What exactly are they trying to accomplish? I doubt they would just abandon the project. They would just redo the concrete which would emit even more emissions.
It’s as productive as people who glue themselves to roadways. It irritates drivers/commuters (who are then more likely to have a negative view of the cause) and it slows traffic resulting in even more fuel usage. Yet, they think they are doing something good.
Are we talking about the environmental impact? Or are we talking about the vandalism perpetrated by activists? Attention on the protestors is not necessarily attention on the protestors' cause.
I mostly see commenters quipping about how this will just mean the concert will have to be re poured, resulting in yet more emissions. The bulk of the comments are about the protestors, not the environmental impact of this data center.
is it? from where I stand, hn seems to be one of the exceptionally few remaining places where the mods don't take sides so the obnoxious minority doesn't get to win arguments by silencing everyone else like they do everywhere else.
The people around me who seem the most enthusiastic about AI are specifically the non techies using it to make slop images, event flyers, stylized selfies, and asking it if drinking glue is bad for their health.
I don't know a single person under 80 outside of tech who isn't using ChatGPT or more on a regular basis. If you really think everyone hates it, you are being very selective in your information/opinion sources. Yes 100% of lefty journos probably hate it, but they are an unrepresentative elite, jockeying for cultural power.
Everyone uses it, but how much of the AI opposition do you think pays to use it?
No matter how much HN users want to deny it, the cultural zeitgeist is that using AI is immensely uncool. If you only read HN, you'd think that everyone is already on board and the opposition consists of their favorite ivory tower stereotype of the day.
LLMs are still a very convenient shortcut, so most people can and will use them for small things. But don't make the mistake of extrapolating that and concluding that they then must also be OK with consuming AI-generated media, generating correspondence with their friends and family, accepting the new garbage-filled internet or permitting giant AI infrastructure projects. Young people especially don't tolerate it.
Do you know anyone in the arts? Musicians? I see more AI hatred on average in those sorts of communities than in tech, where there's a pretty even split.
I suppose if you're one of the people that live near where it would be built it might be worth sabotaging it if only to go another week without the incessant hum and brown, filthy tap water.
A port area that uses the same water infrastructure that runs to residential areas, yes. The saboteurs are not named but I would wager that the Dutch group talked about in the article recruited from the area, yes.
Roadway gluing is designed to sway public opinion -> change politics -> affect the corporations.
This is designed to... affect the corporations. (Swaying public opinion could be seen as a secondary effect.)
I also realize it's not that simple. They probably didn't affect Microsoft here, rather a construction company, who are now calling their insurance company? Or the construction company is eating the cost for the damage, because it's deemed that the site wasn't adequately secured?
In the interest of playing Devil's Advocate, even if they're unlikely to abandon an existing project over this, accounting for potential sabotage and the cost/delays of redoing work might change the calculus of future projects?
Right, all they're going to do is rip the concrete out and repour it, causing even more damage to the environment (concrete production and curing is unbelievably C02 intensive)
I don't disagree we shouldn't be expanding power consumption unless we've moved the vast majority (>90%) of the load off fossil fuels, but this certainly didn't help anything.
The extinction threat from AI to all organic species is a little more comprehensive than a little bit of extra concrete, per the people making the AI themselves (I disavow this etc. etc).
I think XR would prefer your solution as well. Still I can understand young people’s frustration when we after years and years of knowing about climate change do so little and so few laws of this type are enacted.
But I agree that their strategy is lacking. It would probably be easier to get people in general to support it if it didn’t affect them directly, sadly.
I understand why people are frustrated with the current system in general. You wouldn't design it this way. We need more young politicians shaping the laws and more entrepreneurs improving society.
I call baloney. What percentage of the US Congress and governors, say, are people whose parents were in Congress and/or governors? I have no hard data, but my gut feel is less than 25%. That's basically not hereditary.
> Personally I think data centers should pay a 100% fossil fuel tax. Markets respond to incentives.
Yes, by changing the incentives to align with their desires.
I guarantee if a politician had a serious chance of introducing something like this that record breaking amounts of money would be poured into even a primary election these days to stop them.
I think fossil fuel taxes are a great idea, but if one consumer, data centers, should pay it, shouldn't all consumers (private car owners) pay it too? That's the only way we'll be able to make good decisions about what types of fossil fuels are useful (i.e. more good than harm) and which are pointless luxuries.
No. Industrial vs consumer use is night and day. Industrial has much higher draw of resources and should pay more as a result especially when total capacity needs to increase specifically for them.
The reason an industrial use uses x times more than a consumer is because the industry is selling products and services to x consumers. You can't compare them 1:1.
Well the industrial should charge more to cover its costs instead of offloading the cost of its goods to consumers? Why does Walmart get to utilize food stamps or hyperscalers get to drain all the energy? Thats a massive public subsidy for a private corporation.
Data centers should just pay anything really. They get massive tax breaks, eat up huge swathes of industrial zoned land, and piss off anyone nearby. And for what? 3 permanent jobs and a penny worth of tax revenue.
very minor nit but no CO2 is released during concrete curing. And over time (decades) the calcium hydroxide in concrete reacts with CO2 to pull it out of the air, producing calcium carbonate.
Ca(OH)2 + CO2 → CaCO3 + H2O
(producing the concrete of course makes a ton of CO2, since its basically the reverse reaction, which is accomplished by generating a lot of heat)
Sabotage works by introducing friction into your opponents activities. Sabotaging one piece of one data center doesn't do much, but the more you do, the more outsized the impact.
Imagine I'm a factory building widgets. If I buy materials, my default assumption is that I get the materials I asked for. If 5% of the time, or even 1% of the time, my vendor sends me junk that breaks my machines, now I have to introduce a step to verify that the vendor sent me the right ingredients to every widget. That's an asymmetric cost.
The messaging for something like this wants to be "we publicly announced and took credit for this this time", because it's good publicity, and the threat of future, clandestine attacks increases costs across the board. If you can include exactly how you did it, you might even inspire copycats.
This is also all the sabotage the saboteurs have volunteered to tell you about. If your opsec has allowed sabotage to happen, it’s prudent to assume there’s other sabotage you don’t know about.
Datacenter builders now have to add security so it doesn't happen a second time, perhaps even add it in more places around the world, and the overall attractiveness of building a datacenter in the region go down.
The CO2 not emitted by opening a later easily offsets curing by orders of magnitude.
To fully model it you'd have to account for the demand being moved as other centers will pick up the load and try to model either the reduced output and reduced future-demand at the temporarily higher cost.
That's too much effort for me, but "concrete curing causes more CO2" is jumping to a conclusion.
> now have to add security so it doesn't happen a second time
You assume that that cost is going to be borne by the corporation building the facility and not by the general public through lobbying to protect construction sites from mischief (mischief in the legal sense, which in many countries is an indictable offence).
In most democracies, private security generally has to defer to the police for anything that involves actual violence beyond detaining people until the police show up. From that point on, it's up to the police and the courts to deal with the matter.
> the overall attractiveness of building a datacenter in the region go down.
There are two directions this idea can go:
- a reduction in the rule of law by normalizing the idea that it is OK for citizens to damage otherwise legal and permitted construction - insurance costs go up for everyone because the country's government has demonstrated that protection of private property is not one of its priorities.
- an increased police presence / crackdown against protesters. The region remains a competitive venue.
If a country demonstrates the first option, this in turn leaves the corporation with two options:
- move on to a jurisdiction that does respect private property using the police
- move on to a jurisdiction where private security has more latitude to "deal with" protesters
The most likely bottom line impact that this will have, from my perspective: insurance premiums will go up a bit and everything else will stay pretty much the same. Most democratic countries will step in and protect property owners (yay property, sales, and income tax). Governments and courts don't generally look too favourably on protestors who do actual physical damage to people and companies going about their lawful business.
Ruining concrete seems to go against extinction rebellion main goal. According to the World Economic Forum the co2 released during ciment production account for 8% of global co2 emissions, datancenter are estimated to contribute between 1 and 2 percent....
Did the Data Center get canceled? If not, then no it is not ruined and instead what's going to happen? Is someone's going to scrape up a whole bunch of that concrete releasing a whole bunch of carbon dioxide and then someone's going to pour down some more concrete which will increase the CO2 in the atmosphere.
That sounds likely to be true. They'll move operations to a temporary building while they build a new one. To some extent their ability to make plans will be disrupted, but the effect those plans would have had on the climate is unknown: the result is just that the oil company behaves in a more stupid and poorly-planned way, while doing some extra construction.
You think they did math on this? No, all he did was have a tantrum where they got attention to themselves and patted themselves on the bat for doing something.
They didn't think through the ecological results of someone scraping off the destroyed concrete and pouring more.
They threw balloons… over a fence, while they like drama, this is unlikely to have had any effect on a cured structural slab. I doubt they even managed to get industrial strength peroxide.
An obvious point, but if Europe wants sovereign onshore AI, they have to get these people under control. It's easy for Microsoft to simply build EU-serving datacenters elsewhere.
Companies at this scale only speak existential threat. If you can't pose one, they don't even know you exist. I question whether this made enough of a dent to be noticed, but it's a start.
Companies at every scale speak marginal gains/losses. Microsoft looks at this the same way your local drugstore considers shoplifting. They will look at property damage in the context of potential revenue & margin, possibly accounting for cost of mitigations. If it continues to make sense, they will continue. If it doesn't they will consider raising prices until it does make sense, or relocating to jurisdictions with fewer elites play acting as activist proletariat. Since your local drugstore won't be local if it leaves, it's only options are to close down or raise prices or lock everything up.
I suspect many HN commenters would be surprised to learn just how much the general public are on the side of these activists, condoning if not outright applauding their actions.
Indeed. One of few things to grant me hope for the future is watching both the youth on the left and right start to stand up to these Silicon Valley ghouls and decrepit dementia politicians who make up the biggest domestic threat to the nation and its ideals.
Yep. Even in very red areas like Texas, isn't the public opinion something like 95% opposed? City councils keep allowing it despite this, clearly due to bribes. Whole situation sucks.
Sure you can build a data center near me, if your going to fund a new swimming pool and library with the taxes you pay. Also I get reduced local taxes? Even better!
Infrastructure building would be a whole lot easier, if people could directly tie it to tangible benefits.
It would be great if it worked that way, with the people living nearby getting concrete benefits from the new data center. Instead, they typically just see an increase in their utility bills.
If you think bribes are at all going to the constituents, you don't understand what a bribe is. This is a very different thing from them paying taxes back into the city.
I think it's in large part because the public is being fed Chinese propaganda about all the supposed issues. There are real issues, but nowhere near to the scale people seem so think.
Combine with the fact they have zero clue about what AI is capable of*, they think we are pouring billions into technology to write emails.
(They don't have any idea about current models, let alone an intuition about what future models will be capable of)
> There’s an acute water shortage in The Netherlands right now. When I open BlueSky, everyone is talking about water being increasingly wasted on cooling data centres. And for what? To generate more AI shit.
Ah, the water-use BS again. In Europe, other than in the US, water use for data centers is strictly regulated. You cannot just do open-loop cooling and use a tap-water -> chiller -> sewer line. Things have to be closed-loop so there is no water consumption beyond the initial filling. The only thing you could get away with is to mist your outdoor units on the one or two hottest days per year. But even that is getting more and more restricted.
On paper you can't do this, but in practice the fines for doing so (if they ever even reach your mailbox after you've bribed the local politicians, which you've done to get your center built in the first place) are just a cost of business. There are plenty of videos of people who live near data centers who now have sputtering water from their sinks, or water that comes out brown and unusable.
I have a friend (engineer) working on a data center in Texas. It is closed loop. What’s interesting is the chillers have so much condensation that they pump it out to sprinklers which water the desert which now has grass growing. So at least water doesn’t seem to be as big of an objection now. Power though? Still a problem.
I hate all this weird activist stuff. It's pointless. Someone just pays for it and the problem is fixed.
If you want to sabotage their hyperscale data centre construction, you probably should do it from the inside. Get the skills, get a job, get to the top and do a fucking terrible job of it like MSFT's C-suite.
> In recent years, people from Extinction Rebellion Netherlands have focused heavily on large scale disruptive action of ‘business as usual’.
Everyone talking about how stupid and ineffective this is. The whole point is to interrupt business as usual to draw attention to the stupidity of our continued head in the sand path. The damage (or lack thereof) is largely irrelevant. The fact a regular person is risking jail to try and stop business as usual is the entire point. It starts with one person.
The point people bring up about concrete CO2 use is absurd. To me it screams of refusing to talk about the debate the protestors are having and instead trying to find any minor nit to pick, which then lets you declare that they're imperfect and therefore not even worth discussing.
In the grand scheme of things, the concrete use here is completely unnoticeable. They're not causing extreme ecological damage here. This is a protest that does something about the problem they're complaining about, slows down their enemies and brings a lot of publicity to their act of protest. Without making a value judgement, this is much better than what a lot of other protests achieve in terms of direct effectiveness.
Frankly, the CO2 retort can be reused for almost any protest that destroys or defaces something, because the work to undo or replace that probably creates emissions.
My tinfoil hat says this isn't "spontaneous grassroots activism". Someone made this happen that benefits from this. Maybe a country that wants to mess with the Netherlands. Hell, it could even be a competing tech company.
I hope they look very carefully how this was organized, where the money came from.
OsrsNeedsf2P | 3 hours ago
Aunche | 3 hours ago
mc32 | 3 hours ago
afandian | 3 hours ago
Manuel_D | 3 hours ago
skeaker | 3 hours ago
Yes, obviously. Scroll up or down.
Manuel_D | 2 hours ago
skeaker | 2 hours ago
inigyou | 3 hours ago
junaru | 3 hours ago
You have to be special to think this is comparable to paint throwing on works of art or blocking public roads. Everyone outside tech hates AI.
vitalyan8184 | 3 hours ago
ask ChatGPT to give you the definition of "echochamber".
junaru | 3 hours ago
skeaker | an hour ago
vitalyan8184 | 55 minutes ago
100percentjake | 3 hours ago
appreciatorBus | 3 hours ago
tavavex | 3 hours ago
No matter how much HN users want to deny it, the cultural zeitgeist is that using AI is immensely uncool. If you only read HN, you'd think that everyone is already on board and the opposition consists of their favorite ivory tower stereotype of the day.
LLMs are still a very convenient shortcut, so most people can and will use them for small things. But don't make the mistake of extrapolating that and concluding that they then must also be OK with consuming AI-generated media, generating correspondence with their friends and family, accepting the new garbage-filled internet or permitting giant AI infrastructure projects. Young people especially don't tolerate it.
Zenul_Abidin | 2 hours ago
So that's pretty much everyone
tock | 3 hours ago
wk_end | 3 hours ago
skeaker | 3 hours ago
mc32 | 3 hours ago
skeaker | an hour ago
sverhagen | 3 hours ago
This is designed to... affect the corporations. (Swaying public opinion could be seen as a secondary effect.)
I also realize it's not that simple. They probably didn't affect Microsoft here, rather a construction company, who are now calling their insurance company? Or the construction company is eating the cost for the damage, because it's deemed that the site wasn't adequately secured?
smallpipe | 3 hours ago
“That achieves nothing” sounds like what a Microsoft PR person would want you to think.
lp0_on_fire | 3 hours ago
"The real friends are the clicks and attention you receive along the way."
inigyou | 3 hours ago
wk_end | 3 hours ago
exabrial | 3 hours ago
I don't disagree we shouldn't be expanding power consumption unless we've moved the vast majority (>90%) of the load off fossil fuels, but this certainly didn't help anything.
catigula | 3 hours ago
NoGravitas | an hour ago
abirch | 3 hours ago
Personally I think data centers should pay a 100% fossil fuel tax. Markets respond to incentives.
plufz | 3 hours ago
But I agree that their strategy is lacking. It would probably be easier to get people in general to support it if it didn’t affect them directly, sadly.
abirch | 3 hours ago
inigyou | 3 hours ago
AnimalMuppet | 3 hours ago
Anyone with hard data, step right up...
inigyou | 3 hours ago
marcosdumay | 3 hours ago
It does change people that don't know about your cause against it, quite reliably as long as activism results go.
For climate change, everybody probably heard about it, so yeah.
inigyou | 3 hours ago
IAmBroom | 2 hours ago
PETA's brand recognition has probably made more people anti-vegan than all other vegans put together.
cliglot | 3 hours ago
Yes, by changing the incentives to align with their desires.
I guarantee if a politician had a serious chance of introducing something like this that record breaking amounts of money would be poured into even a primary election these days to stop them.
appreciatorBus | 3 hours ago
bix6 | 3 hours ago
appreciatorBus | 3 hours ago
bix6 | 2 hours ago
skeaker | an hour ago
bix6 | 3 hours ago
ourmandave | 3 hours ago
But they'll just use AI powered flock cameras instead, so never mind.
simonsarris | 3 hours ago
OkayPhysicist | 3 hours ago
Imagine I'm a factory building widgets. If I buy materials, my default assumption is that I get the materials I asked for. If 5% of the time, or even 1% of the time, my vendor sends me junk that breaks my machines, now I have to introduce a step to verify that the vendor sent me the right ingredients to every widget. That's an asymmetric cost.
The messaging for something like this wants to be "we publicly announced and took credit for this this time", because it's good publicity, and the threat of future, clandestine attacks increases costs across the board. If you can include exactly how you did it, you might even inspire copycats.
OutOfHere | 3 hours ago
Indeed. A single bad review of a product from a user, if justified, can build the impetus to destroy a product. Three bad reviews probably will.
Insurance costs too can be affected.
teeray | 2 hours ago
baggy_trough | an hour ago
DougN7 | 46 minutes ago
athrowaway3z | 3 hours ago
Datacenter builders now have to add security so it doesn't happen a second time, perhaps even add it in more places around the world, and the overall attractiveness of building a datacenter in the region go down.
The CO2 not emitted by opening a later easily offsets curing by orders of magnitude.
To fully model it you'd have to account for the demand being moved as other centers will pick up the load and try to model either the reduced output and reduced future-demand at the temporarily higher cost.
That's too much effort for me, but "concrete curing causes more CO2" is jumping to a conclusion.
Manuel_D | 2 hours ago
tonyarkles | 2 hours ago
You assume that that cost is going to be borne by the corporation building the facility and not by the general public through lobbying to protect construction sites from mischief (mischief in the legal sense, which in many countries is an indictable offence).
In most democracies, private security generally has to defer to the police for anything that involves actual violence beyond detaining people until the police show up. From that point on, it's up to the police and the courts to deal with the matter.
> the overall attractiveness of building a datacenter in the region go down.
There are two directions this idea can go:
- a reduction in the rule of law by normalizing the idea that it is OK for citizens to damage otherwise legal and permitted construction - insurance costs go up for everyone because the country's government has demonstrated that protection of private property is not one of its priorities.
- an increased police presence / crackdown against protesters. The region remains a competitive venue.
If a country demonstrates the first option, this in turn leaves the corporation with two options:
- move on to a jurisdiction that does respect private property using the police
- move on to a jurisdiction where private security has more latitude to "deal with" protesters
The most likely bottom line impact that this will have, from my perspective: insurance premiums will go up a bit and everything else will stay pretty much the same. Most democratic countries will step in and protect property owners (yay property, sales, and income tax). Governments and courts don't generally look too favourably on protestors who do actual physical damage to people and companies going about their lawful business.
maxerickson | 2 hours ago
I wonder if they bothered to get high concentration vinegar.
beanjuiceII | 3 hours ago
nick__m | 3 hours ago
Math is not theirs forte!
inigyou | 3 hours ago
readthenotes1 | 2 hours ago
inigyou | 2 hours ago
card_zero | 59 minutes ago
skeaker | an hour ago
afandian | 3 hours ago
holbrad | 3 hours ago
It's far grimmer to realise that people know, they just don't think we have an acceptable answer yet.
I'm not willing to accept any climate action, if it means I can't go on holiday abroad or it makes my life meaningfully more expensive etc.
It's selfish, but we need to solve it in a way that makes people globally richer.
(This is one of the great things about renewables coming down in price)
readthenotes1 | 2 hours ago
They didn't think through the ecological results of someone scraping off the destroyed concrete and pouring more.
Zsfe510asG | 3 hours ago
luxuryballs | 3 hours ago
j45 | 3 hours ago
cannonpr | 3 hours ago
bpodgursky | 3 hours ago
inigyou | 3 hours ago
holbrad | 2 hours ago
Having data centers in your country seems incredibly important, especially to the EU. You'd really hope to see the exact opposite of this behaviour.
appreciatorBus | 3 hours ago
lol this is not "worker opposition", these are the antics of over educated downwardly mobile elites.
__MatrixMan__ | 3 hours ago
appreciatorBus | 3 hours ago
namuol | 3 hours ago
cliglot | 3 hours ago
skeaker | 3 hours ago
holbrad | 2 hours ago
Sure you can build a data center near me, if your going to fund a new swimming pool and library with the taxes you pay. Also I get reduced local taxes? Even better!
Infrastructure building would be a whole lot easier, if people could directly tie it to tangible benefits.
water-data-dude | 2 hours ago
skeaker | 2 hours ago
holbrad | 2 hours ago
Combine with the fact they have zero clue about what AI is capable of*, they think we are pouring billions into technology to write emails.
(They don't have any idea about current models, let alone an intuition about what future models will be capable of)
mghackerlady | 2 hours ago
cliglot | an hour ago
You don’t think much or very hard at all, do you?
TiredOfLife | an hour ago
mitthrowaway2 | 3 hours ago
IAmBroom | 2 hours ago
Level of effort is a thing.
EDIT: And Cryo32 said the same thing elsewhere, a few minutes ago!
thyristan | 3 hours ago
Ah, the water-use BS again. In Europe, other than in the US, water use for data centers is strictly regulated. You cannot just do open-loop cooling and use a tap-water -> chiller -> sewer line. Things have to be closed-loop so there is no water consumption beyond the initial filling. The only thing you could get away with is to mist your outdoor units on the one or two hottest days per year. But even that is getting more and more restricted.
jandeboevrie | an hour ago
skeaker | an hour ago
cr125rider | 59 minutes ago
DougN7 | 42 minutes ago
cryo32 | 3 hours ago
If you want to sabotage their hyperscale data centre construction, you probably should do it from the inside. Get the skills, get a job, get to the top and do a fucking terrible job of it like MSFT's C-suite.
inigyou | 3 hours ago
hackable_sand | 3 hours ago
bix6 | 3 hours ago
Everyone talking about how stupid and ineffective this is. The whole point is to interrupt business as usual to draw attention to the stupidity of our continued head in the sand path. The damage (or lack thereof) is largely irrelevant. The fact a regular person is risking jail to try and stop business as usual is the entire point. It starts with one person.
readthenotes1 | 2 hours ago
bix6 | 59 minutes ago
tavavex | 2 hours ago
In the grand scheme of things, the concrete use here is completely unnoticeable. They're not causing extreme ecological damage here. This is a protest that does something about the problem they're complaining about, slows down their enemies and brings a lot of publicity to their act of protest. Without making a value judgement, this is much better than what a lot of other protests achieve in terms of direct effectiveness.
Frankly, the CO2 retort can be reused for almost any protest that destroys or defaces something, because the work to undo or replace that probably creates emissions.
im3w1l | 2 hours ago
I hope they look very carefully how this was organized, where the money came from.
Zenul_Abidin | 2 hours ago