Net zero doesn’t mean lowering pollution btw. Net zero means essentially cancelling out any pollution by planting trees, buying carbon credits, etc. It’s possible to be the biggest polluter and also net zero as a company. If that actually helps the planet is another story.
Most “we plant a tree for every _____” things are just scams. They plant the trees, sometimes as monocrops that could never become a healthy forest, and usually without monitoring the trees or guaranteeing their survival into at least early-maturity.
Trees get too much credit. It’s plankton in the ocean that absorbs like 70% of all co2
Don’t plankton mostly release that back into the atmosphere when they die though? Trees sequester it underground as roots and above ground as wood (assuming it doesnt burn, which is an increasingly ambitious assumption)
Well, as long as trees magically suck pollution out of the atmosphere in extremely high numbers, and sequester it for at least a few million years, that should be fine
Otherwise, we’re probably fucked.
In case it was not your intent to point this out with sarcasm, for anyone reading:
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not all forests are created equal: new growth forests are simply not as good at long-term burial of carbon.
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carbon sinks only work so long as the carbon stays sunk, so if a tree dies and rots before it’s buried, all of that carbon just goes back to the atmosphere, except a lot of it is now methane, which is MANY times worse than CO2.
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this means that it is possible for a poorly - managed tree to actually be an effective carbon source for the purpose of greenhouse gas emissions, rather than a sink, since a single molecule of methane can do the damage of a hundred molecules of carbon dioxide.
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the largest carbon sink on earth is not the forests, but the ocean, and that carbon only really has two ways out: back into the atmosphere, or buried at the bottom in the calcareous ooze. Now if you really want to understand how fucked we are, read up on the following:
- Carbonate Compensation Depth (see how it relates to the amount of calcareous ooze being buried in the ocean)
- Methane Clathrate Hydrate
- Permafrost Methane
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i dont trees can safely do it fast enough. also its mostly co2 , pollution is a different matter. Also algae, phytoplankton make half of the carbon capture as well, a net benefit when they become marine snow and sink to the bottom of the ocean.
It would also be in stark defiance of Amazon’s stated climate goals, which center on reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.
That’s not lost on the tech giant. But as Amazon spokesperson Margaret Callahan told the NYT, the “world looks different now than when we co-founded the climate pledge.”
What the fuck? They looked at the world recently and said “yeah, climate change isn’t as much of a problem as it was before”?!?
No, they looked at the blatant corruption from Fatboy McKiddieFiddlers regime and figured, “eh, what’s the point of pretending to give a shit. No fucker has got the balls to stop us from fucking thing up.”
“current gov allows us to do anything so we don’t care anymore because that’s cheaper”
They mean politically, they can get away with this now without blownack, they never gave one single shit about the climate
The same company that will same day deliver a single tube of toothpaste to my door doesn’t care about carbon emissions? What?
On one hand that sounds bad, but if that delivery driver is dropping off enough things in one run that would have been individual people driving to a store, does it balance out?
Maybe, but Amazon in particular will also bag/box every solitary thing. Not sure if it balances, but it’s an interesting question when you put it that way.
Still, I expect they prioritize meeting service levels over fuel economy.
True. Definitely not saying they are more efficient or vouching for them, just a curious thought. They definitely do a lot of stupid shit like, as you said, bag individual items that absolutely do not need it. Or worse, I’ve ordered groceries through them and I’ll get a bag that contains one onion, meanwhile it could have gone into literally any other bag. I’m guessing a byproduct of some weird logistics design sacrificing all else over internal efficiency.
Or maybe “eh, it’s fucked anyways, let’s make red line go up”.
It doesn’t need to be so, the asshole billionaires just don’t give a single fuck about anyone but themselves. They don’t even care about their kids.
They have enough money for generations of their children to live as untouchables. They don’t need to care about their kids.
What womam would want to have sex with those old pedos anyway?
they wouldn’t be able to do shit if we didn’t enable them to do it; point the anger at the right place.
BUT it was ALSO create THREE whole jobs so it’s WORTH it!
Remember that Stargate SG1 episode where they find themselves into a huge underground facility that is under attack by external forces. Jack O’Neill accepts to pilot one of their drones to help defend the complex from a wave of bombers and is infuriated to learn that the attacker’s bombers were manned while he believed they were unmanned.
spoiler
At the end it turns out the facility was actively poisoning the entire planet, threatening to wipe out all life and the “attackers” were simply the people of the rest of the world trying to stop it.
That is what the Amazon data center is to me.
Don’t tempt me to rewatch all of SG1 again >.>
You mean don’t tempt you with a good time?
A key thing there is that the bunker dwellers were at least eugenicists if not outright Nazi analogues and they were deliberately killing everyone outside as untermensch, it wasn’t just a callous side effect of their facility.
Which episode is this, this might get me into SG1
The one with Odo in it!
Season 4 episode 2
Don’t forget to use your paper straws people! It’s the average person that causes harm to the climate, not businesses. Maybe we should give them more tax breaks.
And don’t forget to vote for the lesser evil party that will allow amazon to build just a dozen of these enormous datacenters instead of even more
You’re going to be surprised when you find out who consumes what businesses produce…
“Yet you live in society, curious.”
Not only that, actively consume products and blame the creators of the products for the consequences.
I don’t know, if you actively are reducing your shopping from amazon and try to stay away from their products, I wouldn’t call you a hypocrite for criticising them. And many people now a days are doing just that, so you can’t really assume right from the start that a person is being hypocritical.
Amazon is a seller, they don’t manufacture almost anything, but that’s beside the point. It’s not about the individual. I can blame either BP for drilling for oil, or the millions of people who refuse to:
- drive an EV
- ordering the more expensive but locally manufactured products that don’t need that much transportation
- vote for walkable cities and public transportation
- simply consume less stuff
That would require introspection, and maybe accepting responsibility. It’s easier to live in a world that the BP’s CEO is the bad one and me and all of my friends are blameless victims.
Billionaires can only burn so much oil with their private planes and yachts, they don’t consume 100 million barrels per day.
It’s in one of the sunniest places in the US too. 6.0 kWh/m²/day of solar irradiance. There’s even already a relatively large solar farm in the same county.
This thing is 7.65GW. The largest solar array in the US is 900MW and uses 4600-5000 acres. The scale to do this on solar alone is bonkers, but not impossible.
You would need to at least 4x provision it which means a 30GW solar array, and 156,000 acres, before getting into battery storage for non sunny times.
It’d be nice to use some solar absolutely, but this is better suited to nuclear.
Edit: And if you aren’t storing / over provision to store, then you still need the peak output from another source anyway and these things likely always run near peak as they are constantly in use, so the size of the non-solar source doesn’t reduce, only its output during the sunny day time hours. So you end up with 7.65GW of natural gas still, but maybe they also build a 1GW solar farm on the side.
Nuclear power run by a publicly traded company worries me.
Because there will be shareholder value vs. safety trades.
Probably shouldn’t be run by them i agree, but they could fund it and go into some agreement to purchase its power.
So don’t build it. It needs too much power.
Maybe Trump and Denmark can cover the ice in Greenland with solar cells. That’s about 434,000,000 acres
At that scale you aren’t using batteries, you are pumping water into a hydroelectric dam.
At this scale everything is bonkers. The hoover damn is 2GW.
That severely limits where you can place it, probably more than solar. Now you need all that extra water, and height differential that can be at that scale.
If I were king they could run data centers with solar and fans. No outside power, no outside water.
You realize they are for sifting through the massive amount of surveillance data using AI right? They aren’t for ChatGPT. They are for categorizing and watching every person on the planet 1984 style.
that’s my biggest worry, more data centers won’t lower the cost of LLM tokens.
The only reason they want so much compute power is to have AI agents watching and annotating everything flock cameras see.
not just license plate readers (a raspberry pi could handle that). but everything.
My paranoia is that in 5 years, if you protest, the police will come to arrest you with a long list of every “crime” you have committed: driving holding you phone, no seatbelt, a recipt flew out of your pockets… a long list of petty meaningless violations.
and they’ll have that list for everyone.
They are already unpopular now. Wait till the pigs dive even deeper in popularity.
They might convince the general population that the first amendment is not worth exercising, and instead we all neet to contemplate military style resistance.
Nobody apparently wants to bring trouble to themselves as long as there is still anything left to hope for. However that calculus can change once the powers that be engineer a life even more glaringly worthless than it already is. Lots of people are quiet quitting or not having children already. That trend will accelerate even further.
If ice killing random people on the street, on camera, multiple times, didn’t cross that line, a random construction site won’t do shit.
Do you have a source for this?
Running an LLM is significantly less resource intensive than training it, and all indicators are that these data centers are being built to keep up the breakneck pace of companies racing to create AGI.
They’re literally buying up all the computing resources so that we can’t get any.
We will all have to communicate though walled gardens on dumb tablets.
They can quickly summarize vast amounts of text looking for any “undesirable” patterns using LLMs.
We will all have to rent computing time from them.
This is the point, this has been the point for a long time, it’s just that LLMs were the perfect storm of “impressive to rubes” and “resource hungry”. Micron has already eliminated its consumer brand, Crucial. Hell, Peter Thiel (the Palantir guy) goes around giving talks about how “being against AI is the antichrist” just to make sure that all the remaining brainwashed sheep fall for the ruse.
This shit is not hard to see. They want to own our future entirely and they want us to pay them for the privilege.
Capitalism was a fucking mistake.
Imagine the local government decides they can’t pull water anymore. Like several nuclear reactors having to shut down due to low river levels recently.
The picture of facility in vast desert is baffling.
I know this will be buried but it seems Ai isn’t worth anything really if these giant complexes are the price. Just straight up monetarily, who benefits?
These companies are all racing to dominate the market. Eventually one will win, largely through government contracts. Then all the infrastructure will be used to further propagandize, kill and spy on us.
looks like they are aiming for most govt contract= mass AI surveillance as a constant influx of profit, while they saw commercial use as a total failure, since nobody wants to pay for it, and the growing resentment against AI.
The company benefits by convincing investors that is still growing and innovating. If investors think they are still growing their stock prices go up. If their stock prices go up then they can use their stock as an asset to borrow against or as a form of payment in lieu of cash. Stock is particularly useful to a company as a medium of exchange because they can just make more. But they can only do that without tanking the value if people are buying, and they can only keep people buying if they think the price will go up, and the only thing the price will go up if they think the company is going to become more profitable in the future.
This is basically Cory Doctrow’s argument in his latest book.
But the grid can’t handle EV or the “pollution” they create.
funnily the all the “grid can’t handle all the EV charging” is just assuming everyone is going to fast charge the same time, when in reality most are just going to be using either level 1 overnight charging every night or fast charge for a way shorter time so very few people are doing that at the same time.
Fun fact: This could possibly be true at the same time.
While this certainly could be true, I would say it’s only that way because state and federal government refuse to invest in our aging energy grid.
with proper taxation and directing that towards upgrading the infrastructure, supporting it is absolutely possible.
But Margaret have dog, can’t be mad…
It’s all worth it if my plastic “made in China” hula dancer arrives in time so I can put it on my cars dashboard. /s
can we use some patriot missiles for something patriotic?
How do you think they’re clearing the native residents off the land?
Sounds like an engineering nightmare
Almost every day I have a fight with my gf over her Amazon account. I told her we can not proceed with a meaningful relationship if she doesn’t cancel it. Am I the crazy one?
Yes. The effect of one person’s passive boycott is nothing. If you’re serious enough to sabotage your own relationships over this, then perhaps focus instead on a greater boycott campaign, or actively pushing for legislation to actually make a difference.
Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face.
Seconded. “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism” type shit. Pick your battles.
The effect of one person’s passive boycott is nothing.
This is some centrist capitalism-enabling shit. The sum of our individual efforts can amount to great things. Boycotts have been a great tool against fascism throughout history.
@Waffelmeister@lemmy.world is actually boycotting his relationship. I do not think it is wise for him to try to force her into submission rather than leading by a lifetime of example proving that one can get by just fine without Amazon and inspiring rather than coercing her to leave.
Let’s remind ourselves this is a company actively supporting genocide.
force her into submission
coercing her to leave
You conclude there’s forcing and coercion from 2 sentences? I just see two people with apparently incompatible moral values about consumption. I don’t see any forcing or coercion. I think it’s a very valid reason. If he has or is willing to put patience into the relationship is also a decision he has to take.
Okay, so could you name alternate companies to move to that have definitely spoken against Zion? I’m certainly not pro-Amazon and am aware of the chokehold that AWS has on the entire Internet, but it sure seems there are fewer alts than we would hope. Also, how is an ultimatum not forcing?
Honestly, this is more of a values disparity.
If two people have different values in some places in life, its normal to have adversity.
Just because it’s a capitalist themed value, doesnt mean this person is being irrational imo.
Mostly agree with you, leading by example is the way. I am amazon free, but my fucking goddamn husband, absolutely pays for prime for television (and almost never watches much there, very annoying) but, I have gotten him to change his buying habits, and he doesnt buy off amazon no where near what he used to, its like once a year now. Ive have been successful in teaching him to at least think about where he spends money, and who it supports. It took some time sure.
Fair. What I mean is that there’s surely got to be some sort of compromise. For example, if other members of his family are also Prime-subscribing, could they join to be an actual Prime family entity, and thereby share the cost and reduce the total amount of $ being sent to the giant?
Yes, wtf man?
Imho there are different aspects to this: are they binge buying useless stuff on Amazon constantly, feeding into mindless consumerism? are there more ethical alternatives available?
If someone uses Amazon for something they can’t find anywhere else, or that the alternative costs so much more they can’t afford it, then I understand. If they are just a mindless consumer and they do nothing to change that, they lose my respect.
At the same time, if that is a reason you are considering to break up with someone, imo it tells your relationship is not very solid to start with.
