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Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas

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Re: Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas

#51

Post by spiderfarmer »

niek_pas wrote: post #17
joe_mamba wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah agriculture is bad for the environment, but at least it feeds us to keep us alive, so we can say it's worth it. Datacenters don't. They don't even create that many jobs like a factory for instance so we can say the mass employment offsets the environmental damage.

> Yeah agriculture is bad for the environment, but at least it feeds us to keep us alive This is true, but don't forget a _lot_ of agriculture feeds _animals_ that we in turn eat. If you want to make optimal use of land for human needs, most modern agriculture is not that.

The problem is feed lots.

There's no problem the more conventional practice of letting animals graze the majority of the year. If we didn't use those fields to feed and eat the animals, the grass would turn into CO2 and methane anyway. Or turn into boring forests.

Not everything has to be optimal. That thinking leads to Thanos' snap. People generally enjoy meat. They also enjoy the landscape farmers created.

Re: Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas

#53

Post by perks_12 »

r_lee wrote: post #46
perks_12 wrote: post #19

Datacenters need cheap energy, something no region in Europe is having in abundance (except maybe Norway, Sweden, and Finland). I don't think Lombardy was seeing too much DC construction. It's just typical green politics. Forever backwards. Sure, people feel somewhat AI-fatigued, but blocking the future won't play out nicely for Italy or Europe in general.

wow, I'm so excited for this "future" where everyone is laid off and miserable

The way I see it, we hit a ceiling with the capabilities of AI. Singularity will most likely not happen (not with the resource hunger of current methods). What remains are incredible tools to help remove the most tedious tasks from everyone's work.

Re: Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas

#55

Post by jamespo »

markusw wrote: post #22
joe_mamba wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah agriculture is bad for the environment, but at least it feeds us to keep us alive, so we can say it's worth it. Datacenters don't. They don't even create that many jobs like a factory for instance so we can say the mass employment offsets the environmental damage.

Please at least pretend to read the article before posting something like that.

The US has ~97 people / mi² vs ~519 people / mi² in Italy so the article is less relevant than you think

Re: Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas

#56

Post by jandrewrogers »

thinkindie wrote: post #34
jandrewrogers wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tens of millions of acres of agricultural land goes to things like production of corn ethanol. It is disingenuous to pretend we need this land to feed anybody. We have vastly more arable land than is needed to keep people from starving, even when used inefficiently to produce things like cattle feed.

Maybe in the US, but farmland is quite scarce in Lombardy.

Just because it is scarce doesn't mean it is productive.

I have friends with farms and agricultural businesses in Italy. A lot of agricultural land is no longer cultivated by the families that own it because market prices are well below the cost of production in Italy.

Re: Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas

#57

Post by _vertigo »

perks_12 wrote: post #44
bigmadshoe wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

We do. But currently we are choosing the Luddite way of doing things. Simply ignoring this fantastic technology is not a choice but economic suicide.

Interesting — so in your opinion every country must build out datacenters or be left behind?

Re: Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas

#58

Post by subscribed »

dukeyukey wrote: post #16
joe_mamba wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah agriculture is bad for the environment, but at least it feeds us to keep us alive, so we can say it's worth it. Datacenters don't. They don't even create that many jobs like a factory for instance so we can say the mass employment offsets the environmental damage.

The services provided by a data center do provide jobs. My job for one, and I'm guessing a majority of posters here too.

Normal datacentres, sure, but these services are already running from the existing datacentres.

These purpose built DCs in the recent AI craze doesn't. A handful of security guys, handful of technicians and that's pretty much it

Re: Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas

#59

Post by vrganj »

perks_12 wrote: post #19

Datacenters need cheap energy, something no region in Europe is having in abundance (except maybe Norway, Sweden, and Finland). I don't think Lombardy was seeing too much DC construction. It's just typical green politics. Forever backwards. Sure, people feel somewhat AI-fatigued, but blocking the future won't play out nicely for Italy or Europe in general.

You speak of the future as if it were some certain inevitable thing.

The future is what we as humans decide it to be.

Many humans don't like this vision of the future, where we burn our planet so as to concentrate even more power in the hands of the super wealthy. This is them shaping their own future.

Re: Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas

#60

Post by amluto »

To me, datacenters, especially for AI (which tolerates an extra hundred ms of latency quite well) seem like an unusual form of development. Many forms of development have similar downsides: they destroy green space, they can be noisy, they compete for energy resources [0], etc. On the flip side, though, most new developments add substantial value: jobs, tax revenue, increased industry around them, local availability of their outputs, etc.

Datacenters are weird: they come with the negatives (although, per unit energy consumption, they’re relatively innocuous), but they seem to be missing most of the regional benefits. They don’t create many jobs. They pay little in taxes. They don’t actually produce anything that makes anyone else want to further develop the surrounding area. Their outputs offer little benefit to the community that wouldn’t be provided nearly as well by a datacenter somewhere else.

So I actually get why it makes sense to support development but oppose new datacenters. Or to have an added tax on datacenters so that at least some economic benefit is captured.

As an interesting contrast, a colo facility is a bit different: I want to have colo datacenters near by so that I can use their services. But this isn’t what the new development is about.

[0] Some of which are finite in a given region or are preferable not to use. (But don’t forget that more energy use = increased production in the long term, which can be a very good thing.)

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