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Comment by QuantumNoodle | Hacker News Reader

Animals are all cool with all the different pollution that data centers brings? Vibrations, noise, as well as climate?

Some perspective is important, I think.

This is unpopular in the current climate of hysteria, but it's worth reminding ourselves: data centers are probably one of the least polluting industrial sites imaginable. That's not to say it's nothing, but contrast it with, say, a refinery. Or mineral processing. Or basically any other type of industrial activity on which modern civilization relies.

They hum. That's about it.

Would you mind a data center sprouting up in your backyard? Just ask residents near Elon's new gas turbine powered GPU datacenters how lovely they find the hum.

Framing the choice as a dichotomy between data centers and other industrial plants misses the obvious third option: nothing at all, preserve the status quo.

The problem with your reasoning is that nothing ever matters, because you can always divide things in smaller and smaller chunks and in the end "it's really not that bad it's only 0.x percent of emissions/pollution/etc"

I agree; but that's also not a very useful observation. Modern society depends on industry of all types, and national independence depends on at least some of it being local. We can try to make it cleaner, and to some degree we can choose which types to implement. But we do not have the option to just wish it all away.

It would be very nice if we could have our cake and eat it too.

> They hum. That's about it.

lol. just by having a light pole there you start disturbing the insectoid life

No, and it also won't matter what they feel about it, when Google and the contractor just ignores what's marked as protected and clears it anyway:

> Halmeenpää said satellite imagery shows that areas that should have been protected have already been leveled. Beyond the loss of so much forest, the outcome could be dire for wildlife preservation.

Well, at that point fine them properly and use the proceeds to establish new wildlife sanctuary.

Unless of course the judicial system has been corrupted but that's surely a bit of a stretch no?

It would be good to use funds that way but it's not gonna get the protected species back. We need some teeth to actually stop these things from happening

I tend to agree, it's a flipping ridiculous situation; if a local bikers gang had done that on purpose through fire/malaise/whatever they would face severe personal repercussions whereas corporate malaise that is committed on purpose is basically met with the expected outcome: i.e. a fine which is turn was already in the spreadsheet as a calculated expense. Need upgraded law apparatus to deal with it for sure.

Given the AI boosters don’t care much about humans I don’t think they consider other forms of organic life too important

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