14 ms·

Is it really that expensive to not do stuff like this? I guess 'turning the entirety of the American public against data centers' is not something they factor

Is it really that expensive to not do stuff like this? I guess 'turning the entirety of the American public against data centers' is not something they factor into the cost analysis.

beloch 3mo ago
This is one of the data centres that went to the extra expense of building a closed loop cooling system that would, supposedly, not waste water on a continuous basis. Apparently, even these are not so clean to set up. Governments are going to need to start paying more attention to the commissioning process apparently. -------- "Meta said that it's supporting its general contractor, Fortis, which stopped discharging and began hauling wastewater offsite" -------- Governments should also watch where this wastewater is being hauled to, and likely just dumped.
- andrew_lettuce 3mo ago
  This closed loop system needs to be filled and flushed, which is the operation discussed in the article. The bacterium was described as a possible airborne hazard if used for irrigation, it's not a regulated substance though so dump and dilute might be perfectly safe.
  - beloch 3mo ago
    Might be. Might not be. To put it another way, would you want this waste water diluted and dumped in a lake you swim in or a river you fish in without proper study and regulation?
    - anon7000 3mo ago
      Not sure why you got downloaded, but you’re right. Polluting public (and even private!) spaces is philosophically speaking a property rights violation, which is a core libertarian/free market value. So why the fuck are we in the habit of giving companies the benefit of the doubt on this? Companies always follow the financial incentive. There is rarely a financial incentive to not pollute and always a financial incentive to spend less money on costly processes that slow things down, so they’ll pollute every chance they can. It’s just a side effect of how capitalism works. So yes, if you actually care about your property (including public property in your town!), you absolutely need to push for more oversight. Companies have absolutely zero incentive to do it themselves, as evidenced in this scenario where the town “caught them in the act” so to speak. And I’m not saying this company was doing anything deliberately malicious, but it takes the town being on top of their wastewater management processes and doing a solid root cause investigation to even find out this was happening. That doesn’t happen unless people care. A company has no incentive to do it themselves.
      - benjiro29 3mo ago
        > why the fuck are we in the habit of giving companies the benefit of the doubt on this Because companies pay for lobbyist, give donations, and other perks to politicians. Simple as that ... And companies a a-political, they simply give money to both sides, so who is in power has less effect. While you the normal voter, only matter a few times, and with increased irrelevant as how powerful your vote is. The fact that companies can now vote in local elections (in some states, you can guess the states colors), tells you how deep the corruption has gone.
    - baranul 3mo ago
      Apparently, other people's quality of life and health are of little to no concern in comparison to company profits, after they've paid off the correct politicians. After all, the executives of the company (the important people) know not to swim in that lake (their swimming pools are clean) nor drink the water (as they can drink Perrier bottled water).
    - AnthonyMouse 3mo ago
      > To put it another way, would you want this waste water diluted and dumped in a lake you swim in or a river you fish in without proper study and regulation? Are you going to apply the same standard to every house with a swimming pool, every municipal storm drain that collects rain water having passed over the ground in nature where there are untold strains of bacteria and every other system handling thousands of gallons of unfiltered water? Otherwise it's an isolated demand for rigor. You can tell that something has an ulterior motive when the rule or its enforcement special cases the doing of a generic thing only when it's being done by the people being targeted.
      - watwut 3mo ago
        > Are you going to apply the same standard to every house with a swimming pool, every municipal storm drain that collects rain water having passed over the ground in nature where there are untold strains of bacteria and every other system handling thousands of gallons of unfiltered water? All of those are regulated and studied.
        AnthonyMouse 3mo ago
        If by "regulated and studied" you mean there are some laws that people regularly pay no attention to and aren't even aware exist, and some random sampling of a minuscule proportion of storm water for a minuscule subset of possible contaminants, and not even that much in many jurisdictions.
        watwut 3mo ago
        People dont need to pay attention, because when you buy a pool or pool chemistry, it already follows applicable regulations. The companies doing the work also know them. > some random sampling of a minuscule proportion of storm water for a minuscule subset of possible contaminants The whole point of random sampling is to ensure you need as miniscule amount of water as possible. These tests checking likely polutants is also not a bad thing. Are you claiming these pools are massively poluting water? Or are you just angry that potentially large polutants are not allowed to just do what they want?
- hamdingers 3mo ago
  > began hauling wastewater offsite They towed it outside the environment.
kibwen 3mo ago
By definition, externalizing a cost is less expensive than internalizing it; the only recourse for the rest of us is forcing them to properly internalize their costs.
smrtinsert 3mo ago
Move fast and break things isn't a mantra that arose from first principles, it's literally all they know how to do
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
derekdahmer 3mo ago
Testing for an extremely rare bacterium is not the bare minimum. In fact even the water treatment plants rarely do it. They admit in the article we don’t even know whether or not the bacteria originated from the water supplied by the city that entered the pipes in the first place. DCs should be responsible for their output but this seems to be a super edge case.
kccqzy 3mo ago
Not do what? Not discharge the water with bacterium? But the data center claims that their independent testing shows that they didn’t even discharge the bacterium. It seems that neither the city nor Meta knew where the bacterium came from.
jstummbillig 3mo ago
Is this a common problem? I would assume not, since it lead to a suspense, and that is probably very expensive and something you aim to avoid.
washadjeffmad 3mo ago
Yeah, unfortunately. Effluent and wastewater companies have been getting greedy. If one suddenly 100x's your cost, you're fucked until you build onsite treatment or find a way to ship it out.
vlian2088 3mo ago
'turning the entirety of the American public against data centers' is a blatant public opinion campaign ran by people and entities who didn't give a damn about data centers up until 3 years ago.
- anon7000 3mo ago
  Well, it turns out people started noticing local community impacts when new data center construction absolutely exploded 2-3 years ago.
  - vlian2088 3mo ago
    you have numbers? I asked a chatbot and the numbers I got were underwhelming.
    - jubilanti 3mo ago
      I feel sorry for you. How about you do your own research?
      - vlian2088 3mo ago
        [dead]
  - jubilanti 3mo ago
    Not just exploded, but went full on "move fast and break things". Nobody complained about the data centers that have no more impact on the local environment that a warehouse. But in all this rush, they're cutting corners everywhere and putting so much strain on the electric grid. Many also have massive onsite natural gas turbines, some big enough to power a small city, built by the contractor with the lowest bidder, half a mile from people's houses. You can hear and FEEL them from inside a house.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
stainablesteel 3mo ago
it's incredibly hard to identify microbes like these, this is not a simple task, especially if you're not aware they exist or that they can occur in this way.. if they did, which i'm skeptical of
croes 3mo ago
Wait until they get nuclear power plants for their data centers. Profit over safety all day long
rcxdude 3mo ago
I kinda think the reaction and reporting on this is already being colored by the objection to the datacenters, as opposed to the other way around. And it's not obvious exactly where the problem came from in the first place: it doesn't look like this is some super-obvious, common and easy to prevent issue that they just decided to cheap out on, nor is it obviously a datacenter-specific issue.

Is it really that expensive to not do stuff like this? I guess 'turning the entirety of the American public against data centers' is not something they factor into the cost analysis.

beloch 3mo ago

This is one of the data centres that went to the extra expense of building a closed loop cooling system that would, supposedly, not waste water on a continuous basis. Apparently, even these are not so clean to set up. Governments are going to need to start paying more attention to the commissioning process apparently. -------- "Meta said that it's supporting its general contractor, Fortis, which stopped discharging and began hauling wastewater offsite" -------- Governments should also watch where this wastewater is being hauled to, and likely just dumped.

andrew_lettuce 3mo ago
This closed loop system needs to be filled and flushed, which is the operation discussed in the article. The bacterium was described as a possible airborne hazard if used for irrigation, it's not a regulated substance though so dump and dilute might be perfectly safe.
- beloch 3mo ago
  Might be. Might not be. To put it another way, would you want this waste water diluted and dumped in a lake you swim in or a river you fish in without proper study and regulation?
  - anon7000 3mo ago
    Not sure why you got downloaded, but you’re right. Polluting public (and even private!) spaces is philosophically speaking a property rights violation, which is a core libertarian/free market value. So why the fuck are we in the habit of giving companies the benefit of the doubt on this? Companies always follow the financial incentive. There is rarely a financial incentive to not pollute and always a financial incentive to spend less money on costly processes that slow things down, so they’ll pollute every chance they can. It’s just a side effect of how capitalism works. So yes, if you actually care about your property (including public property in your town!), you absolutely need to push for more oversight. Companies have absolutely zero incentive to do it themselves, as evidenced in this scenario where the town “caught them in the act” so to speak. And I’m not saying this company was doing anything deliberately malicious, but it takes the town being on top of their wastewater management processes and doing a solid root cause investigation to even find out this was happening. That doesn’t happen unless people care. A company has no incentive to do it themselves.
    - benjiro29 3mo ago
      > why the fuck are we in the habit of giving companies the benefit of the doubt on this Because companies pay for lobbyist, give donations, and other perks to politicians. Simple as that ... And companies a a-political, they simply give money to both sides, so who is in power has less effect. While you the normal voter, only matter a few times, and with increased irrelevant as how powerful your vote is. The fact that companies can now vote in local elections (in some states, you can guess the states colors), tells you how deep the corruption has gone.
  - baranul 3mo ago
    Apparently, other people's quality of life and health are of little to no concern in comparison to company profits, after they've paid off the correct politicians. After all, the executives of the company (the important people) know not to swim in that lake (their swimming pools are clean) nor drink the water (as they can drink Perrier bottled water).
  - AnthonyMouse 3mo ago
    > To put it another way, would you want this waste water diluted and dumped in a lake you swim in or a river you fish in without proper study and regulation? Are you going to apply the same standard to every house with a swimming pool, every municipal storm drain that collects rain water having passed over the ground in nature where there are untold strains of bacteria and every other system handling thousands of gallons of unfiltered water? Otherwise it's an isolated demand for rigor. You can tell that something has an ulterior motive when the rule or its enforcement special cases the doing of a generic thing only when it's being done by the people being targeted.
    - watwut 3mo ago
      > Are you going to apply the same standard to every house with a swimming pool, every municipal storm drain that collects rain water having passed over the ground in nature where there are untold strains of bacteria and every other system handling thousands of gallons of unfiltered water? All of those are regulated and studied.
      - AnthonyMouse 3mo ago
        If by "regulated and studied" you mean there are some laws that people regularly pay no attention to and aren't even aware exist, and some random sampling of a minuscule proportion of storm water for a minuscule subset of possible contaminants, and not even that much in many jurisdictions.
        watwut 3mo ago
        People dont need to pay attention, because when you buy a pool or pool chemistry, it already follows applicable regulations. The companies doing the work also know them. > some random sampling of a minuscule proportion of storm water for a minuscule subset of possible contaminants The whole point of random sampling is to ensure you need as miniscule amount of water as possible. These tests checking likely polutants is also not a bad thing. Are you claiming these pools are massively poluting water? Or are you just angry that potentially large polutants are not allowed to just do what they want?
hamdingers 3mo ago
> began hauling wastewater offsite They towed it outside the environment.

kibwen 3mo ago

By definition, externalizing a cost is less expensive than internalizing it; the only recourse for the rest of us is forcing them to properly internalize their costs.

smrtinsert 3mo ago

Move fast and break things isn't a mantra that arose from first principles, it's literally all they know how to do

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

derekdahmer 3mo ago

Testing for an extremely rare bacterium is not the bare minimum. In fact even the water treatment plants rarely do it. They admit in the article we don’t even know whether or not the bacteria originated from the water supplied by the city that entered the pipes in the first place. DCs should be responsible for their output but this seems to be a super edge case.

kccqzy 3mo ago

Not do what? Not discharge the water with bacterium? But the data center claims that their independent testing shows that they didn’t even discharge the bacterium. It seems that neither the city nor Meta knew where the bacterium came from.

jstummbillig 3mo ago

Is this a common problem? I would assume not, since it lead to a suspense, and that is probably very expensive and something you aim to avoid.

washadjeffmad 3mo ago

Yeah, unfortunately. Effluent and wastewater companies have been getting greedy. If one suddenly 100x's your cost, you're fucked until you build onsite treatment or find a way to ship it out.

vlian2088 3mo ago

'turning the entirety of the American public against data centers' is a blatant public opinion campaign ran by people and entities who didn't give a damn about data centers up until 3 years ago.

anon7000 3mo ago
Well, it turns out people started noticing local community impacts when new data center construction absolutely exploded 2-3 years ago.
- vlian2088 3mo ago
  you have numbers? I asked a chatbot and the numbers I got were underwhelming.
  - jubilanti 3mo ago
    I feel sorry for you. How about you do your own research?
    - vlian2088 3mo ago
      [dead]
- jubilanti 3mo ago
  Not just exploded, but went full on "move fast and break things". Nobody complained about the data centers that have no more impact on the local environment that a warehouse. But in all this rush, they're cutting corners everywhere and putting so much strain on the electric grid. Many also have massive onsite natural gas turbines, some big enough to power a small city, built by the contractor with the lowest bidder, half a mile from people's houses. You can hear and FEEL them from inside a house.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]

stainablesteel 3mo ago

it's incredibly hard to identify microbes like these, this is not a simple task, especially if you're not aware they exist or that they can occur in this way.. if they did, which i'm skeptical of

croes 3mo ago

Wait until they get nuclear power plants for their data centers. Profit over safety all day long

rcxdude 3mo ago

I kinda think the reaction and reporting on this is already being colored by the objection to the datacenters, as opposed to the other way around. And it's not obvious exactly where the problem came from in the first place: it doesn't look like this is some super-obvious, common and easy to prevent issue that they just decided to cheap out on, nor is it obviously a datacenter-specific issue.