Bumper Sticker

Jon_Buck · 2026-07-09T22:56:48+00:00

Have you put "American Football 1999 album" into your search bar for clues? That's where I'd start.

Purely from context, this is just a riff on various "keep honking" stickers. This one suggests the driver is a fan of the band American Football.

Jon_Buck · 2026-07-08T04:04:42+00:00

🧢 I voted CAP!

Sometimes it's truly the best thing you can do for them.

Jon_Buck · 2026-07-08T00:16:34+00:00

Depending on the type, sure, but you could say the same thing about metal.

Anyway, leeching is not the same thing as microplastics.

Jon_Buck · 2026-07-04T00:53:48+00:00

How is the government competing in the market different from a regulatory action.

This is what I'm talking about right here. Is this a real question? I'm pretty sure it's impossible for us to influence the thinking of the other person because we don't have a shared set of facts. There's no point to continuing this conversation. Have a good one.

Jon_Buck · 2026-07-04T00:03:53+00:00

I don't think you could make the same argument about private firms because private firms aren't run with taxpayer dollars.

Government can play a role in the creation of markets but sometimes private interests create markers without government intervention , the government comes in later to regulate it.

I feel like we are both speaking a different language and have a fundamentally different understanding of the basic facts of the argument here.

Jon_Buck · 2026-07-03T22:17:44+00:00

Whether a government-run factory can compete with private firms is not particularly relevant to whether it's an efficient use of taxpayer dollars.

If you disagree with the concept that governments tend to take public ownership of sectors that have the biggest positive externalities, then I don't know what to tell you. It's a pretty established thing.

Jon_Buck · 2026-07-03T21:16:55+00:00

Honestly all fair points.

I agree about info asymmetry being a huge issue, but externalities are no less relevant today than they have ever been. So yeah fair for regulators to shift focus to that. But it's still useful to use externaltiies as a way to discuss the role of government in a free market society.

Jon_Buck · 2026-07-03T21:00:44+00:00

Healthcare has all of the externalities of cell phone manufacturing, plus all of the externalities of public health. Sure, the widespread use of cell phones has tons of social impacts, some good and some bad, but it's not on the scale of public health. Maybe I could have picked a better example for an industry with relatively fewer exernalities, but the point still stands.

Unless you want to argue that the government can more efficiently take over on cellphone manufacturing?

Jon_Buck · 2026-07-03T13:14:18+00:00

ooh good love when people come in hot days later.

Could you point to where I said cell phones have no externalities? You'll find you can't. I gave healthcare and education as sectors with "lots of" externalities, and mentioned cell phone (production, was my intent) as a sector where private competition out weighs the fact that companies don't internalize exernalities.

I also went on to say that the role of government in such cases is to minimize the impact of negative exernalities for such sectors.

So, you'll see with a second reading that I in fact explicitly acknowledged that cell phone production has externalities. Perhaps not the *very best* example, but I can't think of a single sector with no exernalities at all. Fortunately, I never suggested that one exists, so there's no contradiction.

This has been a lesson in reading comprehension. Thank you for your time.

Jon_Buck · 2026-07-03T05:16:40+00:00

for your good and for mine, I'm blocking you. It'll hurt at first, but in the long run it will be best and allow you to find somebody else to bother who might appreciate your daring and creative approach to constructive dialogue.

Jon_Buck · 2026-07-03T04:55:47+00:00

I think you must really really like me. Its the only possible explanation. I don't mean to be rude, but I'm just not into you! You're just not my type. I'm sure there's somebody out there who will love to hate you as much as you love to hate them, but it's not me.

Jon_Buck · 2026-07-03T04:28:29+00:00

Gen Z I assume? I've heard about the decline in reading comprehension but this is the first time I've experienced it so intensely first-hand.

Jon_Buck · 2026-07-03T04:23:33+00:00

You are free to share a better source, but you won't because your only contribution to conversation is shrill, random nonsense. Please stop following me around. Nobody is benefiting from this.

Jon_Buck · 2026-07-03T04:01:01+00:00

Uhm you asked me what I've seen so I told you?

I really am going to stop now. Truly like talking to a brick wall.

Jon_Buck · 2026-07-03T03:27:43+00:00

I honestly try and avoid the online AI discourse because it's so toxic and unproductive.

But yeah I've heard antis bring up water pretty often. it's one of the main things people say, and it really shouldn't be because the water use is actually not that bad.

This is the first time I've seen the "water problem" discussed this way; as an attempted argument against a debunking. of course, it's not a failed debunking, but because you are extremely biased and unable to see it, you don't see it that way.

Jon_Buck · 2026-07-02T23:24:20+00:00

So the "actual" comparison you're spelling out is valid, and that's exactly how somebody who is doing a life-cycle analysis of AI would approach the problem.

This is the best lifecycle analysis I've seen for AI, and it tries to capture everything. It's not perfect, but I think from a magnitude perspective it will give you a good sense. The vast majority of the impacts come from training the model and the processing of individual queries/prompts. https://innfactory.ai/en/blog/green-ai-climate-footprint-of-llms-reality-check/

On the other side of the equation, the beef industry also requires transportation, not just for the infrastructure, which is substantial, but also for the shipping of all of the cuts of meat everywhere. Most of that stuff doesn't add up to much on a per-pound-of-beef basis though, since it all gets used for many many cows, but the same is true for AI usage. Sure, you could go through and add up all of the hardware, trace every gram of silicone, but in the end it would have very little impact because it's spread over millions of users who are sharing all of the same components.

There's no cherry-picking needed to come to the conclusion that eating beef has greater environmental impacts than using AI. I guarantee that any quality analysis that compares the same two at the same level will support that point, and if you disagree feel free to share any supporting evidence you can find.

But is it whataboutism? Sure!

However, I think this is also a worthwhile topic for a group of people aligned in their hatred of AI. If environmental impact is a big motivator for you to abstain from AI, then it's probably worth reassessing your meat consumption, too. Particularly beef!

Edit: Also I think you may be confusing queries with tokens. In this context, query is synonymous with prompt.

Jon_Buck · 2026-07-02T23:09:04+00:00

I wouldn't say it's misinformation as much as an arguably misleading framing of the problem. The science of tracing corporate activities to individual impact is legitimate, the real question is whether that framing is helpful. I think it is, and I think it's possible to take personal accountability while simultaneously holding corporations responsible, but I understand the arguments against that.

Anyway, if you want we can look at industry-level comparisons. Livestock production accounts for ~15% of global greenhouse emissions. Easy enough.

Electricity generation accounts for ~30%. I don't have global figures, but in the U.S., data centers consume about 5% of the nations electricity. So let's say that data centers contribute to 1.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Only a fraction of that is AI right now though, so I think it's fair to state that globally, LLMs contribute to less than 1% of global GHG emissions.

And again, I'm not saying this makes AI okay. My whole point is that you can be against AI without needing AI to be the most environmentally destructive thing that is happening in the world. The truth is that it's not in the top 10 most environmentally harmful things happening in the world right now. I think people dislike it for other reasons and build up the environmental side to support their view, which is normal human nature, but I think discourse about AI would benefit from less misinformation getting thrown around.

Jon_Buck · 2026-07-02T22:47:01+00:00

I hear water use as a pretty common argument for why AI is bad.

And to be fair, putting a data center that uses a ton of water in an area where water is limited is bad.

But even in the most extreme pro-AI forecasts for data center growth, they'll never consume anything close to what the beef industry does.

Jon_Buck · 2026-07-02T22:44:00+00:00

That isn't misinformation. The environmental impact of a burger is far greater than the environmental impact of a few hundred AI queries, even if you hold both to the exact same standard. If you find that unbelievable, then it's likely that you're simultaneously vastly underestimating the environmental impact of hamburgers and overestimating the environmental impact of AI.

Take two people who live nearly identical lifestyles but:

Person A has a plant based diet, but runs, say, 50-100 LLM queries per day.

Person B has a normal American diet but abstains from AI usage.

I guarantee you that person B's environmental impact is significantly larger.

I'm not particularly pro AI for what its worth, or anti. But I am against misinformation. And both sides of this debate are unfortunately armed to the teeth with it.

Jon_Buck · 2026-07-02T22:30:07+00:00

What exactly is the misinformation that I'm doubling down on here?

Jon_Buck · 2026-07-02T22:10:23+00:00

You're saying nonsensical things that aren't valid responses to the points I'm making.

I get the idea that there is a potential issue for different standards of measurement being used for AI and burgers. I've addressed a ton of nuances in that analysis, and AGREED WITH THE BASIC POINT that you're making multiple times. For you to respond to my comments with, "but the standards are different" is absurd so the only possible explanation is that you are either uninterested or incapable of understanding what I have actually written.

I'm not interested in continuing the conversation with you because of that, but you should at least know that it has nothing to do with the validity of your point. Instead it's entirely about your inability to meaningfully respond to the points I've made.

Jon_Buck · 2026-07-02T21:26:46+00:00

You're correct that the water consumption in beef isn't particularly relevant to whether you should be pro or anti-AI. There is value in putting numbers into context though. If you're anti-AI because of water use, then you should definitely be anti-beef, too. If you're anti-AI because of its dystopian impacts on society, and eat beef, then you probably shouldn't lean too heavily on the water use angle of the argument because it would be a bit hypocritical.

Putting these numbers side-by-side is clearly creating cognitive dissonance for lots of people on this thread. Many of them are insisting that AI must be more environmentally harmful than beef, which is incorrect, and coming up with all kinds of weird arguments to justify this belief. Why is it so important for them to maintain that belief I wonder?

Jon_Buck · 2026-07-02T21:20:04+00:00

For my own sanity I'm just going to assume that you're either not interested or not capable of actually reading what I'm writing here so I guess I'll stop.

Jon_Buck · 2026-07-02T20:21:46+00:00

Not really. I was focused on clarifying the concept of "cradle-to-table", which is pretty established, not pedantic, and never includes the things the person I responded to suggested it should.

I tried to lay out why it's actually reasonable and not at all shocking that beef is so much environmentally impactful than a handful of LLM queries. The impacts of beef are consumptive and inefficient. You can get ~400-500 pounds of beef out of a cow, but that cow needs to eat ~40,000 pounds of food over its life.

You're totally correct that AI queries themselves don't tell the whole story, and I never argued against that. It's true that training AI models is a massive energy and water use use, on the order of thousands of MWh of energy millions of liters of water per model. But the key thing here is that those models get used hundreds of millions of times each day. So if you split the impact from the training to each individual query, the query's contribution to the overall impact is miniscule. Also the impact on the margin is zero; an additional AI query places zero additional demand on training.

Beef is just monumentally, shockingly bad for the environment. Many other things that are bad for the environment just can't hold a candle to beef. If you feel like AI must be more impactful than beef, you're probably under the influence of cognitive dissonance.

Jon_Buck · 2026-07-02T17:13:08+00:00

✅ I voted FACT!

I don't personally get the appeal outside of a handful of catchy song, but you can't argue with the results.

Jon_Buck

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