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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   23672 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 8, 2026

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extreme damage to our education system

So your stance is that the US education system was doing fantastically in 2021? No pre-existing problems or awful trends?

students use LLMs to complete the assignments that were created by LLMs and will be graded by the same LLMs

This is so depressing. I agree with you here. I hate that this is happening.

I don't blame LLMs though. I use LLMs to teach myself new things all the time.

I blame the absolutely shit school system, which has been shit and wildly unable to adapt to anything my entire life.

environmentally catastrophic data centers

How are they bad? Can you actually substantiate this? What makes them worse than giant suburban tracts of sprawl?

Of course education has been bad for a long time, but the fact that it's bad doesn't mean AI isn't making it worse.

As for the data centers, there's a lot of independent reporting on this from people living near them on immediate harms. There's damage to groundwater that makes the local tap water undrinkable, there's constant noise levels in residential areas.

On a larger scale, data centers are now responsible for 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and projected to rise. This paper estimates it at $25 billion in environmental damage per year.

There's also other more subtle impacts. For instance, the Utah data center project is expected to produce a heat island effect that would raise temperatures from 5 degrees during the day to up to 28 degrees at night, potentially preventing the dew point condensation effect and quite literally killing local ecologies.

All of these effects are being ignored in the name of progress, and the costs of these externalities are being paid by the people living in these areas who have no say in the matter.

The real downsides are things that would be true of any construction whatsoever, to give into them would be to just completely capitulate with degrowth ideology and only not return to the mud out of inertia.

There's damage to groundwater that makes the local tap water undrinkable

This could happen with the construction of any building, essentially the crew either accidentally interrupted a drilled well or just the blast of construction shook up the silt in the well water.

There's also other more subtle impacts. For instance, the Utah data center project is expected to produce a heat island effect that would raise temperatures from 5 degrees during the day to up to 28 degrees at night, potentially preventing the dew point condensation effect and quite literally killing local ecologies.

This is only in the valley itself where only the datacenter is. This is all "end civilization to save the spotted desert lizard style obstructionism. You'd find yourself in likeminded company with the people who threw everything at the wall to keep us from getting nuclear power.

If we operated on your apparent preferences we couldn't have even built the society we live in today, let alone improve one.

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