Im not sure I follow. AI barely consumes energy compared to other industries and instead of focusing on the heavy hitters first wasting time on the climate impact on AI doesn’t seem useful
Compare that to ~30% of all energy use for transportation. So approximately 40%*4% = 1.6% vs 30%. I find your correction to be more wrong that the initial statement.
> And most of that new capacity will be natural gas. That increase would basically whipe out the reduction in CO2 emissions the USA has had since 2018.
Emissions in 2018 were ~5250M metric ton and in 2024 it was 4750M. That is a reduction of 10% total emissions. Without going into calculations of green electricity and such, its still safe to say AI using 10% of the grid would not completely wipe out the reduction.
> Compare that to ~30% of all energy use for transportation
Transportation, especially ALL transportation, does a LOT. You're looking for ROI not the absolute values. I think it's undeniable that the positive economic effect of every car, truck, train, and plane is unfathomably huge. That's trains moving minerals, planes moving people, trucks transporting goods, and hundreds of combinations thereof, all interconnected. Literally no economic activity would happen without transportation, including the transition to green energy sources, of which would improve the emissions from transportation.
I think it might be more emissions-efficient at generating value than AI by a factor exceeding the 7.5x energy use. Moving rocks from (place with rocks) to (place that needs rocks) continues to be just an insanely good thing for humanity.
Also, I'm not sure about your math. 4% would be 4% of the whole like in a pie chart, not 4% of the remainder after removing one slice. 4% AI, 30% transportation, 66% other. I don't know where that 40% is from.
> Also, I'm not sure about your math. 4% would be 4% of the whole like in a pie chart, not 4% of the remainder after removing one slice. 4% AI, 30% transportation, 66% other. I don't know where that 40% is from.
AI is not currently 4% of the energy market of the US. Only the grid. I should have been more clear about the ALL ENERGY vs GRID distinction.
> I think it might be more emissions-efficient at generating value than AI by a factor exceeding the 7.5x energy use. Moving rocks from (place with rocks) to (place that needs rocks) continues to be just an insanely good thing for humanity.
I really made no statement on the value of doing things. Transportation is obviously very valuable. I just wanted a more fact based conversation.
> Compare that to ~30% of all energy use for transportation. So approximately 40%*4% = 1.6% vs 30%. I find your correction to be more wrong that the initial statement.
I don't follow. The comparison is 30% of energy use for transportation vs 4% for AI, and soon 30% for transportation vs 10% for AI.
The grid is not all energy use. To get the numbers on an even playing field you need to compensate for that only ~40% of energy goes through the grid.
And that leaves a 6:1 ratio assuming projections run true. It very well might be possible to get efficiency wins from the transportation sector that outweigh growth in AI.
That's the way the system is set up but basically it's not sustainable. You can have more young people now to fix the problem of funding older people. But what happens when these young people get old? Now you need even more young people.
The less context switching LLMs of current day need to do the better they seem to perform. If I’m writing C code using an agent but my spec needs complex SQL to be retried then it’s better to give access to the spec database through MCP to prevent the LLM from going haywire
I think you intended this to be a validation of the idea that small quakes relieve stress and therefore lower the chance of a large quake.
The above link does not answer that question. It is relating stress release to "fault strength", or the maximum shear stress that can be withstood by the fault. There is an incidental relationship with depth that plays a role.
The video linked nearby (on criticality) also does not address the question at issue.
I'm only replying because I work adjacent to this area, and my understanding is that the idea that small EQ's release stress is a myth. Here [1] is another link, listed as #1 in the "Myths" category. And you can dig up quotes from none other than Lucy Jones [2] saying that this is a myth.
I don't work directly in this area, so I'm not willing to say absolutely no. But I'd really like to see a head-on reference supporting the claim that it's not a myth.
EQs are a release of energy. That energy is stored as stress prior to release. There is a finite amount of stored energy at any given time.
So the statement "EQs release stress" is true and it follows that adding the modifier "small" to the front doesn't change this.
It should also be immediately apparent that it would be very surprising if there were not statistical implications as a result of this. So surprising in fact that I would suggest that the burden of evidence should fall on those claiming that any such statistical effects are unexpected.
This part is unquestionably true. But since we don't have a direct measurement of the stored energy at a given time, the occurrence of an earthquake acts as both an indicator of release of stored energy but also, potentially, evidence of increasing stored energy.
Like how buying a Porsche costs money, and leaves you poorer than before you bought it, but when you see stranger buy a Porsche, you update towards believing that they're wealthy rather than poor.
Fair enough. I'm also not a geoscientist, and to clarify I didn't mean to imply any specific statistical effect there. It seems entirely reasonable to me that a series of EQs might tend to increase in intensity.
In reality I think (layman's impression) that there's rough (post hoc) evidence for both things. Foreshocks followed by noticably larger EQs as well as trains of progressively smaller EQs.
Precisely, and the 'myth' is worded in such a way that the effect of stress relieving pre-quakes is set to a big fat zero and that seems to be a thing more related to the composition of what is underground than the fact that it does not happen at all, and if it happens at what magnitude you would expect the effect to show up.
To me a myth is something that isn't true at all, not something that we do not have data on to be able to rule it out completely or that may be an influence just not a capital one. I think the most generous reading of the 'myth' claim would be that the energy available in the smaller quakes is too low to have a meaningful effect on releasing energy from a larger quake and I'll buy that. But at the same time an absence of such fore-shocks in an area where earthquakes are known to happen indicates that stress may be been building up over a longer time and that stress would be released in the next bigger quake if and when it happens.
This too may not be a big enough difference due to the immense increase in energy present in larger events (the scale is logarithmic). But its effect is quite probably still non-zero and for it to be a myth it would have to be zero.
Myth = the sun rotates around the earth
Myth = unicorns exist
Myth = the earth is 6000 years old
Those are directly falsifiable, and we know all of these to be categorical falsehoods.
Smaller earthquakes can - depending on local crust composition and other environmental factors - affect the amount of energy released in a larger one following, is not necessarily a significant effect (though even this would be tricky to establish) but I find it hard to believe they are completely unrelated though the effect may not be large.
For real: Earth science is complex. When you have domain experts literally saying the opposite of your guesses, in a section of an outreach webpage devoted to "Myths," reconsider your position.
Your link addresses a different claim than the one I made. So far we have release of stress (true by definition), statistical correlation (foreshocks and aftershocks), and reduction of a future event (your link).
As to objections about relative quantities, earthquake swarms exist. I think it's going to be just about impossible to make claims that are correct while also being applicable to all scenarios. A more limited claim that a particular quake or activity in a particular region does not exhibit a certain sort of relationship is going to be much more defensible.
GP is correct; I'm not sure why CA gov is calling that a myth (it's not). However keep in mind that it's not necessarily true 100% of the time. Or at least the things it might seem to imply at first glance aren't true - the presence or absence of small quakes in a given period doesn't necessarily tell you anything useful about the future.
Indeed. But I get why people are confused because it is a subtle difference between 'stress relieved through small earthquakes is stress expended' vs 'stress relieved through small earth quakes is not indicative of the magnitude of future events'.
The long term absence of stress relief small quakes on a known fault line might be bad news, or no news at all, statistics are where the difference is here, not in particular events. See also, 'the big one' and various theories around it.
This type of argument is kind of logical but not so immediately useful. Earthquakes just happen and no one is involved in that process. There could still be the big one coming, or that one might have been defused by this one. No one knows.
(stresses build up and are often released through many small, unfelt earthquakes (25:54). If these small movements don't dissipate the stress, it can accumulate and lead to a powerful chain reaction (26:25) * disclaimer I used YouTube's built-in AI to find/summarize the timestamps, as I couldn't remember offhand where it was when I previously watched this.
I don't believe the video quite says this (I watched the relevant section).
It's worth noting that they are mostly interested in critical phenomena in general, and earthquakes are kind of a drive-by application, treated along with fires and sand piles.
They do hint around the edges, but they don't head-on make the claim for earthquakes that small EQs materially lessen stress buildup and thereby make larger EQ's less likely.
I was looking for a credential of one of the people they interview, to see if they are really a solid earth person or more of a critical phenomena person -- their names aren't easy to find. This particular myth ("small earthquakes relieve stress") is a bit of a stinker in the solid earth community, and I think a solid earth person would be quite careful about their words as they discuss this.
I think you've summed it up correctly. It's not proof and some scientists claiming some things isn't the same as studies/evidence. However, is there evidence that it's not true? The fact is we do have these smaller movements and earthquakes quite regularly, so we don't really know what would happen after a long absence of them (do we? I suppose there are simulations perhaps that could be run? But I don't know that that's proof either way). To me though it makes a lot of sense that it would/could spur a huge event.
As someone neurotypical I take it for granted that my feelings most often align with what’s best to fit in with society. A few times it doesn’t and I end up giving in to my feelings and do the morally wrong thing
It is often useful to chain multiple sed commands and sometimes shuffle them around. In those cases I would need to keep changing the fist sed. Sometimes I need to grep before I sed. Using cat, tail and head makes things more modular in the long run I feel. It’s the ethos of each command doing one small thing
Internet was too big to fail in 2000, and in the long run was a net positive for the economy. Yet, a lot of internet companies still have not recovered the bubble bursting
Most EVs these days can recharge 300ish miles in 15 mins, but 99% of the time I don’t even have to drive anywhere to refuel as it get recharged overnight in my garage. EVs are waaay more efficient in terms of MPGe so at least for me it is less half in terms of cost to refuel compared to petrol not even considering the external cost of emitting CO2
15 minutes is still not as good as the 2 minutes it takes to fill up a gas tank. Electric cars just aren't there yet for long drives, though they are great for everyday driving around town.
reply