Data Center Managers Weary of Whittling Cooling Costs 198
Nerval's Lobster writes that a survey from the Uptime Institute "suggests something it calls 'green fatigue' is setting in when it comes to making data centers greener. 'Green fatigue' is exactly as it sounds: managers are getting tired of the increasingly difficult race to chop their PUE, or Power Usage Effectiveness. The PUE is a measure of a data center's efficiency. The lower the PUE, the better — and Microsoft and Google, with nearly limitless resources, have set the bar so high (or low, depending on your perspective) that it's making less-capitalized firms frustrated. Just a few years ago, the Uptime Institute estimated that the average PUE of a data center was around 2.4, which meant for every dollar of electricity to power a data center, $1.4 dollars were spent to cool it. That dropped to 1.8 recently, an improvement to be sure. But then you have companies such as Google and Microsoft building data centers next to rivers for cheap hydroelectric power in remote parts of the Pacific Northwest and reporting insanely low PUEs (below 1.1 in some cases). The Institute latest survey of data center operators shows only 50 percent of respondents in North America said they considered energy efficiency to be very important to their companies, down from 52 percent last year and 58 percent in 2011."
why not migrate everything to the cloud? (Score:5, Funny)
that always works
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*cloud
Re:why not migrate everything to the cloud? (Score:5, Funny)
That cloud is where the joke that went over your head is at. ;^)
Doesn't really matter (Score:3, Interesting)
These are just publicity stunts. Computing is cheap in terms of energy, the energy used by datacenters barely registers in the total energy usage.
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You know this because you run large-scale datacenters running millions of machines?
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You know this because you run large-scale datacenters running millions of machines?
Is first-hand knowledge required to make a factual statement? You manage a large-scale datacenter, Mr. X?
Re:Doesn't really matter (Score:5, Interesting)
Datacenters accounted for 1.3% of all electricity used worldwide in 2010, I imagine it's higher today, so reducing their power usage by say 40% is a big deal, almost as big as the similar reduction in the 5-6% of total electricity used for residential lighting we got by switching to LED/CFL.
Re:Doesn't really matter (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, electricity is one of the major costs of running a large data center - the amortized cost of a single server is probably only a few hundred bucks a year over its lifetime. The energy to operate it is typically a comparable amount, and the energy for cooling is even greater.
Now I wouldn't expect anyone to upgrade their cooling efficiency on a regular basis, but it's foolish not to consider both operating and cooling efficiency during a major upgrade - you may end up paying a larger sticker price, but it can lower your amortized costs significantly.
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Especially when you consider that energy costs will only go up. Any improvements today will reap even bigger benefits down the road.
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Well that's a good way to avoid a price increase. If you're off the grid you are free. Not many can manage that unfortunately.
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Not many can manage that unfortunately.
I understand this is the point of TFA
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Because hydroelectric sites are taken, and your customers might take issues with their clouds disappearing when eclipsed by real ones.
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It is true no renewable energy source is a panacea, but if you combine multiple sources, it starts filling the deal
Usually when you don't have sun, you have wind. Hydroelectricity can be a cheap energy storage system for time when you have neither sun, nor wind: while you have power, just pump river or sea water into a high pool, and release it when needed.
Re: Doesn't really matter (Score:2)
Because these powerplants cost money to operate and you could be selling excess capacity if you decrease consumption of your own datacenter
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I would expect rising energy costs to be a temporary blip. Once solar hits price parity, energy costs will only go down. Until we run out of desert and have to switch to energy satellites at least.
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You will not see price parity spend in your lifetime. You really need to do some research for the cost of the infrastructure you speak of.
It is always a pleasure to see such well reasoned arguments, particularly from an Anonymous Coward.
Re:Doesn't really matter (Score:5, Insightful)
In 2009 the EPA estimated that if historical trends for datacentre expansion continue (that is PUE remains steady as datacentres continue to be built) then USA datacentre power usage would consume 120 billion kWh/year. To put that into perspective a typical house uses about 12000 kWh/year. So datacentre usage was projected to be the equivalent of 10 million US households. Best case scenario currently puts this closer to 5 million US households.
That's just serving up data. Now add the insane amounts of network switching gear to allow data to get to the end users and then add the computing power of the end users themselves and you end up with a significant environmental footprint.
All this based just on environmental savings too. Don't forget energy costs money so by improving cooling efficiency there's significant opportunity for high ROI in the long run. Being energy inefficient these days is an express ticket to Chapter 11, especially for companies like Facebook and Twitter who had trouble monetising their services to being with. Many of these companies have a really large book value but very poor cashflows.
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Energy isn't cheap, but it is low enough to be absorbed in the price of the software without being losing you competitive edge.
However there is a phrase you need to spend money to make money. Which leads you need to have money to spend money. Which then finally means you need to Have Money to make Money. The sad truth of is the big guys will always have the upper edge just because they are more self reliant on their infrastructure, they can have their own power plants they can cut through regulations, in
Don't use HVAC? (Score:4, Insightful)
I like the way Facebook say they don't use HVAC... yet their entire BUILDING is a huge HVAC unit!
Efficiency of scale works nicely with HVAC, if you can afford to get the building made to your specs.
Re:Don't use HVAC? (Score:5, Funny)
I like the way Facebook say they don't use HVAC... yet their entire BUILDING is a huge HVAC unit!
Amazon just hires local surfs to peddle bicycles that power belt-driven fans. When a surf drops, they simply hustle them out and replace them with another. Communities are so glad to have such a huge employer, they look the other way...
Re:Don't use HVAC? (Score:4, Insightful)
Amazon just hires local surfs to peddle bicycles that power belt-driven fans. When a surf drops, they simply hustle them out and replace them with another. Communities are so glad to have such a huge employer, they look the other way...
Wouldn't those workers be replaced by labor cost saving robots?
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Wouldn't those workers be replaced by labor cost saving robots?
Apparently an endless supply of low-wage humans is cheaper than robots. [huffingtonpost.com]
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Surf power is the "wave" of the future. I'm a big supporter of it. However, when the surf drops there's nothing to do but wait for it to pick back up... OHHH you mean SERFs. Never mind.
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Why local surfs? Because (cue "Ride of the Valkyries" as used in Apocolypse Now) Charlie don't surf!
Not sure how it's would go since Google Wave didn't take off, let alone sell bicycles.
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Which highlights another interesting point: if your building has alternative energy sources like solar then the cost of some of your electricity is close to zero. PUE isn't a very good way to measure efficiency.
Dumb summery (Score:3)
Dumb summary.
What does is matter how cheap the electricity is?
It is a ratio of two electricity costs.
Price of electricity has no effect on PUE.
Maybe climate has.
Cooling in arctic is cheaper than cooling in nevada desert.
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And cooling is also easier to get if you are located close to the sea or a major river. If you are lucky you can use the cool water "as is" to cool your data center and through that lower the cost for cooling a lot. Only the cost of the energy needed to pump the water is what will remain.
Water cooling of the data centers in combination with water cooled servers could be the answer. Could even keep down the noise in the data center.
And the cost of cooling will make sites where natural cooling is possible mor
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Go North, Young Man (Score:5, Interesting)
Why don't they just site their centers up north? Here in Duluth, most of the year the outside air is cooled for free by mother nature. Heck, they could sell their waste heat to nearby homes and businesses and get a negative PUE.
Don't need to be green to worry about this, it's $$, something ever company wants.
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Why don't they just site their centers up north? Here in Duluth, most of the year the outside air is cooled for free by mother nature. Heck, they could sell their waste heat to nearby homes and businesses and get a negative PUE.
Don't need to be green to worry about this, it's $$, something ever company wants.
At my last co, we did just that at a Canadian compute farm - used cold river water as the main coolant, pumped the low-grade waste heat to a local town for residential heating.
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That is funny but their are good reasons. One do you have cheap Hydro power in Duluth? Fiber? The people arguing about latency are a bit silly. South Florida to Seattle is only 14ms distance so it would be about a third of that Duluth to LA or NY.
The places that they are building data centers have cheap hydro power and even better cheap cold water. Frankly the ideal place for a Data Center is probably the Hoover Dam. The Colorado river is actually too cold because of the dam so dumping the heat back into it
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"That is funny but their are good reasons. One do you have cheap Hydro power in Duluth? Fiber?"
Cheap land? Check.
Cold frigid body of water? Check
Cheaper workers? Check
Lower taxes? Check
The cost of land compared to California? Priceless!
I got into a debate 2 years ago when someone said you must be in the bay area if you are a young I.T. startup! I called that out as Bullshit! Unless you already have tens of millions of dollars sitting in your bank account. Texas is a much better deal. Those who hated Texas f
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"Cheap land? Check.
Cold frigid body of water? Check
Cheaper workers? Check
Lower taxes? Check"
Ever hear of the TVA? What about eastern Washington state and Oregon?
Tenesse and North Carolina have all of those things plus cheap power.
Washington and Oregon have all but maybe the lower taxes but I bet they are lower than California plus the cheap power. We are talking about data centers so they do not employ a huge number of people.
I think you are right about start ups but here is the rub. The VC firms and tech p
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Of course not everyone has needs where the distance in the speed of light in just a few hundred yards in .00001 of a second means trillions of lost dollars stealing from the backs of hard working savers in manipulating the stock prices in buying and selling the same share at the same time to rip them off.
Well, what are they doing where they need that kind of speed? If they're outwitting human traders, then latency can be seconds to minutes and they'd still get in ahead of most small time traders.
And "trillions of dollars" "stolen"? Hasn't happened yet. Sounds like you're confusing the real estate crisis with HFT. They aren't the same.
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HFTs are making their bank on a millisecond advantage that others can't get. It's better than insider trading.
Well, HFT is legal. But if that weren't so, then it wouldn't be better than insider trading.
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I prefer Superior, because well it's Superior.
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That works - if there are fat enough pipes available to handle the data. If there isn't, and you have to roll your own, then it's probably not cost efficient to do so.
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Re:Go North, Young Man (Score:4, Funny)
Yet only six hours at the speed of light*.
*Disclaimer: Speed of light in fiber optic cabling is even faster than speed of light in a vacuum, because vacuums have all the dirt swirling around in them, whereas fiber is very clean. So it says in our marketing material, anyway. So come build your data centers in Duluth, we welcome you.
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For high-frequency trading or something I can see latency being an issue, but for some social networking site that is going to be accessed across some crazy latent cell modem anyway, I don't think the geography matters too much. Heck, I live on the east coast but played on a west coast WoW server and didn't have any problems.
I could see the increased distance as greater exposure to inter-ISP politics fallout since you have to transit more peering agreements; there was a week or so when service to the west c
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This is on reason that I reason that you need actual engineers. Knowledge of heat transfer matters a lot when trying to scale a system up.
Heat transfer actually becomes a dominant concern of nearly all chemical reactors especially the bioreactors.
on what scale is this issue? (Score:5, Insightful)
For instance, I suspect we waste more energy moving tap water in plastic bottles between cities.
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Well, we have to move that water around. What are people in New York City going to do when they can't get water containing Maine bear piss? New York bears just taste different ...
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"You didn't come here to hunt, did you?"
sounds a bit like a nirvana fallacy to me (Score:3)
For instance, I suspect we waste more energy moving tap water in plastic bottles between cities.
"Well, people get shot all the time, so what's the big deal if I shoot someone?"
Doesn't work that way, does it? It sounds a bit like you're arguing a nirvana fallacy, namely that because this trend of saving energy in datacenters doesn't save energy everywhere, it's useless.
Re:on what scale is this issue? (Score:5, Informative)
The difference between historical design and best practice is somewhere in the vicinity of being able to power 6 million US households [energy.gov].
Not to mention the strawman you have made there. This isn't an either-or choice. Why can't we improve energy efficiency AND make an effort to rely less on bottled water?
who gives a crap about Google (Score:3)
Typical modern groupthink - if you dont match up to some artificial social standard you lose. Watch your own checkbook, don't chase some mythical metric that others self-report. You'll never win, they'll just keep moving the goalposts. Spend less money as you expand capacity, and you're doing a good job.
How I read this (Score:2)
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Think of all the hot air eliminated right there. Should be worth at least .2 reduction on the old PUE.
hydro doesn't affect PUE... (Score:3)
But then you have companies such as Google and Microsoft building data centers next to rivers for cheap hydroelectric power in remote parts of the Pacific Northwest and reporting insanely low PUEs (below 1.1 in some cases).
Power Usage Efficiency [wikipedia.org] has nothing to do with the source of the power you're using.
It's not even a measure of efficiency of equipment.
Diminishing returns (Score:2)
So they've been doing the stuff with the greatest return on investment.
What's left is the marginal improvements that probably cost more than they're worth.
Moving the whole datacenter to the Pacific Northwest just isn't in the cards for most companies.
Run hotter (Score:3)
I read that google did some experiments a while back and found that running the datacenter hotter saved more $$$ in cooling than the cost of the increased failure rate of hardware. That's fine for some computing workloads, but what are the obstacles to making computers that can run with an acceptable failure rate in an ambient temperature of (say) 50C (~120F)? I assume there are some major obstacles, i'm just curious as to what they are.
Even if you could run the solid state hardware at 50C and the disks in a separate storage room at 22C, that would still be a win right?
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As I recall, the paper from Google said something slightly different. It said they found no increase in failure rate. As a result, Google data centers do run warm: 80F. The employees in data centers wear shorts and t-shirts all the time.
http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/efficiency/internal/#temperature
Why are they worrying? (Score:2)
Why are managers worrying about meeting some arbitrary criteria set by Google/Microsoft/etc. for a metric that in the end doesn't matter? PUE is irrelevant, what matters to the business is the total cost of providing the computing power the business needs. If you have a cheap way of reducing that cost, take it. But if your cost's within acceptable limits and reducing it further's going to cost too much or take too much resources or investment, then stop wasting your time worrying about it and concentrate on
Whittling? (Score:2)
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carve (wood) into an object by repeatedly cutting small slices from it.
Read further into the dictionary... Substitute (wood) with costs
Or did I just miss a really bad joke?
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Not sure, but his username makes it kind of funny in any case.
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"Whittling" refers to cutting a stick down to a sharp point and then repeating the action until you no longer have a stick to whittle. Sounds like business as usual.
Boo fucking hoo (Score:2)
Bunch of pansies in IT need to get used to the idea of rationing.
Blame Facebook (Score:2)
You can blame Facebook for much of this green datacenter hype--some of which is arguably greenwashing.
Facebook was under the gun for opening its own data centers that were, and still somewhat are, powered by electricity generated by coal.
To answer this unwanted attention they bent over backwards to reduce power consumption at all costs, so much that they even designed their own "Open Data Center" servers to reduce power consumption at the cost of discarding nearly everything we already know works fine in co
That cheap hydroelectric power maybe going away... (Score:4, Informative)
There's talk of removing a few Dams and with them the cheap power.
The Washington state Indians have a treaty to fish salmon they way they used to (with nets)
that they then sale to make a living. The salmon are in decline which is blamed in part to the Dams. All of
the Dams have fish ladders that help the Salmon migrate but they are asking for the lower (last) four Snake river Dams to be removed.
http://www.americanrivers.org/initiatives/dams/projects/snake-dam-removal-economics.html [americanrivers.org]
It's much more than just the Indians, but they seem to be the loudest.
From the link: ...Replace the dams' energy in an affordable and carbon neutral manner..."
"Before the dams are removed, there must be a plan in place to:
I don't see how that can be accomplished unless wind power can be considered carbon neutral.
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This idea not go anywhere because people realize the cost of dismantling the dams and replacing the power generated and agricultural water supplies would be EXTREMELY exorbitant. That's why all the talk of dismantling O'Shaughnessy Dam in Yosemite National Park has not resulted in any action, because the economic cost of dismantling the dam, raising Don Pedro Reservoir to replace it, and restoring the habit of Tuolumne Canyon behind the dam would cost US$25 BILLION.
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How the fuck can you replace a dam with wind power ? Hint: It fluctuates at a ration of easily 10x from windy to windless days here in Germany.
In a point installation, the same size as the dam? You can't. But averaging the wind power from a geographically larger area (the whole of Germany might just be large enough, but barely, I guess) ought to smooth thing up a little bit...that is, ONCE the distribution grids are smart enough to handle that. Right now, I don't think the infrastructure is ready for it. Also, you need a good predictive model to anticipate the changes. Again, something yet to be done. Oh, and there's this silly stuff called "natio
Dollars are not apples to apples (Score:2)
They should compare BTU's of cooling to see efficiency.
Dollars just compares costs.
Cost of power can due to many factors.
Actually going down (Score:2)
Sounds like it's time for multiple micro-centers (Score:2)
The concept is simple. We've got car AC units that are 400% efficient, meaning for every one watt of power consumed, 4 watts of heat gets removed from the system it is cooling, within a certain size (the size of the interior of a Ford Explorer, for example.)
Then you make these into micro centers - insulated rooms, fully-sealed, holding no more than maybe 3 or 4 racks of servers. Have one or two of these cooling that room.
Hey, suddenly, you're spending $1 in electricity to cool off $4 of used power (and if y
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If your AC is 400% efficient, your PUE is 1.25, which is nice but not ground-breaking. And that is just for the AC, on top of that you waste power on transmission losses and UPS (if you run double-conversion, that is another 10% loss) and everything else a datacenter needs.
Also, 400% is mostly a marketing number. The efficiency depends on the temperature difference. If the outside air is cooler than the temperature you need, you can get infinitely high efficiency -- in theory you can even get electricity ba
A problem specific do data centers? (Score:2)
Electricity costs money. Reducing the cooling costs of data centers isn't a green issue; it's a cost issue. TFA mentions this specifically:
so I find it odd that the take-away is "green fatigue."
Why bother to read TFA? (Score:2)
"for every dollar of electricity to power a data center, $1.4 dollars were spent to cool it. That dropped to 1.8 recently, an improvement to be sure."
Sure, 1.4 dropped to 1.8. Progress.
If the rest of the article makes that much sense, I'm not wasting any more time. Typos are typos, but typoing the premise leaves me, well, feh.
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2.4 dropped to 1.8.
Just tax electricity to account for environmental (Score:2)
And if it still doesn't come to the top of some company's balance sheet, it' perfectly fine. Chances are it will for heaviest electricity users and in the meantime taxes can be used for pro-encironment R&D.
Beware PUE lies (Score:2)
As a one-time member of The Green Grid Technical Committee, let me summarize and correct a few points:
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*None of this is intended to in anyway be in disagreement with any part of th
Simpler than that (Score:2)
If you look at just about any large organisation you'll see plenty of examples of that.
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Consolidation might be good for industry in this case.
Re:Fuck those companies (Score:4, Interesting)
Up-front cost
Long-term cost / TCO
Speed of delivery
Reliability
Electrical/energy efficiency
Minimizing under-utilized assets / operating near full capacity
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How irresponsible for them to cry that their competitors are destroying the environment less than they are.
They're only human. You have people yelling at you that you're destroying the planet enough times you tend to get jaded. Also, this is a little like claiming butchers are tired of sharpening their cleavers; if I'm a middle manager that last thing I want to hear from my stable of IT monkeys is "I'm tired of finding ways to cut costs." My response would be to point out where the door is. Last thing I need is a minion refusing to do something as important as cutting costs when possible.
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But there is a difference between cutting costs just for the sake of cutting costs, and being wasteful....
Re:Fuck those companies (Score:4, Informative)
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Creative accounting has created too many problems and expenses already. Cost cutting itself will never waste money if the actual cost cutting is really done right. I've seen and heard of too many cases, especially in larger companies, of being penny wise pound foolish.
Re:Fuck those companies (Score:5, Funny)
"From this financial quarter onwards, as part of our corporate strategy of reducing paper usage, all corporate division teams will be required to provide monthly publication quality reports detailing how much paper they have purchased, used and have saved in the past month. Duplicate copies should be printed out and sent to their line managers, accounting, purchasing, IT and archives. Each team should also maintain their own local archive to provide the annual report at the end of the financial year."
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True. Those things are almost exact opposites. You will never waste money by cutting costs, if you are accounting correctly.
Nobody ever accounts correctly. Practically everything has ripples that extend far beyond what goes into the bean-counter calculations, whether it's producing sweatsuits, generating power, running a datacenter, outsourcing key resources or just storing fertilizer in an old barn instead of a facility designed to hold volatile substances. And sometimes those ripples don't kick in for years, which means that in today's near-term focused business world, accounting allows you to dump major costs "over the neighb
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They are not "only humans"! They are *Americans*! And *that* explains their fucked-up mindset of instead of *stopping destroying the planet*, getting jaded. Fuck that! Go fuck yourselves! Nobody cares how "jaded" you are! Reality check: YOU. ARE. ACTIVELY. MURDERING. AN. ENTIRE. PLANET! NOBODY cares if you like being yelled at and stopped at doing that! It's our existence on the line! And in that case, you can bet your ass that we'll end yours before you end ours! (And in the end, nature always wins. We're just not interested in going extinct *with* you.)
How fuckin' hard is that for you to get in your thick retarded ignorant delusional American skulls, you fucktards??
I realize talking shit about America is just so cool on /. Especially by anonymous little bitches like you. But why don't you take that electricity powered computer that is filled with toxic crap and use if for something useful if you are so concerned with "murdering an entire planet" instead of posting crap on /.? If you can't do that, then I would suggest you think of the environment and shove it up your ass and go live in a fucking cave.
It seems to me that most of the people I see bitching about the US
Re:Fuck those companies (Score:4, Informative)
What have you and your countrymen done for the world? I'd seriously like to know what country you even come from. For all the stupid shit we americans do, have you ever looked at the amount of financial aid we give to countries that have absolutely no strategic value?
Yes, I have. It's embarrassingly low. A little less than what Greece gives, about half of what Germany gives, about 1/5th of what Sweden gives.
There's some stats over at [statisticbrain.com]http://www.statisticbrain.com/countries-that-give-the-most-in-foreign-aid-statistics/ [statisticbrain.com]
The US has a lot of good points. Foreign aid isn't one of them, and neither is consumption patterns.
(Oh, and I live in the US and am originally from Norway, if that makes a difference.)
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for a year? Lets do it for a presidential term and use that money to straighten ourselves out. Maybe we'd finally get our infrastructure back up to Cold War standards.
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So a Swedish citizen give approximatly six times the foreign aid a citizen in the US does?
Yeah, you're right. That is pretty embarrasing.
Re:Fuck those companies (Score:5, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal [wikipedia.org]
Riiiiight.
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Datacenters with very low PUE are addressed in the summary : "But then you have companies such as Google and Microsoft building data centers next to rivers for cheap hydroelectric power in remote parts of the Pacific Northwest and reporting insanely low PUEs (below 1.1 in some cases)."
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Heh, you think we're fucking it up for everyone? Take a good look at what China is doing. Of course, don't bother telling them about it because they could give a fuck what you think about it. Even less than I do.
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Heh, you think we're fucking it up for everyone? Take a good look at what China is doing.
Dude, what's with the China bashing?
1) The pollution/carbon footprint per capita of the chinese is still way below the per capita footprint of the US or pretty much any other western country for that matter.
2) Even if they did pollute as bad as the US, it shouldn't have anything to do with the argument. A bad act is a bad act, regardless of who else is doing it. If some random person somewhere in the world shoots their wife, does that mean you would be justified in shooting your wife?
What's worse ab
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China's pollution is rapidly rising. Overall they have more pollution but it is lower than the US per capita. The US rate is headed down however while the rate for China has been going up. This is not about China bashing but reducing pollution. It'll help if the US keeps dropping their levels of pollution but not if the Chinese just take over for us. I don't think lazy data center managers are so much of the problem as that the alternatives for reduction are harder and harder to get. Eventually you hi
Re:Americans whining "Can't shit where I eat" (Score:4, Informative)
Trollish troll, I rebuke thee with a Citationing of Statisticals:
Country / CO2 (ktonnes) / % of world emissions / source China (ex.Macau, Hong Kong) 7,031,916 23.5% UN Estimate[6] United States 5,461,014 18.27% UN Estimate[6]
Except that the population of China is 1.3 billion, and the population of the US is 315 million, so the statistics you supplied basically state that the US is polluting over 4 times as much per person than China is.
Good argument you have there.
Why is there so much China bashing in this thread? The GP didn't mention them at all, and as I mentioned in an earlier comment, they aren't relevant to the conversation.
Re: Americans whining "Can't shit where I eat" (Score:3, Informative)
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Far less sulphur than US coal and they are putting in scrubbers anyway.
They are building those too.
Where's a US civilian nuclear power plant that's been built this century? It's not going to happen in the USA because the return on investment takes decades and no power utility has enough spare cash for a nuclear power station in the first place. The only hope is cheap mini-reactors that haven't been developed yet.
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The environment doesn't care about the ratio between population and GHG output. China is doing more harm than the US, full stop.
I have the perfect solution then: Split China into 100 separate countries, then none of them will be doing a significant amount of harm on its own.
If we then split USA and Australia and Canada into states, CO2 levels must surely drop, as no country single country emits anything worth worrying about. We're all saved!
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Because mine is that it is useless to focus and put blame on the west when most emissions, and a greater share of emissions (per capita and aggregate) come from India and China.
a) Aggregate is not true today. One day it may be true, but the Western world today still emits more than India and China combined.
b) Per capita is really ridiculously far from being true.
If our purpose is simply to self-flagellate, then by all means be like the GP and persist in whining about selfish Americans (and Danes, too).
It is the selfish Americans and Danes that are the problem. That is also where a lot of the goods that cause the pollution in China and India end up. The Chinese and the Indians do not get to enjoy them, they just get the pollution. Shifting blame to those who have little and can do nothing about the problems is immoral at