Telemachus93

Colombia has price discrimination for residential areas: households in richer areas have to pay more than those in poorer areas. I don't know how good the actual implementation works out for the people there, but it was in effect when I was there more than 10 years ago and it still seems to be (see "estratos" here: https://www.enel.com.co/content/dam/enel-co/espa%C3%B1ol/personas/1-17-1/2025/pliego-tarifario-enel-diciembre-2025.pdf). If that is possible for different areas of one city, of course we could make data centers pay more for 1 kWh than a private consumer would.

It just won't happen in our hyper-capitalist north american and european countries.

Expanding on that: in competitive electricity markets, in theory, total demand is met by the cheapest plants (by "marginal price": how much does an additional unit of electricity cost?) that are available.

The marginal price of PV, wind and hydropower is pretty much zero.

The next cheapest are usually older nuclear fission plants and coal power plants.

Then is a huge gap and then come newer nuclear plants and gas fired power plants.

But all of these plants aren't built over night. So maybe before all of the datacenters, total demand may have mostly been met by renewables and coal and gas power plants only operated a few hundred hours per year. Now, total demand rises and those plants need to operate more often. That's why the prices rise just because of demand increase. Other effects (e.g. changes in regulation, corporate greed, ...) might be at play as well.

This article sounds mostly like greenwashing and giving false hopes. They also clearly don't know what they're talking about. To me, the most obvious is when they speak about AI-powered grids balancing supply and demand in real time. I'm a researcher in energy management algorithms and that's pure buzzword vomit without anything backing it up. Notice how short the paragraphs are and that there's no references to real-world projects or scientific studies, just some random numbers thrown around.

Yeah, some people on the internet like to oversimplify and I get how your impression arises that those people bend the narrative how they like it.

On the other hand, it's pretty well-documented that

• western governments work with authoritarian leaders when they're not hostile to western corporate interests (see, e.g. Saudi Arabia)
• western governments fund opposition groups no matter if they're democratic or not as long as they can expect an outcome that's better for their corporations' interests (see, e.g. the guy that leads the current Syrian government; see also the royalist opposition in Iran [mostly in exile])

Also left-wing opposition inside western states is often demonized although we have similar aims as some highly-praised opposition movements in other countries.

I wouldn't say purely theoretical. Of course it's incredibly far away from what our society looks like today in the grand scheme of things but as the other answer points out, anarchism is always there in the little things. A really great text pointing that out is David Graeber's "Are you an anarchist? The answer may surprise you!": https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-are-you-an-anarchist-the-answer-may-surprise-you

Another point I'd like to make concerning the "purely theoretical" aspect is one that comes from my background as an engineer. In electricity distribution planning and probably many similar problems, "green field" planning plays a significant role. Engineers look at where the electricity sources and consumers are and, in a first step, disregard the current state of the grid. Instead, they try to find an ideal distribution system layout. THEN they look at the current state of things and start planning what changes can be made in what order. That can take decades but if the ideal vision is constantly kept as a goal to move closer to, the system will resemble that ideal state more and more.

Anarchists often take a similar approach. We know that humans are well capable of both, competing for resources AND of cooperating for the common good (actually, a great early anarchist was also an academic whose general ideas in opposition to narrow-minded social darwinism are close to what evolutionary biology knows today: see Petr Kropotkin's "Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution" if you're interested in that story). Capitalist society has ingrained the ideology in us that everything is about competition. The society we envision is all about cooperation. Society is always changing and that change comes from how humans operate in this society. So what anarchists do is very many diverse things, smaller and greater deeds, but all either about unlearning competition and hierarchy or learning, practicing, showing and teaching cooperation. A great video essay diving deeper into these ideas would be Zoe Baker's "The unity of means and ends": https://youtu.be/syR0P-2uwp4

No, that's not anarchism! Anarchism wants a society without any hierarchies or authorities. Exclusive access to resources (e.g. private property of factories etc) needs hierarchy/authority to keep that access exclusive. If there is someone calling themselves boss/king/whatever and wants you to do their bidding, he won't have any power if neither you nor anyone else accepts their claim. If they resort to violence, then the community should come together in solidarity to defend against that.

There are people calling themselves anarchocapitalists and what they argue for would indeed lead to the problems you envisioned. But they're not accepted among "real" anarchists who are definitely and absolutely against capitalism (which is where we are aligned with others on the far left) but also against any other form of oppression, including the supposed "workers' states" like the soviet union.

No, it's not. Not seeing that it's capitalism is the reductive view. Instead of trying to type down a huge text while I'm tired, I'd like to introduce a 112 year-old text that still seems extremely relevant today:

Moreover, capitalist production, by its very nature, cannot be restricted to such means of production as are produced by capitalist methods. Cheap elements of constant capital are essential to the individual capitalist who strives to increase his rate of profit. In addition, the very condition of continuous improvements in labour productivity as the most important method of increasing the rate of surplus value, is unrestricted utilisation of all substances and facilities afforded by nature and soil. To tolerate any restriction in this respect would be contrary to the very essence of capital, its whole mode of existence. After many centuries of development, the capitalist mode of production still constitutes only a fragment of total world production. Even in the small Continent of Europe, where it now chiefly prevails, it has not yet succeeded in dominating entire branches of production, such as peasant agriculture and the independent handicrafts; the same holds true, further, for large parts of North America and for a number of regions in the other continents. In general, capitalist production has hitherto been confined mainly to the countries in the temperate zone, whilst it made comparatively little progress in the East, for instance, and the South. Thus, if it were dependent exclusively, on elements of production obtainable within such narrow limits, its present level and indeed, its development in general would have been impossible. From the very beginning, the forms and laws of capitalist production aim to comprise the entire globe as a store of productive forces. Capital, impelled to appropriate productive forces for purposes of exploitation, ransacks the whole world, it procures its means of production from all corners of the earth, seizing them, if necessary by force, from all levels of civilisation and from all forms of society. The problem of the material elements of capitalist accumulation, far from being solved by the material form of the surplus value that has been produced, takes on quite a different aspect. It becomes necessary for capital progressively to dispose ever more fully of the whole globe, to acquire an unlimited choice of means of production, with regard to both quality and quantity, so as to find productive employment for the surplus value it has realised. From Rosa Luxemburg: The Accumulation of Capital, Chapter 26 - The Reproduction of Capital and Its Social Setting

This passage is kind of an introduction to Rosa Luxemburg's definition of imperialism. Back then, capitalism was not yet developed in the whole world and she argued that simply because it's a question of survival for companies, these companies will push for the right to exploit the whole world. And now, 112 years later, I'm pretty sure we can agree that happened. And in the past few decades, when they can't expand spacially, now it's all about squeezing every last bit of profit from nature, the workers and the consumers.

The particular ideology oligarchies are using to justify their rule is incidental.

Here, we have a point of agreement. The USSR developed into something that was no better than capitalist states. In my opinion, that's because it's bureaucracy developed into something very similar to the burgeoisie in capitalism, resource hoarders led by self-interest.

But I believe your answer built on another false dichotomy here. The alternative to capitalism I have in mind isn't a one-party state with central planning and communist aesthetics. I'm more of a proponent of decentralized power, dismantling the state and people governing their surroundings cooperatively.

That's a false dichotomy. We can also improve our technology while ditching capitalism.

Nothing factually wrong with the article, but it has this sound of "this technology will solve all our problems" to it that I find highly problematic. Seven out of nine planetary boundaries are exceeded, climate change just being one of them. And all of them are exceeded because of our wasteful and growth-oriented way of life.

with lfp at about 200 Wh/kg which still is less than Lithium Ion.

LFP is a lithium-ion technology. You probably meant "worse than NMC", which is another, older, higher density but less safe lithium-ion technology.

I was totally expecting that phrase when reading "New York Times". :D

Yeah, uneducated people might say something like that.