41–50 of 201 posts
Well my IP (regular plain residential Asian ISP) is blocked on this site. Zealous Cloudflare-blocking is breaking the web. (also thanks for the useful message telling me to "contact the website owner... while blocking me from the website where the contact info should be)
Well my IP (regular plain residential Asian ISP) is blocked on this site. Zealous Cloudflare-blocking is breaking the web. (also thanks for the useful message telling me to "contact the website owner... while blocking me from the website where the contact info should be)
I'm not defending Cloudflare, but what is a better solution? If small websites can just be DDOS'd out of existence because some group thinks it'll be funny, what protections do they have? It takes too much equipment and know-how to stop an attack for people to be able to survive online. The next thing you'll hear about is a monthly service fee to the hackers as a protection racket just like the mob.
Probably a wise decision on their part Microsoft already is all in on Copilot AI if it fails, the CEO probably is gone.
Wealthy white exclave succeeds in using environmental justice language to keep cheap coal-fired power to themselves. Very American outcome. Although I obviously don't care about Microsoft's outcome here, this was clearly a great site at the intersection of two transmission lines and with essentially infinite water resources. The data center would have been built in this scene. https://www.google.com/maps/@42.8440852,…
"a great site" -- you frame it like Microsoft was working for the public good
Modern datacenters also require very high standards of construction and are complex, so these projects create jobs and also represent a real training, upskilling and work experience opportunity for labor. There are many examples of electricians, plumbers and groundwork teams who did Microsoft’s site getting future work from Meta, Google or Amazon in the same part of the state because the experience has value.
It’s easy to dismissively say datacenter is bad, or that it consumes too much water (despite many datacenters accused of this being a closed-loop cooling system), and ignore the billions of dollars spent during the project on labor which supports that local economy, or the improvements negotiated for the local area and paid for the hyperscaler, bundled in by the city/county planning as part of the permits and approvals.
It’s also rare the tax for a campus is fully rebated, although it’s normal for the improvements to be partially rebated for some period (this is an investment incentive). Viewed over 20-40 years these sites are often tremendously lucrative in tax for the county/city as well.
What is the actual procedure through which this happens? You buy the land and then are granted permission on a discretionary basis? It seems to me that if you were a small business this becomes much harder to participate in because you need to acquire and hold the unproductive asset. This would mean that land use tends towards that which large firms (which can sustain the costs easily by self-financing) find useful.
My employer went through a similar process, not for a data center but for a large recycling yard/center. We had to buy the land first, and it was basically unproductive for 2.5 years of mostly waiting for permits, and it was already zoned industrial so no zoning changes were needed. The whole project was several million in expenses before even making a dollar. We aren't huge either, the permitting was not supposed to…
Wealthy white exclave succeeds in using environmental justice language to keep cheap coal-fired power to themselves. Very American outcome. Although I obviously don't care about Microsoft's outcome here, this was clearly a great site at the intersection of two transmission lines and with essentially infinite water resources. The data center would have been built in this scene. https://www.google.com/maps/@42.8440852,…
Some of us would like to keep our “infinite” water resources which actually aren’t infinite. I live beneath two transmission lines (overlapping, I guess, but not intersecting) and would prefer no data centre built here. Why? Because it will provide me no benefit whatsoever, reduce my property value, and worsen my quality of life due to things like light pollution and noise. If data centre operators would fix these th…
Kind of a cool idea, actually. These data centers could turn the towns where they build into startup incubators. Offer free high speed internet and heavily subsidized compute to residents in exchange for building there. At least gives back economically somewhat, as a data center itself doesn't provide much in return.
Well my IP (regular plain residential Asian ISP) is blocked on this site. Zealous Cloudflare-blocking is breaking the web. (also thanks for the useful message telling me to "contact the website owner... while blocking me from the website where the contact info should be)
I'm not defending Cloudflare, but what is a better solution? If small websites can just be DDOS'd out of existence because some group thinks it'll be funny, what protections do they have? It takes too much equipment and know-how to stop an attack for people to be able to survive online. The next thing you'll hear about is a monthly service fee to the hackers as a protection racket just like the mob.
Wealthy white exclave succeeds in using environmental justice language to keep cheap coal-fired power to themselves. Very American outcome. Although I obviously don't care about Microsoft's outcome here, this was clearly a great site at the intersection of two transmission lines and with essentially infinite water resources. The data center would have been built in this scene. https://www.google.com/maps/@42.8440852,…
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Earlier quoted context omitted.
I support in principle the rights of towns to set their own land use rules, but on the larger societal picture I don't support people benefiting from things like intermodal shipping, goods distribution, and information services that they refuse to host. So I perceive a certain hypocrisy in this story.
Maybe everyone in this village already has their own local AI rig. From a technical perspective, data centers aren't providing public goods - rather they're more like attractive nuisances that foster centralized control.
There's no reason they can't be economic accelerators for the towns they are in.
Probably a wise decision on their part Microsoft already is all in on Copilot AI if it fails, the CEO probably is gone.
Are you sure? AFAIK, Satya did a great job from the point of view of a shareholder - +1,200% from 2014 to today [0] [0]: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/sto...