I don’t think in the USA the leaders or the people are really spineless. You elected Donald Trump twice. The time he lost the people threw a terrorist act of insurrection. Those are not spineless things. Just because the result is not what you wanted doesn’t make it spineless. In fact it’s pretty much the opposite.

I don’t think that the everyday people in my country are spineless. Our leaders on the other hand…

Have you heard of Lizz Truss who lasted for less time than a piece of lettuce? Now that’s what I call spineless.

In my country weed isn’t legal. I get what you are saying though. NIMBYs are a problem everywhere. Which makes me wonder why you are saying that these data centers can build wherever. Surely if democracy and local government works as well as you say it does they wouldn’t be able to build anything that big without the say so of the local people, no?

I don’t think this is quite how the world works. The reason people need to work to survive is because we can’t survive if everyone stopped working. We have to make people work under threat of homelessness because if we didn’t there is too great a risk they wouldn’t work at all and that would eventually mean the collapse of society. How many people would quit their job tomorrow if they won the lottery? Sure some would find work doing something they preferred, but not all of them, and often the thing they prefer doing is not the job that actually needs doing the most. If it’s something they even are good at. Loads of people would love to be an actor, but how many actually have both the talent and the skills needed to do that?

In a society where most people actually don’t need to work because most work can be handled by machines without significant negative consequences things would change to be very different. People like to think rich people or politicians or kings control the world by themselves but the reality is there are always limits on what they can actually do. If you dick around too much even in an absolute monarchy you will be overthrown one way or another. Typically by your own military, underlings, or family, sometimes by revolution or insurrection. The same thing applies today to liberal democracy. In fact it applies even more so. Anyone who tried to kill off the working class as a whole would find themselves very quickly dead or dethroned one way or another.

If you need the consent to build them then how are they being forced on communities without consent? You are contradicting yourself now.

Thinking democracy actually works and the representatives actually care about the people is very wishful thinking. From my experience they don’t and they haven’t for a long time.

I wouldn’t know. I haven’t been to a town council meeting before.

Would a town council even be involved in an industrial zone which might not even be part of a town?

What do you think the social contract is?

Yeah you need the consent of the council for planning permission. Not the consent of the individual people.

I am not a libertarian either, but whatever.

Most datacenters are not in urban communities they are in industrial zones.

You also don’t need the consent of other people to build things on land you own. Get out of here with this shit.

No? It’s powered by wind energy. Wind is created by heat from the sun. If you capture and use the energy or not it still stays in earth’s system. This is about as green as computing can get.

You can also just use air

I never said it fixed the issue of generating heat. Heat isn’t really a major problem as far as I am concerned. I thought we were talking about water use.

Why would they call closed loop liquid cooling “dry cooling”? Unless they explicitly said that then I don’t believe you to be honest.

Evaporative cooling wouldn’t make the water undrinkable unless something has gone very wrong. So I don’t think what you are saying about Oregan is true either.

This is also only representative of the USA, not worldwide. I get that much of the world doesn’t have many datacenters compared to the USA, but you at least have to include China and the EU.

YouTube requires enormous amounts of data center hardware. Do you have any idea how much video data they injest, transcode, and distribute in even just an hour or a minute? It’s not very economical to run actually and they had major problems even breaking even.

Most large Lemmy instances run on cloud services nowadays. So they rely on a datacenter somewhere. I am well aware you can self-host - I have done so for multiple things including AI models and tools - but that’s a minority of Lemmy users. Most are using public instances which are hosted on servers in the cloud. In fact if you read the deployment guide for Lemmy it is meant to be deployed using cloud native technology.

You also don’t need a whole Stargate to host one users AI usage. You don’t even need a whole server. Typically AI servers process requests from multiple users simultaneously. The actual marginal cost of each user is relatively small, hence why people can and do run local AI models.

What do you want me to put together? Why don’t you just come out and say what you mean instead of beating around the bush?

The guy you are replying to doesn’t actually know jack about data centers. Plenty do use closed loop cooling which doesn’t involve evaporating water. It’s only a minority that use evaporative cooling. Power stations are more likely to use evaporative cooling (hence big towers with steam clouds) than datacenters are. They also use far more cooling water than datacenters do. Both pale in comparison to agriculture and other uses.

Pretty sure most modern data centers are using closed loop cooling or refrigeration. Not evaporative cooling.

You can’t condense the water either that would defeat the point of evaporating it in the first place. Closed loop liquid cooling does not involve boiling or evaporation. You are just pumping a liquid around a circuit. It’s not just water either it’s more like a car antifreeze.

The majority of datacenters and datacenter power consumption are not for AI. Before AI no one cared about datacenters. Still no one cares about datacenters that already existed and make up the majority of datacenters. I don’t understand it. Is this just manufactured outrage?

How is this being obtuse?