> The hyperscalers have already outspent the most famous US megaprojects

[sebbernery@mamot.fr]

@cwebber OMG I never thought about the fact those invest could have built the best railway system we can imagine on a continent scale. And operate it.

[aldeka@wandering.shop]

@cwebber ah yes, the MarshaLLM plan (_also_ implemented to forestall the spectre of communism!)

[sixohsix@icosahedron.website]

@cwebber with the exception of some railroads, all of those were government run programs. So yeah, private industry can deploy far more private capital than the US government can deploy taxed income. Not surprising.

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@cwebber @aeva chat are we cooked

[dragonfi@social.jsteuernagel.de]

@cwebber

Very nice info-graphic.

I hate this timeline.

[xgranade@wandering.shop]

@glyph @cwebber @aeva by global warming, yes

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@cwebber imagine all the things that could have been done with that money if it was spent on stuff that benefited the general public instead

[musicman@mastodon.social]

@cwebber the data center bubble is clearly dumb, but I think the railroad line might be the most interesting/misleading one on the graph.

Or maybe it is the Interstate line that is misleading...or potentially misleading? Idk, no graph is ever going to be perfect, but yeah...

anyway...

It seems to equate rail spending and road spending, but the Interstate system is not the entire federal road system.

[ohmrun@indieweb.social]

@cwebber
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the over-leveragedest of them all?

[seanmiddleditch@hachyderm.io]

@aeva @cwebber Benefit the general public!? That's absolutely not what the people who invented money wanted it used for.

[smilingdemon@mastodon.art]

@cwebber utterly insane.

[balcanquhal@tldr.nettime.org]

@sixohsix @cwebber perhaps, but all of the numbers the hyperscalers are associated with are partially/entirely made up

[elexia@catcatnya.com]

@cwebber luckily we will never need another data center ever again

[sixohsix@icosahedron.website]

@balcanquhal @cwebber so we're agreeing that this chart is misleading and meaningless but in different ways...?

[flashesofpanic@ruby.social]

@musicman
I've been working my way through _Railroaded_ https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/ac561c89-bdeb-453c-be0a-348eb2f288e5 and if anything it makes me think the railroad line is *too steep* - railroads in the second half of the 19th century were massively over-leveraged and overbuilt (especially in the American West), and a very large fraction of the investment went into the pockets of the financiers rather than into construction. Which... sounds familiar, now that I type it.
@cwebber

[jpkolsen@social.data.coop]

@darkuncle @cwebber It would basically be indistinguishable from the x-axis

[shane_kerr@fosstodon.org]

@cwebber Marx said that capitalism requires periodic destruction of capital. Just sayin'

[aspensmonster@tenforward.social]

@shane_kerr @cwebber Crisis of overproduction here we come

[gimulnautti@mastodon.green]

@cwebber It feels like we’re creating a new ”oil”. On purpose.

A global dependency on compute cycles, with control in very few private hands.

Ready to hold the world hostage line Iran in the Strait of Hormuz..

This is genuinely scary shit.

[akamran@indieweb.social]

@cwebber this is a mind boggling waste of money