Comment by UncleOxidant
11 hours ago
> The rush to fill brand new high energy intensive data centers with hardware that has commercially useful lifetimes measured in months (instead of decades for machine tools) seems quite short sighted to me.
There's a sort of collective ADHD where we as a culture or economy collectively chase the latest shiny bauble in the hopes of getting rich without having to expend any effort. It often ends badly for the economy and then we go through a phase where we collectively are forced to slow down and reflect on our mistakes vowing not to repeat them... only to do so a decade or two later. The older you get, the more you notice this pattern. We did it in 2000 with the dotcom implosion and then again in 08 with housing and shady mortgages. This time it's overbuilding AI; putting way too much capital into infrastructure that has short useful lifetime.
Arguably this boom bust cycle is more of a intentional feature than a bug. Thanks to the cycle private actors are able and to capture the benefits of the boom, but when the bill is due the downside falls on the general public or taxpayers at large, basically Ersatz Capitalism or Lemon Socialism. 08 is the clearest example but they're all generally fueled by credit cycles creating exuberance.
There's also a element of lost collective memory via generational change providing a new supply of optimists.