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Posted by Bender 2 hours ago

Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity(www.theregister.com)
159 points | 114 comments
mrtksn 52 minutes ago|
Isn't this a similar issue of doctors raised by taxpayers money doing hair transplant and cosmetic surgeries instead of working in much less profitable hospitals with sick people or European scientists and engineers risen by public education working in American tech companies or super rich people from all over the world buying all the homes in London which is valuable not because of its resources but because of the people there and now causing housing problems?

They all have the same issues:

1) Pricing that doesn't account for externalities.

2) Those who bear the consequences are not those who reap the benefits

syntaxing 33 minutes ago||
In certain Asian countries, medical education is 100% covered but you must work at a public hospital for X years. I honestly think it’s very fair. If tax payers full funds your education, it should be mandatory to work in public services for X amount of years.
hx8 15 minutes ago|||
This is common for teachers in many US states too -- spend X years teaching where we need you the most and we cover your degree.

In the US a teaching degree might be $50,000, and medical degree might be $500,000. I'm not sure I want my state government covering half a million in education costs for one person... I know that we need doctors but I'd want to see some ROI numbers to justify such a high expense.

mrtksn 27 minutes ago||||
Yep, that's common in many countries for doctors. Not much for anything else(maybe teachers too) and how much X is good enough is debatable.

Certainly common resources are very vulnerable to incorrect pricing and profiteering.

In the past there are many cases where local populations were deprived from their vital needs because some king/queen/sultan/khan etc needed that more.

carbocation 19 minutes ago|||
That is essentially how it works in the US as well thanks to public service loan forgiveness for physicians.
hinkley 48 minutes ago|||
What kind of plastic surgery are you looking to gatekeep?

Because I guarantee you the people who pointed out that plastic surgery was covered have ideas of what that should be.

Plastic surgery can include burn and emergency surgical scars (trauma surgeons are just trying to keep your insides in and your outsides out, and then they have to run to the next patient to do the same), and hair transplants can include head injuries or cancer surgeries in young people in addition to vain old men.

When we discuss things like this in political arenas, nuance goes out the window and you're contributing to condemning little girls to walk around with giant patches of missing hair and people to tolerate visible scars that will absolutely be used to illegally discriminate against them for jobs that would allow them to afford their own procedures.

olelele 39 minutes ago|||
He's talking about highly educated doctors taking jobs in private clinics instead of working in public hospitals for less.
mrtksn 34 minutes ago||
Exactly. In countries with medical tourism this not only pushed the doctors to work for tourists instead of the local population that sponsored their education but also the brightest doctors to do things like botox, nose job or hair transplant because its incredibly lucrative. Fields that deal with stuff like cardiovascular deceases or children have become leftover fields where only the idealists and those who couldn't get into the cosmetic stuff specialize.
mrtksn 44 minutes ago|||
I think its obvious from the context what kind of plastic surgery, the vanity one.
hinkley 39 minutes ago||
I think it's obvious from 'all nuance is lost' that it does not matter, at all. You're inviting collateral damage, as I already said.
jubilanti 18 minutes ago||
[flagged]
s1artibartfast 41 minutes ago||
The common thread in your examples is the idea of entitlements.

Either entitlement to the doctors/engineers labor or a house one doesnt own.

I dont think externalities is the most useful model for thinking about this because it is easy to construct a more favorable hypothetical. That doesnt mean one is entiteled to it.

slowin 34 minutes ago||
You are entitled to a benefit from your tax dollars being spent. Otherwise, it's just theft.
s1artibartfast 26 minutes ago||
No, no you arent. Money given without strings attached is just that. Claiming ownership of another humans labor is called slavery.

It might be evidence that you or your government isn't benefiting you with its spending. That doesnt put obligation on the recipient.

slowin 20 minutes ago||
My taxes aren't "money given without strings attached". They are payment for services that benefit myself and others in the community. They're not a free gift for the government to hand out, that's theft.
s1artibartfast 2 minutes ago||
Sure, I agree with that. I just think that is a problem to take up with your government. It doesnt mean a doctor or engineer owes you.
pizzafeelsright 2 hours ago||
That is about 3% of California's total energy usage

Or about 11,000 GWh which is about 4% of California which means without the theatrics:

California has 4x more data centers than Ireland.

California: ~810 watts per person. (278,000 GWh / 39.4 million people)

Ireland: ~690 watts per person. (32,000 GWh / 5.3 million people)

We have air conditioning and that may be why we use more POWAH

hinkley 42 minutes ago||
I'm actually quite surprised that California only has 4x as many data centers, with CA having more than 7x the population (not to mention being pivotal in the Information Age)
paleotrope 35 minutes ago||
California is not a great place to build data centers. If you need to service CA, there are better options
hinkley 23 minutes ago||
Oh yeah, power distribution is kind of a circus there isn't it.
tims33 33 seconds ago||
Power, land, water, people - all expensive in CA.
JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago||
What fraction of Irish GDP is linked to datacenters? If I remember correctly from the pre-AI world, datacenters were at the heart of Dublin's industrial strategy, and they were credibly linked to a double-digit fraction of production.
stuaxo 1 hour ago|||
Irelands big pull to these companies is to not tax them as much as other countries.
dboreham 1 hour ago||
That said, once built and lit up, it's hard to move a data center to another country.
dilyevsky 18 minutes ago|||
Like 90%+ cost of a dc is actual computers which are pretty shippable
henry2023 1 hour ago|||
Even in the hypothetical that datacenters would double Ireland’s GDP what real positive impact would it have if they pay zero taxes?
hunterpayne 56 minutes ago|||
The rest of Europe sued Ireland to get them to stop being a tax haven. Ireland basically refuses to do so. If they did, most of their economy evaporates overnight (and the US government gets a lot more tax revenue). Ireland's economy is basically 2 tax shelters in a trench coat.
a_paddy 1 hour ago||||
They do pay tax, 12.5%. Plus employment during construction and maintenance. There's also ancillary investment in national infrastructure such as Google's CO2 battery
phs318u 1 hour ago|||
Did you mean hypothesis?
henry2023 40 minutes ago||
I meant hypothetical, thanks for pointing it out.
hudo 31 minutes ago||
And got electricity price hike last year, and now few weeks ago again, from ~25c kwh, to around 35c kwh! They say its reliance on fossil fuels. Not just that, think Ireland has one of the most expensive broadbands in the EU!
HtmlProgrammer 1 hour ago||
My electricity costs 34 cent per Kw/h and I can’t afford solar panels or a renovation to air to water heating while the government insists we shouldn’t use oil / coal anymore nor logs or turf to heat our homes

edit: I live in Ireland

hunterpayne 59 minutes ago||
That's 7x the cost that I pay in the Pacific NW. Where are you?
dymk 11 minutes ago|||
I'm in the PNW and I pay 11c/kWh (well, I would, if I didn't have solar). Seattle is 13c, King County averages 16c. Where are you paying 5c/kWh? That's exceptionally cheap.
Keloran 57 minutes ago||||
I am going to assume based on the fact that the article is about Ireland, and Ireland uses the euro, the commenter is in Ireland
keane 22 minutes ago||
Also the mention of turf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%B3rd_na_M%C3%B3na
s1artibartfast 55 minutes ago|||
Paying 50 cents here in California. Running the electric oven costs literal dollars. However, this isnt new. Im hoping the data centers bring more attention to our state run cartel and push it over a tipping point.
delichon 31 minutes ago||
18 cents here in New Mexico. You must be getting premium government services for paying all of that in California.
lotsofpulp 17 minutes ago|||
California utility prices are a function of income.

https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/industries-and-topics/electrical-ene...

IncreasePosts 40 minutes ago||
At 34 cents per kwh how can you afford to not get solar?
simonw 29 minutes ago|||
The Sam Vimes theory of socioeconomic unfairness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
hinkley 37 minutes ago|||
Being poor is expensive.
cbmuser 59 minutes ago||
Ireland consumes roughly 40 TWh per year, that’s less than the production of four EPR reactors or two times Hinkley Point C.

The country could easily solve its electricity problems with nuclear power. They can ask South Korea for help who built four reactors in UAE with 12 years which now provide 25% of the country’s electricity.

anigbrowl 4 minutes ago|
Nuclear power is a non-starter in IReland because the Sellafield nuclear plant in the UK emitted pollution of various for years but UK officials covered it up. The actual severity of the pollution is open to debate but the loss of trusthad a generational impact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield#Incidents

lavela 10 minutes ago||
We need global minimum tax.
hahahaa 1 hour ago||
Is there a snowball effect where a big AWS region attracts more usage? Those snowballs are more significant in smaller countries?
EwanToo 1 hour ago|
Yes, the largest regions get new services launched in them first, and the widest range of hardware, encouraging more people to use them.
illwrks 2 hours ago||
A few years ago I was reading a recruitment report and was surprised to learn that Ireland is a large source of data scientists, so it’s no surprise really
teamonkey 1 hour ago||
I don’t really see the link between data scientists and datacentres, or even AI researchers and datacentres.

The data scientists aren’t the ones working in the data centres. There’s no real advantage to having the data they’re working on next door unless it’s extremely lag sensitive.

Local proximity of a datacentre is good for fintech, Netflix and gaming servers.

alephnerd 2 hours ago||
Yep. IDA's services FDI model helped attract much of the tech scene that exists in Ireland today. In the 1990s and 2000s no one would have expected Ireland to become the tech hub it is today without the IDA's foresightedness.
matttttttttttt 2 hours ago||
I read this as 'Irish Dancers now guzzle....'

I'm sure they work up a sweat but probably not on the same order of magnitude

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