Comment by joe_mamba
2 hours ago
Yeah agriculture is bad for the environment, but at least it feeds us to keep us alive, so we can say it's worth it. Datacenters don't.
They don't even create that many jobs like a factory for instance so we can say the mass employment offsets the environmental damage.
> Yeah agriculture is bad for the environment, but at least it feeds us to keep us alive
This is true, but don't forget a _lot_ of agriculture feeds _animals_ that we in turn eat. If you want to make optimal use of land for human needs, most modern agriculture is not that.
The problem is feed lots.
There's no problem the more conventional practice of letting animals graze the majority of the year. If we didn't use those fields to feed and eat the animals, the grass would turn into CO2 and methane anyway. Or turn into boring forests.
Not everything has to be optimal. That thinking leads to Thanos' snap. People generally enjoy meat. They also enjoy the landscape farmers created.
Please at least pretend to read the article before posting something like that.
The US has ~97 people / mi² vs ~519 people / mi² in Italy so the article is less relevant than you think
Tens of millions of acres of agricultural land goes to things like production of corn ethanol. It is disingenuous to pretend we need this land to feed anybody.
We have vastly more arable land than is needed to keep people from starving, even when used inefficiently to produce things like cattle feed.
Maybe in the US, but farmland is quite scarce in Lombardy.
Just because it is scarce doesn't mean it is productive.
I have friends with farms and agricultural businesses in Italy. A lot of agricultural land is no longer cultivated by the families that own it because market prices are well below the cost of production in Italy.
The services provided by a data center do provide jobs. My job for one, and I'm guessing a majority of posters here too.
But thanks to the magic of the Interwebs, most of those jobs don't have to be in the city, region, or even the same country as the one where the DC is located. So for a local politician, most of those jobs won't get them reelected.
I realise it's a politically hard sell, but it's just a lie that data centers produce few jobs. Few direct jobs, sure, but the internet and cloud existing has created many, many millions of jobs.
Normal datacentres, sure, but these services are already running from the existing datacentres.
These purpose built DCs in the recent AI craze doesn't. A handful of security guys, handful of technicians and that's pretty much it
they said "that many jobs" not "no jobs".
compared to something like a car factory, data centers do not provide that many jobs.
(and the jobs are of significantly different nature)
Directly, sure. Indirectly, they have created many millions of jobs. Tens of millions at the very lowest. There are nearly 30 million web developers alone.
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Many of which are bullshit jobs... Just because something generates a job, it doesn't make that something automatically a good thing with a net impact on our world and society. There are many more boxes to tick.
As long as we don't see the damaged areas around data centers than all is fine, right?
Where have I heard this before?
What damage do you have in mind? I live next to a big cluster of data centers, second biggest in Europe, and I haven't seen anything like "damage" from them.
What damage?
One can say that food can be produced elsewhere, but also data centers might be a critical component of future society if we don't solve birth rates. Also, fewer births mean less food required.