It feels a little disjointed to compare old tech. Computing tech iteration cycles and adoption rates seem more interesting than things at the dawn of communications technology.
Perhaps they are simply not taxed enough to benefit the community. If the local municipality is bearing a lot of these hidden costs, then perhaps the taxes need to be higher and directed at efforts that mitigate the worst of the problems. Water management solutions, air pollution management. Are there ways to mitigate the noise pollution? It seems like they should be taxed /more/ to help offset the negatives. There is surely a way to mitigate the problems. For example, can the noise pollution be addressed by forcing more green spaces around them, etc?
Almost anything can be mitigated at some cost - but it has to be determined what those mitigations are, and then demand them.
Many municipalities are unequipped to deal with a "datacenter" because on paper it is the same as an office building (that draws a lot of power), where it should be treated like an industrial site (rail yard, factory).
True. There likely needs to be some sort of templating handled by states. Each data center and location will be different and require assessment. This does drive costs up for the data center, but I don't see another fair way to handle it really.
They get their own unique third category as unlike industrial sites there's no hazardous chemicals and even the noise pollution is substantially different in nature.
The old datacenters are analogous to office buildings that emit some unusual noise and consume large amounts of electricity.
The new ones (ie gigawatt class) consume enough electricity for ~1 million households and at minimum enough water for 100k households (but possibly many times that).
I believe evaporative cooling is the norm (thus my "possibly many times that" remark doesn't apply) however theoretically they could provide hot water as a utility or (as you say) just dump it into the sewer. If located next to a river or the ocean they could conceivably dissipate it that way but I'm not aware of any examples.
It's the sort of externality that could be solved with a well placed megaproject. A related question to my mind is why we're building such expensive strategic assets in the open rather than under a mountain.
Large industrial customers often have to sign up to load-shedding agreements wiith grid operators in times of peak grid load.
Can datacenters load shed when requested?
If not, they should be paying a premium/spot market prices for power if they arent participating in load management.
The one I toured (decades ago) and dual redundant multi-megawatt diesel generators (big boys, always ask for a tour when they’ll be testing them, it’s fun to hear them start).
Local utility would ask them to shunt to the generators now and then during potential rolling blackout situations.
The city making money off of it doesn’t make the impact smaller. You can’t tax away the air pollution coming from a gas turbine running in a populated area.
That was my point. It doesn't all have to be taxes. It can also be agreed upon mitigation maintenance. Better filtration on gas turbines, etc. Green spaces to mitigate sound impact. I don't know, I am just wondering if there is a model that can be designed that makes a data center "balance" within its local environment instead of getting the opposite, tax incentives. Right now I agree, they get to socialize the costs and reap the benefits of building data centers to a large extent.
That all sounds nice in theory, but does the Lewiston municipal government have the resources and expertise to determine what countermeasures would be effective? Would it be left up to the company paying for the mitigations to decide what’s reasonable? I think we know how that would turn out. Even in heavily regulated states, industrial pollution still heavily impacts people in the vicinity. They usually accept it because so many of them work there. This place was estimated to employ 30 people. We don’t even know if problems like infrasound are reasonably avoidable or mitigated, and it’s not like they can make more water. Additionally, the way the industry has conducted itself over the past decade has been abhorrent. There’s no reason to believe they wouldn’t try to circumvent every last shred of mitigation knowing the city has comparatively minuscule resources to fight it.
If we put them anywhere — and I’m not convinced we really need all of the data centers we have, let alone all the ones we’re building — they should not be in the middle of densely populated areas like Lewiston.
youre starting a good conversation but as per typical internet fashion you are being critiqued as though your direction of thought is being presented as some sort of final solution.
i completely agree that we should be looking into modelling this in terms of what is possible to mitigate its impact and what does that look like with current technology and costs, and where would we need to develop new tech, and what would be the critical values to hit to consider mitigation a success
The fact that they need to use gas turbines at all is a tragic condemnation of how the US can’t build shit at all. We should be consuming more (green) energy to make our lives better, and rushing toward diminishing returns on energy consumption. Instead, we have this unholy alliance of (usually right wing) NIMBYs and (usually left wing) degrowthers that make it much more convenient to use a gas turbine than build renewable energy somewhere windy/sunny and plumb it in with some transmission lines. Renewable energy is way past the tipping point of being cheaper, the gas turbines are just there due to regulatory burden at all levels.
Yeah, but unfortunately, here we are, and there are the companies that want to build these things in completely inappropriate areas because it’s more convenient.
Just make a route on your web server, making all the files available with some long, impossible to guess, unique ID that can be shared. Like https://files.<your domain>/<id here>.
If they want to collaborate, they can just post the changed file, using the auth key you generated for them set in some header field, to https://files.<your domain>/<id here>, which could automatically increment revision numbers. Then you could access specific revisions with .../<id here>/rev/<revision>.
So much easier than installing an app! You could literally just use curl as the interface! (I kid)
Hah, yeah. I do have a one line CLI script to upload a file to S3, get a shareable link, and send it to me on ntfy.sh. And my family all have ntfy.sh so that honestly is viable for some things. But still, not really all that workable for many things. And only I have this power in my family
Every so often someone is like, Dropbox isn’t that hard. Look at this amazing ZFS/whatever! So simple. Yeah, I keep paying Dropbox every year so I don’t have to think about it. I shoot a sync off to backblaze every once in a while.
I dislike Dropbox for reasons that aren't technical, but the big thing for me is that I want either E2EE, or control/ownership of where my data is stored. These are my personal files (no, not that kind of personal), I'm not just going to scatter them on the internet.
My solution so far has been NextCloud, but I'm getting pretty fed up with it. But not enough to actually do anything about it... yet.
> I dislike Dropbox for reasons that aren't technical, but the big thing for me is that I want either E2EE, or control/ownership of where my data is stored.
You could run something like Cryptomator on top of Dropbox:
Boxcryptor used to be amazing for this till they got acquired by Dropbox. Last I checked cryptomator couple years ago it still hand random file corruption risk, is that still true?
I do agree with you at a philosophical level. I have worked in infosec long enough to know. I am pretty careful with what I upload. It’s just hard. Every little home hosted thing. They eat your time. Take effort. Even the “easiest” solutions have a real human cost if you are hosting it yourself.
My solution is… I have no fucks left to give about it. I haven’t for a long time. It works. My family will have all our photos and valuable sentimental data preserved. I keep a local backup. I spend my time on other stuff more valuable to me. If dropbox and backblaze disappear tomorrow oh well. If all my data is leaked? Knock yourself out. All the good stuff is in encrypted volumes.
My data has been breached 12 times by my count. /Twice/ by the OPM itself as I had a security clearance. DOGE goons have all our data and walked out with USB drives with all of it.
Equifax and credit agencies are a joke. My threat model is simple, nothing you can blackmail me with goes to the cloud. And that’s that. Breach me, try to hack my finances, try to steal my crypto. I have had my SIM transferred and someone unsuccessfully attacked my crypto accounts with it.
I love Dropbox, I pay annually. I use the open source client https://maestral.app/ on the Mac for workstation use, but also integrate other systems with my Dropbox account using their API. If someone built an open source Dropbox server that sat on top of S3 compatible storage, I would not only use it, but pay to have that optionality to get out of Dropbox if they ever enshittify. I can recognize form and function worth paying for ("value"), but still want an exit plan. It's not about the spend, it is about data sovereignty. This is colloquially referred to as “vendor and third party risk management.”
The Manhattan project employed some significant % of all of America. A project of that scale will likely never happen again.
It was also about far more than the science. It was about industrializing the entire production process and creating industrial capability that simply did not exist before.
I am skeptical you could do something of that scale for 30B today. That is just the dollar cost based on inflation. If you used CPI indexing probably hundreds of billions to a trillion dollars now.
Does quantum computing need that though? We don't suddenly need a large, unique supply chain for these computers. We don't need to dig up the qubits and refine them. Testing doesn't blow up the computer.
The Manhattan project had a huge impact but it was not that big as far as efforts in the war went (they managed to hide the budget allocated to the project from most of congress, for example).
It was like 0.5% GDP. It wasn’t insane, but still, you are right.
It was very focused. What do we get out of the F-35 program? By comparison, it has eaten (projected total lifetime cost) 2 trillion dollars. It is 4.5% of the GDP. I had no idea. This is just a military and government contractor subsidy. What are we doing…
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