Comment by MSFT_Edging | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MSFT_Edging | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Sorry, your small town getting a short stint of construction work followed by maybe 20 sysadmins, is not worth the pollution that DC will pump.

I commute by rail to the tune of ~6000 miles a year. How long would it take for those gas turbines to make those greenhouse savings worth it?

Some napkin math, lets say a conservative 50MW/day? half what the XAI Colossus DC uses. So they'd be generating about 2MWh running 24/7.

Those gas turbines spit out ~700kg of CO2 per MWh.

My car would emit about 5 tonnes of CO2 over about 15k miles(2L hatchback).

The drive is far less direct than the train, so lets call it approximately 10k miles in commuting.

In a day, one of those gas turbines would produce about 16.8 metric tons of CO2. Over 3x what my car would produce. In a day. It takes me all year to save 4ish metric tons of CO2 from my personal carbon emissions.

Yeah, so screw your small town and screw the datacenter. We all share this world. Your small town isn't worth the damage.

>so screw your small town

I don't live there, but this attitude won't make you any friends.

>We all share this world.

Yes, tell me how me and you and Bezos and Musk are all equally sharing the world. We're all in this together and you care so much about the pollution of other peoples' small towns. That's why there's nice neighborhoods and not so nice neighbourhoods, nice areas to live in and not so nice areas to live in. Because some people have to deal with the pollution so that you can live in nice neighborhoods without any pollution while still enjoying all the luxuries of modern society that generate pollution except not in your back yard.

>My car would emit about 5 tonnes of CO2 over about 15k miles(2L hatchback).

And where was that car manufactured? In your back yard or in some industrial town with more pollution? Do you oppose car factories there too?

> care so much about the pollution of other peoples' small towns.

It's CO2, it's in my town too.

I'm saying, the minor economic boon for this small town is not remotely worth the pollution over the lifetime of that data center ran off turbines.

> while still enjoying all the luxuries of modern society

We could enjoy the modern luxuries a bit more without Altman Et. Al. working to centralize labor into expensive automated Capital that we'd all have to rent back. Hell, even with some pollution caused by relocating manufacturing stateside.

I firmly believe we need to reintroduce friction into our lives to provide them some meaning and experience beyond ordering food on apps and looking at ads.

> And where was that car manufactured?

Michigan.

>I firmly believe we need to reintroduce friction into our lives to provide them some meaning and experience beyond ordering food on apps and looking at ads.

That's why in my country the government is incentivizing via fiscal policies for employers to be cancelling all home office perks to employers. To get people back to spending money on commuting.

>Michigan

So what's your opinion on building car factories there? If we remove those factories, air there would be cleaner.

This has a simple solution. Impose a carbon tax, and let the market sort out who is polluting more and who is providing more value.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com