this is actually happening

my elecric company just raised its rates 13% and forcast rasing 25% next year after

we have a power making dam in town

historically we have had some of the cheapest power in the USA

With gas prices at multiyear lows and electricity being so expensive it’s really hard to justify electrifying appliances. I was considering doing so (gas dryer, stove, water heater, furnace), but I think if I did I’d be paying an extra $300/month for quite a long time and that’s a hard pill to swallow.

But think of the (big tech) shareholders!

and anyone near datacenters get polluted water or any unforseen pollution, contamination that has yet been studied.

Switch to retrocomputing; it’s currently significantly more affordable.

it would be more unaffordable once people dont have jobs from all the layoffs.

Yeah I noticed that lmao, definitely AI slop.

That delusion keeps pumping up stocks.

The C suite and management of these companies want two things - for the stock to go as high as possible, and for them to be able to sell at the top and leave a bunch of bag holders wondering what the fuck just happened.

Don’t forget obligatory data mining the crap out of you!

currently its very useful for propaganda, thats why conservatives are all in on it.

Yes we definitely want to support the consumers, but hey look, the thing is, these data centers want to buy a lot of memory, and guess what, they’re willing to buy it in bulk even at a huge mark up! Like just think about that… We’re gonna make so much money!

To be fair I would not be mad if that was the response, It's the pandering that get's me fuming

That's exactly what they're aiming for.

there are plenty of home computers for sale for under $500. i'm on a $700 laptop right now that's 4 years old.

they just can't run modern games. i can run 2d games just fine or old games.

the gaming crowd seems to forget that most computers don't use integrated graphics and a $1000 PC is a luxury purchase.

I hope that will prompt many more people to adopt Linux then

That was their plan all along. Resist by gaming twice as hard.

You could go further and say what's happening now isn't capitalism at all. Yanis Varoufakis calls the modern world economy "technofeudalism": it's controlled by information hypercompanies like Amazon, Google, and Apple, that make money not by producing anything, but by controlling the flow of information between consumers and producers, and charging producers rent for access to consumers.

If you're an app developer, you pay Google and Apple whatever they ask, and you follow their rules, or you don't get to sell your product in their app stores; if you sell products, you give Amazon their cut, or you don't get to sell in their market. And because Google and Apple and Amazon have so effectively entrapped customers, capitalists who don't agree to their terms can't get to their consumers at all.

Capitalists aren't the masters of the economy - they're vassals. They pay their technofeudal lords their tribute, their 30% cut of revenue, and compete with each other for the remaining scraps. And then they raise prices and cut wages, squeeze their workers and exploit their consumers even more, in order to make enough money to survive at all.

The customer is always right was never a thing.

For a start, it's an intentional shortening of the actual phrase, for exploitative reasons, of "the customer is always right in matters of taste"

Which just means "if they want to buy ugly shit, let them"

Im kind of wondering if that isnt the real end game- there was a Bezos quote i saw the other day, where he said he wants to see personal computing die out in favor of essentially cloud based, where users own minimal hardware and just rent compute time for everything.

It kind of feels like they dont actually need ai to succeed- its already achieving the goal of denying components to end users. If they maintain that scarcity long enough, they can kill the pc/ laptop status quo. (Especially if chip makers abandon those fabs for data center tailored units for a whole generation, until theres nothing viable left on the market)

i overheard today on the bus, that someone(assume in grad school) as a TA was planning to use AI to grade all the classes homework without care if it was inconsistently correct or not, it isnt going to end well.