the grandparent commentor provided examples to illustrate 1 idea. you took one of those examples and showed how it could be used to illustrate another idea. thats fair enough. in your second comment you continued drilling this point without expounding upon it and without referring to the original topic. hence it seems you aren't interested in the overall conversation, rather whatever point you are trying to make. im not trying to be pejorative here, it is legitimately my perspective that the only thing you added to the conversation was collateral damage itself, by annoying someone enough for them to get muted.
Okay, fair enough. But once we stop doing things entirely because we are jealous of how some people use it, everything gets a bit dimmer.
I'm all for pricing externalities in. There are some obvious ways to do that with plastic surgeons on scholarships. There are ways to do that with natural resources and power generation and distribution. There's also perhaps space for making deals with the government where load shedding occurs in the data centers, not unlike how the power companies deal with foundries and such.
not sure if you have enabled dead comments or not, somebodys comment was killed for calling you pedantic. anyway nose jobs and skin grafts are both done by a plastic surgeon; one of these procedures saves lives and the other doesn't. the argument is that the taxpayer should prioritize life saving over vanity projects. accusations of jealousy make it seem as though you have missed the point entirely, whether intentionally (which would make the muted person correct) or not
I said "But once we stop doing things entirely because we are jealous of how some people use it"
That's not jealousy, that's totalitarianism. I'm not going to let you do it at all because I don't like it. The "reason" is jealousy, the action is control.
The electric grid and education are both a sort of commons. Once you start telling people how or if they're allowed to use it, you better have a good goddamned reason for doing so. You can block a data center - and we probably should block some of these data centers - the way people have blocked Walmarts: by demonstrating that the store is entirely extractive and is a drain on local infrastructure and impoverishes communities, and either make them make the community whole or fuck off to be someone else's problem.
If you start moralizing how people can use electricity to block something like this, you're going to quickly rediscover that some people think vibrators are morally wrong, and they'll try to block those too.
I started all of this talking about politics. How you do something matters as much as if or why, once you include everyone instead of just deciding you know best for everyone else.
the other day i tried forcing my point into a topic and got flamed for it, i saw the point as relevant but nobody else did, thanks for providing an example of how i must have looked like. i dont know how anything you said relates to publicly funding medicine over vanity, so i say goodbye and exit the conversation