Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New Amazon Data Center Is Set to Have the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 302 posts

Re: New Amazon Data Center Is Set to Have the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.

#151

Post by jurgenburgen »

gruez wrote: post #113
inigyou wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well yeah, it's basically locked in now that in 50 years America won't be a world power any more. It'll be in a similar place to Canada at best.

>in 50 years America won't be a world power any more. It'll be in a similar place to Canada at best. What's going to replace it? Rapidly aging China? https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=600,quality=80... https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=600,quality=80... https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=600,quality=10...

You don’t need a numerical advantage to dominate if you have a technological / organizational advantage. The British empire was outnumbered 10 to 1 and still managed to control a large portion of the world for a while.

US government is working overtime to make sure legacy technologies stay around while the rest of the world is investing into the future.

Re: New Amazon Data Center Is Set to Have the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.

#152

Post by andsoitis »

gruez wrote: post #148
fn-mote wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's going to replace it? Rapidly aging China? Using the age profile of a country with over a billion people to dismiss its geopolitical power has no credibility. More appropriate to point out their (our) lack of domestic chip production and outsourcing of critical technologies.

>Using the age profile of a country with over a billion people to dismiss its geopolitical power has no credibility. The first two charts are for GDP, which correlates pretty well with geopolitical power. Moreover if we're going by population, wouldn't that imply India, and then later Africa are going to be superpowers?

> wouldn't that imply India, and then later Africa are going to be superpowers?

Conventionally, a continent isn't a superpower. A country is.

Re: New Amazon Data Center Is Set to Have the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.

#153

Post by jurgenburgen »

surgical_fire wrote: post #129
mschuster91 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Will my kids be an ethnic minority in their own country in the next generation I didn’t expect having to read great replacement bullshit on Hacker News. JFC do some napkin math, it’s utter nonsense.

It's pervasive. Especially when it is people from the US commenting on the EU.

It’s MAGA ideology and commenters mentioning it are just revealing their red hats. Any Europeans regurgitating that _foreign_ ideology are pathetic.

Re: New Amazon Data Center Is Set to Have the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.

#154

Post by andsoitis »

stevesimmons wrote: post #67
t0mas88 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The overall American economy is going to pay the price in the long term. And current foreign policy is reducing trust in America as a reliable and stable partner, which will make things even worse.

Speaking as a European, current foreign policy is not "reducing trust in America as a reliable and stable partner". It has already reduced trust to rock bottom. It's hard to see how much worse it could get, short of outright invasion or allying with Russia. Just this week, amongst other news: * America's useless adventures in Iran have used up so many Patriot missiles there aren't any left to defend Kyiv against Russ…

> It's hard to see how much worse it could get, short of outright invasion or allying with Russia.

Why would the US ally with Russia, who is a Chinese and Iranian ally?

That's just uncritical thinking.

The United States is the single largest bilateral provider of direct military equipment, intelligence, and defense funding to Ukraine (a European country) against Russia.

Re: New Amazon Data Center Is Set to Have the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.

#155

Post by ch0wn »

ianm218 wrote: post #99
orbifold wrote: post #13

All this AI doomerism is hiding the obvious and immediate harm that will cause a mass extinction event. Funnily enough people at Anthropic are predicting the end of the Anthropocene, completely absolving themselves from any responsibility for the actual reality that the Anthropocene is defined by human made geologically noticeable changes. Like causing a global climate catastrophe.

The existential risk people are worried about a much shorter timeline - like the next 5-10 years. Climate change is serious but very unlikely to lead to anything like ending the Anthropocene in the next 5 years.

400,000 people in Europe are displaced. Pretending that this is a future issue is tremendously disingenuous. Things don't need to be civilisation-ending to cause a degree of harm that is worth focusing on.

Re: New Amazon Data Center Is Set to Have the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.

#156

Post by xyzelement »

Hnrobert42 wrote: post #121
xyzelement wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Will my kids be an ethnic minority in their own country in the next generation - and if so, what's that going to be like for them? What about this is an essential concern for you? Like, what are the potential harms?

I think there are very few countries that can claim to have a good setup for an ethnic minority. Singapore, US, Israel, western Europe. Most of the world - being an ethnic minority sucks. As western Europe changes the ethnic western Europeans may not enjoy their treatment.

Re: New Amazon Data Center Is Set to Have the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.

#157

Post by parineum »

Jansemon wrote: post #92
simianwords wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

What do you mean, "nowhere does it say that things get worse overall"? Do you need to get it explicitly spelled out for you to realize that the environment and ecosystems everywhere are under extreme stress (to say it mildly) and failing!? Do you really believe, that the way humans are using resources and polluting everything, doesn't have any negative impact? And why the hell would the GDP be ANY good measurement, s…

> Do you need to get it explicitly spelled out for you to realize that the environment and ecosystems everywhere are under extreme stress

That's anthropomorphizing. The ecosystem cannot be stressed because it has no natural/good state.

> And why the hell would the GDP be ANY good measurement, since it does not include any environmental costs (if I don't need to correctly dispose of my trash and can burn it cheaper, I have an economic advantage in the way of less costs)?

Because people predict life will eventually get worse. Your scenario is why people are making bad long term decisions (according to you) but the reason it's a bad long term choice is because it's supposed to lead to bad outcomes for humanity. GDP is a pretty decent measure of quality of life.

If the climate gets worse but quality of life gets better, it's not quite the catastrophe that's often claimed.

Not OP but that's the point being made.

Essentially you're both talking about different things. you're saying the environment will be worse and OP is saying we'll be better off.

You're also saying a worse environment will make us worse of but not backing that up with data. OP is. That data might be bad but I haven't seen you say anything that would make me doubt it but the OECD has overseen a period of immense improvement of all the measures OP is talking about.

OPs argument is that climate change might kill a billion people but the energy used that creates that climate change created two billion people with better lives.

Re: New Amazon Data Center Is Set to Have the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.

#158

Post by cogman10 »

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #141
quickthrowman wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a comparison, one acre of alfalfa growing year round in California uses about 5*325000=1,625,000 gallons of water a year for four harvests, 4400 gallons of water per day per acre. There’s around a million acres of alfalfa grown in California for a total water usage of 1,625,000*1,000,000=1.625×10¹² gallons (or 5 million acre-feet) per year. 365 million gallons of water per year for one data center is 1000 acre fee…

Do Alfalfa growers traditionally use limited (and funded at large expense by the local community) municipal water hookups to grow their crops? Are alfalfa growers asking for new water hookup permits to access these resources? Because DCs are, and that is the concern local communities have. Not random comparative statistics whose purpose seems to be to take valid local community concerns and pretend they're just a jok…

It is a sort of "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation.

The reason these DC use so much water is because it uses less electricity to evaporatively cool than it takes to cool with a heat pump.

You are trading water scarcity for energy scarcity.

In my personal opinion, the right tradeoff is more electricity. Also IMO, these DCs should be required to build out solar + battery + wind offset plants which supply their energy either directly or indirectly by selling to the grid operator at a discounted rate. If you want 40MW of power, you need to deploy 40MW of solar (not peak, but yearly average output) and a 400MWh battery plus all the grid hookups required.

The end result for residence should be lower energy bills, not higher bills.

Re: New Amazon Data Center Is Set to Have the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.

#160

Post by perpetuallunch »

fps-hero wrote: post #89
vineyardmike wrote: post #9

Those in power seem to think that a compute advantage is necessary to maintain economic advantage. Despite this, the voters universally hate data centers, so much so that both NY and TX have data center construction moratoriums. Despite this, those in power refuse any environmentally aware energy policy nor water policy. Despite this, companies have been trying to be environmentally aware for either moral or marketin…

Look to Australia if you want to see how these energy policies work out in the long run. Energy is big money. Anything that disrupts the status quo is immediately vilified. It got to the point that our major party at the time lead a “gas fired” green energy policy. They got voted out, the new guys implemented a subsidised home battery policy. In the space of a year it has destroyed the economics of a carbon fuelled g…

> General consumer prices went down

What now?

Where in Australia have consumer prices gone down?

> because of a reduction in peak electricity use driving up retail costs

I don’t understand what you’re trying to day here.

Post reply on HN