the more I'm debt you get the more you owe them,

Well, in the past (and the present in many places) perpetual unrepayable debts were used as a way to implement slavery without calling it slavery. They call it debt peonage. You know, food for thought.

Short term it pads the companies books a bit more by adding an asset on top of the revenue. Medium term it's a perpetual impairment generator. The executives are just planning to cash out before the inevitable happens.

It helps people who can still pay on average but have an unexpected cost which, due to higher bills, now pushes them into the red.

“Capitalism breeds innovation”

Meanwhile we have monthly installments for monthly installments.

Because in the summer people run the AC more than they can afford and rack up like $300 bills when their off-summer average would normally be like $70. The loan programs are more like a deferred payment plan where they will cap the individual monthly payment at $150 or something, and then just push the surplus onto other future bills. Then usually when you close the account you owe them a bunch of money still, and that's when they start doing things like offering to set you up with loan services.

Have you heard of the concept of company towns?

I guess they cover you for a while until you figure it out. It's better than nothing ig.

There's usually usually a power pole near them feeding them with electricity. Shame if something were to happen to it.

More luigi will save us power fantasies for our nightly coping routine?

Replace them. Either recruit a candidate or run yourself. Ignoring your voters should have consequences.

Not to sidestep it, but at what point is doing personal solar a better deal, if you own that is

Let me tell you about my legally required cable.

What if a homeowner was connected but only drew a few kilowatt∙hrs a month, and meet the rest of their electrical needs with solar?

Same as with RAM prices. There is a limited supply and the datacenters are hogging it, possibly willing to pay extra because the entire bubble depends on MORE MORE MORE, or willing to bulk purchase the entire contingent in advance.

Now if you are a power supplier you find yourself in the comfortable position of being financially courted by the datacenter corps, and you have a captured audience of consumers who rely on you supplying them, who you can now justifiably bleed out, and if they cant pay you just sell it to the datacenter after all.

Isn't a kwh the same price for everyone?

Perversely, no. Large industrial users often get a bulk rate that's cheaper than the household rate.

Happy cake day, BTW.

Fortunately, Oregon seems to have figured out how to handle this. This was in my feed, literally right under this post.

https://sh.itjust.works/post/63159063

Definitely a smart move letting those power utilities be privatised, even a regulation forcing cost price power for residents would have been better than full privatisation. I'm so glad my state never got sucked into letting that happen here.

As the other commenter said, they have a limited supply and are expecting us plebeians to be priced out and go without. It's already happening: https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/virginia-county-tells-workers-switch-002400860.html

If it’s anything like it is here in Victoria (Australia); the price per MWh is recalculated based on supply/demand on a 5 minute basis:

https://www.aemo.com.au/aemo/data/nem/priceanddemand/PRICE_AND_DEMAND_202607_VIC1.csv

That’s because when supply outruns demand, surplus electricity is basically worthless and wholesalers need to pay someone to take it - we have long stretches of time, even during winter, where our domestic solar production saturates the demand, resulting in our Feed-in tariffs (what homes get paid for surplus production) has dropped to 1c/kWh, except for certain edge cases).

The bulk of the cost incurred is due to peak-energy generation (gas turbine, I believe?) ramping up to cover peak evening times.

These costs are aggregated and amortised over total demand, to balance out people’s energy bills.

This has been a bit of a tangent, but I found this interesting when I first learned it, and just wanted to share!

It may well be the same price for the data center too, but now that there's significantly more load on the network and there've been no changes to network capacity the price is being adjusted to reconcile the new demand with existing supply.

they get a wholesale/bulk rate which is far cheaper than residential, we atually pay for any datacenter, business in the end.

Isn't a kwh the same price for everyone?

Not sure why you'd assume this

Everyone on the power exchange. Consumers don't pay the exchange price. They pay a premium to the company that transforms exchange power to household power on a virtual sheet of paper.

It's more that everyone pays more including the data center even. It could also be related to non-generation costs such as building additional distribution infra which can be regulated as a shared cost even though the data center pays for all extra generation.

Folks who are saying the price is going up because of demand are technically right but it's kinda misleading. People get mad when they don't understand their bills so I wanna add to that:

With more demand in the system, more distribution equipment is used and will need more maintenance. Your electric bill has fixed fees and usage fees. The fixed fees include the cost of capital upgrades, which cover these costs. It's not a direct 1:1 cost for each connection, as the upstream feed capacity needs to increase too.

Cost per KW may go up too, it depends on the way your utility is set up. Time of day pricing is meant to encourage offsetting costs and sometimes large customers pay proportional to the contribution to peak demand.

It doesn't help that this increase in demand comes when so much of the grid is old as fuck in north america. But we live in interesting times.

Clout. Aura. Bargaining force. Call it whatever you want, really. Corporations are big, they have capital, capital is power. They can hire people to influence politics, pushing for people who are on their side to get elected by funding campaigns, and naturally bribe people on the down low.

Stick, along with the other people served by their provider, most likely don't have the ability to pay people to lobby for them full time. Most people barely have the money to keep their personal economy going, and spend a significant portion of their time just making that happen. As a result, the corporations who are benefiting from this sit on all the power, because they can influence public opinion as well, painting their politics as beneficial to private individuals, even if that's a complete lie.

That is why democracy and capitalism are fundamentally incompatible. Workers could band together and claim power, but they're kept in situations where doing that just isn't feasible.

Things won't get better without some kind of revolution. The balance of power is tipped so far in favour of the corporations that no matter how much time or money workers spend (neither of which we have) trying to better things, they'll never get even close to what the corpos can swing with.

Hell with billionaires and tax cuts to increase something the average person won't enjoy, I bet it's even more than thrice.

Property tax increase cause property is used but not taxed due to being a 'big project', if another company built there (besides say wal mart it'd be taxed)

Power bill increase, which we see happens to OPs post.

Using land that could benefit the area, it's probably a large complex that could help the locals and not make their power bill larger.

Having a complex that heats up local area for things not beneficial to locals. Global warming but thankfully some ai model will grow?

Using water that makes drinking water worse for locals. Read stories of people near data centers, losing all water pressure so the data center can have water. Cause that's more important than people.

Only helping the person who built it vs the locals. I really have no idea who data centers help. I assume some are for the crappy bit we see when we Google but so many must be private. Also who hasn't learned to go through search results? Seriously that's a skill needed, if you don't have it you need to learn. I may have accepted the new paradigm but I would prefer a bit of work going back to searching.

There no good reason for this crap. They get built but don't benefit anyone but the rich. They just want serfs anyways, is that the real future?

See meme

Wait, which?

FWIW,

wp:Data center,

wp:Opposition to AI data centers,

wp:Swiss Fort Knox,

wp:Zettabyte Era,

wp:Military applications of artificial intelligence,

wp:Artificial intelligence,

wp:Category:Artificial intelligence,

36 subcats and 247 articles,

wp:AI nationalism,

wp:Discrimination against robots,

wp:AI takeover,

wp:Category:Artificial intelligence controversies,

3 subcats and 27 articles

wp:Category:Existential risk from artificial intelligence,

64 articles

wp:Stop AI,

wp:How to Survive a Robot Uprising,

How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion is a semi-satirical book by Daniel Wilson published in November 2005.

​

wp:Utah Data Center

Critics believe that the data center has the capability to process "all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Internet searches, as well as all types of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital 'pocket litter'."[6] In response to claims that the data center would be used to illegally monitor email of U.S. citizens, in April 2013 an NSA spokesperson said, "Many unfounded allegations have been made about the planned activities of the Utah Data Center, ... one of the biggest misconceptions about NSA is that we are unlawfully listening in on, or reading emails of, U.S. citizens. This is simply not the case."[4]

​

wp:Ethics of artificial intelligence,

wp:Resisting AI,

Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence is a book on artificial intelligence (AI) by Dan McQuillan, published in 2022 by Bristol University Press.

​

wp:Category:Criticism of artificial intelligence

1 subcat with 32 articles, and 12 articles

​

wp:Democratic backsliding in the United States,

wp:Wikipedia:Writing articles with large language models,

wp:Wikipedia:AI noticeboard

​

​

Search Google: How to destroy a data center

results here

including:

Datacenter Violence

https://www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/comments/1pm2h7w/datacenter_violence/

​

What would be the easiest way to stop data from flowing out of a data center? I'm writing a novel where a terrorist needs to successfully halt all data flowing from a large data center. Would it be best to destroy fiber cables? A Virus?

https://www.quora.com/What-would-be-the-easiest-way-to-stop-data-from-flowing-out-of-a-data-center-Im-writing-a-novel-where-a-terrorist-needs-to-successfully-halt-all-data-flowing-from-a-large-data-center-Would-it-be-best-to-destroy

If we did, it would be populated by MAGAs who would take bribes to let the power company put ALL the costs on the residential consumers. Except for the wealthy neighborhood. They deserve a break, because they're better.