Take Your Meter

The artificial intelligence AI race is on and each world power seeks to outdo the others in this endeavor. That most of them can barely supply the current demand for electricity for several reasons make this look like some sort of muscle-flexing competition. It looks ridiculous, is what I’m saying. Those who have the electrical capacity to develop AI beyond the convenience that it can offer customer service, meme makers and app developers are going to dominate. That means China.

China has been putting online power stations every few weeks while the US has been hamstrung for the past several decades by EPA regulations and the Green New Deal, which is neither “green” nor any sort of “new deal.” It’s the same old deal wrapped in green velvet, the richest, most powerful of those among us will dominate localities to strip from them the resources everyone else needs to survive, just to satisfy their desires.

Environmentalism, and especially the communist idea of rationing power, turning to massively more inefficient systems, is nothing more than a Chinese plot. While China signs onto every international environmental accord, it obeys none of them. For more than a decade, those walking around Beijing have been wearing masks to try and mitigate the smog emergency there, but China has only accelerated their power production.

If the US wants any part of the AI pie, it won’t be able to obtain it. Trump said, not long ago, that the US power production was insufficient to power the AI revolution. He said that it would take a decade to build the power plants to overcome the gap, during which they would fall behind another decade. It will be twenty years of dedication and sacrifice just to arrive at parity, if that’s even possible.

It doesn’t matter how many billions, how many billions of trillions are dedicated to it, there’s a logistical aspect that cannot be overcome and a regulatory aspect that won’t be overcome. Both might be improved, but not alleviated. One would have to have started twenty years ago to build as many new power plants as possible in a year to have the resources necessary for today’s AI.

Looking down the road a few months or so, it’s easy to see that power companies will soon start the narrative that they have to sell power to the customer who will pay the most for it. Then, the AI companies will simply pay more for the energy than the average customer can afford, until they dominate the market. Once that’s done, six months later, when every business, every home cannot afford their electricity bills and are forced either onto generators or out of business, the AI companies, largely the sole customer left, can pay whatever they choose to pay.

It may not work out exactly like that, because the AI companies will be bound by their close location to the power generation sites. That’s less line-loss and being first in line ensures reliability that they must have. That is the Achille’s Heel of the AI companies: they can’t afford even a temporary outage, especially not an unexpected outage.

What the individual will soon understand, I hope, is that they must prepare for sharp increases in costs of electricity. It might become too expensive to have. What then? Part of that is recognizing the issue and taking steps to overcome the monopoly on one’s source of electricity. Whether it’s a private power company or a city-owned utility, they will not be understanding of your situation and seek to mitigate these costs. In fact, the more customers they can chase out of the market, the fewer customers they have to deal with, the better off they are. One of which, by the way, will undoubtedly be the city itself. They have to keep that tax system running, after all.

I will just humbly ask: For what? What do the average citizens get out of all of this? It’s akin to the question: What was so wrong with life in the 1980s that we had to completely overhaul it and turn ourselves into lab rats? More importantly: Why haven’t we demanded an explanation? These are questions that went unanswered during all of the Covid 19 fiasco. There is no longer a sense that any of these institutions or governments are interested in anything but their own power over the population. They will dictate what you must do and compliance is mandatory, or they’ll simply cut you off.

Whenever this condition persists, in all of history, the only thing the individual can do is become more self-sufficient. I’ve been working on this for a while in anticipation of an EMP discharge, which might not be that far off, either. I can see now, that I’m going to have to become much more militant about it. At some point soon, one has to be able to tell them to take their meter off the house. That will cause some discomfort and some inconvenience. It will cause some disruptions and force one to strategically plan their power consumption, but it will be the same as doing nothing until they cut off the electricity for lack of payment.

There are all sorts of reasons to become isolated islands of self-sufficiency. The increasing tendency of governments and corporations to punish political expression and challenging woke ideology will result in the same. But once a person is cut off from that power, what reason would they find to allow those who cut them off from enjoying it themselves?

The question then becomes one of action. When we’re denied all that society has to offer, knowing that our ancestors built this nation into the jewel it has always been, will we just let it go with a curse and a shrug, or will we fight? One could ask that of a teenage Scottish girl and get a different answer. I pray we are at least equal to that.

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