this post was submitted on 10 May 2026
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[–] SethTaylor@lemmy.world 28 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Decades of protests and innovation to stop climate change

VS

one AI techbro

Poof! Progress gone, just like that

[–] reksas@sopuli.xyz 2 points 2 days ago

that is because protesting just raises the awareness of the issue. Its better than nothing, but only direct action has any effect on anything at this point. The billionaires should be considered to be akin to foreign occupation and resisted accordingly.

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 188 points 3 days ago (28 children)

generate the waste heat of 23 atom bombs a day.

Americans will do anything but use the metric system.

[–] echodot@feddit.uk 68 points 3 days ago (10 children)

At least in this case it gets across the truly stupid amount of energy being wasted. As a general rule I think that if you can boil one of the great lakes with your daily thermal output you probably shouldn't be doing it.

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No, in this case humans are just really bad with large numbers. Most people can't even get the difference between a millionaire a billionaire or a trillionaire, despite orders of magnitude difference.

Sometimes you have to use the power of a bomb or a star, or the amount of time it's going to take for heat death of the universe just to get the point across.

[–] Elshender@sh.itjust.works 36 points 3 days ago (6 children)

I still don't quite understand. Can I get a conversion into how many hotdogs the heat could cook?

[–] osbo9991@lemmy.world 42 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (6 children)

Let's assume Costco size hot dogs (1/4 lb, or 0.11 kg), with an internal temp increase from fridge temperatures (37 F, or 276 K) to 165 F (347 K). Let's also assume the heat capacity of the hot dog is about 3000 J/kg*K. To heat up a single hot dog takes this much energy:

q=mc*deltaT => q=(0.11 kg)*(3000 J/kg*K)*(347K-276K)=23,430 J of energy.

The heat capacity here is 9GW. That is 9 gigajoules of energy per second, or 9 billion joules every second. Divide this by the number of joules to cook each hot dog gets us the number of hot dogs that could be cooked every second:

9,000,000,000/23,430=384,123 hot dogs/second

With this hot dogs per second figure, we can find how long this energy source would take to feed the entire US population a Costco hot dog.

342,000,000 people/384,123 hot dogs per sec=890 seconds

Converting this to minutes:

890/60=14.8 minutes

So, this source of energy could feed the entire population of the US a Costco hot dog in less than 15 minutes if properly harnessed.

[–] Elshender@sh.itjust.works 22 points 3 days ago

Finally someone speaking english.

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[–] cdf12345@lemmy.zip 10 points 3 days ago (4 children)

Listen guy, maybe you haven’t noticed, but we have some serious fuckery we are trying to deal with here. While I agree that metric is a more logical system. We’re trying to get a grip while everything around us is crumbling. Switching to metric is in like volume 17 of our todo list right now, sandwiched between end daylight savings time and making the my pillow guy eat a sock.

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[–] Gonzako@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago

And all that for some shitty pngs and the pleasure of not being attended by actual people.

[–] Folstar@lemmus.org 9 points 2 days ago (4 children)

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but shouldn't something generating the heat of several atom bombs be utilized as a heat source for making energy, instead of energy used to cool it?

[–] TehWorld@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I haven’t read the article, and am not a thermo-engineer, but the problem is probably one of too low of a heat for too long. To make lower you generally have to boil water into superheated steam and then can use it to turn a turbine where it loses some heat and we can extract that difference as energy. The hottest parts of the chip are probably still cooler than the steam condensing on the output of a standard steam generator.

[–] Folstar@lemmus.org 1 points 1 day ago

Sounds like a problem one of our super genius god brain billionaires should be able to solve before lunch.

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[–] moopet@sh.itjust.works 23 points 3 days ago (13 children)

An "atom bomb" is not a standard unit of measurement. It's less than helpful.

[–] Hossenfeffer@feddit.uk 21 points 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Pffft. An 'atom bomb' as a unit of measurement is (roughly) equal to:

ff x (hdl/afps) x solh x amb

Where:
ff = football fields
hdl = hot dog lengths
afps = average Floridian pants size
solh = Statues of Liberty heights
amb = average medical bill.

[–] Fiery@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 3 days ago

Americans will do anything but use the metric system.

[–] el_abuelo@programming.dev 11 points 3 days ago (1 children)

How many atom bombs less than helpful is it?

[–] smeenz@lemmy.nz 3 points 2 days ago

Americans will use anything but the metric system.

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[–] ParadoxSeahorse@lemmy.world 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

“When I think about what’s going to lead to intergenerational prosperity in Utah, it is not a data center, it’s the beautify of our landscapes”

This is what’s going to kill us as a species. Because a data center doesn’t do anything. Nothing worth this horrific environmental damage.

At every turn, there’s another terrible consequence to wildlife, more pollution… when did we forget we are animals, too?

Wouldn’t it be great if someone could invent some kind of technology to distribute the compute so it wasn’t so terrifyingly concentrated /s

[–] Zink@programming.dev 5 points 2 days ago

intergenerational prosperity

If I know my rich sociopath talk, this means "generations of MY descendants being old money rich and saluting the giant portrait of ME over their comically large fireplaces."

[–] Blibly@lemmy.world 91 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I can't wait to eat Kevin.

[–] errer@lemmy.world 25 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I’m fine with just cooking him and throwing the meat away

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[–] unitedwithme@lemmy.today 69 points 4 days ago (12 children)

Well, Davies has a point, communicating scale is the difficult part.

So, for those familiar with computers, think Scott this:

A typical Word doc or PDF is several hundred KB's (kilobyte =1000 bytes) to 1MB (Megabyte 1m bytes) a jpg picture your phone takes, is 3-4MB. A full HD movie streamed online will be about 9GB (Gigabyte =1b bytes) of data. Obviously a movie is thousands of "images" stitched together so is file size with be significantly more. The same goes for that energy usage.

Similarly, Homes are measured in kW usage (technically usage per hour or kWh) on a monthly basis. You might use ~800-1,000kWh per month, maybe 10,000-11,000kWh a year. But let's call it 1000kW are used, so 1mW or 1 megawatt. This data center would need at least 9,000x more energy per month as it's gW scale, not mW or even kW... Plus, its power plant will be close by, so you're creating heat and pollution to make the 9+gW energy and then USING up that energy and dumping 8+gW of heat, so his example calculated 16gW of heat being generated... That's the equivalent of a good 16k homes, or ~60,000 people use.

THE KICKER that's just to run the data center, think of the demand for the HVAC and ecological damage to using a lake's water to cool equipment (water would be coming out over 100⁰F)..

Fuck AI!

[–] miraclerandy@lemmy.world 52 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Also, the lake they’re using to cool the data center is in critical condition for drying out. The great salt lake is at a tipping point where if they can’t maintain the current levels it could turn into a toxic dust bowl effect where all the toxic shit that’s collected in the dead lake for millennia will end up in the air in the valley.

[–] CapuccinoCoretto@lemmy.world 39 points 4 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Which is really weird. The world desperately needs desalination for freshwater but we say we can't do it because the water is too expensive due to energy costs, yet here is another case where we piss away heat. Free market fundamentalism will be the death of us all. No civilization this reckless was meant to survive.

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[–] M0oP0o@mander.xyz 23 points 3 days ago (5 children)

They should really try boiling some water with that waste heat, maybe make it spin a turbine or two.

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[–] LiveLM@lemmy.zip 24 points 3 days ago

I propose a hyperscale billionaire cooking center where we drive the heat of 23 atom bombs directly up Kevin's ass.

[–] green_goglin@thelemmy.club 49 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Kevin O’Leary is a parasite

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[–] bitteroldcoot@piefed.social 54 points 4 days ago (2 children)

The funny thing is that Utah has some of the worst air pollution in the world. Yet they keep pushing to make it worse. I remember a couple of years ago in summer doctors in the state beg government to restrict private cars till the air problem clear up and the gov told them to fuck off.

https://www.deseret.com/utah/2024/08/02/utah-bad-air-quality-pollution-salt-lake-city/
https://www.kuer.org/health-science-environment/2024-01-23/reaching-for-air-there-are-solutions-to-pollution-but-will-utah-leaders-listen

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[–] BillCheddar@lemmy.world 39 points 4 days ago (3 children)

And then conservatives are like, why do people keep trying to shoot at us?

BECAUSE YOU'RE GOING TO KILL US ALL YOU DAFT CUNTS

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[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 11 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I don't know who Kevin is, so I looked at his Wikipedia page and I'm still none the wiser what he's actually done to "earn" all that money. Looks like a serial grifter.

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[–] TwinTitans@lemmy.world 23 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Why does this guy have to be such a massive piece of shit.

[–] Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works 24 points 3 days ago

Because he floated to the top. Better question is why do we allow such massive pieces of shit to accumulate in the first place?

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[–] HazardousBanjo@lemmy.world 39 points 4 days ago (2 children)

In a state already facing a water crisis.

Yet they'll still vehemently and gleefully vote Republican.

I feel bad for the few there who see this crisis for what it is. Expect water refugees from the American Southwest very soon.

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[–] deathbird@mander.xyz 15 points 3 days ago

But at least when I have to write a professional sounding email I can shut off my brain and make the computer cluster do it!

[–] Fizz@lemmy.nz 13 points 3 days ago (1 children)

This is never getting built

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 8 points 3 days ago

Look at what happened in Saudi's Neom.

They kicked a bunch of locals off the property, diverted a bunch of local waterways, dropped millions of tons of concrete onto a foundation, and then ran out of money, gave up, and walked away.

You got all horror of industrial terraforming but none of the promised payout.

[–] Etterra@discuss.online 11 points 3 days ago

Only if we can strap him to the heat sinks. 🍽️

[–] orbitz@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 days ago

Oh burning more fuel, you having a laugh mare?

Seriously anyone who thinks more carbon in the atmosphere is going to help may as well be in the loony bin.

Also sorry as a Canadian this idiot got vaulted to the world stage. He's a moron as far as I can tell.

I'm just nobody though,but who can understand impact of climate change and the harm we're doing to our world. So piss off with that idea until it produces a way to run without impacting our environment. If somehow you can then hats off to ya, I'd say I'd eat my hat but I really don't want to and I'm a man of my word.

Mean I'd like to say worse and don't expect anything but if somehow it can be better than thank them all. If not, fuck off for the advertisement I've seen enough commercials.

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