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> Steven Gonzales Monserrate is an anthropologist and a PhD candidate Maybe this person should stick to studying skull sizes or whatever it is an anthropologis

> Steven Gonzales Monserrate is an anthropologist and a PhD candidate Maybe this person should stick to studying skull sizes or whatever it is an anthropologist studies these days. I'm sorry to say, but what a load of horse shit. Yes, data centers use energy. Essentially all of the big cloud providers have committed to carbon neutrality, most of them are pretty far done with getting there, and essentially all of them already source the vast majority of their power from renewables at this point. That's not just because it is greener, but also because it is cheaper. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc. each maintain nice web pages on how far they are with these plans. - Amazon is shooting for 2025 for 100% carbon neutral energy. https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/environment/the-cloud?energyType=true https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/environment/the-cloud... - Microsoft plans for carbon negative by 2030: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/01/16/microsoft-will-be-carbon-negative-by-2030/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/01/16/microsoft-will-b... - Google claims to have been carbon neutral since 2007 and plans to be carbon free by 2030 as well: https://sustainability.google/commitments-europe/ https://sustainability.google/commitments-europe/ That's a trend with many other manufacturers as well. E.g. lots of automotive manufacturers. If there's a deep conspiracy where these companies are lying about what they are doing, that would be news worthy of course. But, I suspect that most of these companies are simply getting very good at managing absurdly high degrees of energy and water efficiency and cost. Kind of counters the message of the article / the author's world view of course. So, instead this author is dragging in all sorts of things: waste problems, hypertension in people, "computational whir of data centers is not merely an annoyance, but a source of mental and physical harm". I mean, what the actual F** is he going on about here?! What's the point here? Modern technology is bad? Is there a point at all?

JadeNB 5y ago
> If there's a deep conspiracy where these companies are lying about what they are doing, that would be news worthy of course. But, I suspect that most of these companies are simply getting very good at managing absurdly high degrees of energy and water efficiency and cost. Believing in a deep conspiracy is probably violating Occam's razor, but I think believing in companies getting very good at gaming metrics and regulators not finding it in their interest to look too closely at positive results on metrics doesn't require too much conspiratorial thinking—everyone's happy in the short term.

JadeNB 5y ago

> If there's a deep conspiracy where these companies are lying about what they are doing, that would be news worthy of course. But, I suspect that most of these companies are simply getting very good at managing absurdly high degrees of energy and water efficiency and cost. Believing in a deep conspiracy is probably violating Occam's razor, but I think believing in companies getting very good at gaming metrics and regulators not finding it in their interest to look too closely at positive results on metrics doesn't require too much conspiratorial thinking—everyone's happy in the short term.