US Tech Firms Pledge At White House To Bear Costs of Energy For Datacenters (theguardian.com) 62
Major tech companies including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta pledged at the White House to pay for new power generation and grid upgrades needed to support their rapidly expanding datacenters. The Guardian reports: The agreement is meant to help mitigate concerns that big tech's datacenters are driving up US electricity costs for homes and small businesses at a time the administration of Donald Trump is seeking to curb inflation. "This means that the tech companies and the datacenters will be able to get the electricity they need, all without driving up electricity costs for consumers," the president said at the pledge signing event. "This is a historic win for countless American families and we'll also make our electricity grid stronger and more resilient than ever before."
The so-called "Ratepayer Protection Pledge" was first announced by Trump in his State of the Union address, and comes as communities and state legislators increase scrutiny of rapidly proliferating datacenters. Datacenters consume vast amounts of electricity to run server racks and cooling systems for the development of technologies such as artificial intelligence. "Some datacenters were rejected by communities for that, and now I think it's going to be just the opposite," Trump said, referencing cancelled or postponed projects in recent months across several states after local opposition.
The pledge includes a commitment by technology companies to bring or buy electricity supplies for their datacenters, either from new power plants or existing plants with expanded output capacity. It also includes commitments from big tech to pay for upgrades to power delivery systems and to enter special electricity rate agreements with utilities. The effort is aimed at drawing support from towns and cities that otherwise oppose the projects, said the Trump official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The so-called "Ratepayer Protection Pledge" was first announced by Trump in his State of the Union address, and comes as communities and state legislators increase scrutiny of rapidly proliferating datacenters. Datacenters consume vast amounts of electricity to run server racks and cooling systems for the development of technologies such as artificial intelligence. "Some datacenters were rejected by communities for that, and now I think it's going to be just the opposite," Trump said, referencing cancelled or postponed projects in recent months across several states after local opposition.
The pledge includes a commitment by technology companies to bring or buy electricity supplies for their datacenters, either from new power plants or existing plants with expanded output capacity. It also includes commitments from big tech to pay for upgrades to power delivery systems and to enter special electricity rate agreements with utilities. The effort is aimed at drawing support from towns and cities that otherwise oppose the projects, said the Trump official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The only question that matters (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: The only question that matters (Score:3)
NPR said it's not at all binding on my way to work.
Re: The only question that matters (Score:5, Funny)
I created an applicable meme. https://imgflip.com/i/aluaht [imgflip.com]
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Oh, I'm sure that they'll pay "market" prices for their electricity... minus their bulk discount, of course.
We'll just ignore the fact that they're doubling the demand for electricity in the area and causing the market prices to adjust accordingly. And if anyone complains about the price increases, we'll just blame it on electric vehicles. Boomers already hate those for some reason.
Re: The only question that matters (Score:4, Interesting)
I wish I was joking, but Mike Johnson legitimately said this... Or rather, he threw out a bunch of numbers during his press conference:
1500 Terrorists on the watchlist
2.2 Million people "released", whatever that means.
1500 Iranian Nationals "crossed our open borders"
"the actual number is much higher, we don't actually know. Keep your head on a swivel."
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Since we had such a porous border, who knows WHO came across that thing during Biden's presidency. That's the whole point of a secure border, to know who's coming and going across it.
I'm wasting my time talking to Democrats about borders though. Half ya'll seem to think everyone is an American with unfinished paperwork. /eyeroll
Re: The only question that matters (Score:2)
Aside from that, however, the point you made about them being â€oeAmericans without paperworkâ€; has extreme originality in the United States that dates back to before its founding.
And if the Supreme Court is allowed to use historical, pre-American doctrine for its reasoningâ€"we can ABSOLUTELY use post-American,
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Biden may have let them in, but Trump's gutting of the FBI (particularly the counterterrorism units) is making sure they can do whatever they want now that they're in. Not to mention regular criminals, which are way more numerous here than the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
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That's counterterrorism (they go after the neighbor who's building bombs)... Immigration and Customs Enforcement is the right one to beef up. (they go after the immigrants who shouldn't be here (yes, I know about them sweeping up Citizens... two choices: sweep up an area and get a few citizens in there OR spend four hours interviewing one person while all the ones you should have swept up find places to hide). Not to mention the possibility of the Citizens in the sweep might be guilty of sheltering or hel
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Ignoring the law to enforce the law results in no law. Without rule of law, you have the rule of the jungle. Meaning the government thug who broke into your house does whatever he wants. Raping, stealing. The domestic terror organization ICE is already doing this where they think they can get away with it. (And mostly they are.)
Right now you think it's only a Mexican, someone who looks like a Mexican, or someone who's standing too close to a Mexican who will get their house smashed up. Right now you don't c
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That, genius, was an example. You can replace the 'Mexican' in my post with any nationality you want to pick. I should know, I;'ve seen it happen first-hand, same with having "advocates" fill out their paperwork (doing it just right so they get the maximum amount of all help the system will give them (SNAP benefits for eight children, even though the kids are actually kids from their neighbors, they all share the same birthday).
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Who says he's done?
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Half ya'll seem to think everyone is an American with unfinished paperwork. /eyeroll
I didn't live long enough in the US to fully understand this: why do some people like to affect a kind of cutesy southern vibe only when saying something aggressively stupid?
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I noticed this line.
"and to enter special electricity rate agreements with utilities"
so when am I allowed to enter special rate agreements, that I am willing to bet a lot, that they will be lower than consumer rates.
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And of course, there are a number of ways the administration could make things hard for companies violating the pledge.
Re:The only question that matters (Score:5, Insightful)
As legally binding as "Don't be evil", the former motto of a large Trumpistani advertiser.
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Funny how liberal Google is some how a Trumpian advisor. That would actually be a GOOD thing if Trump had surrounded himself with advisors from all different perspectives, but then we haven't had a government like that in decades, maybe longer.
Google isn't really liberal though. No corporation is liberal. They are corporations. They will say anything if it gets workers to work and consumers to spend. If you really think all these tech companies really give two hoots about progressive policies, boy do I got
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How legally binding is this pledge?
There's more than one question. Here's just one, the first that comes to mind:
Does this pledge also come with a guarantee that cities/states won't just hand taxpayer money over to the datacenter owners to cover the expense of electricity that the pledge states they must cover?
Most of these giant projects come in with promises of job creation, which gets the local area governments to hand massive piles of cash to them. When the jobs disappear once the datacenters are up in running in this case, it's not like
Re: The only question that matters (Score:2)
We promise guys, trust us.
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You don't have to eat meat, you can easily switch to salmon or something.
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"You don't eat meat? I'll make lamb."
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Yeah, or the classic - if there's no bread, just have some brioche.
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Caviar is almost as nutritious as beef.
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A tad oily for me, but in moderation - absolutely. A great substitute.
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Are eggs still at COVID prices?
Are other groceries still at COVID prices?
Talk is cheap. (Score:5, Insightful)
They also made a bunch of climate change related "pledges" and the second they became to inconvenient, they silently removed those pledges from their websites. If you think they will abide these pledges then you are as dumb as they think you are.
All for show. (Score:4, Insightful)
Like nearly everything with this administration everything is a cheap gilded facade.
In this particular case all Trump wants is to be able to proclaim a massive "win" with no follow up. The tech companies know this so they will make extravagant empty claims of fantastic investments. They all have a public meeting, smiles all around, thumbs up, and everyone goes back to what they were doing before lying, stealing and cheating the government.
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"... doing before: Lying, stealing and cheating the government."
Yep.
This administration has an extra step: Trump threatens to punish the corporations for conducting "business as usual". After bribes ^H^H^H fines are paid, the threats are replaced by an Executive Order excusing corporate bad behaviour.
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If only they were just "cheating the government". They are, in conjunction with the government, cheating regular people.
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What would your buddy Harris do different? Put in an express lane for immigration, force the data center owners to go the proper route (all while stumbling over the cue cards and teleprompter)?
Missing text (Score:5, Informative)
The summary copied the text of the article, but left out the second half of the article [theguardian.com], which is the important part:
You can't build new power plants immediately. Companies saying they'll "pay for new power generation and grid upgrades" (even if they actually do this, instead of completely ignoring this non-binding "pledge") some time in the future won't help the fact that the data centers consume power now/
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Even if they do solar and wind power, the moment the sun goes behind the clouds or nighttime falls or it's a non-windy day, their data center will switch back to the grid immediately (so, a sudden 3GW load just drops onto the grid out of nowhere, and the city browns out for a few hours).
But... gotta have that precious LLM-AI Claude (A.K.A: Clod).
Translation (Score:2)
Big Tech will buy the latest and greatest in power generation / suppliers, and the general population will be left with the legacy power infrastructure that will keep on aging and becoming more and more obsolete, because domestic power isn't where the big money is.
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I pledge to pay for the gas I put in my car (Score:4, Insightful)
The fact this was ever a question is a farce.
We all pay for the gas in our cars to get to work. We pay for the electricity that runs our homes and computers.
Somehow, big tech thinks they can just mooch instead of paying for the batteries for their toys.
Crypto and AI should have launched a great leap forward in clean energy.
All the oligarchs care about is profit, not legacy.
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I genuinely don't understand how this was the root assumption.
Everyone has to pay for their electricity - if I use 12,000 kwH, I pay for 12,000 kwH.
If a data center uses 12,000 mwH, why wouldn't they pay (roughly) 1000x what I pay?
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Because businesses get "deals" because they have so much money. No TOU bullshit for major corporations, I assure you. In fact, they very likely get a cheaper deal because they are consuming so much. Which is bizarre but you have to remember the golden rule of America, he who has the gold makes the rules. Guess who has all the gold? The large corporations and their owners. That's not you!
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Because without building this data center right here, right now, your town will shrivel up and die. And that's just the beginning, eventually civilization itself will collapse. The way out of this fate is by buying a bunch of GPUs. The citizens must fund it, of course - it's for their own good.
At least that's what I've been told.
Look to your states (Score:2)
US energy costs are usually set by a utilities commissions at the state level. They are either appointed or may be elected. There is a legal framework for increasing rates and socializing costs across residential ratepayers. Utility companies spend big money on consultants to sort out how to game these frameworks so they can raise rates. Rest assured - data center operators will not pay a single cent for their energy needs. They will force you to do it, and you will take it like a bitch.
Externalizing costs (Score:2)
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Concerning this story, do your other sources say something different?
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The very existence of that splash page should be sufficient evidence that they are not journalists.
They actually listed some of the most contentious political issues in the world and said, "we aren't going to pretend to consider both sides, we know we are right." (paraphrasing, they
What do you get... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Well, homosexuals do have a larger percentage in tech then the general population. Don't they like big dicks in their mouths? I mean, as a straight guy, I love eating pussy so I would think your typical homosexual guy would love sucking dick. Just speculating of course.
Oh, bullshit (Score:3)
You think they'll take the loss out of the goodness of their hearts? Absolute bullshit; at most they'll shuffle the numbers around so it's hard to trace how it's being passed on to the consumer or local community.
what about.. (Score:5, Insightful)
the water? Where will they get replacements for the millions of gallons of water they waste everyday?
you cant buy that at the big hardware store...
Is anyone else tired of being lied to? (Score:2, Troll)
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Yes I am pretty tired of being lied to by people with like Bernie Sanders and yourself.
IMPORTANT ADVICE:
Never use all your mod points to mod rsilvergun down! The slashdot algorithm then won't give you anymore mod points and might even ignore your mods.
For example, if you get 5 mod points, use at most 2 points to mod him down and using only *1* point out of your 5 points to mod him down is even safer. Use the rest of your points to mod other users up. The algorithm favorize users modding people up, not down and rsilvergun uses it to his advantage to mod himself up with his sock puppet accounts.
In short, it has to be a collective effort. Don't try to do it all by yourself using all your mod points to mod him down.
-Thanks for your attention to this matter.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/art... [yahoo.com] Also, Extreme leftist communists take pride in having as many deficiencies as possible. To them, the more deficient they are the better. Gavin Newsom has just proclaimed he can't read because he is pretending to be dyslexic and that's one more reason to vote for him according to him. He went as far as telling the voter he was talking too that he was "just like him", thus being racist suggesting a black voter obviously can't read.
https://nypost.com/2026/02/24/... [nypost.com] But when a TV reporter asked him if he was diagnosed with dyslexia, he refused to answer the question!
So being broke is desirable to them as much as their deficiencies.
Here on Slashdot, we have rsilvergun bragging about his "various neuro atypical problems". Again here, the more you have the better. This makes all extreme leftist communists feel so special and unique thus better than everybody else. rsilvergun even says he constitutes the blueprint of humans we need to become an advanced civilization!
https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
I'm extremely autistic so I don't think it works on me.
https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
I needed a lot of that treatment myself and never got it because my mother was an absolute lunatic and with the exception of some speech therapy I didn't get any of the other treatments for my various neuro atypical problems... there was always beer in the house though if I wanted to drink it which fortunately I didn't. Like I said lunatic.
The thing with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder is that it often presents as autism spectrum disorder. There is no "extremely autistic", there are only varying levels of how functional they are. FASD patients are differentiated in several ways from high functioning autism, namely things like difficulty with social interaction, where present, tend to be far more pronounced, especially given they're quick to anger and emotional outbursts. Another telltale sign in rsilvergun's case is his speech disorder. High functioning autistic patients only have one kind of speech disorder, namely delayed speech. They will never benefit from speech therapy like rsilvergun said that he needed. Meanwhile, FASD patients run the gamut, everything from mild stuttering to severe limitations in how they can move their mouths. And yeah, they'll need speech therapy to learn to work around this. And then there's also how he mentioned that his mom had severe alcoholism all of her adult life.
The only way to be more certain is to observe facial features. Bradley Manning was diagnosed this way, as was Bernie Sanders https://www.banyantreatmentcen... [banyantrea...center.com] . These never occur with autism.
I reviewed the Slashdot user profile for rsilvergun and some of their comments. Here's an analysis of patterns that might align with common traits found in some autistic individuals again, this is not a diagnosis, just speculative behavioral observation based solely on writing style:
Observed Traits:
1. Intense focus on specific topics The user writes frequently and at length about niche technical subjects. Linux desktops, memory management, retro gaming systems, low-level programming, and kernel internals. This narrow but deep interest in a few topics is consistent with autistic "special interests", where an individual becomes highly knowledgeable and invested in a domain over time.
2. Formal, precise language Their tone is usually very factual, sometimes pedantic. For instance, they correct minor inaccuracies, cite specific versions or system behavior, and show a low tolerance for vague statements. This aligns with the autistic trait of preferring clarity, precision, and correctness, especially in communication.
3. Low concern for social cues or audience tone Many of their posts are direct or even dismissive, e.g. 'that's completely wrong,' or 'it's not bloated, you just don't know how to configure it.' They appear less concerned with how their tone might be perceived emotionally. This could reflect difficulty in modulating tone for social harmony, which is often found in autistic individuals.
4. Literal interpretation of discussions Some responses suggest they take other users' questions or comments very literally, missing subtext or humor. This might point to reduced instinct for implied meaning or sarcasm, another common feature in autism.
5. Resistance to ambiguity or generalization The user often pushes back when others make broad claims or assumptions, offering exact technical explanations or exceptions. This need for specificity over generality is also in line with certain autistic thinking patterns.
6. Obsessions about mod point in line with certain autistic thinking patterns.
What this could suggest:
There are indeed several traits here that align with what's seen in some people on the autism spectrumfocused interests, literal communication style, detail obsession, and a direct tone unconcerned with social smoothing. These don't confirm autism, but they do suggest a cognitive style that might be described as "systemizing" (per Simon Baron-Cohen's theory), which is common in neurodivergent individuals.
Caveats:
None of this substitutes for real-world interaction, developmental history, or sensory profile. Some people just write bluntly or have strong opinions. Technical communities often cultivate communication styles that mimic traits seen in autism, regardless of whether the person is autistic.
TL;DR i will smash you into bits if only i could physically locate you is what this long-winded dipsh!t is trying to say.
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Has there ever been a "legal" war? That you even use that word means you don't actually understand the underlining principle of all life in the universe, that being, Might makes Right.
It's always been that way and it always will, because that's how humans are.
Like HK "democracy" (Score:3)
Later it will be "think of the shareholders". (Score:2)
This is today. Eventually there will be a recession, or a downturn, or a rainy day, and we'll have to drop those pledges because of "they economy". Everyone in the room profits, while things get ratcheted a little tighter for everyone else.