Elon Musk’s xAI to pull about half of its smog-belching turbines powering Colossus Elon Musk's xAI is removing about half of the temporary gas-turbine generators powering its Colossus AI datacenter over the next two months, according to the Memphis Chamber of Commerce, not due to environmental concerns, but because a new nearby substation now supplies the needed power. Reportedly built in Tennessee in just …
See kiddies, this is why you dont want big companies moving into your area. They dont care about you, your town or it's people. They'll happily lie to you, and pass on all the negative costs to you, whilst using every Tax dodge in the book, to minimise the money they give back.
The $160 million figure that the COBRA tool calculates for the health impact, that will come from the local and state health budgets. The company causing the damage isnt going to help out there, since no doubt they will be paying their taxes in a state with lower corporation taxes, and using tax dodges to minimise their bill in your state and local area. And a datacenter will only have a few dozen workers at most (most of them low paid security or cleaners), so dont think you're going to claw back the money there. That's also on top of the nice little hand out you gave them to encourage them to move to the area.
So well done, you've just given them a handful of cash, and you wont be seeing the benefits anytime soon.
The sooner towns and cities realise that big businesses are not your friend, encouraging them to move to your town is not going to bring you the benefits you think it will, and your better off focusing on the small/medium enterprises that will actually contribute to your local economy (whilst employing significantly more people overall), the better...
But then again, small firms are not as good at greasing the palms of the wannabe politicians that you find on town councils, so of course, small towns will continue to bend over backwards for these corporations that then take them for a ride...
[the Memphis Chamber of Commerce says† the generators] are now being demobilized and will be removed from the site
I would imagine if generators each weighing many tonnes were to be removed they would actually require mobilization. I might have gone for decommissioned or removed from service before relocation.
Wonder where these NOx producing nuisances will turn up next?
† presumably a spokesperson for that august body rather than some computer generated response but nowadays who knows?
So your complaint is grammatical. Imagining that AI is worse at grammar than ordinary writers? If you see errors, it is a telltale sign that it is human authored. If there is no error, it could be either. However, there is no error. To mobilize something is to deploy it. Demobilize is to take it away...often back where it came from. Your beef is with English. There are a hundred other words that sound like they have opposing meanings to how they are used. Though, "Demobilize" would not be my first choice. It is unnecessarily militant.
Agreed. I doubt there is anything mobile about the generators. They will lose their commission for the current purpose and obtain a new commission at the same locale, resetting their temporary status and restarting the twelve-month clock wherein they can be termed temporary and not require NOx emission scrubbers.
From 2022:
In the text exchange, which couldn’t be independently verified by CNBC, Musk asked Gates: “Do you still have a half billion dollar short position against Tesla?”To which Gates replied: “Sorry to say I haven’t closed it out. I would like to discuss philanthropy possibilities.”
Musk shot back: “Sorry, I cannot take your philanthropy on climate change seriously when you have a massive short position against Tesla, the company doing the most to solve climate change.”1
I guess all that climate change stuff was before Elon was vaccinated for the "Woke mind virus." Or maybe he just downed a couple of hydroxychloroquine cocktails with RFK Jr and Steven Hatfill3.
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1 Elon Musk says he confronted Bill Gates about shorting Tesla
2 Did Elon Musk Warn that 'Woke Mind Virus' Is Destroying Civilization?
Musk used to believe and do a LOT of things, like voting D-Rat [but no longer does].
It takes time to truly change your mind, even longer as you get older. You sometimes have to hit the wall of REALITY [such as CO2 being impossible to cause 'climate change' - its effect is SATURATED at levels above ~100ppm] before this becomes OBVIOUS. *THAT* and the proposed "solution" has ALWAYS been more oppression, pain, loss of freedom, and increasing power/control by elites+gummint (aka "more communism") for those who are NOT "more equal than others".
So now Musk knows electric cars aren't fixing the climate, but they ARE "kinda cool" when they drive themselves and accelerate like dragsters and/or look like "urban assault vehicles"... so he keeps making them, at prices above MY pay grade, but the company does well so there ya go.
They are natural gas turbines. That is very clean. And they are likely extra clean because they are new. And they are pulling the plug on them. What is wrong with you people? Hate Musk? Okay, whatever. Hate AI? I don't follow that one. Did it cost you your job? I doubt it. Did it take over the World when I was sleeping last night? I doubt it. If your worldview is strongly informed by science fiction dystopias, I think you should rethink that.
> If your worldview is strongly informed by science fiction dystopias, I think you should rethink that.
Funny you should mention science fiction, since Elon's own worldview would appear to be molded by the genre, especially from the 1940s and 1950s, at least if academic Jill Lepore's BBC podcast series X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story1 is to be believed.
While Musk has accomplished a lot (or, let's be serious, hired people who have accomplished a lot), much of what he seems to believe is still more fiction than science.
As documentarian Dan Olson points out in a slightly different but related context2, things in a story don't necessarily have to work, they just need to be plausible within the milieu of the story.
Asimov's Foundation trilogy, a reputed Musk influence, is a wonderful (if somewhat longwinded) story, but it's just that, a story. The dreams of galactic empire are, again, just that, dreams, barring some major revision in the laws of physics.
Even colonization of Mars is pretty far fetched, given that the planet is adverse, if not downright hostile, to life, as our landers and automated rovers have shown. Even the soil itself is toxc3.
Even his reputed love for the Douglas Adams series The HitchhIker's Guide to the Galaxy would seem to be based upon a fundamental misunderstanding. The Guide is not a blueprint, it's a cautionary tale.
I shall leave the ramificaitons of Batman and Iron Man fantasies as an exercise for the reader.
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1 X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story
2 The Future is a Dead Mall - Decentraland and the Metaverse
3 Toxic Mars: Astronauts Must Deal with Perchlorate on the Red Planet
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"I agree he's an unlikeable autocrat at this point, but.."
I also agree. I signed up for Twitter/X for the first time just recently (last year) and quickly had to mute his constantly promoted stream of excrement. I wonder if there is something like Roman lead lined drinking water pipes (pb for plumbum) that drives all fantastically rich people completely insane. Maybe it's a 2 part poison, like maybe ozempic plus viagra, more likely something much more obscure, but something is making obscenely wealthy people lose their god damned minds.
But. So many buts. I love everything he has done. But I hate everything he says. Like Twitter banned him, so he bought the whole thing and fired all those fools. Isn't that everybody's fantasy? He's setting the pace for launching rockets into space. He's developing neural interfaces. He watched "who killed the electric car" and he commoditized luxury electric cars built in totally automated gigafactories in response. He's building androids. You must be able to hear my raging childhood boner for all of that from all over the planet. BUT HE'S SUCH A PALEOCONSERVATIVE RIGHT WINGNUT DOUCHECANOE. It's cognitive dissonance.
"Jeff Bezos..." is the prototypical villain, Amazon is The Borg. "Bill Gates..." is a bumbling nerd who happened into millions and hired the most ruthless mercenaries to turn it into billions and is now focused on giving it all away, almost neutralizing all of his crimes against humanity. "Steve Jobs..." was just a celebrity, it was Wozniak and all the victims who came after him who made the name Jobs at all memorable. Evil, Neutral, and Chaotic. Elon seemed like he could have been Good.
He must be putting everything he has into supporting Trump and Trump like people all around the world because he can see something I'm not smart enough to see, right? Right? RIGHT?? Deep breath.
"If it's as easy as just "hiring" someone else to do the work..." - he did do that, simply hire the people to do the work. But it really seemed like he was easily capable of doing any of the work.
"Nikola Telsa had a plan..." an apt comparison. Elon has already gone much further than Nikola ever did. Debatable which one was the more impressive mind, I would lean heavily towards Nikola, but Elon has been quite impressive. But in the end, they will both have died utterly alone with people pontificating after the fact about what might have been if either of them had just been a little bit more comfortable in the world.
Hand me trillions of dollars and watch my bright light put them all in the shade ;)
Uh, what? Musk never invented an electric car, nor a rocket, nor a tunnel. Not even a PayPal. Oh, you must have believed him when he called himself an engineer. Yeah, to confirm: Musk is no engineer.
Perhaps he’s a good whip-cracker, but that’s all.
You maybe don’t realize who you’re talking about. This is a guy who exercised hostile takeover of Tesla, claimed all the credit, and when it looked like the true inventor of the technology might win in court, Musk took Tesla Roadster #1 and launched it into space. So that the rightful owner would never get his paws on his own property again.
Oh I get it, you never realized Musk is nothing but a miserable vindictive prick.
To quote your hero, “G.F.Y. Is that clear? I really hope so!”
> Like creating the true first Brain-computer-interface and having a real patient 0
The first BCI? Really? You might want to read about BrainGate and Matt Nagle (2005). I'm not sure Nagle was even patient 0. Neuralink is not by any means "revolutionary" - if anything, it's evolutionary, building on decades of actual hard work by others. I have no issue with Musk financing the technology, but no thanks to the self-aggrandising bullshit.
Which you appear to have swallowed without blinking. Which makes it hard to take anything else you said seriously.
"That is very clean."
No, you left of the '-er' on the end and the comparison to old coal plants. Burning anything is not "clean". Temporary power generators are also allowed more emissions than permanent. If Elon had permits for 15 and was running or even just had 35 on-site and set up, that's a violation of the permit. He gets a pass on this sort of thing so often that he hardly bothers to go through any formal processes that you and I would have to or be swatted for our insolence.
Temporary use generators do not run clean even if they're running from a relatively soot-free fuel. There's also no smokestack visible in photos. Scale this up large enough to run an AI datacenter and I'm surprised there hasn't been a still air day where everyone suddenly dies from CO2 poisoning, CO poisoning, and/or NOx asthma.
The word you are looking for is Hysteria. This is a problematic word. Its origin in the Greek word for womb, is perhaps one of the most offensive synonyms for irrationality in the English language. The rank misogyny of the term, best exemplified in Freud's musings, is so unadulterated, that it really should be excised from our contemporary lexicon. No. This is not hysteria. At all. Full stop.
No method of generating power is without some form of "pollution". The goal is to minimize it. [life itself creates pollution - i.e. excretion]
Gas turbines likely create hydrocarbon and nitrogen oxide pollution, particular portable ones. You can smell jet exhaust near airport runways, same idea. LARGE integrated generator plants would probably have scrubbers on the stack, NOT expensive unless you have to make 25 of them. "One big one" would be more cost-effective.
[on a related note, wind turbine blades cannot be recycled, need replacement every few years, and POLLUTE by filling up garbage dumps and landfills - not to mention that wind turbines kill birds and [probably] whales].
I didn't see in the comments that the battery was removed, but the car appeared to be sitting rather high. I'm surprised that the suspension wasn't squished flat given how often it breaks on Tesla cars.
There should have been another pass 90deg to the first one and then a chain attached for a bit of a 'drag' race behind the tank.
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