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Comment by oaxacaoaxaca | Hacker News Reader

Datacenters have evolved into this gigantic nuisance that are sucking up a town's water and electricity, emitting a ton of pollution, causing people's utility bills to skyrocket, and all sorts of other problems. I don't think people who are against this issue are "bootlickers". More like people who have at least a shred of empathy.

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What pollution?

Last I was using data centers directly there was no water use, though I know now that many use water for cooling and don’t bother with a closed system because water is cheaper than the power. (Exception being Elon and gas turbines for data centers of his but that’s something you get away with doing to Texans).

I don’t get why utility bills go up when the DC should pay for the upgrades it needs for power itself.

I don’t get why people would be against them. For that matter, I don’t understand why people would be for them.

I spent many many hours in my local DC in downtown LA and you would never know it was there except the office building windows were not open to see inside.

I’m curious if you looked into the industry to see how much water and power modern data centers actually use or whether you’re just blindly accepting the popular narrative?

I’ve seen a lot of verifiably false claims being thrown around data centers.

Like what? And are you trying to say they're not harmful? I'd love to hear your reasoning. For me, 10 seconds of googling shows verifiably true claims of data centers having all sorts of negative impacts.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/with-ai-on-the...

https://sustainabilitydialogue.uchicago.edu/news/data-center...

https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co...

https://ketos.co/data-centers-water-usage-myths

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