> Part of the issue is related to Prince William’s 33-year-old noise ordinance, which in residential areas like Great Oak limits daytime noise to 60 decibels, or what a normal conversation sounds like from about three feet away, and 55 decibels at night. But the ordinance exempts air conditioners, which are what the data center cooling systems and exhaust fans technically are.
Okay, so the real issue is inadequate regulation. Amazon is many negative things but one thing they will do always is stick to the minimum effort required to adhere to the law. Want to change their behavior? Change the law. Enact noise abatement requirements and they will make it happen.
Absolutely, Amazon famously push anti-union propaganda in their workplace (just talk with anyone working either at corporate or at the shipping centers) and move centers just to avoid union-heavy regions.
Also worth noting, blamazon (parent commentator) seems to work for Amazon (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25758868), or at least previously worked for them so probably sitting on a bunch of AMZN stock, but they never disclosed that, so might want to take their positive views of Amazon with a bit of salt.
Previously, yes. I try to avoid talking about the labor issue because well, exactly what you pointed out. My comment above deserves an asterisk in this regard, it occurred to me but I figured repliers would suredly provide worthy counterexamples that I could just upvote, which was intellectually lazy of me and I do apologize. To future readers, consider this reply chain the asterisk I guess.
Companies will always break the law, if the cost of paying for litigation and penalties (whether financial or reputation) is less than the profit they stand to make.
Regulations also need to have consequences and enforcement, but the companies can lobby to reduce or eliminate those elements when politicians are drafting new regulations.
I think the general public believes that simply making it illegal will be sufficient; it is not, but that perception is what permits corporations to get away with this kind of political tampering.
Making low noise, highly efficient, actively cooled heat exchangers is hard. Also, even if you use ARM processors, you use a lot of them, again creating a lot of heat.
So at the end, you either need much more heat exchangers, make some noise, reduce capacity or invent better cooling tech.
So, changing the law is not enough. You need to motivate right people to innovate, too.
Also, on US; good luck trying to change their behaviors through law. This is why companies have lobbyists.
Disclosure: HPC admin sitting on top of a datacenter.
Or just move elsewhere where it isn't a problem. Hell, they shouldn't be built near the housing in the first place but someone probably lobbied their way into it...
No, it's just shifting the cost of dealing with waste (pollution, sound) back to the producer rather than allowing them to make it someone else's problem. The cost isn't high, it's what it needs to be to run the operation in a way that's agreeable to the everyone in the area.
If you don't want to operate a business that deals with those costs, move or don't build a data center.
I'm not the GP, but I agree with this stance. But the specific policy proposed really matters if this is your goal. Politicians often want to write very narrow regulations which are intended to tweak some small behavior by some specific business they find distasteful (or politically desirable to modify). So they play whack-a-mole with problems like this by writing policies that look like: "in Zone 5, businesses operating as data centers must operate cooling equipment that does not increase ambient noise levels above X decibels within Y meters of their property. "
This kind of policy does not accomplish the cost-shifting you talk about. Rather, a cost-shifting policy looks like: "in Maricopa county, a business may make as much noise as it likes, but must pay fees to the owner of any plot of land which has its ambient noise levels raised in the amount of $X per Y decibels per minute per square meter experiencing increased noise. "
I'm not aware of much regulation in the latter vein, at least not where I live. But it has the advantage of cost shifting, from ANY business, to those affected by the negative externality. That reinternalizes the cost without hampering freedom of businesses to operate in whatever way most efficiently accomplishes their goals, and helps C-suite execs see the true cost of their operations, which incentivizes them to innovate that cost away. It's also not specific to the cause of the noise, so church bells pay the same as the data center which pays the same as the glass factory which pays the same as the concert venue.
I think the reason such broad brush stroke laws aren't made is probably partly a lack of system thinking, but also partly a result of it. If you try and monetise church bells, people will oppose it. Easier to monetise the evil corporations.
If it doesn't then it's drifting off topic, which I don't actually think was your intent, but let's follow along a bit anyway. What does motivate people to innovate? Obviously one motivation is internal, basically curiosity (which someone not trying to be so argumentative might have considered equivalent to persuasion). And another is profit. But what if a innovation in a particular area would only be necessary to maintain profitability, because current methods are already cheaper but damaging (e.g. environment) or otherwise unacceptable (e.g. privacy)? Then we're back to making that activity as it is currently done more expensive.
"That's a bad way to motivate innovation" still begs the question of what would actually be better in the real world for cases where sufficient motivation is currently lacking. The case where no "spur" is needed isn't even interesting in this context.
Yes, you were, whether you acknowledge it or not. You can't just ignore the existing context and expect everyone to follow you into a new one that you supposedly created out of nowhere. That's not only the height of hubris, but it's also not how curious conversation works. Please see the guidelines.
Although his rhetorical gymnastics attempting to dodge and avoid answering those obvious questions are certainly telling and amusing, and he helps make your point by ignoring the context and not being willing to address your straightforward questions.
I didn't create a new context; doing so would not have been the height of hubris; and I didn't expect people to follow me, other than in the most basic (or so I thought) comprehension sense. You and DonHopkins are the only ones behaving badly enough to be accused of annihilating curious conversation. My few words cannot be accused of that.
I have seen the guidelines, and nowhere do I see DonHopkins' mouth-frothing or your arbitrary rule-setting there.
I appreciate that now you've read my comment in its correct context (that of the previous comment) you understand it and aren't trying to say anything in response other than some brand new iron laws of conversation and DonHopkins' gossipy nastiness, as that hopefully means you've at least accepted it for what it is. A simple truthful statement, designed to modify the predecessor which was not, in my opinion, sufficiently caveated.
Not all Rand fans live in basements. Larry Ellison is one, and a few other famous names are too. Nothing against your general point about public services though.
Yet the grown up ones still act like angry spoiled incel teenaged boys who don't know the price of a bar of soap, like Elon Musk as an archetypical example. Which is my point exactly.
Anyone who hasn't grown out of being a foaming-at-the-mouth libertarian after they've reached puberty and moved out of their mother's basement is suffering from arrested development and a nihilistic lack of empathy for their fellow human beings.
The only person angry and foaming at the mouth appears to be you.
If you're this aggressive based just on what I said then it's worth considering if you also interpret various other very normal things people say in the worst way possible, and the problem is mostly in your own perception. If so: don't be a libertarian, and get help.
It seems you need to get help to explain what to do after persuasion and appeals to conscience have already failed, if not simply making it too expensive to not innovate with taxes and regulations.
As notacoward asked: surely you don't suggest that raw force is better? Or do you have a better and proven solution? Then share it with us!
Now go reply to his question above and the others that you're pointedly ignoring (unless you still don't have any answers):
> Making things very expensive is precisely how to motivate people to innovate.
I don't think that is the best way to innovate. The ability to make money is the best way.
> that you're pointedly ignoring.
I don't really understand the mentality of someone who would write this, as though someone can ignore something in piecemeal asynchronous communication.
I also don't understand the archaic phrasing, and while I feel I shouldn't have to say this, but I am not at an 18th century finishing school and you are not my headmistress.
Again, don't be a libertarian, and get help. You don't have to do this alone.
Do you really mean to ignore or dismiss the relationship between "ability to make money" and "things becoming more expensive"? That's not going to work here. Raise your game.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. I'm saying in general it's the worst way. Not scoped to this. And it's nothing to do with taxes being bad or good.
As you pointed out, even just dirt works. Noise abatement is done for urban freeways all the time, without changing the trucks, cars, road surface, et cetera.
Noise abatement is done for urban freeways all the time, without changing the trucks, cars, road surface, et cetera.
One of the reasons the Kennedy Expressway in downtown Chicago is zoned for skyscrapers on both sides is to block the traffic noise from getting into the rest of the area.
Dallas does the same thing with 75 and it's so wild because it seems like you're in an intensely urban area for miles, but really it's a wall of 10-15 story buildings surrounded by single family homes.
That's not true at all, automobiles and road surfaces are engineered for their acoustics in addition to noise abatement along roadways. Otherwise we wouldn't require mufflers or design better performing asphalt/cement mixtures and groove patterns that balance friction and noise.
To make my statement more precise, I know what you're saying is true but what I mean is, in a three month span one can put noise abatement panels along a freeway, in say, Charlotte North Carolina. (Just to be optimistic in this hypothetical) Three months isn't enough time to propagate effects from the long term changes that you correctly mentioned are responsible for reducing auto noise on a larger scale, and those panels aren't going to make the sound go away entirely, but they will abate the noise on the other side. That's what I'm saying is happening all the time and is analogous to the conditions in the article which seem to be newly constructed data centers. Of course there will be changes over time inside the data centers that make them more efficient and whatnot, but if there's a nearby residential zone when a new one is being built, just put some abatement into the site design. That takes no R&D, but it does take more capital.
While it's not data centres, locally we've had this issue but flipped on its head a bit: big electrical facilities were built out 5 minutes out of town on farmland... and then the city grew and now has critical electrical facilities right in the middle of residential areas.
Edit: funny enough, we had a similar situation with a rural gun range. In that case, at least, when they built the suburban neighbourhood next door the buyers did have a clause in the purchase contract that acknowledged that they were purchasing property next to an existing range and that there would be noise. They were generally fine with it until the national police force started renting the range and doing full-auto practice on Saturday mornings :D
> Residents and some local legislators argue that the industry’s footprint in the region is expanding too much, too fast and in the wrong places, posing potential risks to the surrounding environment — and, in some cases, creating noise from cooling fans that disrupt neighborhoods such as Browne’s.
Sounds to me like a case of plain bad zoning. Here in Germany, no way that would slide for new zoning - you can't zone noise-generating industry next to residential or mixed zone areas, you need a buffer (usually either undeveloped land or offices) between them.
> But the ordinance exempts air conditioners, which are what the data center cooling systems and exhaust fans technically are.
And that one a case of plain bad noise emissions regulations.
As usual, regulation is widely seen as "why do we need it"... until it affects people personally and all of a sudden they see why regulation is needed. Or to put it bluntly: Who would have thought that a face-eating leopard eats faces?
Exempting air conditioners was not necessarily bad regulation for a residential area.
Most of the time your air conditioner is not going to bother your neighbors despite being louder than what is normally allowed because most of the time when you need your air condition the neighbors won't hear it because they are also using their air conditioners.
What they missed was that business air conditioning needs are different and they might run air conditioners at times when no residents would be doing so and that businesses might a lot of air conditioners.
While there definitely are issues related to zoning and (from an European POV) utterly brain-dead car centrism - the issue at hand doesn't have to do anything with car centrism, data centers these days are (in-)famous for barely requiring any employment that needs presence of employees and associated car traffic.
I think it's a symptom of the same problem. We've already devalued quality of life by embracing car centrism, so we may as well let noisy DCs set up anywhere.
Here's a quick summary: [1]. Or for a longer treatise [2]. Basically, property owners enjoyed certain rights prior to the new data center construction that the data center is infringing upon.
So I have a factory and want to emit a lot of air pollution but I'm in a place that uses Mises/Rothbard style property rights to deal with pollution. What do I do?
Simple. I make my smokestacks really tall so the pollution is emitted very high into the air and has dispersed massively before some of it reaches any particular property. All the other factory owners do that too both locally and far away.
Someone comes after me for violating their property rights by polluting their air...and I get off because they can't prove causality. Yes, my factory emitted pollutant X, but so did hundreds of other factories both near mine and hundreds of miles away and everywhere in between. They can't prove that any detectable amount of my pollution actually ended up in their air.
Proof that low power, highly efficient computing power needs to become the new standard (ie, ARM).
At the same time, I am glad that these NIMBYs and suburbanites get a small taste of what happens when decades of "not in my backyard" and car centric policy comes to bite them in the ass. Nobody wants to be next to the "noisy" data center, but at the same time everybody wants access to the internet. If we had sane city design in the United States of America which emphasized density, walkability, alternative forms of transportation, and accessible and highly available public transportation. Nobody would care if a data center is out in the middle of nowhere.
But this is the good ole US of A, where everyone must have a car. Everyone must have their 8000 sq ft fiefdom. Everywhere needs to be accessible by a 2 ton death machine.
I like to imagine/describe this as like driving three 2004 Toyota Camry at one time. Probably you could do that and have it still weigh in below the Hummer. That would make a good YouTube video.
CAFE rules are the real reason - fleet wide emissions targets means lots of more efficient cars allows ‘indulgences’ in the form of limited numbers of very high margin larger vehicles. See the ford raptor for another example.
Once a vehicle is over 8k lbs, its considered a commercial vehicle. which is why all 3 major companies '3/4 ton' pickups are just a hair over 8000lbs..
...with a whole host of other tax breaks that kick in, including depreciation, "investment", "infrastructure", or whatever the economic-stimulus du jour is.
ARM vs x86 vs RISC-V makes very little difference in power efficiency of servers.
Cooling efficiency and efficiency of power distribution circuits are some of the biggest impacts on energy usage. The most energy-efficient datacenters today use liquid cooling vats for their computers, which are much more efficient than air cooling but come with tons of other problems.
How does walkability or the lack thereof require datacenters to be near anyone at all?
Light travels 300 kilometers in 1 millisecond; we're talking one millisecond additional latency to be outside of most metro areas, two or three and we're in unpopulated rural areas for sure.
Datacenters should have good, reliable and redundant supplies of power and connectivity. It is much easier to build a data center near or in a population center where fiber and electricity substations are plentiful, than to build your own long-haul fiber and high voltage lines into the middle of nowhere.
Of course you can do the latter if you have unlimited capital, but most companies choose the path of least resistance.
Don't know what the walkability argument is supposed to mean though: Amsterdam is famously walkable and cyclable, yet there are quite a few data centers right next to the center of the city; same goes for London.
Yeah I suspect that datacenters congregate near areas that multiple fiber connections come together, and those ares are near where multiple roads and rivers come together, which have traditionally been where cities are located.
> If we had sane city design in the United States of America which emphasized density, walkability, alternative forms of transportation, and accessible and highly available public transportation. Nobody would care if a data center is out in the middle of nowhere.
Nobody cares if a data center is out in the middle of nowhere with the current American city design.
The article is about data centers that are not in the middle of nowhere.
Nobody wants to be next to the "noisy" data center, but at the same time everybody wants access to the internet. If we had sane city design in the United States of America which emphasized density, walkability, alternative forms of transportation, and accessible and highly available public transportation. Nobody would care if a data center is out in the middle of nowhere.
The downside is that instead of being exposed to noise from data centers, you're exposed to noise from nearby buildings, neighbors, transit, etc. We get plenty of work in city centers from folks annoyed by noisy neighbors (residential and commercial).
You're not wrong about the US needing to better emphasize density, but it's not a panacea.
> The downside is that instead of being exposed to noise from data centers, you're exposed to noise from nearby buildings, neighbors, transit, etc. We get plenty of work in city centers from folks annoyed by noisy neighbors (residential and commercial).
It's worse than that. In his proposed carless utopia where everyone lives in high density housing and walks or bikes or takes public transit, the data centers would be built in the city because that's where the workers are. They wouldn't built them out in the middle of nowhere because public transit generally is not going to go to the middle of nowhere.
The comment I was referring to also used the phrase "2 ton death machine" instead of calling them cars. That's usually a good sign that what a person is advocating for is more than merely adding more non-car transportation. :-)
And indeed, checking their other comments they also want to greatly reduce parking spaces for cars in cities. That would make it so most people in cities could not own cars, and greatly raise the cost of parking for those that do own cars meaning cars could probably be owned by people in the top income groups.
So I think my inference that the type of city they are advocating would be one where data center employees would very likely not have cars, and so data centers would not be in the middle of nowhere.
Many data centers are on industrial estates; hardly in the middle of nowhere. For those who truly work in the middle of nowhere, I'm sure a permit scheme could be worked out.
Yeah I live in a place where the walkscore is like 30, and am able to get more places I need to go via walking than when I lived in downtown Seattle.
They're even adding a bike and walk link to the carmall on the outskirts of town, connecting it with the rest of the city on a traffic separated trail.
Meanwhile, in Seattle it was 2 miles to get to the grocery store and took all day while dealing with city car traffic.
The problem isn't "car centric" design, the problem is that nobody is designing anything at all.
I once lived in a place with a Walkscore of 80+. Looking at the details of the score, it was largely because Walkscore counts pornography shops as bookstores.
Along those lines, I imagine Walkscore also counts peep shows as movie theaters, and strip clubs as general family entertainment centers.
Meanwhile, in Seattle it was 2 miles to get to the grocery store and took all day while dealing with city car traffic.
When I lived in Seattle, I didn't even own a car. I could get everywhere I need to on a bus, or train, or walking. Perhaps you have a different definition of "downtown" than where I lived. If you were two miles away from the Whole Foods on Westlake, then you weren't downtown.
Haha. I had the same reaction. What Seattle were they living in? I suppose parts of north Seattle can kind of be like that.
My experience living in Seattle was that it was hard to live in a place where there wasn't a small commercial district within a few blocks. Seattle does wonderfully with mixing small commercial into residential zones.
I put my car in storage, it was doable but it wouldn't have been without uber, going anywhere via transit would've involved at least one twenty minute transfer.
I mostly just hoofed it everywhere, but it did limit my access substantially.
Meanwhile, unless it's very cold or I'm going to a different city I have much less of a need for a car in my more rural locale.
I put my car in storage, it was doable but it wouldn't have been without uber
Why not? I lived in Seattle for years without a car, before Uber was even invented. Get an Orca card, and a ZipCar subscription for once-a-month trips. Problem solved.
Having to take any transfer at all adds fifteen minutes to a trip, scheduling issues and a life pattern that routinely had me in Fremont, Bellevue, etc.
Went to SoDo a fair bit and that was always an extreme chore despite the short distance.
Walking .8 to whole foods and back with a weeks worth of groceries wasn't unlivable or anything, but I had to pay 50% more for food to even get that close.
Today, I walk like a quarter mile for groceries basically whenever I'd like and don't have to deal with city traffic.
The point is not Seattle bad or transit bad, the point is that despite a design with many more "car centric" elements, I have an easier time walking and biking here than I did there - so you can't lay all urban problems at the feet of cars and assume that pro density urbanism magically fixes them.
There is no place in downtown Seattle where the closest grocery store is 2 miles away. I think you'd have trouble finding a place anywhere within the city limits where that was the case.
I can't see how this differs from any other article about a large, dominant employer in an area. It could be a coal-mine, theme park, or university, and there'd be a very similar comments.
Suburbanites get a small taste of what it felt like in the 1950s when poor or predominantly black communities were bulldozed and replaced with massive highways
The Media hates tech for destroying their business model and for now controlling the means of distribution. That's why you see articles like this about data centers but not, say, hospitals - which are WAY worse.
The Media is mostly just a bunch of journalists trying their best to write interesting enough stories to keep their jobs. The stories they're writing are typically a reflection of what they think people care about: in this case, people care about the impact technology is having on us, and this is one aspect of it. The fact that we're here discussing this story proves that it was a good story to write. Suggesting this is a backlash against technology for "controlling the means of distribution" is silly (not least because WaPo is owned by Bezos so they'd be the last participant in an anti-tech conspiracy, if indeed there was one).
If anyone knows a good lawyer, please contact me. I’m dealing with this exact issue. The noise levels are above the city code at night and it’s been going on for over two years with empty promises that it’ll be fixed
Data centers don't have to be exceptionally noisy. There's at least ~5~ 9 data centers within 5 miles of my house. One is across the street from my kid's daycare, another is along a bike trail nearby, and both are practically silent compared to just the road noise. Looking on Google Maps a bit closer, there's some along some streets I used to walk my dog, and I didn't even fully realize they were a data center but judging by cooling capacity and power from satellite its pretty obvious.
I don't know if its just the operator's decisions in design or zoning requirements that makes that reality for me, but almost all the data centers aren't exceptionally loud from outside the facility grounds.
By the way the idea that Loudoun county handles a third of global internet traffic is ridiculous. Some guy from the chamber of commerce said this in the 90's and journalists have been parroting the statement ever since. Sometimes as much as 70%! Since it's not based on reality they can just make up anything.
The whole entirety of the problem seems to be politicians allowing them to pop up in same place residental zones are. No doubt because it looked like nice money.
> Local jurisdictions can tax the value of the computer equipment inside the buildings without having to provide many government services — giving Northern Virginia a steady stream of funds that, officials say, can go toward schools or affordable housing.
That will get the problem "solved" by datacenters leaving.
Aside from having these noise producers in an area that would not bother anyone is there a solution for this problem possible or it's a case of we don't care because that would cut into profits? How would cladding with foam the exhausts or building some sound barriers around these facilities do? I don't know much about this and am just wondering if a solution already exists or is being sought
I love this idea. I wondered why this wasn't leveraged by cryptocurrency miners. You could supplement and subsidize heat all winter for any apartment building or office.
I also saw a post where a guy was using Bitcoin mining to heat his outdoor pool in the winter. Couldn't find that one with a quick search but it's definitely out there if you want to dig.
Doesn't negate the point. Waste can be useful if paired with a complementary system. As I understand it, high efficiency manufacturing can be like this.
Yeah 55dB at night, must be nice. I guarantee you these NIMBYs believe it is their God-granted entitlement to drive their cars at 70 MPH down the freeways of Northern Virginia like I-395 and the Beltway, where the 55dB contour extends for hundreds of meters from the centerline of the road, right into the homes of numerous families.
Okay, so the real issue is inadequate regulation. Amazon is many negative things but one thing they will do always is stick to the minimum effort required to adhere to the law. Want to change their behavior? Change the law. Enact noise abatement requirements and they will make it happen.