[HN Gopher] The staggering ecological impacts of computation and...
___________________________________________________________________
The staggering ecological impacts of computation and the cloud
Author : _Microft
Score : 80 points
Date : 2022-02-20 18:56 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)
| [deleted]
| nemo44x wrote:
| Update for today:
|
| "We wanna be free! We wanna be free to do what we wanna do. We
| wanna be free to compute! We wanna be free to run our virtual
| machines without being hassled by The Man. And we wanna get
| bitcoins. And we wanna have a good time. And that's what we're
| gonna do. We are gonna have a good time. We are gonna have a LAN
| party."
| bloopernova wrote:
| And now I need to listen to Loaded by Primal Scream. Thank you
| :)
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Surely you mean Mudhoney's "In 'n' Out of Grace" (or even The
| Wild Angels, since that's where both sampled it from).
| Shadonototra wrote:
| bad software and slow code should be heavily taxed
| ozfive wrote:
| How do you suggest doing that? Measure all VM usage and if CPU
| memory usage to service ratio is too high it would be taxed?
| TOMDM wrote:
| The "tax" is already baked in, it costs more to run poorly
| optimised code.
|
| What we need is a carbon tax, then wasteful use of electricity
| can funnel back into paying for its impact.
| abecedarius wrote:
| > paying for its impact
|
| The rationale of a carbon tax is to make prices account for
| the externality, so that people use carbon-emitting energy
| where it's still worth it, and stop where it's not. (And over
| time encourage everyone to find better ways to do things.)
|
| You might see this as a quibble, but there's so much
| misunderstanding. E.g. the #1 objection is about the expense
| to poor people, but if all this tax revenue went straight
| back to a UBI it would not affect the above logic. The
| objection does have force if it's "funneled back into paying
| for its impact" instead.
| brabel wrote:
| The Australian Government circa 2010 introduced a carbon
| tax... it was one of the first governments in the world to do
| so. It causes prices to go up, miners to threaten to close
| mines as costs became too high, basically it was a shit show
| and the government went to election against a conservative
| party promising to remove the tax and make it impossible to
| bring it back, ever, if it won... of course, it won and has
| remained in power since then. Today, Australia is probably
| one of the worst offenders when it comes to carbon emissions
| per-capita, and its Government is hostile to carbon emission
| reductions except when it costs no jobs, no taxes and no
| worries to anyone , i.e. never.
|
| I think we can see this scenario playing up again in quite a
| few other countries, unfortunately... for this reason, I
| don't think taxes will solve the problem.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Here in America we make it difficult to deploy natural gas,
| so we burn more coal instead.
| kixiQu wrote:
| * The Jevons paradox seems really relevant but there's no
| analysis done. The predecessors to the cloud seem important to
| look at if you're being honest about analysis of efficiency,
| but...
|
| * "While in technical parlance the "Cloud" might refer to the
| pooling of computing resources over a network, in popular
| culture, "Cloud" has come to signify and encompass the full gamut
| of infrastructures that make online activity possible, everything
| from Instagram to Hulu to Google Drive." Okay, so we're using a
| definition of "the 'Cloud'" that extends to the services that run
| on it. Tricky to evaluate cost-benefit if you're doing that, but
| okay, sure. "Today, the electricity utilized by data centers
| accounts for 0.3 percent of overall carbon emissions, and if we
| extend our accounting to include networked devices like laptops,
| smartphones, and tablets, the total shifts to 2 percent of global
| carbon emissions." Sorry, _what_? So you don 't actually mean
| cloud computing when you say "the Cloud", you mean _everything
| connected to the Internet_?
|
| * All of the stuff about the wastefulness of protection against
| failure seems pretty sketchy to me, especially when considering
| that the preceding systems had all of the redundancy of every
| business that needed compute having its own physical servers
| scaled for peak. But again, there's no consideration of "what did
| we use to have" or "what would we need if we didn't have this"...
|
| * Putting in a quote like "It festers in his mind, clawing at his
| thoughts, probing his sanity, poisoning him with a constant spell
| of dread and anxiety." to color the locals' objection to noise is
| _pretty dramatic_ , so there must be good evidence for how awful
| it is, right? "Over the course of my fieldwork with the
| communities of Chandler and Printer's Row, I learned that the
| "noise" of the Cloud uniquely eludes regulatory schemes. In many
| cases, the loudness of the data centers, as measured in decibels
| (dB), falls below the threshold of intolerance as prescribed by
| local ordinances. For this reason, when residents contacted the
| authorities to intervene, to attenuate or quiet their noise, no
| action was taken, because the data centers had not technically
| violated the law, and their properties were zoned for industrial
| purposes. However, upon closer interrogation of the sound, some
| residents reported that the monotonal drone, a frequency hovering
| within the range of human speech, is particularly disturbing,
| given the attuned sensitivity of human ears to discern such
| frequencies above others. Even so, there were days when the data
| centers, running diesel generators, vastly exceeded permissible
| decibel-thresholds for noise." .... So I'm supposed to read
| "uniquely eludes regulatory schemes" as... "isn't as loud as the
| limits for the relevant zoning." Cool. How elusive of them. What
| are the limits supposed to be? How often are they being exceeded?
| Why should I give credence to "some residents" on the importance
| of the frequency -- shouldn't there be studies about that? I live
| in an area with noise pollution so I am fully willing to take
| this issue seriously, and I can believe that the existing
| regulation isn't catching what it should, but this doesn't read
| like someone being serious about presenting the issue!
|
| * "Historian Nathan Ensmenger writes that a single desktop
| computer requires 240 kilograms of fossil fuels, 22 kilograms of
| chemicals, and 1,500 kilograms of water to manufacture. The
| servers that fill the halls of data centers are dense,
| specialized assets, with some units valued in the tens of
| thousands of U.S. dollars." So the implication slithering between
| these sentences are that servers are worse than desktops vis-a-
| vis environmental impact of physical production, and desktops are
| really bad... but that's not actually _shown_ by the fact that
| servers are expensive.
|
| * "Even with these sustainability initiatives in place,
| environmental organizations like Greenpeace estimate that less
| than 16 percent of the tons of e-waste generated annually is
| recycled." Yes! This is a huge problem! Only... what percent of
| that is consumer-level and what percent industrial? Is cloud
| computing less efficient re: e-waste? The author seems to be
| saying that we should leave things in use until they break, but,
| well, in practice that's kind of all those standards codify
| anyway.
|
| Ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh. I really care about the environmental impact
| of data centers and computing, and I want more people to care,
| but I want them to have better material to work with than this
| suggestive hand-wavey piece that _isn 't even compelling from an
| anthropological perspective._
| dfdz wrote:
| >Today, the electricity utilized by data centers accounts for 0.3
| percent of overall carbon emissions
|
| So The Cloud, arguably the peak of human technology, uses
| contributes a tiny fraction of our total carbon emissions. Is
| curbing this technology in in any major way a productive way to
| reduce our emissions?
|
| These emissions are all electricity usage converted to carbon
| emissions. Would it not be more productive to focus on
| transitioning all power generation to solar, wind, hydro,
| nuclear, etc?
| Gigachad wrote:
| Same way I feel when someone here tells me I should dither my
| PNGs or something to save the planet. Not eating a single steak
| would offset my entire life of using the internet.
| floodle wrote:
| This is besides the actual topic, but the typesetting on this
| website is just beautiful. It's a pleasure to read; almost like a
| print magazine.
| _Microft wrote:
| Off-topic but I said [0] a similar thing about another website
| not long ago. Maybe you like that too:
|
| https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/walmart-but-for-...
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30321310
| waynecochran wrote:
| I live near the Columbia River where Google, Facebook, Microsoft
| all have data centers that rely on hydroelectric power. The dams
| produce clean energy, provide waterway for barges, prevent
| flooding, allow for recreation, and can back up water at night
| when demand for electricity is low. As the salmon fisherman will
| tell you, the salmon have adapted to the fish ladders and are
| spawning in the Columbia's tributaries. Yet there are still
| political forces that want to breach these dams. Nothing is
| ideal, but hydroelectric energy is about as close as you can get
| to ideal in the Pacific Northwest.
| waynecochran wrote:
| Edit: My comment concerning salmon was poor. The fisherman I
| know who fish above Bonneville, The Dalles, and even above the
| John Day dams do catch salmon have good reports, but this is
| only local and anecdotal. We know there are places where salmon
| are spawning where they haven't in 80 years which gives hope,
| but doesn't provide a good overall indicator. The dams have
| been a tough on the Salmon.
| ej3 wrote:
| Thanks for that. I hate to nit pick, but the issues
| surrounding the dams in the Columbia river basin are so
| complex and frustrating.. I honestly don't even know who or
| what is right at any given moment. I've torched friendships
| debating culling - not even sure I was right or they were.
| It's just horrible. Everything about it.
|
| The dams are hugely beneficial to society. The produce energy
| and expedite inland commerce, and that makes us all better
| off. At the same time everything comes at a cost, and the
| costs are easily just as catastrophic.
|
| I've seen rivers three times the size of the Columbia that
| have no dams. They are like the arteries of the Earth. They
| wend and breathe through existence itself. Heave and fall
| feet in hours. To see this, to be near it is to feel
| everything upstream. It's like looking into the night sky,
| but instead of making you feel small it connects you.
|
| The Columbia is dead. I get itchy about it because we've lost
| that and no one even knows anymore. We long ago muted a voice
| that used to sing to us, but people will only consider the
| loss in economic terms - salmon fisheries. We can't even talk
| about things like humans anymore.
| golemotron wrote:
| Consumption really can lead to the development of clean energy
| sources. People need to develop a growth-mindset on this issue.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Consumption cannot scale to infinity. There's little harm in
| periodically taking account of the externalities of the
| things we value.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| kodah wrote:
| > The current mindset in California is to cut down life
| style and eat bugs.
|
| I live in CA, the valley specifically. I get why you have
| this image in your head, but I'm telling you it's not
| true. There are loads of normal people out here, with a
| select few very loud voices on certain topics. The
| problems those loud voices cause societally is likely
| more than their worth. This is true across the political
| ecosystem from what I've seen. It's not worth judging
| large groups of people by the loud and thorny voices
| among them.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| Perhaps not infinity, but if we manage to exploit space
| then it'd be close enough.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| That's a big 'if'. And IMO pointless to explore seriously
| until we can sustain ourselves on our native planet.
| [deleted]
| missedthecue wrote:
| We don't need to it to scale to infinity. It's a weird
| objection. It's like saying human lifespans can't grow to
| infinity so we should stop trying to be healthy.
|
| The truth is, humanity can continue to be more productive
| and efficient for millions more years. We can do more with
| less like we've been doing for centuries.
|
| For example, the US economy is bigger than ever, yet we
| emit less carbon than we did 10 years ago, both total and
| on a per capita basis.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| This logic is really no different from stupid Bitcoiner logic
| that PoW induces demand for cheap clean energy.
| barkingcat wrote:
| Salmon in the Pacific Northwest on the whole is dying. The
| entire salmon fishery will go extinct. Don't know where you get
| your information from, but Salmon in the Pacific Northwest is
| going the way of the cod fisheries in the North American
| Eastern seaboard.
|
| Don't believe what your "salmon fisherman" will tell you -
| their whole purpose in life, their raison d'etre is to fish the
| salmon until every single last one is gone. Then they will move
| to another place to fish.
| bahmboo wrote:
| The fish have not adapted to the fish ladders and no salmon
| fisherman will tell you that. The dams do a lot but helping
| fish or the ecology is not on that list.
| [deleted]
| zw123456 wrote:
| Agree E. WA is a great place for server farms.
|
| Unfortunately, lately there is a push for lower network
| latency, and in response to that, there are now a lot of Edge
| Cloud clusters being built near urban areas where various
| fossil fuel power plants to meet peak loads or load leveling
| are often used.
|
| Putting these edge cloud server farms in those areas will cause
| the carbon producing facilities to be activated more often.
| That low latency comes at a price to the environment more so
| than the centralized ones positioned in places like E. WA.
| textman wrote:
| Sockeye salomon returning from the Pacific via Columbia R. to
| the Stanley basin in Idaho dropped from over 25000 to a few
| dozen. That is not adapting, rather, approaching extinction.
| https://www.idahopress.com/news/local/sockeye-salmon-return-...
| ej3 wrote:
| > As the salmon fisherman will tell you...
|
| This is objectively false. Salmon populations are more often
| than not considered in decline. The fish haven't "figured it
| out". They marginally persist solely due to intensive
| management that plainly consists of atrocities for species less
| popular in the media [0][1], millions spent on fish ladder
| theatre, and hatcheries.
|
| The dominant mechanism in support of the fisheries being
| hatcheries that are basically a strangely laundered welfare
| program for indigenous, sport and professional fishermen each
| to their licensed proportion.
|
| If you live in the Dalles, and you don't know the Columbia
| basin damns are an ecological nightmare.. it's unconscionable.
|
| Not to mention the displacement of indigenous peoples from
| important traditional regions, the complete loss of stochastic
| annual flows feeding nutrient cycles in the river... etc etc.
|
| Im no eco-activist. I don't necessarily think removing the dams
| would improve anything for anyone at this point, but if we're
| going to advocate for doing things a better way in the future -
| let's be honest: dams are horrible. The dams on the Columbia
| will eventually result in no salmon, no matter how hard we try.
| It's inhospitable. They used to run all the way up the snake
| into Idaho. Into IDAHO. Never again.
|
| It's ok to advocate for energy, and the things you believe in,
| but let's not be belligerent about it - be honest.
|
| In the Astoria maritime museum (several years ago now) I
| remember reading a passage that was proud of "..taming the wild
| Columbia, and turning it into a beautiful series of lakes and
| streams to wonderfully facilitate shipping and recreation.."
|
| Some hutzpah, to think we know what we're doing.
|
| [0] https://www.audubon.org/news/the-corps-cormorants-and-cull
| [1] https://www.marinemammalcenter.org/news/response-to-
| columbia...
| rr808 wrote:
| Its great that these huge corporations use hydro power for
| greenwashing, but there is a limit to how much hydro any river
| can generate and it would be great to use these sources for
| regular people and/or when there is no solar/wind.
| vanusa wrote:
| _The salmon have adapted to the fish ladders_
|
| That's a strange use of "adapted", there. The logic here seems
| to be:
|
| "Sure, salmon and trout numbers have gone down -- but not _all_
| runs have been _completely_ wiped out. Therefore, they have
| "adapted" and there's really nothing to worry about. All so-
| called scientists talking about a 98 percent reduction in
| return counts since 1880, and warning that some runs are on the
| verge of extinction due to the combined effects of habitat
| reduction and climate change -- they have no idea what they're
| talking about, really."
| Animats wrote:
| _Especially in Virginia's "data center alley," the site of 70
| percent of the world's internet traffic in 2019._
|
| Too much internet infrastructure is optimized for wiretapping.
| There's no other good reason for so much near CIA HQ.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's also a patently absurd statistic by any possible measure.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I've often wondered if a "slow" datacenter could be created, that
| used low power processors. Amazon, for example, could offer a
| cheaper AWS tier that used the low power datacenter. Not
| everything needs to be fast. I'm perfectly happy with many jobs
| on my computer taking all night.
| grogenaut wrote:
| It's called graviton. Also from what I hear internally (at a
| subsidiary), price of service is mostly correlated to carbon
| footprint as power is a large factor in pricing. Yes there are
| profit percentages / etc but it's not a bad huristic.
| kqr wrote:
| Is there a chance it would be more efficient to run a
| relatively fast processor and race to idle instead?
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| AWS has announced an upcoming carbon footprint calculator that
| I'm excited to play with that will help to optimize this sort
| of thing.
|
| https://www.inc.com/kevin-j-ryan/amazon-carbon-footprint-too...
| bonzini wrote:
| The tiny (non-dedicated) instance types on AWS probably
| multiplex hundreds of guests on a single host.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Or just use arm instead of intel frying pans.
| colpabar wrote:
| They were touting their graviton (arm) powered instance types
| a lot at last year's reinvent.
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/
| georgeoliver wrote:
| Sure you can document the ecological impact, but who's measuring
| the economic/cultural/social impact (positive and/or negative)?
| How do I measure an airline-sized carbon impact against a billion
| cat videos? Is there even a framework for that kind of
| accounting?
|
| Until there is I think no amount of documentation is going to
| change people's behavior in the large. IMO the article is much
| better when citing specific impacts like noise pollution and
| water rights abuse.
| novok wrote:
| What previous resource intensive activities are these data
| centers replacing although? We used to ship far more paper around
| by parcel, and store them in temperature controlled rooms and
| shops in dispersed locations be it books, legal documents and
| more. Things that used to be air flights are now video calls.
| Videotapes, DVDs and video stores replaced by efficient
| streaming. Photographs stay on digital media instead of paper
| media. We fell trees and had 'paper' data centers in the form of
| pulp mills, which are also resource intensive industrial plants
| in remote locations.
|
| Yes we still have paper and lots of it, but now it's
| significantly reduced.
|
| When you look at the internet and the telephone compared to what
| we replaced it with, the internet comes out far, far ahead in
| environmentally friendliness.
| beebeepka wrote:
| I am not sure paper usage is down. Overall, humanity is using
| more than ever.
|
| As for video calls, they don't need massive data centres since
| it's supposed to be p2p for all sorts of reasons.
|
| I am struggling to get where you come from. The actual content
| is so wrong, that it seems satirical, yet it's presented in a
| very serious, almost patronising way
| Retric wrote:
| Overall humanity is much larger and richer than it was 40
| years ago. Paper use includes packaging, plates, toilet
| paper, etc so it's hard to get actual numbers as it relates
| to IT. Especially when recycling initiatives have resulted in
| new uses for lower grade paper products.
|
| That said, personally I am way down due to IT not just
| replacing forms but also physical books, newspapers, and even
| bills.
| roca wrote:
| P2P can't work once you have more than a few participants.
| ssivark wrote:
| > Yes we still have paper and lots of it, but now it's
| significantly reduced.
|
| But a la Jevons Paradox [1] I'm sure the total amount of
| information being shuttled around now is far more than what was
| being sent around on paper -- bu orders of magnitude. So it's
| not at all clear that we still have a lower net ecological
| footprint.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
| shadowofneptune wrote:
| That assumes the same amount of information is being passed
| around. The ease of the modern internet has led to more work
| being produced for servers to process. No video site 10 years
| ago had HD enabled by default, for instance.
| rr808 wrote:
| We used to print out a few dozen photos a year. Now my wife
| takes that many photos at lunch time- then backed up to 3
| locations forever.
| open-source-ux wrote:
| What about calculating the ecological impact of the programming
| languages running on those 'cloud' servers?
|
| Some of the most popular languages are the least performative (we
| all know which ones), but they make life easier for developers.
|
| Thankfully, newer languages take performance seriously: Rust, Go,
| Nim, Crystal. A typed, compiled language gives you good
| performance for free and a smaller memory footprint (and the
| reduced computing resources that implies). When you consider the
| millions of servers in use, that additional language efficiency
| adds up to a substantial saving in electricity use.
|
| In the computing field, we readily encourage throwing cheap
| hardware at a performance problem until a program runs fast. It's
| embarrassing that the "hardware is cheap" attitude is so
| widespread among developers. Imagine if a manufacturer said that
| they were going to make energy-guzzling fridges/washing machines
| or other appliances without regard to energy-efficiency.
|
| In programming, everything is for the ease and comfort of the
| programmer and anything else takes a back seat - the user, energy
| use and ultimately the environment.
|
| _Aside - If you think programming language energy usage a
| ridiculous topic, consider the follow_ :
|
| The creator of PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf, calculated potential CO2
| savings due to speed improvements in PHP 7: fewer servers,
| smaller memory use and reduced CPU activity. (And remember this
| is an interpreted language.) You can watch a segment from his
| presentation below where he talks about the calculations he made
| of potential CO2 savings:
|
| Rasmus Lerdorf - "PHP in 2018" (extract from the 15 min mark):
| https://youtu.be/umxGUWYmiSw?t=15m16s
| throwaway17_17 wrote:
| Here are two papers on this topic. In particular, the first is
| the shorter version (with a better/more journal friendly
| layout) and second is basically the technical report for the
| research. It does show some support for your hypothesis
| compiled languages are more energy efficient. C ranks in at #1
| and Python is last at #15.
|
| There is also a paper that I can't find (I'm on my phone) that
| was done in conjunction with a Google researcher that reaches
| similar conclusions.
|
| 1 - https://greenlab.di.uminho.pt/wp-
| content/uploads/2017/10/sle...
|
| 2 - https://haslab.github.io/SAFER/scp21.pdf
| jeffbee wrote:
| Pretty much exactly as accurate as you'd expect from an
| ethnographer holding forth on datacenter thermodynamics.
|
| "Today, power-hungry computer room air conditioners (CRACs) or
| computer room air handlers (CRAHs) are staples of even the most
| advanced data centers."
|
| False. The absence of CRACs is, in fact, the defining
| characteristic of "the most advanced data centers".
|
| "In most data centers today, cooling accounts for greater than 40
| percent of electricity usage."
|
| That might be true if the statement is weighted improperly, but
| for advanced large-scale cloud data centers, the figure is more
| like 8%.
|
| "Virginia's "data center alley," the site of 70 percent of the
| world's internet traffic"
|
| This author has no idea what they are talking about.
| mmmBacon wrote:
| Yep. The amount of power that can be pulled to a building is a
| difficult thing to change. So the biggest cloud companies try
| to maximize the amount of power used for compute. There is a
| metric for this called Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE). It's
| the ratio of totally energy usage to energy used for compute.
| Most modern cloud companies have PUEs <1.3.
|
| Here's a great link showing Google's PUE.
| https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/efficiency/
|
| The data centers in Ashburn, Virginia are mostly leased
| facilities and these kinds of facilities are more of the
| traditional raised floor air conditioning type facilities.
| However these facilities are also quite efficient with PUEs in
| the 1.6 range.
|
| https://sustainability.equinix.com/environment/energy-effici...
|
| Digital Realty Claims to have some sites with PUE <1.12
|
| https://sustainability.equinix.com/environment/energy-effici...
| rp3 wrote:
| The stat about Virginia receiving 70% of all internet traffic
| seems to be often repeated: https://www.vedp.org/industry/data-
| centers
|
| I can't find where that stat comes from, however. As for
| everything else you said, it would be great to have sources. As
| far as I know, cooling is one of the major costs of running a
| data center. It would be illuminating to know why that's now
| false.
| jeffbee wrote:
| The 70% thing came from a business development official in
| Loudoun County, a person whose job is to promulgate
| misleading boosterism. It doesn't make even a sliver of sense
| to someone who thinks it over for a moment.
|
| Cooling _is_ a major data center cost, but it 's not 40% any
| more. All of the major datacenter operators claim a PUE of
| 1.11 or less. Facebook has been the most open and vocal about
| how they achieve this, for example at
| https://tech.fb.com/hyperefficient-data-centers/ (scroll down
| to "Systems").
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| > Steven Gonzales Monserrate is an anthropologist and a PhD
| candidate
|
| Maybe this person should stick to studying skull sizes or
| whatever it is an anthropologist studies these days. I'm sorry to
| say, but what a load of horse shit.
|
| Yes, data centers use energy. Essentially all of the big cloud
| providers have committed to carbon neutrality, most of them are
| pretty far done with getting there, and essentially all of them
| already source the vast majority of their power from renewables
| at this point. That's not just because it is greener, but also
| because it is cheaper.
|
| Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc. each maintain nice web pages on
| how far they are with these plans.
|
| - Amazon is shooting for 2025 for 100% carbon neutral energy.
| https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/environment/the-cloud...
|
| - Microsoft plans for carbon negative by 2030:
| https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/01/16/microsoft-will-b...
|
| - Google claims to have been carbon neutral since 2007 and plans
| to be carbon free by 2030 as well:
| https://sustainability.google/commitments-europe/
|
| That's a trend with many other manufacturers as well. E.g. lots
| of automotive manufacturers. If there's a deep conspiracy where
| these companies are lying about what they are doing, that would
| be news worthy of course. But, I suspect that most of these
| companies are simply getting very good at managing absurdly high
| degrees of energy and water efficiency and cost.
|
| Kind of counters the message of the article / the author's world
| view of course. So, instead this author is dragging in all sorts
| of things: waste problems, hypertension in people, "computational
| whir of data centers is not merely an annoyance, but a source of
| mental and physical harm". I mean, what the actual F** is he
| going on about here?! What's the point here? Modern technology is
| bad? Is there a point at all?
| globalise83 wrote:
| A lot of the time people watching cat videos aren't travelling by
| car or airline, so the net impact is quite subtle.
| rossjudson wrote:
| NFTs close the crypto loop back to cat videos. So now it's
| really cat videos all the way down.
| rodgerd wrote:
| Something near and dear to my heart - it's painful watching NZ
| shift its compute footprint from local hydro sources to coal-
| fired in NSW.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I assume you are talking about New Zealand and New South Wales
| here?
| rodgerd wrote:
| Yes
| roca wrote:
| AWS and Azure opening data centres here should help.
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