Global Warming and Global GAFAM Energy-Wasting

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 22, 2025

Two weeks ago: Global Warming and Free Software as a Force of Mitigation

Burn, baby, burn. Burn more money (borrowed, loans), then hope the waste will somehow translate into profit?

"On the apparent size of the AI [sic] bubble," an associate notes, there is this comments thread which says: (a comment which responds to Meta hype)

The units used to describe the center give away the true purpose: waste. They brag about gigawatts of wasted electricity. If their center were actually about computing cycles, they would have been bragging about teraFLOPs or petaFLOPs, etc. That would have indicated that the center was about getting work done. But that would have risked people asking, "what kind of computing work?" So instead they lead right in with how much they are wasting so as to avoid people asking what they are wasting it for. In short, it is about conspicuous destruction of resources, no more, no less, and not about computing power except is is not their resources which they are destroying but ours and our future's.

Can't these "investors" go back to speculating on random stock fluctuations or betting against progress using futures? Both are destructive but far less destructive than these centers as they waste far less fossil fuel generated electricity and drinking water in the process.

Meta (which means just Facebook rebranded; it was renamed as Facebook was waning and became too a toxic brand) has no future. Moreover, it also has a lot of debt (it's at an all-time record) and many layoffs. The slop thing shows that right now it plays roulette with another buzzword/hype/catchphrase because metaverse (VR with more hype) failed and there's no way to rely on Facebook or even WhatsApp - both of which may be banned in Russia imminently.

"Several of Facebook's bet-the-future endeavors have failed," the associate explains. "However, [NSA's whistleblower] Bill Binney pointed out that if Facebook had not just arrived at the moment in time that the US government decided to make a social graph of residents connections then the NSA would have been obligated to create it."

"Recall that at the beginning, every time Facebook was fading, there would be a flurry of puff pieces in the yellow rag tabloids promoting FOMO; each and every time."

That's still happening. Now Facebook openly speaks about replacing actual users with chatbots to fake "engagement" [1, 2]. █