subject to change without notice

thank you for putting in words what i have been unable to articulate for the last years haha

Good news, everyone!

Like, seriously, women should be educated about their own bodies.

So if you're on the other side of 45 and suddenly everything is twice as difficult, you get more migraines, your blood pressure goes funny, you can't sleep and you feel like your entire psyche is unstable, you might be experiencing perimenopause. My gyn was like,oh, like think of it like reverse puberty, your entire body rearranges itself. I was like, Great, nobody ever told me it can be this bad. My GP didn't even ask me about my period or hormone levels or anything. He just told me I was probably depressed and sent me to a psychiatrist, who also didn't ask about my period or my hormones. If I hadn't experienced something akin to postpartum depression and therefore know what my body does when its hormones are out of whack, I would have had no idea.

Seriously, nobody tells you how much hormones fuck you up as a woman. Nobody prepares you for this.

I've been trying to talk openly about what's fucking me up right now, and I've discovered that it's a lot more common than I thought it was. I feel like every phase of life finds another way to fuck women over. Puberty: have fun with your period as it adjusts itself. Childbirth: prepare for a hormonal rollercoaster. PMS: oh, it can get BAD. Like, BAD. After birth: hormones out of whack for months, maybe longer. Perimenopause: can fuck up everything. Like literally everything. Osteoporosis is also hormonal. Post menopause: supposedly things get better, but they don't have to.

And I feel like we're left pretty alone dealing with all of it. And we know so little about it that we're left wondering why suddenly nothing works anymore. So we flail about and feel terrible about our sudden inability to cope with life, when it's in fact our bodies screwing with us. Again.

humans are the moms

compared to other species on earth, humans have a really outsized "protect baby" instinct. you give a human a thing and tell them it's actually a baby thing and many humans will suddenly develop a complete and total aversion to harming it, even if it's like, a writhing mass of slimy tentacles in no way reminiscent of human infants

cats domesticated us by figuring out that they could leave their kittens with us when they went out hunting and come back and probably still have the same number as before they left. there is a decent chance that wolves did the same thing

word gets around the less parenting-inclined species and they're just like, are you doing a long haul space voyage? going to have to lay some eggs in the course of the trip? take a few humans with you. yeah they'll just start training the young and keeping from them climbing into the machinery themselves you don't even have to find specialists. I know a guy who budded unexpectedly on a freight hauler halfway through a four year trip, and not only did the humans not eat his spawn, they set up this thing called "babysitting" where they'd take turns monitoring its survival and helping to teach it basic skills

"Easy. You know how most civilized species lay eggs, and even the ones that don't will have young ones able to move around and fend for themselves within the day?"

"Yeah, obviously."

"Human newborns can't even lift their own heads. They require the full-time attention of as many adults as possible to make sure they survive to a self-sufficient age, much less adulthood."

"Whaaaaat. How long does that take?"

"Many years. And their planet has long years."

"What!"

"Yes. So their parenting instincts are overclocked for a reason. And sometimes that spills over onto other species. ...And by 'sometimes,' I mean all the dang time."

"Uh huh."

"So keep them away from the dangerous fauna, especially the little ones, and be prepared for them to get emotionally attached to the occasional inanimate object. Oh! And if you need to get their attention in a loud room, play a recording of one of their young making a distress sound. They hate that, and will want it to stop immediately."

I don't have any experience with the weirder corners of university campuses – my work in that particular job just never happened to take me there. I did, however, once have to do a cable trace in the basement of a former Christian elementary school. It had haphazardly been subdivided into numerous tiny rooms, some as little as ten feet across, with no central hallways or apparent floor plan. Every single room was, for reasons that were and remain unclear to me, full of broken kitchen appliances. One room in particular contained an enormous industrial freezer unit that was larger in its smallest dimension than any of the doors leading to it. Was it delivered in pieces and assembled on site? Did they build the room around it? That one still bothers me a little bit.

Because, from what I know this mass rollout has been in fact an ecohazard, but I'm unsure of how much of the factors that make it so were a problem we're only hearing about now; IE the need for consistent power leading to dirtier poison-the-community fuels, the use of drier climates for the lack of humidity meaning the coolant water, ect, were already normalized or if it's new with this wave thanks to the a-holes doing it (Because from what I know it's very specific companies doing this shit)

I did see leftists bring up the physical infrastructure of computing before this as an ecohazard, but a lot of it was in fact bad-faith "This is why mass computing will have to go away in a sustainable future" rhetoric.

Albeit, one I've always been neurotic about (Along with the issue of minerals in production) because I was never sure how correct they were about its total unsustainability (Because a lot of shit is in fact unsustainable and bad, the question is whether all of mass personal computing/the net is) and how much they were going off Vibes and dubious data but still.

I'm not aware of any large scale ecological malfeasance associated with data centers. i won't say "it hasn't happened" but i haven't heard of it.

large cloud providers (such as google/microsoft/etc) are actually significantly more energy efficient than traditional data centers. this is from a paper about water use (where it's an indirect measure) but as a direct measure of energy efficiency, you can see how much power is going to providing compute vs being wasted as heat

aside from some modest efficiency gains, among those "hyperscalers", power requirements per "unit of compute" and hardware across the industry are not substantially different than they were five years ago. the same major players in the industry are building and operating them. it feels different because these things are in the news and the popular discourse, but the industry was always going to grow*-- the world uses a huge amount of data.

the ecological costs of data centers have been wildly overblown. they are significantly less polluting than any heavy industry-- they're not using vast amounts of chemicals or doing intense manufacturing.

if you want to talk about water usage specifically, because this is the thing that people have latched onto, you need to look at the numbers in context. here are three numbers in context

[source: Mitton 2021, published in Nature] as reported in 2021, it was estimated that data centers were using 1.7 billion liters (449,092,489 gallons, four hundred forty nine million gallons) of water every day.

[source: USGS, 2015, estimated use of water in the united states] in 2015, the livestock industry (primarily beef) withdrew 2,000,000,000 gallons (two billion gallons) of water per day

[source: USGS, 2015, estimated use of water in the united states] in 2015, total united states freshwater water consumption was 281,000,000,000 gallons/day (two hundred eighty one billion gallons)

i wrote those numbers out in text not to be condescending but genuinely, staring at a number like that, it's hard to grasp the scale of what is going on. five hundred million gallons, approximately what data centers were using every day, is a quarter of what the livestock industry (2 billion gallons) is using every day, and both of those are less than half of 1 percent of domestic freshwater usage 280 billion gallons). even if the number of data centers has doubled since 2021 (it hasn't), it would not equal the livestock industry, and would come nowhere near irrigation, which accounts for 37% of US water use

tbh this is a subject i don't really know what to say about, aside from trying my best to point people at the numbers and compare them to other industries and hope that communicates a sense of scale. the opposition to data centers is not based in a good understanding of the scale of water and power usage across the board, and is just people venting their frustrations about technology they don't like. which is fine, be frustrated, but please, let's get real! the ecological impacts of this are less than so many other industries it never even crosses people's minds to think about