241–250 of 535 posts
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America is huge. Why do they need to be constructed next to people's homes?
That's where the resources are. You wouldn't expect some uber wealthy billion dollar company to have to provide power/water needs way out in the middle of nowhere would you?
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Yeah, but when we account for that scale, and look at resource usage, datacenters aren't topping the charts, or even really getting in the top 5, for anything. You have people who eat meat at every meal losing their mind over water usage and people who set their AC to 68 panicking over energy usage.
Eating meat fills my belly. Setting my AC to 68 keeps me cool. A data center costs my community money, damages the environment directly and indirectly, and further enriches a few already rich people. Can you spot the difference?
So do many other things which use less water.
The estimates I've seen place the water consumption of water at such a low level that a whole month subscription consumes roughly as much water as 1-120 grams* of beef.
> Setting my AC to 68 keeps me cool.
What, is 70 not good enough?
Air con, and basically all things connected to the power grid, also "costs [your] community money, damages the environment directly and indirectly, and further enriches a few already rich people."
* yes, one to one hundred and twenty, there's that much uncertainty in the estimates for the AI.
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I don't think it's necessarily shady, but let's say that we're assisting at bets and capex spending we've never seen in history. Companies like Meta, Alphabet, etc that were drowning in cash flow and buying back their stock are now back at issuing shares, creating a huge number of SPVs, issuing debt, etc. There's a gigantic spending spirale with no signs of ending. Nvidia is financing companies to buy its own hardwar…
> even if every adult on the planet spent 250$ on AI per year this would still not cover anywhere near what's being invested. Your math does not make sense. That's something like $1.5 trillion every year. That's no where near what is being spent in AI hardware buildouts on an annual basis.
https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-05-1...
If even on Hacker News a topic like this can't be objectively discussed, what hope do we really have? What is the solution? Even in a place like this, the comments are full of extremist ideology, bickering, people arguing from feelings, people just repeating echo chambers mantras, and a significant portion of the comments are probably from inauthentic/propaganda accounts. We're incapable of just using a place like th…
has there ever existed any forum of perfect discourse in all of human history? HN is still so much better than on any other site I've been on outside of MetaFilter. I get pissed everytime I read any reddit commentary because it's just a series of tropes - here at least, the tropes are well written and people come with citations
I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up. There are legitimate nation-state and political entities that would love to create pressure for degrowth in this area. And, pollution and natural resources are a concern, yes, fine, sure. NIMBY happens, I get it ... *BUT*, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth. My skeptic meter ma…
50 years later...
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Eating meat fills my belly. Setting my AC to 68 keeps me cool. A data center costs my community money, damages the environment directly and indirectly, and further enriches a few already rich people. Can you spot the difference?
People say this and then use AI for literally everything they do.
Just because the bubble here uses AI doesn't mean it's even remotely valuable for the 80%. But they've done a great job convincing a specific group of people this.
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Yeah, but when we account for that scale, and look at resource usage, datacenters aren't topping the charts, or even really getting in the top 5, for anything. You have people who eat meat at every meal losing their mind over water usage and people who set their AC to 68 panicking over energy usage.
Eating meat fills my belly. Setting my AC to 68 keeps me cool. A data center costs my community money, damages the environment directly and indirectly, and further enriches a few already rich people. Can you spot the difference?
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What I don't understand is why communities want to block the data centers. Just make them pay! Your electricity price shouldn't go up because of them. So just make a rate card for data centers that ensures the burden doesn't fall on residents. That's what Oregon started doing, and residents' electricity prices actually started falling, because the fixed costs of energy production were being spread across more kilowat…
I'm also in favor of making them pay, and in the end I'm expecting/hoping that's what will happen. But either way, when negotiating it's better to start from a harder position (no building) and soften up (limited building, cover the cost of extra electricity) then vice versa. Plus I'm sure some DCs would just pick another spot if forced to compromise; there's always some red county out there willing to do whatever ju…
That's assuming they have so few alternatives that opening with that wouldn't cause them to just cross you off their list.
Convincing your competitors to do that while you don't tends to be pretty profitable though, which is one of the reasons that strategy has so many champions.
If even on Hacker News a topic like this can't be objectively discussed, what hope do we really have? What is the solution? Even in a place like this, the comments are full of extremist ideology, bickering, people arguing from feelings, people just repeating echo chambers mantras, and a significant portion of the comments are probably from inauthentic/propaganda accounts. We're incapable of just using a place like th…
If you need dispassionate reasonable debate to get things done you'll be waiting a long time.