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Comment by sriram_malhar | Hacker News Reader

Oracle and OpenAI centers getting hit, oil shortages forcing the world the move away from fossil fuels ... my cynical ass feels hope.

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AWS flex used to be they did not tell you where the data centers are physically located, and availability zones are actually at least 50 to 100 miles apart, unlike Google and Azure where multi-AZ its just two firewalls in the same building... Good times. Now your cloud provider selection matrix looks like:

- Number of THAAD batteries within intercept range

- Active defense agreements with NATO member states

- Licensed Ukrainian anti-drone EW systems per facility

- Iron Dome coverage overlap percentage

AWS Shield is going to mean a Patriot battery included...We went from cloud is just someone else's computer to cloud is just someone else's military base...

Underground data centers are looking better by the day. Deep underground. I can see some uses for abandoned mines.

Orbital data centers looking like even worse of an idea. Mighty exposed up there.

Fertilizer shortages worldwide resulting in massive famines all over the developing world, energy shortages that are affecting critical utilities supplies in the developing world... Sounds good, amirite?

Is it better to have no upset at all until we are past the point of no return for global warming based extinction?

Correct

Is there any reason to believe we didn't already sail past that point decades ago?

The upshot is it could accelerate the development of smaller local fertiliser factories running on solar power. There’s a few that have been built and demonstrated. If we start to build them in large numbers hopefully the costs will become reasonable.

That’s for nitrogen. Sulphur is another matter. I suppose in the long term we should just adapt food production to what can actually be sourced sustainably and locally.

Amazing, and people wonder why there is this immense backlash to environmentalists.

"Tons of people will die, but thats fine if it achieves my political/environmental goals"

7 million people per year die prematurely from air pollution alone. Are you suggesting we should just keep killing those people indefinitely instead?

Those 7 million lives were apparently never worth fixing things for; now maybe we can shift away from a fossil fuel-driven economy and cut back on a lot of that pollution, and maybe save a ton of lives in the long run.

Yes it is horrible that people are going to die from famines, no one is arguing against that, but maybe it will result in shifting our economy to something where people don't die of famines and also don't die of air pollution.

The number of people who'd die from famines will be much much higher than 7 million per year.

We have to evolve ways -- or bring back ways -- of making our agriculture less petroleum dependent. But short of a shock of this nature, we are not going to do any research in that direction because of trillions of dollars of investments in that way of doing business and in their vested interests. The oil will start flowing soon enough, but this is the defibrillation that the world needed, even if it didn't want it.

Perhaps you're giving thee cheers for Britain 'While the US ramps up oil production to unprecedented levels, the UK is refusing to tap into its vast reserves' Nice if you're not poor.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/22/americas-energy-...

Germany closing Nuclear energy generation enters the room ...

Then Germany, for no reason at all...

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