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Comment by Ydarbleoj

19 hours ago

You are engaging in the "but you participate in society" fallacy.

One can critique systems they are still interacting with, to suggest otherwise is just so incredibly lazy.

Not at all. The post being responded to completely failed to acknowledge any value brought by data centers to the general populous. That's disingenuous. To force the point: run me through the scenario where we turn off all the data centers. Consider how much more water we will have, how much less expensive electricity will be, and what other problems might arise.

  • But that value is subjective. If my tap water is brown as a result of a DC, I may not agree with your positives. If my neighborhood is humming all night because of a DC, again, I might not have the ability to see what you see as positive.

    So, my take is that maybe the pro-DC side can do better at seeing multiple perspectives instead of acting like anything negatively said about DCs is a psychosis.

    • >If my tap water is brown as a result of a DC, I may not agree with your positives. If my neighborhood is humming all night because of a DC

      Those things are both a result of a failure of government, not the existence of data centres. If there are externalised costs the company wants to put on people then your government should extract them from the company as a condition of permission.

      Data centres are factories that turn electricity into heat and money. They're basically the nicest factories possible. There is no fundamental reason they need to harm people, any issues data centres cause should be easy to address as a fraction of the already massive sums involved.

  • They also didn't say whether or not they like electric lightbulbs. Or hot showers. Or clothes. Or the wheel.

  • One tylenol is good at reducing my fever. 20 tylenol will likely damage my liver and might even kill me.

    I'm not saying tylenol is bad. I'm not saying it's good. I'm just pointing out that your position is equivalent to opposing a person saying "lets no shove 20 tylenol down someone's throat" with the argument "but one has reduced the fever".