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New York just passed a one-year temporary ban on data centers

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Re: New York just passed a one-year temporary ban on data centers

#151

Post by j_w »

fintechjock wrote: post #149
j_w wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheaper software: where is this cheaper software? Most users don't pay for most software. Facebook/Instagram are introducing paid plans now. LLM companies are seemingly starting to increase prices. Unlimited cloud storage: Where are consumers getting unlimited cloud storage from? I'm not aware of AWS/Google/others reducing prices/providing unlimited plans.

> Cheaper software Software prices are down 73% since 2000: https://x.com/Mark_J_Perry/status/2015463505298878746 > Nearly unlimited cloud storage $9 / month for 2tb of cloud storage is a pretty sweet deal for anyone. And unfathomable if you travelled back in time before data centers were scaled. Data centers are a net good for all consumers. Pretty significantly!

Oh stop. Both of those are a bit ridiculous. We are talking about the sudden surge of data centers, the past 1-3 years, not the 20 prior to that.

Sourcing a tweet that doesn't have a real source (saying source: BLS without an actual reference to BLS isn't a source) is worthless.

Consumers don't buy software, they buy services. Whether or not that is captured by your source in the "Computer Software" is unknown, since I don't have the source. FRED via BLS has PPI for software publishers going up in the last ~6 years, but that's not exactly analogous to consumer spend.

When you say 2tb for $9 is unfathomable if you travel back in time, yes obviously if you go back to floppy days it's comical. Cloud storage prices have been the same for a decade now (pre LLM boom).

So software may or may not be cheaper for consumers (hard to say, nobody buys software). And in real dollars cloud storage is cheaper because of inflation. Not sure what the significant gain is.

Re: New York just passed a one-year temporary ban on data centers

#152

Post by mhb »

threwrfaway wrote: post #83
mhb wrote: post #71

Other than data centers being the bogeyman du jour, why isn't the bill written more generally to address potential impacts of any large new business that is anticipated to create effects like noise, pollution, infrastructure requirements, etc. It's not already required for proposed businesses to address these issues?

Data centers growth is consuming resources far beyond other industrial users. Aluminum smelters use a lot of DC power, but smelters aren't popping up like VC fertilized mushrooms.

Not really the point. Should we have separate laws for stealing from grocery stores, electronics stores and drug stores because they have different characteristics?

Re: New York just passed a one-year temporary ban on data centers

#153

Post by fintechjock »

j_w wrote: post #151
fintechjock wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cheaper software Software prices are down 73% since 2000: https://x.com/Mark_J_Perry/status/2015463505298878746 > Nearly unlimited cloud storage $9 / month for 2tb of cloud storage is a pretty sweet deal for anyone. And unfathomable if you travelled back in time before data centers were scaled. Data centers are a net good for all consumers. Pretty significantly!

Oh stop. Both of those are a bit ridiculous. We are talking about the sudden surge of data centers, the past 1-3 years, not the 20 prior to that. Sourcing a tweet that doesn't have a real source (saying source: BLS without an actual reference to BLS isn't a source) is worthless. Consumers don't buy software, they buy services. Whether or not that is captured by your source in the "Computer Software" is unknown, since…

We can be respectful with this!

The tweet is from Mark Henry who updates that chart often. It’s cited pretty often. There is a bit about the methodology here: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century-8...

My original list was just some brief examples, all of which I think hold up, but not nearly the entire list of data center benefits to all consumers. (One of those other benefits being the means to have this very conversation). There isn’t much of a way I can see to remove data centers from the technological progress we’ve benefited from over the last couple of decades.

Re: New York just passed a one-year temporary ban on data centers

#154

Post by square_usual »

kube-system wrote: post #95
throwaway198846 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much land do data center use and of which type of land?

Nobody is concerned about the quantity of land used by an active datacenter. Local municipalities are having to upgrade municipal infrastructure as a result of these projects -- which wouldn't be too bad, if they can be guaranteed the tax revenue to pay for those things -- and the employer sticks around and maintains their property. But in a bubble, it is foreseeable that many of these properties will go under when t…

> Local municipalities are having to upgrade municipal infrastructure as a result of these projects

Then they could pass a law requiring the data centers to pay for these instead of banning them outright, should sort itself out no?

Re: New York just passed a one-year temporary ban on data centers

#155

Post by akramachamarei »

CodingJeebus wrote: post #79
zerobees wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised by your interpretation. As a deliberately polarizing analogy, the first Trump administration pushed for a policy that boiled down to the same principle: pause immigration from certain places "until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on". I don't think anyone here would describe that example as a good-faith policy. I feel the same goes for the NY bill. It's not a sincere attempt t…

> it's just an attempt to shut unpopular projects down to appease the electorate. It's weird to see "the government is doing its job by responding to its voters" being framed as some nefarious and underhanded move.

It shouldn't seem that weird. One can like democracy while also disliking its outcomes sometimes.

Re: New York just passed a one-year temporary ban on data centers

#156

Post by akramachamarei »

distortionfield wrote: post #33
FergusArgyll wrote: post #22

I don't get it, nyc wants to add government programs, they obviously need to tax something. Here come massive corps willing to invest a ton of money, just tax them at some reasonable rate and voila, you can now pay for city funded grocery stores or whatever

They already have a balanced budget, why would they need to cave to these corporations?

They only have a balanced budget until their deferred bills come due, bills deferred precisely so they can declare the budget balanced, bills such as paying pensions.

Re: New York just passed a one-year temporary ban on data centers

#157

Post by j_w »

fintechjock wrote: post #153
j_w wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh stop. Both of those are a bit ridiculous. We are talking about the sudden surge of data centers, the past 1-3 years, not the 20 prior to that. Sourcing a tweet that doesn't have a real source (saying source: BLS without an actual reference to BLS isn't a source) is worthless. Consumers don't buy software, they buy services. Whether or not that is captured by your source in the "Computer Software" is unknown, since…

We can be respectful with this! The tweet is from Mark Henry who updates that chart often. It’s cited pretty often. There is a bit about the methodology here: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century-8... My original list was just some brief examples, all of which I think hold up, but not nearly the entire list of data center benefits to all consumers. (One of those other benefits being the means to…

> There isn’t much of a way I can see to remove data centers from the technological progress we’ve benefited from over the last couple of decades.

That's not really the argument.

The problem with the tweet is that the chart kind of sucks, and it isn't immediately obvious. The category cited is "Computer Software and Accessories" which is under "Information Technology, Commodities"

A more interesting category is "Video and Audio services," specifically the live streaming subcategory. People don't buy software anymore, they pay for subscriptions to services.

Here are links to FRED for both top levels: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SEEE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SERA . Unfortunately the granularity for the Information Technology index isn't available on FRED from what I could find.

So IT price index is down, frankly to a huge degree. But that includes hardware, so it's hard to draw conclusions about software pricing from that specific chart. But Video/Audio services have seen a fairly sizable increase in index in the last decade.

But that's not really very important. We are talking about price indexes, which do tell us roughly how expensive something is over time, but who cares about the price of basketballs unless that's something I plan on buying as a consumer? The BLS charts give a relative importance which we can use a proxy for "how much a price change would affect the consumer." The relative important of the IT category (linked) is 0.745, but the software subcategory is 0.029. Video/audio and live streaming are 0.595 and 0.185, respectively.

Consumers do not purchase software. Companies don't even bother trying to sell software to consumers. The chart linked is tracking a metric that doesn't matter, because it's not important to consumers.

Going back to the relative importance values from 1999 (https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/cpi-detailed-report-58/a...) personal computers are at 0.106. No other categories. 2009 (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/cpi_05192010.pdf) is 0.248. 2012 (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/cpi_05152012.pdf) software is included with an importance of 0.048. At that point cable/television is at 1.387 (see Video/audio above).

So software prices don't matter. Consumers aren't spending on software. Service prices do matter, and they are getting more expensive.

This feels like a schizo post. Sorry for the complete lack of formatting.

Re: New York just passed a one-year temporary ban on data centers

#158

Post by akramachamarei »

WarmWash wrote: post #147
autoexec wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't disagree that the agriculture industry has pollution problems they need to address. It's just also true that one of the environmental problems data centers can cause is making existing problems with water quality much much worse. That's also a major problem. Maybe Amazon knew about it before they built their data center. Maybe they didn't. Each community where data centers pop up gives us more informat…

Amazon can just mix in more water post cooling and then by your metric the problem would be solved. They can just rely on dilution like the farmers do. Or we can use our brain and actually hold the right people accountable.

I'm finding it interesting to reason about this subject, not being a geologist and what not. It seems that there is a relatively stable rate at which the farms output nitrates regardless of how much water Amazon pumps from the aquifer. The issue RollingStone seems to have identified is that as Amazon pulls more water, it effectively concentrates the solutes by evaporating some of the water. As a result, less water going into wastewater treatment, so the pollutants are more highly concentrated. But the total amount of contaminants is unchanged, right? Unless Amazon's water consumption somehow increases the solutes output by the farms. Not sure how that would work, but it doesn't seem impossible.

Do you two think I've framed this issue correctly?

Re: New York just passed a one-year temporary ban on data centers

#159

Post by fintechjock »

j_w wrote: post #157
fintechjock wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can be respectful with this! The tweet is from Mark Henry who updates that chart often. It’s cited pretty often. There is a bit about the methodology here: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century-8... My original list was just some brief examples, all of which I think hold up, but not nearly the entire list of data center benefits to all consumers. (One of those other benefits being the means to…

> There isn’t much of a way I can see to remove data centers from the technological progress we’ve benefited from over the last couple of decades. That's not really the argument. The problem with the tweet is that the chart kind of sucks, and it isn't immediately obvious. The category cited is "Computer Software and Accessories" which is under "Information Technology, Commodities" A more interesting category is "Vide…

I think your point on costs here is right. I was treating “computer software” as anything that consumers use: apps that provide a service for free in exchange for data, etc.

Very interesting, thanks!

Re: New York just passed a one-year temporary ban on data centers

#160

Post by quickthrowman »

kube-system wrote: post #130
quickthrowman wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data centers are not industrial. It’s a 6” slab with prefabricated walls, bar joists, and a metal roof. There’s no continuous distillation column, smelter, fly ash pond, tailings pond, or anything remotely industrial. Data centers are essentially an Amazon distribution center that is filled with servers instead of racking with a shitload of electrical and HVAC equipment.

Both an AI hyperscaler and an Amazon warehouse would be typically classified as "light industrial". > There’s no continuous distillation column, smelter, fly ash pond, tailings pond, or anything remotely industrial. This is typically classified as " heavy industrial "

Maybe for real estate brokers or city planners.

I use the definitions that the entire construction industry uses. A data center is commercial. A distribution center is commercial. A plastic injection molding company or machine shop is commercial. An oil refinery, grain mill, or power plant is industrial.

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