"AI" data centers consume massive amounts of energy per square foot, have been caught using LNG generators for power, have polluted ground water, material usage, habitat destruction, etc
How about you provide some proof?
(PS I'm not advocating that golf courses are good for the environment - they're not - but data centers are absolutely not "zero on the pollution scale" that is laughable)
It's pretty well documented that datacenters (esp the AI variety) are offloading grid expenses to customers as higher baseline costs.
The issue is that these DCs are not paying for the cost of the necessary grid upgrades but are instead having the power cos pass these costs off to all consumers as base increases.
Local labor is often not used to build them. Most of these companies have crews they bring in during build out. Plus the actual setup of the facility is highly skilled: everyone is imported. The only local jobs we're talking about would be things like security, cleaning, and maybe some site prep work. The actual technical staff will not be hired locally in the majority of cases.
The argument here tho is the amount of jobs provided does not do a good enough job counteracting the downsides (noise, ground water pollution, generator air pollution, grid load and offset costs to customers, etc). In most cases these far outweigh <50 jobs if you look at overall cost/benefits.
You really think an individual employee trying to help a customer when they likely have little impact on org wide issues like how customer support is run is tarpitting? Seems a bit uncharitable
You can't be serious? I hope I'm just missing the joke
To have an equivalent capacity of DCs in space would require such astronomical costs there is 0 chance it would be profitable esp considering how fast GPUs deprecate
How about we start with actually finishing all the datacenters we've started (many if not most are unstarted, paused or outright cancelled)?
So by your logic if a massive company came and said they want to setup an oil refinery or coal power plant you'd say they should say yes just because they could get tax revenue?
You always have to way the pros and cons of such massive projects.
Plus, this isn't a ban it's just a one year moratorium so impact etc can be studied.
Minimal impact as defined by whom? I'm sure they impact those that live around them plenty as well as the price on electricity for those on the same grid.
They provide mostly temporary jobs (and majority imported to boot), after construction they're run with very little staff.
New York needs to upgrade its power grid (source?) so they should force it upon themselves by primitively overloading the grid?
A one year moratorium while impact is investigated, esp considering the current state of datacenters buildout, especially considering many in the US are either unstarted, on hold or abandoned, seems reasonable.
Are you talking backup generator vs solar for a home?
If so, solar continually supplies power without paying for an input vs a backup generator which is only meant to run infrequently and is costly to run and requires you to pay for inputs and of course maintenance of an ICE.
- The workers platform is quite pleasant to work with compared to competitors.
- Globally deploying edge workers which have access to their many services (D1, R2, DO, etc)
- Having the ability to assemble globally distributed workers using bindings is dead simple
- Their CI pipeline, while limited, is easy to setup and run and keeps improving
- Their pricing is extremely competitive
For your second:
- That's my biggest conflict with using any service (Cloudflare, AWS, Azure, etc). Don't have a good answer with what to do about it considering for many projects I don't have the time/energy to fully self host everything.
The dashboard UX has improved a lot lately but one thing that drives me absolutely nuts is that I get rate limited all the time using it.
For example, I had to recently change an env var we had on a handful of apps and opened them all into new tabs and made the changes and about half way through I started getting rate limited. This has happened to me many times and I've reported it to support and in Discord but it still happens.
One other big complaint is support is non-existent. We sent many support emails (on business plans) and I'm pretty sure we've never gotten a reply. Same for posting in Discord. It's pretty disheartening to build your business on Cloudflare and have no confidence support will help you when you need it.