I find this debate a bit odd. Climate change is a global issue. So moving these emissions out of Ireland so Ireland can reach it's targets doesn't help if those emissions mearly happen elsewhere in the world. In reality, there is two options either these data centers are simply not built, which isn't going to happen. Or rich countries such as Ireland, take it on to themselves to see taken on datacenters as a burden they must carry, coupled with increased renewables. With Ireland's wind on the west coast potential, this is something we must Especially with a temperant climate
Moving the datacenters away from East coast Dublin to West coast. Galway in an ideal world would be also useful.
>> moving these emissions out of Ireland so Ireland can reach it's targets doesn't help if those emissions mearly happen elsewhere
They aren't being moved out. This is basic market forces, negotiation between provider and consumer. Ireland would be perfectly happy to host these datacenters should they be carbon neutral, perhaps by constructing their own green energy support system. The datacenters don't want to do that. They want cheap electricity. They want to be simple electricity consumers and thereby outsource any emissions issues to the local grid. Ireland has chosen not to take on that burden. If another country is willing, then so be it. Nobody should engage in a race-to-the-bottom on emissions. If these datacenters want to be in Ireland, they are free to foot the bill.
I'd be ok with it. As long as nobody that's contracted to build housing or apartments here is involved. We'd somehow have meltdown before they laid the foundation.
I think others have already alluded to this, but the source of the electricity is the important bit. A datacenter running entirely on hydroelectricity is significantly greener than one running on coal. Moving the datacenter to a location where the source is as green as possible can have a big impact on emissions.
Exactly. Furthermore, the fine article mentions 21% going to datacenters (of which, which fraction might be off-shoreable anyway?), and 18% to homes.
Okay, that leaves 61% going to what?
Which other industry uses have been going up or down? Then compounded by "If we already had lots of wind and lots of solar, it wouldn’t be a problem", which, as far as datacenters go probably misses the need for storage.
What this is seems more of a meme article, linking presumably evil datacenters, with climate change, with "policy of low corporate taxation."
Commercial maybe? I used to work in a Lidl and it was mentioned when they started automating their store lights inside and outside to turn off at night that it was taking a large load of the grid.
Lot's offices, SME's etc?
Warehouses? Not sure if they count as industrial or not.
Of course. And metals smelters, and street lighting. Whatever.
The point was that the fine article didn't care about that because it was a political hatchet job, rather than informing on how or why electric power is used in Ireland.
Presumably you'd keep evicting them out of these tax havens until the only option they've got left is to innovate and optimize energy use, or heavily invest into renewable sources that don't have a huge heat/pollution footprint.
> either these data centers are simply not built, which isn't going to happen
And this is why we will never solve the climate issue, because we still refuse to even entertain the idea of doing what we must do, what we must have been doing for decades but have refused to so it's going to be harder and harder to quit.
This is quite hard to do safely. Generating air breakdown with IR femto requires a reasonable amount of fluence. They are probably using galvo scanners to shift the beam in xy, but to get the required intensity they have to also shift the focal plane. Given the distances they are projecting away from the car that NA is low meaning they would need a reasonable power. Probably why they are running it at 1kHz. Given its 2015 it is probably a ti-sapphire at 80fs, galvos and an optotune lens. The reason this isn't a thing is that it very hard to make this eye safe.
Diamond with nitrogen valance centers are used as fluorescent markers. If a current passes close they change their emission spectrum. Some workon this as a method to measure neurons firing. So maybe that use case expands. Also quantum applications with diamond.
Proper laser goggles come with ratings. Dependent on the laser wavelength, beamsize, energy/power and pulse duration. Most goggle suppliers will tell you what you need if you supply the laser specs.
Even pension funds can't think on that length of time. Really only institutions like university can. Lots of Oxford colleges are known to look at these time scales. It has been around for As someone said Harvard will probably be around longer than the united States.
> Even pension funds can't think on that length of time.
An interesting way to legislate conservation is to mandate pension funds to set aside a fraction of their portfolio for investments that take longer to mature, such as slow-growth managed forests.
During COVID in UK alot of grades were given by teacher assessment not by an exam. There was grade inflation. For one reason I didn't see was, people mess up exams, run out of time, spend too much time on an answer, misread a question, panic, don't turn over a page, feel ill on the day. Predictied grades don't predict non knowledge based exam performance. I wonder have there been studies covering how many grades are lost due to such failings.
Used to work in the Oxford lab that developed some of the earliest confocal microscopes. I had one of the early Oxford instruments mentioned under my table. Always wondered why it didn't find it's way to a museum. Science historical artifacts aren't a huge field of history yet I guess and items only a few decades old aren't that exciting to the average person. Technology becomes ancient faster than anything else.
Education is an odd profession. Where people feel because they have had an education they are qualified to determine best practice. It is as if having an operation makes one feel as they understand the best practice in heart surgery. Teachers spend years studying teaching practice, always read the research on best practices, spend all day working in education settings. Yet people often dismiss their methods and demand change based on often misremembered anecdotes of their own youth over half a century beforehand and pride in their children. I wouldn't be shocked if a vast majority of parents thought their kids were above average, which isn't a bad thing, but sometimes professionals know what they are doing.
Teachers also operate under different constraints. Class sizes and number of classes per teacher varies, but a given teacher could easily have over 100 students. They also see those students for only a year before getting a new cohort to learn.
In contrast, parents have only a handful of children who they typically know from birth.
Not only does a parent have far more specialized insight into their child, but (perhaps more importantly) that parent does not need to make sacrifices for the greater good of the class.
Schools aversion to children getting ahead is largely duevto the practical challenges it imposes on the school system, not the pedalogical effects on a given child.
You do however spend probably 8 hrs working on it, read hackernews on latest tech, probably better than you were 5 years ago. Now imagine your marketing department saying they went to a computer summer camp once in the 90s and therefore think you should rewrite the tech stack in perl.
Moving the datacenters away from East coast Dublin to West coast. Galway in an ideal world would be also useful.