in its basic form, but it wasn’t really ready for deployment yet.

I see data centers that way. Technically, they can build it, but it still has too many problems to be truly viable yet. There are too many problems with cost, the environment, the corruption, and that’s before considering the impact on society.

In 50 years, maybe we’ll have the technology and the public policy to do this right, but right now it seems like we are forcing an inferior system to accommodate something that is too advanced for it. We’re getting way ahead of ourselves.

It’s like body builder who gets on a bike for the first time, and can’t believe how fast his giant muscles can make that bike move, without realizing how out of control it will be at the same time, or how big the crash will be when it finally arrives.

Yeah, it’s creepy and weird, but we already have cameras watching and recording your every move. I don’t see how this really changes anything.

We probably can’t stop it from happening, but we can make it very socially unacceptable, and we can make some behaviors illegal.

Fun to drive? I’ve never experienced that. You drive a car. They’re all pretty much the same. I never take it above about 75. I wouldn’t call that fun. What’s fun about it?

I’ve said Fuck You, and that’s pretty close.

OR, we could build those solar panels right here in America, and not only relieve the pressure on oil reserves, but kick off a new big American industry, backed by a national energy initiative, backed by tax incentives. There would be lots of new small businesses around the country selling and installing solar, creating thousands of new jobs.

All those shithole Red states are going to get raped by data centers, while the Blue states will force them to pay their way.

Countries need to sit down and figure out how to make it work because as it stands, jobs have turned into a form of slavery by design.

Yeah, they already did that, and “slavery by design” is what they came up with.

The next time, we don’t consult our country, we force them to do what WE want.

When they come up with it on their own, and push it relentlessly despite obvious and enormous resistance from the citizens, you know they been paid off handsomely.

Disney, Iran, GW Bush, etc. Somehow MAGA manages to consistently be worse than the worst people on Earth.

When they suspended Kimmel, I sent them a ferocious email, and one of the things I said was that the FCC license that they are so concerned about also carries with it the responsibility to serve the American people and the First Amendment with integrity. Defending our Freedom of Speech is literally the most important responsibility they have, and I expected them to hold the line to the bitter end.

It seems like they agree. So far.