Step 1: steal all of the worlds IP and make a judge rule it is fair use

Step 2: declare end of the Anthropocene (defined by man made influence on earth), while simultaneously accelerating mass extinction

Step 3: ???

Step 4: Profit?

Do not forget loans with APR starting at 24%. Recourse of course. With the collateral taken back if payments fail.

Hoggish Greedly if memory serves. Regardless of one's politics Captain Planet is so campy it's fun to watch MST3K-style. Remember Linka from the Soviet Union? "Imperialist pigs!"

Both of whom could happily sit together on a corporate board. It's just capitalism!

These aren’t “technicalities.” What types of activities the laws apply to is a central aspect of every regulatory regime.

It should be mind numbingly trivial to stand up a solar farm and ram through some transmission lines in the desert, and mind numbingly hard to set up a temporary gas generator. We needed regulatory exemptions yesterday for clean energy, public transit, and EV charging.

All of them are good except for democratic oversight. Those other things are beneficial and cheap and easy to comply with. It's the democratic oversight of what gets built and where that is nothing more than a giveaway to worthless bureaucrats, lawyers, activists, and NIMBYs.

You're not thinking like a techbro. My startup shouldn't have to adhere to those regulations, but everyone else should. In fact, once my startup gets established we should make even more regulations

Who is causing what here? If there is no demand for those services then the data center will sit there idle and cause no pollution. You can't consume services that cause pollution without accepting your share of the responsibility.

>Big picture

Well, if you juuust let the rich get richer, something (intentionally left unspecified) will trickle down on you.

Isn't the US in a perpetual state of emergency?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_i...

Yep. The loophole is not hard to close, they could restrict the exemption to standby generators which only operate (1) in the event of a grid outage, and (2) for testing purposes.

For a genuine off-grid use case (eg: very rural locations), they could add a new exemption which allows installations up to X kW capacity per site where local grid connections do not exist. Set X large enough that it won't negatively impact applications like cabins or nature retreats, but small enough that it's not useful to a large operator like a datacentre.

Of course, this all requires a functional Congress... so good luck.

Some of the most effective emissions control equipment scales down very poorly. The bigger you can make the plant, the more viable these technologies become.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_scrubber

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_catalytic_reduction

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_emissions_monitorin...

(et. al.)

You’re just not trying.

There’s no reason at all that “generator” can’t be batteries rated for x hours, or a small generator that IS emissions certified.

I.e. https://www.reddit.com/r/Generator/comments/1hydy6j/recommen...

AI training, not inference, seems like it would actually be a good application for a solar powered DC because you could just checkpoint and pause when it gets cloudy. It might end up worth it for the free electricity.

If we didn’t have stupid regulatory bullshit and protectionism, it would be cheaper to run a data center on solar and batteries in bumfuck Nevada

Imposing rules like that is what we are supposed to use religion for.

Are you looking at a textbook from the 1990s or something? I'm sure that was true at some point, but it hasn't been true for a long time.

No this was a plastic molding company ~10yr ago.

Edit:

They had a facility with a rail siding. Cheaper to relocate to a new site with expansion potential in another state than pay the state a million bucks an acre to let them fill in wetland (a ~100yo mill pond). The city did what they could to facilitate things but it basically just came down to the discretion of the state officials who live a few hundred miles away amongst all sort of moneyed tech and medical and finance industry and don't really see any upside to economic development in the poor end of the state, especially manufacturing. We're just a line item on the welfare bill as far are they care.

The real cherry on top is that the wetland went away "naturally" as the result of a low head dam removal a few years ago, at the behest of the same agency that said you can't fill in any of the mill pond.

The site is still vacant. It got sold to a REIT that's headquartered a couple blocks from the statehouse and environmental agency. Supposedly Waste Management or Republic Services wants to buy the old site now for it's rail siding and development potential.

>Did that happen?

I chose 7-mile for my hypothetical example because the road is an absolute goldmine for "you can't do that these days it's too dense" site plans and there's at least one liquor store with a dirt lot on it but I don't recall where. The "we want to make it nicer but it's not worth the stormwater treatment cost" example is from a business down the street from me. These things get stopped at the engineer/lawyer phase when the true costs become known to the owner.

Basically all the stormwater rules BS come at the expense of incentivizing sprawl. Doesn't really matter if you're walking past 1000ft of strip mall or 500ft of fancy multi level retail with a parking garage in back with 250ft of empty grass on either side, you're still 1000ft from the bus stop.

These same types of evil people exist in droves on the right too. They just circle jerk about different topics and peddle different forms of progressivism (lowercase P!!). Right now the establishment is somewhat catering to them, much to the chagrin of the useful idiots who are all in on the other team. They were the ones screeching all throughout the last administration.

At the end of the day has very little to do with MAGA(TM) or Liberals(TM). They're just the current characters in a script that's been played a bunch of times. Kinda like how you can set the basic plot of Romeo and Juliet in any century. From the Tea Party to the Ron Paul thing to the Bernie bros to MAGA the populist movements will keep arising so long as the "we know what's best we're so smart" crowd continues to do things at the expense of the average person. Whether that's back handed environmentalism or facilitating monopolistic big business (or both, for these two examples often go hand in hand) doesn't really matter. The average person doesn't like it even if they can't quite articulate why. And so the populists will keep coming, until one day one shows up that the system can't de-fang. Who knows what'll happen then but I'd bet a lot of money we won't get a stronger EPA or a more favorable environment for big business out of it.

The entire argument rests on a 36-year-old survey form: "DOE Form 860 (1990) defines electric utility to mean 'a corporation, person, agency, authority, or other legal entity or instrumentality that owns and/or operates facilities within the United States for the generation, transmission, distribution, or sale of electric energy primarily for use by the public.'"

So the leap is: an old survey form says "sale of electric energy primarily for use by the public," therefore anything not grid-connected isn't a sale to the public.

No assessment of prior practice, history, the plain meaning of the statute, or other statutory exemptions. And there are grid-connected plants serving a single customer so why the distinction?

Why the 1990 form? Congress froze it into the statute so a survey agency couldn't rewrite Clean Air Act coverage by editing a questionnaire. EPA is now exploiting that freeze by treating the form's obsolete boilerplate as substantive law; a taxonomy EIA itself abandoned, since modern EIA-860 covers essentially all generators above 1 MW, grid or not.

It's as if Congress defined citizenship by reference to a 1990 Census form, and the agency decided who's a citizen by parsing the instruction booklet.

100% complete BS. The silver lining is that without Chevron deference, this "interpretation" won't survive litigation, though the memo's "not final agency action" disclaimer means challengers may have to wait for an actual permitting decision to sue.

For sure, an argument can be made that the text of the law could be tightened up. In my opinion, there's nothing in that text that would exclude these generators. In addition the rationale provide for excluding these generators seems... disingenuous at best.

No it isn't. Otherwise the entire concept of Original Intent would be dead in the water rather than a cornerstone of how multiple federal judges all the way to the Supreme court rule on cases.

apparently you're very excited about this partisan victory. at some point we do need to actually think about how to effectively manage the country. there should be a back and forth about the appropriate degree of environmental regulation since it is a tradeoff between economic constraint and qualify of life.

I grew up in the 70s, and my father was a Nixon supporting environmental engineer. At the time the amount of nitrogen and sulfur being emitted into the air in the northeast was turning surface water into acid. a ph of 6 was getting quite common, 4 wasn't unusual, and if you were in a bad spot it was approaching 1. Not only would that water not support life, or be unsafe to drink, but it was actually unsafe to touch.

So if we were reasonable people we would look at the economic activity and the upside of burning these gasses, and add up the numbers and based on past experience make a very reasonable estimate of the impact, and make a decision.

but we fired all those people, and we're very much not interested in having this discussion. I fail to see how that's a win for anyone except the polluter.

just type 'single cycle gas plant efficiency and emissions vs combined cycle' into google

Whataboutism works a lot better if you don't literally start sentences with "what about..."

> Do the octogenarians in power not remember when they couldn’t breathe because of the lead in the gas in the 60s and the lack of emissions controls on everything

No because they were extremely rich and lived in massive houses set far back from the city streets filled with polluting cars and well away from factories spewing poison into the air. They've lived perfectly comfortable lives in climate controlled and filtered spaces and traveled around to beautiful remote areas where poor people can never go and the pollution had barely touched. They know that they and their families can buy a comfortable and safe life no matter how miserable and sick they make the rest of us. They will always have healthy food and clean water no matter how many of us don't.

Our government works best when it's "of the people" but instead the octogenarians in power have almost nothing in common with us (even most of us here, in a forum filled with very wealthy people) and so their interests are not our interests and our concerns are not shared by them.

> Do the octogenarians in power not remember when they couldn’t breathe because of the lead in the gas

Lead causes brain damage and memory impairment...

They’ll be dead by the time it gets worse again

Most of those octogenarians weren't responsible for any of that. Their parents did it for them. If you're 80 you came of age in the 60's, and you wouldn't have been eligible for the Senate or the Presidency until 1970 or 1975. The decline of the US started pretty much when the baby boomers came to power and the people who fought WWII were all retiring.

> Do the octogenarians in power not remember when they couldn’t breathe because of the lead in the gas in the 60s

No, lead poisoning makes you a brain damaged retard. They can probably hardly remember shit.

Just wait for the new generation of grifters to get their chance to be at the wheel. Current timid bullshit will be billed under nostalgia then.

no, they don't

You are not radicalized enough.

The law was specifically written to exclude things like independent power sources and backup generators etc...

From 42 U.S.C. § 7651a(17)(A) [1] which defines the power generation units that are covered by the law:

"(17) (A)The term “utility unit” means— (i)a unit that serves a generator in any State that produces electricity for sale, or (ii)a unit that, during 1985, served a generator in any State that produced electricity for sale."

The key phrasing there is "for sale". The clarification from the EPA simply restated that these units don't fall under the regulatory authority because under a plain reading of the law, they are not generating power for sale. [2]

The EPA certainly cites Trump's power agenda several times, but that doesn't make the plain text interpretation of the law wrong.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/7411

[2] https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-issues-permitting-guida...

> How many Democrats stayed home in red states because they knew their vote wouldn't matter? And how many Republicans stayed home in blue states for the same reason? It's unknowable.

Just to add on, not voting in decided states is appealing for the winning party as well as the losing party.

Personally, I think a nationwide popular vote would be a logistical disaster, especially in the modern era of alternative facts.

> The majority of voters who voted for president got the president they wanted.

Again, no. 49.8% is not a majority. It is a plurality.

In theory the US has checks and balances. Ask 10 years ago if you could have a president selling national secrets via an api and you'd be laughed out of the room.

Carter had to sell his peanut farm. Trump makes billions each year.

Only half? So you're saying half the country's idiots voted the other way?

That suggests more non-idiots voted Trump than Harris.

Sure, they'll be unemployed until they chose to do something else that people will pay for. Like I was reading some guy is making downloads for Minecraft and making great living in it (science fiction a few decades ago). Worse case scenerio, move to the country side, and homestead. Thats how people survived wars and famines. Surely they can survive a tech transition.