To Feed Data Centers, Pennsylvania Faces a New Fracking Surge

[jfz9580m]

4. It's not just that hatrack

Last edited Wed Dec 17, 2025, 06:32 PM - Edit history (1)

These industries are filled with these guys who break human social and professional contracts casually and in the ickiest ways, to monetize things and spaces no one thought an adult would find confusing wrt asking for permissions.

I am not American, but have been a member here for 19 years now. I was in grad school when I joined DU during the Bush years. I was an environmentalist from way back and that was my primary motivation for joining. I picked DU on reading that Elad was vegan. 1/3 of the admin being vegan made the board a good fit. I was very pleased on returning after a 10 year break, to see that you hatrack were still around in 2020, with the same V for Vendetta icon . Oh yeah you changed it to Ukraine.

We exchanged emails long back. You wouldn’t remember. I was nam78_two back then. I pmed you about how I wished there were as many environmental stories as celeb ones and you sent me a laconic and acerbic remark

I saw In Memoriam that Saphire Blue who used to post about poverty and homelessness etc back then is no longer with us.

But to get back on point, I cut my teeth in an EECS dept in the US in grad school. And that was a purely mercenary scam though a high end one. I was too young to get at the time that “Hey maybe if I am here at this high end school which seems to have accepted me only because of a high GRE score, average grades from a no name school and a reasonable command of English and its just a business transaction-I should expect better services.” Even by their own Randian standards the services sucked. I wasn’t such a hopeless student that with some guidance I couldn’t have performed better. There was none. My assigned advisor seemed nice, but mostly it was just ..no interest. The natural sciences were way better. have never been spoilt or entitled even though I am an only child - I just like a bit of space ;-/.

That was one reason my first postdoc mentor was so different -he really cared about mentoring. He is a Bernie supporter..he is self-consistent. He was pretty awesome. He wasn’t touchy feely or sappy. I was in awe of him.
Which I never have been of these Google creeps and I have forgotten what it used to be like to have automatic respect for scientists.
These guys are a menace and should never be near human brains.

He was generally laconic and rigorous etc. But you knew that whatever ..I could guess how he thinks outside science.
I don’t know..He was very much the old school publicly funded scientist without much flavor of the military or industries. I liked that.

When I wrote a recommendation letter for him, I was deliberately more measured to not sound like a fawning damn LLM or some sort of ghastly sycophantic person. As opposed to those tech creeps where the stuff I say here is the better stuff..kidding.

They don’t value anything. They are either too stupid or too malicious to get that Soap operas and clicks and tears. That’s not the tangible value a good teach or mentor confers. Daft..those guys.

Like your insides getting scooped out with a rusty pitchfork..Google personality AI agent..terrible..That would be beyond obscene.)

If like James Buchanan you think anyone motivated by anything but the crassest form of greed or desire for importance is a zealot, how would your goods and services not deteriorate..their worldviews are less self consistent I notice with right wingers.

That means that job satisfaction, respect from the community as a teacher (which can’t be commodified which these guys don’t seem to get)-those things just don’t matter and some horrible person’s (Buchanan’s) horrible worldview is the “prediction machine for progress”.

That’s really clunky and stupid. How would an AI trained using methods and procedures from that crowd not be an abomination in every way? And they would totally blame not the privatization of education and greed, but the student. The Randian view is so shallow and these guys hate being confronted with realities which mediocre scientists like me who still get how science and reality are don’t mind as much.
But I don’t like stupid crap being gussied up and sold as something amazing.

I am pretty certain my last employer-one of those ghastly schools: Dartmouth, Yale, Harvard, Stanford, MIT etc. Doesn’t really matter -they are all the same.
I focus on Stanford and MIT due to their extensive ties with Google and Alex Pentland and such people and they had the MIT Media Lab, that Aaron Schwartz suicide. Those two schools are jerks.

But I totally bet they were trying to shill a version of the ORI - like a creepy AI agent that is on your devices, plus healthcare. The whole idea is that the ORI is stressful so a creepy little bit of tech solutionism that normalizes a Panopticon is just awesome.

Even I would find Internet sleuths stressful though not the Ori. That’s kinda the same tablodization and phony populism of the net being represented democratization.

I hate spectacles. I am glad the era of being silent and pretending that one thinks RetractionWatch is awesome! Ioannidis is awesome! To show how contrarian and boldy honest and open they are. While those guys whale on publicly funded science like petty Nazis, but don’t really attack what is making science so shitty.
They are always eager to platform loudmouthed venture capitalists like that ass Roger MacNamee, but hypocritical.

I am not saying that RetractionWatch doesn’t ding some pretty awful people. But in retrospect rather than being this awesome self correcting of science, it’s this rather petty venture on a spook and corporation built web with a pretty libertarian bent. It’s part of the same worldview that made lfie so hard after Covid.

Many people in science are from overseas and are not paid much. The NIH postdoc is not meant to be the gig economy, but that is how Google, Facebook etc would view it and find ways to exploit it.

I am myself self correcting some old work on my own dime and it’s fine. That’s my job. But I self police but I can’t pretend that I think this other policing type is awesome. I don’t like policing other people and think that sort of performative honesty is kinda..dishonest. It is crossing some ts and dotting some is. But most of the science I saw was honest and honestly collaborative.

The sleaziness I have seen was all from this Trumper humper or humpers of capitalism of the Californian Ideology strain. And I don’t think it is actually good for publicly funded science or medicine.

The gist is that these guys are libertarians destroying the public sector or making it completely useless and that started a long time back and is mercenary.
I am an honest scientist, but I don’t have patience with heartlessness nor histrionics and soaps.
It’s why I liked your email response.;-/
I swing between gruff and friendly myself. Not bipolar ..