this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2026
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Do I get to include the gargantuan cooling system for the data centre and all the infastructure required to keep that going?
Total impact is the only fair comparison. Pollution from the power plants included, sewage treatment from the houses too.
Humans living is the whole point of civilization, though. We don't need the LLM to pay for the techbro carbon footprint or olichsrch child abuse, so we should similarly exclude the human's base sustensnce and survival from their budget.
You can include the human writer's coffee, music, and writing snacks / cigarettes.
All a matter of which externalities you're willing to overlook.
80 years ago, the solution to pollution was dilution - nobody gave a flying F if you dumped raw sewage in the ocean so long as you did it far enough offshore that it didn't come back to the beach... That works when you've got a total human population under 2B and most of them aren't burning significant fossil fuels... with 8B of us and rising, and half of us capable of hopping in a jet plane for a round-the-world trip whenever we feel like it, the pollution really does start to matter.
War is one of those side effects of civilization, and I haven't seen the war yet that gives a F about what it does to the environment, beyond maybe - just maybe sometimes - not wanting to kick off global winter.