The World of Gags

They once forgot to pay me for 8 extra hours that they needed me to work on Thanksgiving weekend. They simply needed me to be present for 8 hours in order to quickly fix any problems that happened during their busiest weekend, and no such problems ended up happening.

When they saw the mistake and paid me for it, the gross pay for that day was $420 (base of $35 x 8 hours x 1.5 for overtime).

The first thing I noticed was how that compared to what I got paid at my warehouse job before I became a programmer. When I started the job at the warehouse, I got paid $10 an hour. For a full time week, I got paid $400.

I got paid more for that one day of doing practically nothing as a programmer than I did busting my ass at the warehouse for a whole week.

and its water use is a much bigger deal than people realize within the broader context of climate change and how its expected that glaciers (one of the main sources of freshwater on the planet) will be basically gone by 2100 which will cause insane damage to ecosystems, agriculture, economies, and drinking water across entire continents. (and this wasted water use doesn't just apply to data centres necessarily either. the industrial use of freshwater is something that needs to be seriously considered and heavily regulated.)

we're being incredibly stupid. and while it would be bad no matter what, we could at least have an excuse if we were using this energy and water for something actually useful or helpful but this generative ai shit is no different than lighting vital resources on fire just to watch them burn. its short-sighted and suicidal.

Building new data centres is generally bad for the local environment, regardless of their operation. The construction industry is very carbon-intensive, concrete hardening gives off CO2, all the machines and vehicles used are still diesel powered.

Sealing up arable land that is also part of the local water cycle for a huge factory that produces nothing of value is the dumbest use of that land I can concieve of, short of a parking lot (and data centres need those, too!)

We can't use data centres for anything else after the inevitable AI bubble crash. It's going to be vast, windowless, concrete bunkers that would have to be retrofitted massively to even be used as future data centres. Plus, the minute those spaces aren't air conditioned and climate controlled and particle filtered, mold. Mold everywhere. It's like someone was trying to build Fallout ruins/dungeons 20 years in advance.

The more chips we produce, the more POPs (persistent organic pollutants) we dump into the ecosystems where they are produced. Semiconductor lithography is very intensive on forever chemicals. And the downstream/upstream pollution is also very intensive. SimCity lied to us, high tech industry isn't clean at all (tragic, I know).

Data centers add a paltry amount of jobs for the footprint they require. A few people to maintain it and a few people to secure it is all it provides. It provides no service or value to the community, and circulates no money in the local economy.