Thank Libertarian Jesus for your Job Creators, Peasant!
This doesn’t seem like a great way to avoid getting this construction site burned to the ground daily.
Or they could take over the state government or power utilities and tell the data centers to fuck off.
The problem is that the situation isn’t strictly new for Liberty, and has been dragging for the better part of two decades. Per the Fortune report, Liberty was supposed to have started buying power from other sellers as far back as 2009, when NV Energy sold Liberty its California assets. A temporary agreement was set in place so the situation could be resolved, but that was extended repeatedly in 2015, 2020, and 2025, a fact that Fortune says it verified via regulatory documents.
Danielle Hughes, a local resident and CEO of the nonprofit Tahoe Spark, also points out that at only 49,000 strong, even if the area could get a good short-term deal on power coming from the west side, it wouldn’t be able to find affordable long-term pricing competing with giants. Understandably, Spark and another local interest group want the California Public Utilities Commission to fully oversee Liberty’s procurement process, except that the entity has no actual power over NV Energy.
For its part, NV Energy is building out its Greenlink West 525 kV line and intends to transition Lake Tahoe to this pipe, but watts are only expected to flow on it come May 2027, making for the closest of shaves. The operator says that the transition was set “well before data center load growth was a consideration,” and “not a reaction to recent developments,” but at the same time, there’s no telling if the schedule could slip.
If we could stop reposting this every hour or so, that would be great. The outrage over data centers aside it looks like this problem has been ongoing for more than a decade.
good news is - trebuchets can be built with hand tools.
Yeah, but then you can see them being rolled out by Palantir’s street cameras. These things are going to get drone striked, I would bet on it on a prediction market if I could. Drones are like one of the top 10 hobbies in America, after our number one hobby… Blowing shit up.
Techspot deleted the article. Here’s an Internet Archive capture.
It seems like a force who invades an area and steals all of the resources but in america it’s “just business”.
Yeah for deregulation!
/s
Seize the means of energy production!
…they could speak to their chosen representation…
Alternative…be the light you wish to see in the world. It’s cheap and effective.
50,000 people used to live here.
Now it’s a ghost town.
Using AI is actively harming people, stop using AI
It’s getting really bad. The software engineers I work with have been telling me that they now have their coding agents running 24/7 and it sucks for them because they never really clock out anymore. They know that if they don’t periodically check in and set the agent on to the next task, or solve some glitch, that it will only sit there for 8 hours until they come in next day and deal with it, and then they’ve lost that 8 hours. They’re able to do a lot with AI but it is not always fast. So they feel pressure to babysit their AI task flows all the time.
My thought was Jesus Christ what kind of energy is it consuming for these things to be running like that nonstop. I’ve stopped myself from using AI to look up one fact because it would be a waste of energy. But these guys have agents running agents running agents and they’re just crunching and crunching constantly.
It’s effective in terms of cranking out software. I’m talking about skilled senior engineers managing this directly. They know what they’re about. But at what cost?
At least they’re still trusting their software engineers to use it. My employer hired a bunch of people for their “AI taskforce”, the leader of which can’t even be bothered to use a password on his vibecoded SQL database full of sensitive company data. And you can bet your ass he’s getting paid three times as much as anyone in the IT department.
Best thing is that they’re expecting us to take care of their mistakes.
We went through that phase. A couple of vibe-coding douchenozzles had our management convinced that everyone can ship code now. They launched a whole initiative to get product managers and UX designers deploying. It failed. Then they dialed it back to “cosmetic fixes only” that aren’t worth an engineer’s time. Now they realize that having uneducated PMs using AI to ship code is actually slower than that PM asking an engineer to use AI to ship code. So we’re back to having distinct functions again. All that really matters is that someone in the chain is using AI to accelerate the process, and the engineers turn out to be so much better at it than anyone else that we now just let them work.
It’s effective in terms of cranking out software. I’m talking about skilled senior engineers managing this directly. They know what they’re about. But at what cost?
Those senior engineers became skilled by starting out as entry-level engineers who didn’t know all that stuff, but learned from the senior engineers before them (and by writing a lot of bugs that hopefully got caught by code reviews.) Now, companies are using AI as an excuse not to hire entry-level people.
15 years from now, we will find there are no mid-level people to promote, because they never got their entry-level job and are now waiting tables.
I said it was effective at cranking out software, not at training the next generation of engineers. However obviously the terms of engineering are changing so it would also be a mistake to automatically think we should train them exactly as we did before. Some people saw compilers as the same thing: it’s an abstraction layer! How is anyone going to know what’s actually happening in the CPU anymore?! Well, they don’t actually need to.
Okay but how does that effect next quarter? I need line up now
What I was thinking… 50000 is an army.
The rich choose violence daily. The 50,000 would be committing self defense.
A lot of those will be elderly and children.
Edit: and according to this the population there has just been getting older and older. https://www.tahoeopendata.org/pages/demographics
Most old people can rooty tooty point and shooty
Coming to the defense of others unable to defend themselves is a legally protected action. Just saying.
“In other news, 50,000 people wearing ski masks manually disassemble a data center.”
In a better world, I’d be reading that headline.
Its going to be protected by the military. They are going to turn the residents into terrorists just because they want to survive.
I wouldn’t mind “community uses eminent domain to socialize a power utility.” Then the data center can buy the power, at market rates, after the community’s power needs are met.
This is the play. They are giving up $3.3B (?) in incentives to the get the data center, which will strain the power grid and cost citizens. Why not (bribery) invest that in the power grid directly so it can support both, and monetize on it. Almost nowhere has the power needed for these data centers, so advertising reliable power would be a big selling point. And you can charge them enough to recoup the investment over time, and the citizens they are supposed to represent would actually benefit.
Also “50,000 Lake Tahoans visit the houses of utilities CEOs in the night and thoroughly encourage them to review their policy shifts”
