> Your lawn is trying to tell you something.

It's saying "I'm an unnatural, non-native monoculture that does little to support biodiversity but will gladly suck up your time and money."

Sorry to speak negatively of the thing you're working on Andrew, but the subject matter is one I feel strongly about. Having a short cut lawn area has many recreational uses, but most people don't do anything except maintain most of their lawn. On top of that, many people become focused on a particular aesthetic that usually requires non-native grasses and harmful pesticides. In some places, scarse water supplies are used just to maintain a certain color.

I encourage everyone to look into replacing grass lawns with native plant landscapes, and where you do want it short cut, look into a mix of plants like clover that require far less work to keep alive than most grass monocultures.

I agree, broadly, with your statement. I am removing my entire front yard to xeriscape. I compost and am otherwise environmentally active and conscious.

That said, plenty of people _do_ actually use their lawns, especially those of us with children. My actual grass lawn is surrounded by native and low water use plants, but my small patch of green (around 2k sqft), will stay green until my kids move out.

I think it's much more useful to target the endless industrial and commercial parks that have far more grass than a normal size neighborhood. Let people have some joy in their lives.

I don't disagree at all. I have a fairly large area I keep cut short for playing with my dog and having campfires. But I'm converting my front yard to native fruit bushes and flowers. And the parts I do cut short(either for recreation or just for code compliance until I get the time to convert it) never get sprayed or fertilized besides from the natural falling of leaves and the clover fixing nitrogen. It's a mix of various grasses, clover, creeping charlie, wood violets, dandelions and other plants that all survive a few mowings per month. I do manually pull out things like thistle since I like to walk barefoot sometimes, and aggressive invasives like garlic mustard.

I have gone full "pocket forest" / Miyawaki Forest - planted 100 trees in my tiny back yard.

Technique developed by the Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki: planting seedlings close together makes them compete for sunlight, thus growing tall quickly. Get a forest in under a decade!

https://www.creatingtomorrowsforests.co.uk/blog/the-miyawaki...

Huh! Seems quite obvious in retrospect, but the forced competition for limited resources that encourages growth, while fairly dystopian* if applied to humans, is an interesting idea in terms of forests, as long as you don't believe trees can experience qualia such as grief, a fear of death, unhappiness, etc.

[0] I was thinking of this kind of human dystopia: "overpopulation could never be a problem: if people run out of food they'll either invent a better alternative to farms or simply arrange themselves in groups where people who can achieve the highest metric that the head/quorum of their society wants the fastest will be fed and the new growth that can't be supported and can't reach that level will simply "select themselves put of existence", increasing our evolution by >10x"

P.S. ..that being said, if a confirmed traveller from the future tells me that in 100 years we discover that trees have feelings (just like we discovered that plants communicate about threats and exhibit behaviour that is definitely anthropomorphized by a tiny, but loud portion of people as selflessness), I would not be at all surprised. I mean I would be surprised, but about as surprised as I was when I learned that a captive octopus that lived in a tank kept shorting out the electrical system in his room at night. No one had any idea wtf was happening until they put cameras and found out that when it wanted to go to sleep at night, it would turn off the lights by spraying salt water into electrical outlets until the breakers tripped so he could get some nice dark sleep.

It seems to be a trait from the time we became _the_ apex predator that we are way too overconfident about our understanding of our environment, especially the other creatures that share this rock with us. Are we the baddies?

I'd add more but this already went on a huge tangent. Thanks for the link.

>Are we the baddies?

As a like minded person wrt the environment I'd like to ask what makes you think that this should be a question (I know the skit)?

I appreciate the sentiment, perhaps it would be wise to include some lawn alternatives or eco-friendly lawn techniques, or even drought tolerant landscaping. Though my site is not likely to change peoples' behavior around traditional lawns, perhaps we can eliminate needless application of pesticides and fertilizers by focusing on the right applications at the right time, rather than via guesswork. I also appreciate the irony of a lawn site using AI which itself uses a lot of water. Seriously though, this is helpful in that I can also be considering ways of encouraging users to seek alternatives. Maybe they don't even want the pressure of trying to keep a short cut, green lawn.

If you were able to translate chronic problems like drainage/poor soil/etc into broader alternatives like landscaping or LA/engineering, that could increase your market on the service provider side.

Great insight. Never would have thought of it. Thank you

> Maybe they don't even want the pressure of trying to keep a short cut, green lawn.

I think offering a range of options and leaving it up to people could go a long way. Especially since people could just try out all options to see what it would involved, how they might imagine (and like) the results, before committing to anything.

As in, here's the lawn, I want it to a.) keep it trim and green, b.) keep it decent looking and still human friendly, but also make it low maintenance and better for biodiversity c.) turn it into a jungle of flowers.

I tried clover. Eventually it just got replaced more and more with grass, now there's not much there. It was meant to be more drought tolerant than grass, but it didn't work out that way. I probably need to do more research.

I did look into it but neither the state, the county, the city, nor the HOA allow for that to happen. It’s gotta be Bermuda and it’s gotta be green.

What (U.S., I assume) state do you live in that has a state law requiring green grass? I've never heard of that.

Georgia, but doesn’t require green, just doesn’t allow for wild grass to grow. The HOA can set any kind of rule it wants grass wise. Please prove wrong!

One of a whole list of reasons I would never buy into an HOA.

I do realize that in some localities you don't have a lot of choice, though.

While in some ways I am against HOAs, I've also lived in neighborhoods without them and inevitably someone always ends up with a rusted out old Buick covered in a tattered blue tarp in their front yard for 400 years

Kill your lawn!

*Advice only applies to neighborhoods without an HOA.

I dug a lot into "starving cancer" while we tried to save our dog from an aggressive sarcoma. I can't find his name off hand but I recall reading about a researcher who used a ketogenic diet to keep glucose low, and then occasionally gave drugs to "hammer" the cancer by quickly and temporarily depleting glutamine as well.

Collecting water with tarps is just strategic collection of condensation/dew. Clothing has the issue of often being warmer than ambient because people are warm blooded, so it's unlikely water would condense from the air(though it can condense on the inside from evaporated sweat).

With any water use, I'd say it's important to examine how the water gets back into the system. Does it return to the same source or end up elsewhere? Does it return clean, treated, or polluted? If it evaporates, where is that vapor most likely to end up?

A lot of ways people use water can actually end up back in the source area after treatment. That should be considered differently than water evaporated in a desert that rarely receives rains.

We should never assume any aquifer can be used up lightly, whether Utah or in a rainforest. Droughts are going to become more common, and not only does a lower water table impact other human activities, but also plants that have deep roots and anything relying on natural springs that might dry up faster if we're wasting a bunch on evaporative cooling.

Demanding closed loop cooling is just as important as demanding self built renewable power for new data centers.

Just friggin tax carbon. The notion that we pick disfavored new industries and require them to bear the brunt of our renewable buildout is absurd and effectively a tax on the 'new'.

I see no reason we should grandfather in 'heritage carbon emitters' when we are emitting way more than we ought to.

Water isn't carbon.

Leaving aside whether a carbon tax would be an effective solution to CO2 (I genuinely don't know), there's no reason to suspect it would be an effective solution to our water crisis, particularly given the huge growth in solar recently.

Datacenters don't need cooling because they're burning gas for their power. They need cooling because computation produces heat. Even if they were feeding as much clean solar power back into the grid as they were using, we would still need to find a solution to their voracious thirst.

My comment was in reply to the self-built renewable bit at the very end.

In terms of water, I also think that water is severely underpriced for a scarce resource.

The problem with trying to price it is that literally everyone needs it to live. Access to clean drinking water is, and must be, a human right.

We need to find a way to limit its use for profit, while still allowing actual humans who need it to get as much of it as they need.

Georgists have figured this out long ago. To make a regressive tax progressive all you need to do is turn the revenue gained from it into a flat per capita tax rebate. Also residential water use is tiny. Maybe your water bill goes up $400 a year but that doesnt matter when you get a $1000 rebate because most of the tax is paid by agriculture.

Ultimately 'profit' is the result of transitive dependencies on things people want fulfill what they are willing to pay for. But I agree that we should subsidize residential water and electricity usage. But the base price before subsidy should reflect the externalities.

Pricing water properly includes figuring out how much someone is drawing directly from wells on private property.

And the feeds are largely the way they are due to unregulated greed.

There is a different root cause then, perhaps.

If these data centers are going to be so profitable, then it should be simple to make guarantees about clean self-power, closed loop cooling, and noise and light pollution mitigation. There definitely shouldn't be deals to avoid taxes while lying about job creation.

Maybe if they did those things, there would be fewer permitting fights.

This is pretty much exactly my gripes, too. Data centers are necessary, but why are we doing this all the wrong way?

The new Utah data center is building new gas pipelines to generate 9GW instead of requiring ANY percentage of green energy, while also giving massive tax breaks that the families living nearby and statewide will have to cover.

For actionable information on this specific project, see:

https://www.breatheutah.org/news/the-stratos-project-questio...

I keep seeing people all over the internet adding the caveat that the data centres are necessary in comments following stories about rollout (and often the stories themselves). But never why that's the case. So the question is why are more data centres necessary at the proposed rollout rates? What actually drives this demand?

Don't worry, upstate New York's got your back.

We see your gas pipelines and raise you 100 to 316 diesel generators in a generator farm, with "only 20 running at a time". Shitty Bitcoin mining company that didn't give us any jobs suddenly pivoting to AI.

https://northcountrynow.com/stories/massena-town-board-takin...

Hot take: this is actual a symptom of power demand being too low, not too high. Bitcoin mining didn't draw enough energy to drive a real structural transition, so minors made up the gap with diesel. If NY had Virgina or Texas levels of datacenters, they could provide enough spend and power offtake to justify investments in nuclear.

Can you deploy a nuclear plant in 6 months, which is the time scale these facilities are looking for? You can do that with solar or diesel or natgas.

I agree with this in part. Funneling some of these massive investments into clean power, reduced water use, and noise mitigation, should certainly be a big policy priority, but I think actually achieving those things requires a lot of other policy flexibility. For example, if we want data center builders to use clean power, we also need to clear the way for them to actually build nuclear power plants. I suspect the water problem will solve it self as closed loop cooling systems come down in cost (and besides, 80% of data centers' net water use happens at the power generation stage).

Also, I am a big fan of data centers profit-sharing directly with communities.

Nuclear plants will not be built in the timescales these plants demand. No data centre is going to wait 5-10 years for a nuclear plant to be built in the USA, and the modular passively safe designs aren't ready.

I also seriously doubt the ability of the Trump admin to co-ordinate the required reforms and investments in nuclear energy.

Renewables, batteries and gas are probably going to be the only viable option.

> There definitely shouldn't be deals to avoid taxes while lying about job creation.

The people making those deals are physiologically incapable of not attempting to benefit from socialized externalities to make obscene levels of private profit.

You might as well be asking them to voluntarily stop breathing or pay a fair amount of taxes, they just can't do it.

The problem is it only takes one stupid municipality for them to get a ridiculous deal and, unfortunately, there are a lot of cities that don't have great representation. These companies probably only have to ask 10 different places for an obviously disastrous deal before one of this says yes. It doesn't take corruption, just odds.

>clean self-power

Just clean and scale the grid.

>closed loop cooling

Just clean and scale your water supply. Remove all the lead that's clearly in there while you are at it.

>noise and light pollution mitigation

NextDC B2 has its phase 2 under construction right now, after the construction workers have all gone home theres no external noise from Phase 1. You can stand outside Equinix SY1 2 or 3 and you cant hear anything but road noise. Its a solved engineering problem. Any deviance from this can be interrogated locally. Its not a pertinent issue with Datacenters as a class.

What if instead of trying to figure out how to catch criminals, we focus on building a society where no one wants to be a criminal? Can we find solutions to what causes crime, like desperation, greed, fear, failure to understand and have compassion for other people, etc?

For anyone trying to figure out how to build a society where no one wants to be a criminal, I highly recommend When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment by Mark Kleiman.

There are evidence-backed ways of reducing criminality.

One counterintuitive way of reducing crime is to increase the likelihood of being caught, to have small-but-increasing consequences for committing crimes, and to increase the swiftness of sentencing.

For example, if you are caught drinking and driving, you immediately spend 1-2 days in jail.

Long sentences are not very productive at reducing crime or at least are a very inefficient way to do so.

An intuitive way to understand it is imagining that there was a system where if you stole something, you 100% of the time got hit with a charge to your account of the item value + $10. No one would steal again even if the penalty for getting caught was relatively nothing. Because the feedback loop is so short and guaranteed.

No ones life would be ruined over a dumb choice and yet they would change their behavior very fast.

You have to deal with the judgement-proof somehow.

There’s effectively two sets of laws - one for those with something to lose (fines, etc) and one for those with nothing to lose.

It’s still the same. If you steal something and have no money you lose the item and get some small penalty, perhaps a day in jail. If there is absolutely no chance you’d get away with it, everyone quickly realises there is no point.

Scott Alexander has a good analysis of these issues:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prison-and-crime-much-more-...

A leading cause of premature death in the US is car crashes. Car crashes are in almost all cases caused or exacerbated by operator negligence. That negligence is not caused by desperation/greed/fear/lack of empathy, but by a confidence that one won't get caught or punished.

I can't imagine a better way to deal with this problem than with cameras that can detect these behaviors and issue citations impartially and consistently.

It's totally possible to implement a system where cameras do this but do not record enough data to amount to consistent surveillance of people who aren't acting negligent (i.e. using radar to trigger them), but as long as the conversation is "cameras everywhere vs no cameras ever" these kinds of compromises seem unlikely.

> That negligence is not caused by desperation/greed/fear/lack of empathy, but by a confidence that one won't get caught or punished.

Greed comes in for the perceived time savings of speeding or ignoring signals or the desire to "have fun" or be perceived as cool. Lack of concern for pedestrians and other drivers/passenger by driving recklessly is the lack of empathy/compassion part.

We have the technology - the government could automatically ticket you a dollar per mile per hour over the speed limit if we wanted it to.

And if nobody sped except in emergencies fatalities would likely be way down (and speed limits would be adjusted up where sane).

Reducing poverty only has a minor impact on crime.

I think some Criminals commit crimes because they know they will most likely get away with it, they are bad people

I think people miss that this is a possibility. Yet it's fairly easy to see that when more people become homeless more bicycles get stolen off the street. Idk about you, but I'd have to be pretty desperate to steal a bicycle. Idk about you, but if I was living on the street struggling you find food, I'd be pretty desperate. I mean FFS you don't even have a stove to cook ramen. And where are you going to get the money to afford a camping stove?

I guffawed at "proper checks/balances". Since ICE brownshirts have been roaming around with masks and automatic weapons, abducting random people and even shooting some, you're at "checks/balances". What?

This is largely because states will not cooperate with ICE to help identify criminals among immigrants. ICE is not an issue in states where the police are cooperating with it.

Good old-fashioned "we can do this the easy way or the hard way" extortion. Why should a state want the federal government to just do whatever it wants within that state?

I'm not American, I never mentioned America, and these cameras are being installed across the world. Not everything is about America and a single government agency. Sometimes it is about the bigger picture when having discussions. I also disagree with your very biased wording of such a discussion and don't wish to go down this line of unproductive discussion.

The article was about Seattle and the surrounding discussion has been US-centric. I recognize it's a global problem but I don't think it's the same everywhere. We shouldn't just throw up our hands like "oh well."

Yes, but you're arguing against a police agency utilizing a tool to enforce existing laws. Whether or not you agree with enforcing immigration laws is your opinion, but it is a law and that is not personally what my comment is concerned about or addressing. I am referring to misuse, this would not be misuse, it would instead be a law you disagree with enforcing. Which I feel is off-topic from my discussion as it is centered around laws you disagree with, not about the underlying idea of Flock cameras being added.

If you have a problem with police being able to utilize cameras to enforce laws, please make your case about that. But if your problem is about a specific government agency enforcing laws that you disagree with, please move on. I'm not interested in a political debate about that.

It feels like you have not been paying attention at all. There isn't accountability when government stormtroopers shoot law-abiding citizens in the streets. (There hasn't even been an investigation). That's not me "disagreeing with certain laws"--the federal government is blatantly violating constitutional rights--and, incidentally the law. And here you're arguing the surveillance state is going to have "proper checks and balances" and just abide by said checks and balances. You're literally saying "oh they're just enforcing the existing laws" when the current US administration is the most lawless ever and refuses to hold itself accountable for anything. The breakdown in the rule of law is just staggering. They can take their cameras and shove them.

Have a good day!

With these kinds of things, I want to see comparisons to trained, alert humans. Cut out all the distracted, stressed, tired, incompetent, intoxicated cases from the baseline. That includes rushed doctors at the end of a long shift.

A self driving car doing better than a drunk on the freeway doesn't reassure me that it'll do better than sober me in a snowstorm.

That would be a fine bar if you could ensure your doctors or nearby drivers aren't distracted, stressed, tired, incompetent, or intoxicated.

How does sober you in a snowstorm cause the drunk on the freeway not to drive?

Non sequitur. The core idea is that if you have just self-driving cars you won't be trained enough to drive properly next time you're caught in a blizzard, because you never drove for the last 5 years.

I also question if the kind of person who actually drives while drunk - knowing perfectly by thousand of society inputs and peer pressure that it is wrong - will care enough to buy a self-driving car.

It doesn't, but I'm not going to trust my own safety to a self driving car that can only be said to be better than the worst drivers. It's a bad baseline.

A less high-tech way to reduce mosquitoes in your own back yard is to set up an attractive nesting location, such as a bucket filled with plant cuttings and water with protection from the rain, and putting Bti(Bacillus thuringiensis subspecies israelensis) in it. Bti will kill the larvae after they hatch. You can buy Bti pretty easily, usually in a dehydrated form called mosquitoes bits or mosquito dunks. Make sure to remove other potential nesting locations or add Bti to them too.

I am not an expert, but the last time I looked at this kind of thing what I took away from it was that you're not really doing anything to negatively impact the total mosquito population, you're just creating a new nesting site that won't produce adults. My understanding was that while it might feel good, it is not actually doing much to impact the population.

Apparently mosquitos don't really migrate. They get migrated by wind, but otherwise they stick to a relatively small radius. The idea with these is that you can reduce the hyperlocal population, like in a patio area. I use them on my property. It's not a silver bullet, but I can spend most nights outside without being overwhelmed as long as I maintain them.