The reason these data centers are getting built in place people don’t want them is because the towns are broke.
The city councils know it, but the residents don’t.
The entire point of the last 10 years of Strong Towns was talking about municipal finance, infrastructure costs, and the insolvency of the American suburban town.
Bullshit. The proposed data center in Utah is projected to use more electricity that what the entire state already uses, on an area larger than Manhattan.
The entire state of Utah is not broke. Box Elder County is largely a rural community but it is also not broke.
I'm not here to fight about one mega-data center where they are circumventing local control. I'm talking about the dozens and dozens of data centers being proposed and accepted by city councils all over the United States: https://www.datacentermap.com/
There will be some obvious bad deals. I think you're wrong to assume that the county is not broke from a municipal finance perspective. Nibley, Utah residents had their town evaluate by Strong Towns, they were in a fairly tough financial position until about 2015. The idea that you have residents that are even doing these reports mean that you have an electorate that actually cares at all.
The proposed Box Elder County data center would double the county's tax revenue, even with the tax breaks. There's a clear incentive for the county to approve it.
I was a relatively early investor (2008), but I was very hesitant early on because Microsoft was building an integrated search function, which became Windows Live Search, which became Bing. I definitely remember it took me to the beginning of the financial crisis to finally decide that it was going nowhere. I suspect it was the development of Google Maps that changed my mind.
"Google" of today is really AdSense ($102M, 2003) -> Android ($50M+?, 2005) -> YouTube ($1.6B, 2006) -> Google Docs ($50M+?, 2006)
Without those prescient and lucky acquisitions, we'd be talking about a "Google" that looked much more like Yahoo.
It wasn't search proficiency that built the empire, it was leveraging a transient search quality advantage into cash flow, then plowing that cash into acquisitions to construct a durable moat.
There were many search engines around during that time. Yahoo, Excite, Microsoft Live Search, Lycos... I don't recall any of them improving enough to rival early 2000's Google.
AdSense wasn't a thing until 2003. Google didn't have much revenue before that. However, they still surpassed their competition in quality of search results long before...
Erm 2008 isn't early, I had been using it for almost a decade by then. They had won by 2001. No-one who knew Microsoft thought that they had a chance with Bing. This was post-Gates and Microsoft were already a laughing stock in 2008 with respect to the web.
As a long time Berkshire and Alphabet investor, I'm quite please to see my investments working in tandem, but I worry me diversification just went down non-trivially.
Automobiles, steam trains, even electricity or the printing press… There has always been a compelling argument for ludditism, the protection of people in that moment (as if that moment would last forever).
And that argument is always doomed to fail, because you can’t freeze society in amber. Whether it’s the lamplighters, the mule-drawn barge operators, or the scribes… we would do much better to have a social safety net and distributive taxation system so that we all win in Industrial Revolutions.
But we won’t. The skilled artisans that are put out of work from their positions of leverage tend to have the political views of someone with leverage, so instead of communitarian instincts, they want to go back to when they had power.
> And that argument is always doomed to fail, because you can’t freeze society in amber. Whether it’s the lamplighters, the mule-drawn barge operators, or the scribes… we would do much better to have a social safety net and distributive taxation system so that we all win in Industrial Revolutions.
Agreed.
I don't think it's the out-of-work "skilled artisans" who are to blame though, esp in the US.
Obviously there is no “blame” in complex systems, but over and over, folks with financial leverage tend to move immediately from a position of libertarian meritocracy to a position of regressive intervention at exactly the moment when their skill becomes automated.
A society that promotes risk, plans for failure, and facilitates starting over, all while minimizing wealth inequality is a society that can sprint headlong into every new technology in a way that everyone benefits.
The lining factor I see time and time again, is that folks see the world, philosophically, as static even though in one lifetime we start at the invention of the light bulb and end on the moon, and in the next, we start with the moon landing, and we’ve created artificial thinking with 23 years to spare.
It’s a sad state of affairs. But what do I know, I live in a city with a massive housing crisis because one group finds construction of more homes as ruining their nice static lives.
Both are asking for money to extract oil (and hopefully sell it for more money). I don't see why the oil well being already drilled or not should make a difference if I don't want to invest in CO2-producing endeavours.
The point is that in the secondary market, the oil will be extracted regardless. By you not participating, you actually increase the return on equity for others, making it more profitable. Buying the stock does not add money into the business.
The area for disincentivizing oil production is the political sphere, not the financial sphere. Refusing to participate in secondary market ownership does almost less than nothing to disincentivize the extraction. At least with ownership, you get a say in the firms harm mitigation.
To be clear, I was answering your second paragraph, about "funding oil extraction that is happening anyway". I understood this as "buying shares directly from the extracting company".
I agree that buying on the secondary market doesn't directly give money to the company. However, it increases demand (and therefore price) of shares in petrol companies, which might help them raise more money per share for new projects.
The earnings coming from such shares also comes from actively encouraging CO2 producing activities. Some people don't want to earn money that way, because they think it is morally wrong.
>Some people don't want to earn money that way, because they think it is morally wrong.
I mean that's fair, but it's also why I brought up the three major schools of ethics. The consequentialist likely won't care if it's going to happen anyway. The virtue ethicist will.
By increasing the return for other investors I'm increasing the cost of capital for the oil exploration companies. So: Yes, not buying shares in existing oil companies will (ever so marginally) decrease oil exploration.
I hate to get really pedantic here, but the concept of "truth claims" plays fast and loose with concept of knowledge in a philosophical sense. The idea of "fact checks" misunderstand how information and knowledge work together. Knowledge is about evidence, not "facts" because facts are a shorthand for a preponderance of evidence.
I feel we are doomed to debate the veracity of Wikipedia on a loop, forever, because people don't understand that Wikipedia exists as a place to find citations not as a place to find facts. Yes, those stated facts may disagree with the citations, but even if we try to fix that issue by having experts write the encyclopedia, we still suffer from the problem that the experts are often wrong.
We need a view of knowledge's relationship to LLMs that is based in Karl Popper's idea of falsifiablity. We should ask LLMs for evidence of claims not for truth values. Truth values are foundational to deductive systems, where axioms define truth. In inductive systems, like the real world, the concept of black swan events means that truth values are never fixed and are always in a state of uncertainty.
I honestly think it would be helpful going forward if we add some basic philosophical education to the standard curriculum, because no that we have an artificial form of information retrieval, we need to be much, much more pedantic about how we interpret that information.
I think that "impossible to detect" is not something realistic if camera manufacturers are willing to start adding encryption signatures to their cameras outputs and are willing to vouch for them.
I realize this would still allow fakes to be presented by governments in all likelihood, but not everyone.
Who posts raw output from cameras anywhere? This doesn't seem useful outside some niche use-cases (like security camera footage). At a minimum just about every recording is going to be re-compressed for streaming.
Synthid is a watermark which indicates the video is AI-generated, not a digital signature indicating it's real. Completely different use case and threat model.
I'm not aware of any secure digital signature schemes that don't require the thing they signed to be bit-for-bit identical to pass verification. There are perceptual hashing algorithms that could theoretically be used to build such a scheme, but such hashes are not second preimage resistant, so someone could create a modified video that still passes signature verification.
I'm not even sure what you're hypothetically describing here. You want a system that authenticates that an image hasn't been manipulated, but which still allows you to compress and transcode it? It's feasible in the same way that synthid was feasible, but I don't think there's actually a use case for it. You either want it to be unedited or you don't. I'm not sure how you can say "edited, but only exactly this much editing is allowed."
I suppose the validator could do a fuzzy match and just output a similarity score that compares the result to the original image. IE - This image is 75% similar to the original with something like a perceptual hash. Then it's the users problem to decide if 75% is close enough for their trust.
You want it visually identical but not necessarily bit-for-bit identical. Compression and transcoding should not cause validation to fail unless the compression artifacts are particularly severe, but even a tiny, one-pixel change that substantially alters the appearance of the photo should cause validation to fail.
And yes I agree this is hard to quantify and impossible with existing algorithms, that was my point.
I bet the cameras' companies will start automatically uploading the real footage to their servers for attestation, and allow the camera owners to get those links, so people will just add that link on YouTube or whatever and say "See, its real, Sony vouches for it", heck maybe they will make their buyers to sign up with YouTube and do it for them.
How on top of security do you think all the camera manufacturers are going to be? That is, how long until people can sign videos that were not, in fact, shot with their camera?
Proving that you were able to upload something that is not real would go viral so it's very attractive to people to share such findings, meaning it would not last long, then they fix it and that's it, specially because they can require you to upgrade your camera's firmware if you want to keep using their attestation service.
Perhaps that could work in certain situations, but you don't even necessarily need digital signatures for that. A link to a reputable news site claiming they've verified the footage as real would be good enough in like 95% of cases, people just don't bother to check.
You'd also need close to 100% adoption for this to be effective, otherwise people will just assume the fakes were recorded with one of the cameras that doesn't have that feature, or that they didn't bother to upload the raw footage anywhere.
Joking and all but sexting would benefit from this technology, if it can vouch about the time, GPS location and email address of the owner then the receiver can have some certainty about the pic (if the sender decides to share such attestation link/info, of course)
Attention is valuable these days, so making people go to their websites for people to check if something is real is good for them, its people they can try to sell more cameras (or phones) and all that.
I don't think it needs do be raw output. I'm pretty sure that signatures can exist within image and sound outputs that are reproducible when changing to other formats.
Leica started doing this a few years ago in response to the first wave of AI images[0]. Other, bigger manufacturers (Nikon, Canon, Sony as well I believe) have also joined, though with less fanfare. Adobe is in the loop.
As someone with a passing interest in infosec and cryptography, I'm sceptical of the long-term viability of this kind of product; it only takes one person successfully extracting a signing key to undermine the entire project.
Yes, you're correct about private keys getting exposed, but it's better than nothing. I suspect though, even after key exposure there may be a way to make new private keys so that compromised keys have a known point when they are compromised, which makes public how much skepticism we should all have about authenticity.
I just think there is a world of difference between "certainty" and "plausibility" when it comes to videos on the internet. Yes, state actors might circumvent it, and skepticism should remain, but there is a world of difference between North Korea trying to convince me of some political scandal, and Pepsi Co trying to convince me that someone I trust loves Pepsi.
I currently use a 2008 Fujifilm camera and a 2018 Sony. The Fujifilm doesn’t even have a firmware update mechanism, and the Sony camera doesn’t get updated anymore. These devices are rarely connected to the internet and never go obsolete so they get used until they break.
There might be a specialised line of cameras for forensics that signs the output and has lidar to detect when the camera is pointed at a screen, but the average person won’t have a camera with this kind of crypto. It would just be too easy for hackers to extract the keys from.
You still ultimately have the analogue hole here - pull the camera apart, splice your own hardware somewhere between the sensor and the thing that adds the signatures (or in front of the sensor).
Or just straight up point the camera at a computer monitor, without even trying to hide it. Most of the security camera footage online is already uploaded this way.
I intentionally didn't say that because I feel like people might dismiss that with "oh but you can tell the difference with sufficient analysis etc" whereas literally sending data directly through the same path as the real sensor would be potentially less detectable (or more, if the sensor itself has some kind of noticeable fingerprint)
Why do we keep on seeing that elementary misconception? Cryptographic verification != reality of the underlying data fed to it! Plus vouching for hardware that is in consumer hands? There is the gaping analog hole of 'recording' arbitrary data streams. All that system would do is make it easier to deanonmyize speech.
I feel it wouldn't be too difficult to get a social-media video to look convincing enough even with just a regular camera and monitor, at least after compression (if end users aren't served raw footage directly, and instead trust the attestation of the site).
Right, my point is that this should default to "untrustworthy." The idea is that a camera would at the very least include a timestamp and camera type in the signature. That signature should usually be reproducible when being filmed by another camera (these signatures can be part of the physical image). This should mean that a cameras filming screens would have multiple ways to show the images are not legitimate (as something as simple of shadows not matching time of day could show the video is illegitimate).
If I were creating a verification system, I'd include a Timestamp, camera used, and UUID. If I were selling products to news teams, I'd likely include fields that the firm wanted included like name of company, and if applicable, gps location.
The road, water, sewer, and various other public services that make your house valuable are not free.
I would familiarize yourself with your city’s municipal budget before complaining about paying taxes. You’re likely being subsidized by urban dwellers if you live outside the city center.
I pay water, sewer, gas, and power to those utilities directly. The taxes to my county don’t pay for roads as that’s handled by the state DOT. The bulk goes to county police, fire, and schools. Yet, these haven’t seen increased costs, the people in those jobs haven’t received pay raises (which, my God, why not?) and overall, I can’t see why my taxes then got raised.
The city councils know it, but the residents don’t.
The entire point of the last 10 years of Strong Towns was talking about municipal finance, infrastructure costs, and the insolvency of the American suburban town.
https://youtu.be/tI3kkk2JdoI
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