Not just Zoomers. I'm nearly 40 and also thought it smelled weirdly good. Though there's a difference between the original LCD and OLED models, with the latter's smell being much weaker and more like generic plastic off-gassing.
Confirmed: Gen1 LCD smelled about the same as the gen2 LCD units, but the OLED version doesn't smell as strong/good. I still huff it. I'm also over 40.
Expectation: removing standardized tests will give more opportunity to students who historically tend to do worse on those tests, like poor kids.
Reality: removing standardized tests means that universities have to put more weight on the rest of the college application, such as extracurricular activities which are often expensive and thus disadvantage poor kids.
Calling it a "paradox" is maybe a little hyperbolic, but basically it did the opposite of what they expected.
But this is relative, right? We're talking about SATs vs just relying on grades. Do poor kids do worse on SATs relative to how they do in their class grades, as compared to other kids? I kind of just figured poor kids do worse overall.
Its easier to get good grades in poor schools since regardless how you grade your teachers grade you against your peers, and poor schools have worse peers. So given same knowledge poor students have better grades, so their grades will be relatively better than their SATs.
At least in public schools were you don't have an incentive to give everyone an A, maybe private schools are different.
Alain Leroy Locke high school. So I don't know if there was any academic improvement, but they was certainly a safety improvement.
Ed (looked it up): there was academic improvement, LAUSD claims it's not enough, LAUSD is comparing against neighboring districts, which were not as distressed at the outset, "18 years to improve should have been enough". Safety is considerably improved. Alumni and district residents seem to want to keep the school. Locke high school is currently going through a charter renewal challenge.
Perhaps OP is tall and big then he'll probably handle the volume. It's best to divert anyway but if one want to max out your intake with a single ingredient, Tempeh is the way to go: 15-20gr/100g. I'm a skinny guy and can eat 500gr of those in the day with ease, although it's also full of fibers and level up satiety as soon as you start digesting.
But if cheakpeas your only food source, 7/8 seems achievable. Ask the "carnivorses" that says plant left them hungry :-p
The average person is going to have a hard time getting through two cans of chickpeas, which are some of the highest almost complete protein sources when it comes to beans and legumes. As you can anecdotally see with most vegans it’s almost impossible to get the required protein using that diet. Even Indian cuisine, which is the closest humans have come to perfecting vegetarian dishes, heavily, heavily supplement with dairy products to make up the deficit.
Then don't exclusively get legumes via cans of chickpeas? It's just a weirdly specific and inconvenient strawman you've latched on to. Rice and beans, lentil soups or curries, black bean burgers, seitan, tofu, nuts. There are just so many ways to get enough protein (with "enough" being "way less than most Americans get").
Also matters a bit what happens to a surface that they don't do anything to. Does a precisely rough surface get too rough or too smooth? Does a precisely smooth surface get rougher in a way that's beneficial?
Could be the case that in-practice this means they just worry less as their perfectly smooth planes get a bit rough.
My first reaction is that 244 acres for a data center sounds absolutely obscene. But I have to admit that I'm coming from a place of ignorance.
How big "should" a data center be? How big are some other data centers? How big is us-east-1, for an example of a large one? I'm finding this to be rather difficult information to google.
That's the land allocation rather than the building-size / data-centre size.
The average data centre is 10,000 square metres (2.5 acres).
As well as compute and network facilities, DCs also need to accommodate parking, personnel areas, cooling, fire-suppression, power substations, power redundancy (generators), ground-security…
244 acres is absolutely at the upper end of any DC site.
Most hyperscalers now prefer to build larger sites as “campuses” which may consist of many buildings each consuming 40-100MW, and then yes each building needs most of what you mentioned, so it adds up.
A few sites are now also contemplating BTM or ‘behind the meter’ power generation which takes additional space.
Then some sites like Microsoft’s Fairwater design are optimized for a very large number of Accelerator cabinets — think GPU, TPU, etc. Those cabinets are each consuming 140kW today and with a path to 700-1000kW cabinets soon, so that’s one super dense building instead of a campus of less dense buildings filled with Compute.
> Utah’s 40,000 acre datacenter proves it’s not absolutely at the upper end
So far it seems to be more of a concept of a plan. I wouldn’t be surprised if they build smaller scale data centers first, then cancel the 40000 acres expansion. That sorts of feel like a marketing tactic. If not and they are serious, are we close to peak bubble?
Amazon is probably deploying in the range of 250,000 racks per year into AWS. That’s millions of square feet before you get into all the infrastructure around them so they’re powered, cooled and operated the way they need.
Figure on ~10 million square feet of conditioned DC space per year, approximately 5-10GW of additional power consumption to power those 250k cabinets (depending on the exact mixture of what’s in the racks — Compute, Storage, Network, Accelerators), and that’s just for one hyperscaler.
There are at least 5-7 companies in the hyperscaler weight class although likely none individually meaningfully larger than AWS, they’re the 800lb bear and everyone else is in the 500-750lb range.
It’s a lot. Datacenters also take long enough to build that a hyperscaler is pouring concrete today for shells they expect to serve real workloads in 2029 - 2031. What you’re seeing come online today in response to customer demand really started being built in 2021 - 2023.
10,000 square meters sound suspiciously small for a datacenter, even more so if you have to account for supporting facility? Maybe a small one? it's just 100m by 100m, which is smaller than most Walmart Supercenter.
Building on grade is much cheaper. There is in general plenty of surface area on Planet Earth.
Datacenters aren’t built next to Nordstrom. Theres just no reason to spend on engineering and construction that increases density like underground parking.
Caledonia is an exurb of Milwaukee, so it's pretty sparse and spread out. There isn't that much demand for land on the outskirts of Milwaukee and most of the demand out there is industrial. Compared to the other industrial uses you'd get, data centers are almost certainly preferable.
> Compared to the other industrial uses you'd get, data centers are almost certainly preferable.
Why? The ratio of jobs and taxes to local resources tied up has to be one of the worst possible trade-offs of any industrial use that you can envision. That is precisely why data centers are proving to be profoundly unpopular.
Compare and contrast to something like a Boeing assembly plant with thousands of high-paid skilled jobs, and knock-on effects with local service providers and OEM vendors.
> The ratio of jobs and taxes to local resources tied up has to be one of the worst possible trade-offs of any industrial use that you can envision
Why? There aren't much "local resources tied up" since it's land that isn't that valuable for the most part. DCs, once built, don't emit fumes or loud noises, or make traffic worse like other industrial land use might. They just sit there quietly and generate tax revenue for the locality.
Sure, there aren't many ongoing jobs at an operating DC. But I can't see why it's one of the worst possible industrial uses, from the point of view of the residents around one.
> data centers are proving to be profoundly unpopular
From what I can tell, this is just from a combination of AI being unpopular plus opportunistic fearmongering on the part of politicians.
The bigger thing here is just the idea that the alternatives are "Boeing assembly plant" or "data center". Like: if you have the option of getting the Boeing plant, get the Boeing plant! Racine County does not have that option. Meanwhile, the happy sounding businesses there --- like the duck farm --- are actually major polluters, and more problematic for the region than a data center.
The people opposing data centers oppose them everywhere, including in the middle of the desert in Utah, which really gives away the game.
> he bigger thing here is just the idea that the alternatives are "Boeing assembly plant" or "data center".
This is a false dichotomy, though. That region has enough land that you could do both. There just isn't much demand for manufacturing in the Upper Midwest right now.
What you're saying is just factually incorrect. Data centers absolutely are loud and they're disruptive.
They're not good for the environment. They consume large quantities of water, typically, and huge, absolutely staggering amounts of energy, which typically has the effect of raising rates for everybody else by driving up demand and causing capital infrastructure needs that are financed by everybody, not just the data center.
There is absolutely widespread dislike for data center construction in basically every region spanning almost every political axis in the United States right now.
There's polling on it. It's abysmal. The assumption that all these people are stupid sheep probably won't be a productive way to approach this public policy question.
> The assumption that all these people are stupid sheep probably won't be a productive way to approach this public policy question
I agree, and I do not assume that these people are stupid sheep. However, having said that:
> Data centers absolutely are loud
Compared to undeveloped land, sure. Compared to other uses of industrially-zoned land? Most likely not. I've been to a lot of datacenters. They're not very loud from the outside.
> They consume large quantities of water
I honestly do not understand why they don't just build closed-loop systems, or geothermal where they have a closed loop with the ground acting as the heat sink. Open-loop systems where they consume water just to evaporate sounds stupid to me. But I don't know how common that is.
Politicians showing off in front of the camera with a dirty jug of water, of course, is just grandstanding and has no real relation to datacenters other than they made construction happen.
> huge, absolutely staggering amounts of energy, which typically has the effect of raising rates for everybody else
This isn't just true of datacenters. They're building an aluminum plant near me that will consume on the order of 100+ MW, which is comparable to a fairly large DC. Any other large industrial plant would consume a lot of electricity, but nobody's blaming them for utility capital investment needs.
They do not in fact consume large quantities of water, and "they consume lots of water" is a pretty good shibboleth for "this isn't going to be a productive discussion". Golf courses in the US consume more than 8x the water of all data centers combined.
Obviously, that's my response to your polling claims as well: people getting polled thing data centers are consuming all the water.
You've got these people going on TV and doing interviews saying that this new technology will be capable of replacing huge amounts of jobs.
The people that say that most jobs will be eliminated by AI are making direct threats of violence against the families of millions of people. Telling someone that they will no longer have any way of feeding their children is telling them that you're going to kill their family.
I'm not saying this to convince you that that's true. You could make some counter-arguments to that, and I'm sure people will come along and do that. The point is to understand it that that's how it's perceived by the people hearing it.
And then to add insult to injury, they want to come do it in your town.
They want to pitch a giant "development" project. But remember nobody ever wants “development” except for the fact that it might bring jobs and economic growth, to them, not you living somewhere else.
Meanwhile, you've already told them that the reason we need so many more data centers all of a sudden is specifically so that we can eliminate whatever jobs are left that we didn't get a chance to eliminate over the last several decades when we exported most of the jobs we could to different countries.
By the way we're the same assholes who said "trust us" last time, and pitched the idea that it would lead to a prosperous future for everyone. Instead you made money off sending the jobs to china, capturing all excess value with software, and addicting our children to opioids.
And your next exciting offer for us is a giant windowless building that will take up open land, nature, and yes, water and electricity, and employ almost nobody.
People don't feel like they control a whole lot, but they do have some ability to complain about this thing happening where they live.
The actions of people opposing these data centers are completely rational. If I'm trying to make one point, that's it.
The actually interesting part of this back and forth on HN is that Silicon Valley (aka "tech") culture has grown so fundamentally rotten at its core that not only do people not have values that place humans first, they can't even recognize when other people do.
> But remember nobody ever wants “development” except for the fact that it might bring jobs and economic growth, to them, not you living somewhere else.
This is really the only point that matters. It's held true my whole life, and I expect it will be true until I die. Doesn't matter what you build. I was watching a couple transmission line projects over the past decade that are still in the "lawsuits and community rage" phase - proposed to bring wind farm watts to load centers - and now they will likely be killed since the anti-development folks can pretend they were always due to Datacenters.
Datacenters are just an easy scapegoat for the anti-development crowd. It's been amazing to watch how quickly it's gone, and how folks have such a strong opinion on stuff that otherwise would have been built half a mile from them and they'd never have known any better until they were told to care.
The rest of what you wrote is largely social media driven ragebait in comment form. Kernels of truth, but largely immaterial.
Datacenter land use is the least interesting thing you could possibly discuss. Knocking out some corn fields and building some warehouses off the road no one can see or hear, with almost no traffic to/from them after construction is pretty much the lowest possible bar for local community impact for quite literally any project. It change nothing for anyone, other than the farmers who sold the land and that a few local trades companies have a couple decades of stable highly paid employment.
Therefore, the only way to get communities up in arms about these things is basically lie about it.
It's going to be a real head scratcher to folks when electricity rates continue to march upwards even if they get all AI datacenter construction banned. The green tech crowd who had the datacenter bogeyman land in their lap is playing an exceedingly dangerous game here. What we are largely seeing is the bill coming due for generational lack of investment into the grid.
If your local community can't figure out how to get the money raining down from the skies like it is now to subsidize the build out of your local infrastructure for something as minor as municipal water treatment in Wisconsin You likely will never be building anything at all.
The people who want these data centers are telling us that the reason that they want them is to keep momentum on their plans to destroy our entire way of life.
They just say it. They go on TV and do interviews and say it out loud.
So then everyone who has any ability to stop it in any possible way tries to do that.
What exactly the fuck do you think they're going to do?
And more importantly, what causes you to feel that it's obvious that they are only coming to these opinions through ignorance?
Lumping together anti-data-center sentiment with anti-development sentiment in general is bullshit. Yes, there are certainly impossible to negotiate with NIMBYs who don't like apartment buildings because they cast shadows on a sidewalk corner or something. That has nothing to do with this.
The politics of data centers are completely different. If this was a real, actual job-creating industrial project, people would react differently.
> Lumping together anti-data-center sentiment with anti-development sentiment in general is bullshit. Yes, there are certainly impossible to negotiate with NIMBYs who don't like apartment buildings because they cast shadows on a sidewalk corner or something. That has nothing to do with this.
I mean, you just did it yourself. You made a great point by doing so.
It's generally the same people. Your rants pretty much prove it. Plus I've been in meetings where it's literally the same people. They will use any and all reasons to stop local development and then stick with the one that gets the most popular traction.
I'm not talking about folks against residential development. I'm talking being around projects and in local meetings about industrial development - primarily electric generation and transmission. The arguments are pretty much the same.
> The people who want these data centers are telling us that the reason that they want them is to keep momentum on their plans to destroy our entire way of life.
AI is now taking rural blue collar jobs? I find it very difficult to believe this is a real grass roots concern.
I find it very easy to believe white collar folks are using their relative positions of power to amp up concerns rural blue collar folks would actually care about. Often at the expense of said blue collar folks.
These facilities would often be a win for a local community with a little bit of foresight. It doesn't matter to your power bill if they are sited 5 miles down the county road from you, or 200 miles. Chances are they are using electricity from your regional interconnect and that's where your power bills come from.
> And more importantly, what causes you to feel that it's obvious that they are only coming to these opinions through ignorance?
Only? Of course not. Primarily? Obviously. For the simple fact that dozens of people in my orbit who never knew datacenters existed near them all of a sudden Care Very Much(tm) about the subject after watching a few very low information videos. These are folks who drove past local facilities most of their lives and never had a clue.
> If this was a real, actual job-creating industrial project, people would react differently.
Not in my experience. Pretty much every single industrial project is nearly impossible to build in the US. Heavy industry sounds fun until someone wants to build an aluminum smelter, copper mine, or wind farm down the way. There are tons of infrastructure projects that need to get done which will not because they are not point-source locations that employ lots of jobs for a single community.
My previous example are wind farms. Typically those are best sited a few hundred miles away from a major metropolitan/load center. Good luck getting anything of scale built these days now that we've more or less burned up every ounce of spare electric transmission capacity leftover from before we de-industrialized ourselves. Once you get out of re-using existing right-of-way you see nearly the same backlash as AI datacenters. The difference? The urban laptop classes don't take your side and the outrage tends to stay localized.
It's very interesting to me a certain class of folks have convinced people that the closest thing to "free money" for a local community is a bad thing. Construction phase might suck, but assuming it's simply a datacenter and not a power plant with a co-located datacenter off the to side, you really can't get any lighter-touch land use than this. It's probably less environmentally impactful (in a negative way) to the local community than the 100 acre corn field it replaces. And employs more people to boot.
I would 100% agree with you on any tax abatements/credits/etc. These facilities do not need them and would be quite happy to pay full-freight on taxes on top of contributing towards upgrading local infrastructure far beyond their expected impact on it. This is where I feel that local politicians have seriously shit the bed all over their communities.
The fact that opposition to one thing looks sort of vaguely like opposition to another thing isn't completely irrelevant information, but you're just missing the actual thing that's happening if you focus on it.
"Seven in 10 Americans oppose constructing data centers for artificial intelligence in their local area, including nearly half, 48%, who are strongly opposed. Barely a quarter favor these projects, with 7% strongly in favor."
This is another way of me countering your main point here.
It's not the same people you've seen in previous arguments.
It's those people plus almost all of the other people because overwhelming 70%+ majorities don't want these things.
So we know that. That's the given here, assuming you think there's at least some validity to Gallup and polling.
The question then becomes why? My rants are intended to illustrate why. They sound like "rants" because people are extremely fucking angry about how things are going, so accurately restating their opinions also sounds angry.
The culture has changed. People do not fucking trust tech companies and their leadership at all for extremely valid reasons. Talk about wind farms all you want. I can go ahead and talk about the Yankees. The conversation at hand is about data centers, and data centers are their own issue.
When people like you come along and say it's "free money" nobody fucking believes you because there is a rich and long history of that kind of bullshit already.
There's a point of view here that they oppose data centers out of ignorance. My countervailing point is that their distrust is almost certainly rational, considered, and correct.
Distrust is the only sane response to recent events.
My original post that started this discussion did not mention water:
> The ratio of jobs and taxes to local resources tied up has to be one of the worst possible trade-offs of any industrial use that you can envision. That is precisely why data centers are proving to be profoundly unpopular.
Nonetheless I can see that fixating on this instead of my obviously correct point which is that people absolutely hate data centers and the sociopathic tech billionaires behind them for rational reasons is a good dodge.
Hardly unexpected when I am posting on the promotional discussion board of a private equity firm responsible for launching many of these sociopaths into society.
My later comment about water usage is both unneeded for that point to stand and trivially proven true.
This is a story about Microsoft building data centers and people opposing it.
So yes, one of the two key players here is the heavily financed tech sector.
Starting to think these disingenuous replies are in fact the point here.
Since none of of these conversations on HN make much difference anyways, my only hope is that one person, somewhere, who is a part of the "tech community" that usually gathers here (and of which I am a longtime member) becomes newly aware that people fucking hate us now for excellent and extremely well-supported reasons and thinks a little about how that happened and how they might change it.
I simply disagree with you. I'm not a fan of populism, and, more importantly, I think that people have had very good reason to "fucking hate us" for decades --- we are in the business of automating away people's jobs, and have been since the 1960s.
It's fine that you think the discussion is unproductive; I agree, our premises are too far apart to get anywhere. But you'd get further with, well, everybody that doesn't already agree with you if you'd stop accusing anybody who doesn't agree with you of being "disingenuous".
Well at least you're honest then. I hope your team loses because the outcomes here suck and are destroying our culture.
And on a personal level, I hope you reconsider your life decisions a little and realize the importance of a culture where people can feed their families and lead healthy productive lives of dignity, regardless of who their parents are or how gifted they happen to be intellectually.
You can just say "fuck you". You don't have to do this kind of violence to the concept of civility. "Fuck you" is what this kind of populism inevitably devolves to anyways. Skip the middle steps!
If having your values questioned sounds like "fuck you" then that's on you.
What I actually said is perhaps you should think about the people who end up worse off under the system you advocate for.
Your call of course but this is definitely not violence.
Violence is what happens when attempting to work through civic institutions and discourse has failed so many times that people no longer try this approach.
us-east-1 is a region. That means that it is 3 to 6 “availability zones” within a 100 km or so. Each of these availability zones consists of a cluster of data centers. Each cluster is perhaps 3-5 that are a few km from each other. The data centers will have tens of thousands of servers each.
So that is the mental model you should have for “how big is us-east-1”. But also, the data centers are not going to be, individually, anything like 244 acres. Best guess is that individual data centers are between 200,000 and 400,000 square feet. That is 5 to 10 acres.
Do the math above and us-east-1 may be 300 acres of floor space spread over a very large area.
AWS publicly stated I think in 2021 that the larger availability zones in US East 1 consisted of 17-18 datacenters each. It’s likely grown a lot since, and they recently announced AZ7 will be online in Maryland soon, so they must be running out of ability to grow the ones in NoVA.
I can’t find a link now but it was one of the re:Invent talks like Peter DeSantis briefly explaining AZs before he dug into how Amazon optimizes their concrete mixtures to be more environmentally friendly or something…
All things point to that being the biggest region any hyperscaler has in the world, and several gigawatts of power consumption.
James Hamilton also gave a talk in 2021 about AWS having crossed 20 million Nitro cards deployed and 12GW power consumed —
Almost all of the site would have been open space, existing transmission corridors, an electric substation, and two flood control ponds they threw in to try to sweeten the deal by offsetting the new impermeable surfaces. The data halls are a small portion of the site.
Stormwater ponds are the bare minimum, not a deal sweetener. A deal sweetener would be an ecological management plan which demonstrates a true desire to limit the environmental impacts of this development as much as possible. And no, a storm pond company that just pours chemicals into the water to control algae and plants invasive privets around does not demonstrate that.
You're saying the data center has a small footprint, but it does not. You don't need that much stormwater pond if you don't have giant impervious surfaces.
Deal sweetener is footprint (buildings, parking lots, and substation) being 1/6 of the land with the other 5/6 dedicated to nature preservation.
Not all wide open space is created equal. If it's wide open space with Eurasian grasses that get cut every few weeks, it's useless and has 0 benefit to the local ecology. Even if they weren't cut, they're still do very little for the ecology in the area.
If those forests don't have keystone tree species, then it's the same.
The people running these companies are so incompetent, they can't even do greenwashng right.
I think you're a little miscalibrated on "giant impervious surface". The 244-acre site in question would have had three data halls, a substation, and one assumes parking lots and aprons. Here's a 300-acre Walmart distribution center in the same region. It has about 100 acres of concrete. I think that's a lot more than the data center would have had.
That's not how stormwater management works. Land elevation, adjacent land, the profile of the land (how much groundwater is there?) on which the structure is built (and probably even more that I'm not considering) all affect how big of a retention/detention pond is needed. And these requirements change over time when it is discovered that older sites' management techniques failed to adequately manage stormwater. The Walmart site was built at least two decades ago, no? That's enough time for stormwater management guidance and policy to change.
Even then, it is improper to assume anything about the stormwater management needs of one site based on another unrelated site. But even then, Walmart's site seems to be completely surrounded by stormwater management. Even the northwest corner of the site is a detention basin. [0]
The most obvious and logical conclusion to be made here is that an engineer told Microsoft they needed to have stormwater management of that size, so that's what they put in their plans. No sweetness, just lawsuit prevention.
If they want to be sweet, they should be building huge nature preserves (and they have enough money to afford it) into these plans instead of trying to be greedy by building the largest possible structures (they think) they can get away with.
Based on a majority of games regions, US-East-1 is scattered properties in a <100 square mile area near Dulles Airport in Virginia, associated with an Internet backbone junction and former AOL campus in small town called Ashburn.
You can just as easily insert an NES cartridge today as when it launched, and you can just as easily copy a .mobi file over USB to a Kindle as when it launched, both without using the internet.
> Kindles are somewhat infamous for updates that wipe storage if they think you are side loading pirate ebooks
Source? I've never heard of this, and I used to work there, including building the OS from source (though my contributions to the OS were pretty minimal). If you just put a .mobi file onto the storage, how does it have any idea where it came from?
> If you don't allow the device to connect to the internet, yes
Why is that a problem for a device which has been EoL'd?
Alternatively, just change your browser's default search shortcut, and add &udm=14 to the end of the normal google search. It changes the default search results to "web" rather than "All", which removes all the extraneous crap they've added over the years.
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