Sunlit7 op
Reading this guy's comment a few minutes ago and it reminded me of a few thoughts I've had on all the closings of plants, layoffs, downsizing, consolidations, and the worst of the worst for me, which is probably why my mind wondered there in the first place, is no more after midnight shopping. As much as our city has grown over the years, unless one is into hanging in bars, there's nothing else left to do in this town after midnight. Which is great if you're young and hanging at bars is all the rage. It's even more fun now given they have pedal trolleys they can pedal around town while drinking, or neat little scooters and electric bikes they can rent stationed conveniently around town to go joy riding around on. When I was their age, it was mostly by foot or whatever friends had cars to get around in. The number of bars is nowhere near what it is now being we are considered the beer capitol of the US for the number of breweries here, but it may have been interesting to have a number of places to track to on foot rather than whatever watering hole was closest. There was a time you could sit atop the hill I lived on and see nothing but total darkness loom over most the city, now it's lit up like an overstrung Christmas tree.
The other night listening to the usual, "attention shoppers, the store will be closing in fifteen minutes, please head to the front to the registers to check out", I thought to myself what's the big deal, all the major retail players use to be open all night, it's been years, the panic in pandemic over is. They had to have been making money to stay open all night, or it'd ended a decade ago, so what's the big deal. The big deal might just add up to electricity and not so much the past years long conclusion it was to reduce the size of the middle class. One does go in hand with another but maybe in a different way. Maybe it isn't or wasn't the planned intention set upon eliminating the middle class as much as it was the demand AI, data centers and digitalization would create on aging electrical infrastructure. Basically, something had to give, and as usual, it wasn't going to come out of the pockets of those with billions to fund their plans for the future, though they will be the biggest benefactors of the windfall. What the person wrote in the comment made a lot of sense of who is going to end up paying the most:
"just wait unit rate payers realize that cypto currency costs them every month in the form of increased energy bills. That's right, crypto bros are making money on the back of every household that pays an electric bill, and then when a proportionate tax is demanded for, by the public, for the value of their crypto...
it will be worthless.
and just wait until rate payers have enough of having to pay increased energy rates for data centers for AI.
Working class US Americans are getting fleeced by these industries."
It's a truth despite commercial businesses pay more for energy cost, but that would never come near what is required, it never has before the plans were ever set into place. When I talk about that time ago period between the darkness and the light, what the light brought us was increased cost of electric rates known as "summer rate" and "winter rate" where our cost is increased during the summer due to increased demand by central air, air conditioners, fans, etc., that everyone puts into motion to keep cool. That's what happens when populations and businesses keep growing without any infrastructure expansions growing with it. Now, when you read your yearly rate increase notices, it isn't one, two, three percent increases, it's more like six, seven, eight, and that will continue to grow because those rates currently aren't based upon the growth of AI, data centers, or all the digitalization of everything they have planned for you. For right now, they can offset some of that demand by consolidating or shutting down businesses and create an era it's due to AI taking over jobs when AI isn't really there yet, not to the extent they are fearmongering with, that comes into the future but as AI grows, so will the job demand for those industries. AI doesn't build itself, nor do data centers, electrical vehicles, charging stations, or those long fraught about robots that are decades away from cleaning toilets, washing windows of high-rise buildings, or most importantly becoming the savvy shoppers who'd buy these investors products.
Realistically they were never going to tell individuals we have to eliminate as much energy use as possible to create a whole new industry dependent upon more of your energy than you can imagine. When it comes to expanding the energy grid after they've consolidated it down to every inch they can find, you'll pay for the expansion, citing increased use, increased population growth and demand, to the very electric car vehicle people bought to save money, it will all be dependent upon individuals to pay all those investors cost much like Europe did aligned with all those NGO's who invested in their energy transitions away from Russian gas, passed that infrastructure cost off onto the citizens who seen their energy cost skyrocket. Don't even be surprised if you see more job losses if another country had more energy capacity despite the creation of new tech jobs it would take decades waiting for it to equalize itself out, if it ever does.
All this for what? To create a digitalized world that will track your every moment, control the very being that you are, that will own who you are, what you spend, what you say, a digital imprisonment brought to you by the same men you so graciously made billionaires.
