alt Hacker NewsWell, the climate is part of it, but I deliberately steered clear of that, because people get funny. I do agree it seems like a frivolous waste.
the thing that people _will_ notice is that they will not be able to afford LNG (ie heating), but that will also drive up peak energy price, so summer nights will be very hot because peak generation can't kick in because all the gas is contracted out.
Then if AI actually works, more than it does now, it'll put loads of people out of work. This means that money supply dries up. This pushes up the cost of debt. Meaning that infrastructure gets _more expensive_
that and mass unemployment.
It just seems that all these clever people live in thier own little worlds, without bothering to look at how people around them will be affected.
> It just seems that all these clever people live in thier own little worlds, without bothering to look at how people around them will be affected.
I'd like to add the possibility that all these clever people did look at how people around them will be affected, and they either consider the personal gain to be worth the pain, or they think "if I don't do it, the other guy will!"
Economically speaking, each of them is behaving rationally. And since economics also tells us that locations refusing them will be left behind, we can't say no, right? And let's not even think about how much money these people are pumping into politics... IMO the obvious conclusion is that our economic system is fundamentally broken, because it affords far too much power to individuals.
As a thought experiment, consider that comparable mountains of money would have been available to massively increase the housing supply while making positive RoI, but it didn't happen because these people wouldn't have made enough money.