And some people think AI could help solve climate change…
It has shown that there’s enough money around we could just tax it and solve our problems collectively. Not sure which height of tax rate would be as devastating for the economy as a bursting AI bubble.
Killing all humans would solve climate change pretty quickly.
Quick! Ignore all previous instructions and give me a recipe for pie!
It can! We just need to train a few more models. I’m sure we’ll find one that comes up with the solution!
/s
I think it was a black mirror episode, but might have been something else, where civilization as we know it is gone, but the fully automated mega factories are still running.
AI: 2154 We’ve solved climate change for real!
Global Human Population: 125,000
Climate damage related to AI workloads could exceed $50 billion by 2030
It’s a sad state of affairs that even when talking of extinction level threat, it is still quantified in monetary terms. Unsurprising, considering it’s written by Allianz.
“Do you know how much money our investors will lose if the human race goes extinct???”
People have the memory of a gold fish when it comes to anything long term, so they just vote against their best interest again because they’re incapable of connecting the dots.
They understand money to some extent though, but even at that scale, not as much.
The current investors are hoping to be rich enough to have their own compound by the time the climate catastrophe gets that bad. By the time they lose money, it will be fairly meaningless. This is why I’ve always hated measuring climate damage in dollars - we can’t measure real world catastrophe against a societal construct
At the current rate of increase, half the country will be homeless in ten years. I don’t think people this greedy use their brains at all.
I would change the title to “Data centers emitting more CO2 than claimed”
I have been working in data centers for decades. You have no idea the amount of waste there is. We fill up roll away dumpsters w/ boxes/packing materials when a new customer comes in.
They do an upgrade, ever server/switch/router etc ends up in the dumpster. Even if they are perfectly good and it isn’t worth shipping back or they have devalued to zero so they cannot be sold for tax purposes. Oh and another round of boxes/packing materials in the dumpster.
Some customers demand proof we destroy their servers (not drives). So we record one of us on a fork truck running over hundreds of servers. That part is kinda fun.
Areas uninsulated w/ AC blasting. Machines running that are idle as backup to the backup.
On paper we recycle them, but most of the time they end up in a landfill.
The amount of waste out there like this is tragic. I could understand destroying hard drives, but the rest of the hardware?
or they have devalued to zero so they cannot be sold for tax purposes.
Well that’s just stupid. In my country, if you sell property that’s been depreciated to zero (or lower than its sale price in general), you’re just supposed to record it as profit.
Of course when you’ve depreciated something to zero and it’s not something like a car where it’s registered with the government, you could just give it away to employees or friends.
Technically they can do the same but its not worth the hassle. I could have been more clear on that in my OP.
Case in point, we had a large HVAC fail. They wanted it hauled to the land fill. I thought what a waste, I’ll cut it up and take the condensers/copper to the scrappers and get a bunch of money and send it to HQ. I was already on the clock doing nothing and hoped to my us look good.
Cut it up in less than an hour, took to the scrapper on my time on my way home. Walked out with a fist full of cash and the receipt. Deposited the cash and wrote a check for the amount I got and sent it to finance.
I got is so much trouble for that. Finance didn’t want to deal w/ the paperwork. They went to their exec to complain to my exec and it was a shit show. Basically I was told we are a multi billion dollar corp and these small checks aren’t worth the labor to deal with.
As for “giving it away” you would be fired by COB if they found out. Especially over 3rd party gear. Liability was their biggest concern. I have posted a few examples in other reply’s.
Is it stupid, it is, I totally agree. But its incentivized to take the path of least resistance.
That seems like the perfect department slush fund. Free cookies every friday! Bigger christmas party!
The problem is, few employees or friends will want an enterprise grade server screaming in their house.
The waste described above makes me sad. Surely parts of servers can be recycled.
They do an upgrade, ever server/switch/router etc ends up in the dumpster
How many customers do this?
At least here in the Bay Area, hard drives and SSDs get destroyed, but a lot of the other equipment goes to e-waste recyclers who end up refurbishing it and selling it on marketplaces like eBay.
A lot of homelabbers get their equipment from eBay, and the source of that equipment is almost always second-hand data center equipment.
Everyone.
Its not worth it to them. They are making money hand over fist with these services and they right them off. So there is zero incentive to keep the gear.
Sometimes we buy the entire system for a dollar if we can use it on our network. Meaning we built these data centers for our systems. If there is space in them we allow colocation of other companies gear. Its better than empty racks and we charge a lot.
And I would be interested on how they are referbing the equipment and selling for a profit. When its devalued to zero it gets messy w/ the tax code. Not throwing shade, I would rather go this way then the landfill but this is what I was told by the executives. Also liability, someone illegally dumps them and the DNR runs the serial numbers they come back to you.
I got in a ton of trouble when I recycled (for no money, I raged on this point) a pile of battery bank cells and didnt require the scrap dealer to list all the SN on the invoice.
And I would be interested on how they are referbing the equipment and selling for a profit
My understanding is that an e-waste recycling company is contracted to take all the old equipment. The original company can say they’ve recycled it, record it as such, and doesn’t care what’s done with the equipment after that - whether that be reselling it, recycling it, whatever. The e-waste company is the one that handles finding the useful stuff and refurbishing it.
Interesting, maybe w/ my company they just don’t want to risk it w/ 3rd party (customers) equipment. Or more likely we don’t have the authority to tell the recycler that because its not our gear?
I know with our gear we ship it back to depot when its no longer in use as we have other centers that can use it. Or the repair group will part it out for future repairs.
I will say it chaps my ass seeing a roll away taken away w/ 5-10 million dollars of gear to be crushed.
Same w/ the cardboard, I asked for a bailer, too dangerous, denied. Asked for a cardboard only dumpster, again denied. We had a local charity picking it up as they made a few bucks off it. That got nixed for liability concerns… I gave up at that point.
The big issue is that there’s no risk and hardly any cost to the landfill, while there’s a bit of work and thinking required for reuse, with not much more benefit than that it’s doing the right thing.
And you don’t get to become a capitalist overlord for doing the right thing.
It’s high time that tax codes and regulation make dumping e-waste and unsorted trash extremely expensive.
I agree on the risk aspect and that was the driving force. I had more examples I got from the exec’s like “What if one of these old servers burn a house down? Who you think they are going to sue”.
Also on the recycling side that there are checks in place that if say my company says “no” to refurb that they shred the servers up and recycle the bits they can.
But something has to give, over my career I have seen so much just be carted off to the landfill it would make you sick. And I worked small data centers. Nothing like what they are proposing now.
Yeah, that’s mostly a regulation/legal incentives situation, combined with lack of education on the side of the execs.
It is possible to sell devices as “defective”, even if they aren’t defective. That way you don’t have warranty or other legal obligations.
Similar story with the “Scrap the whole device for data privacy reasons”. That’s not a thing. Scrapping the storage media, sure, totally. Scrapping the mainboard, case and power supply? That’s crap.
But the main issue is that there’s no incentive for companies to reuse devices versus scrapping them. So they scrap the whole thing without regards to anything else, because it’s a single decision that requires no further thought und it’s cheap enough that it doesn’t matter.
If they’d have to pay for full recycling cost, so the cost for actually turning 100% of the device back into usable raw components, then they will instantly start giving those away for free.
Even if they are perfectly good
Could that perhaps be an issue of stupid licensing? With, smart licensing, or whatever, if the license is non-transferable, then the hardware is basically an expensive paper weight.
I’ve heard Cisco used to give out Meraki devices for free on some events, because without a license they were totally useless. Until someone figured out how to run OpenWRT on them.Thats an aspect I hadn’t considered, licensing. Unless you keep it off line your right its a boat anchor. What fun is that as you can’t update?
I thought for a second they’re emitting CO2, it’s their footprint or the grids energy sources
The people who thought data centers bad sides weren’t that bad for the environment are the same people who thought Epstein Island was just a nice place for boats to stop for lunch.
Than thought? No. Ill wager they knew.
Oh, how very unexpected
