It is just a few people. Any time people are unpleasant to others or post in an uninteresting way I add them to a personal list that filters out their comments. Rapidly the site becomes more usable. The negativity is from a few highly polarized individuals.
I know others also do this - though often they are kind enough to auto-fold.
It’s just a big forum so it has lots of people. Personally, I block most reflexively anti-AI people because they’re boringly repetitive. But this has always been the case. Over a decade ago, my friend made a user script to block Snowden news[0].
There are just some topics that a lot of people like to act as radio repeaters on. I just block everyone who seems repetitive to me or who talks in a boring way. In the old world you’d go to a forum and you’d find that many of the threads are occupied by abrasive old timers of one or other type who have driven away all the people who’ve written the information on the forum. This is the standard thing that happens over time. Those for whom the group is the thing prioritize spending their time expressing group membership over being useful to the group.
As forums grow bigger, they attract these participants and then these guys drive out the rest. But you don’t really have to give in to the whole thing. I just remove them and their threads from my comment feed. It’s a pretty good experience.
Other groups that I find undesirable are those with whom I cannot relate. Programmers in crappy companies spend a lot of time talking about how they’re defending their work from useless managers who take credit for everything and so on and so forth. Or they might invent psychoanalysis to express why bosses want people in office rather than remote. There’s just not very much to learn from this kind of person. It’s just a generalized complaint machine which, unlike on sites which have topic-forums like Reddit, leak into general space here.
But you can clean up your own feed. And it’ll get better. It actually doesn’t take very many.
2 years ago, wrote superfast float -> fixed point string code. That was cool.
Then a while ago, I plugged in everything at the datacenter and one device didn't come up. Plug into the management port, and Claude Code writes a C program to send a particularly crafted packet. Everything comes online.
Well, the welfare state for most nations will suffer. The reason it's a massive sin to scale down is that with a scaled down economy you can't sustain the old without greater sacrifices by the young. So you need someone to pay the price and neither wishes to. For my part, I think. one way or the other my Millennial generation should probably give up the US welfare state. We can still save the next generations.
Surprisingly small contract. It's interesting to see that a full government contract for a payment provider is a fraction of a US mid-size company's cloud bill. I am constantly surprised by things like this. Here's another: there are more foreigners in Taiwan (total pop. 25 m) than in China (total pop. 1.4 b).
Interchange average in the UK was about 0.2% last time I looked (which was a few years ago), it't not much anyway.
Also the government doesn't really do card transactions. I imagine this is for fairly rare things like renewing your passport, booking a driving test or buying a title copy. Oh and visa fees maybe? Small beer anyway, it's not like people are paying taxes via card.
A very crude calculation for £1B a year in payments (thats probably too low) would mean a payment to Ayden (contract is upto £25M over 3 years) of 0.8%
Interchange as a standalone might be low but scheme fees are about the same nowadays. Aydens provide a detail breakdown per transaction, for example on a UK consumer credit card there's sometimes 8 different line items (interchange, ayden markup, various scheme fees), one generally does not get out under 0.5% on interchange++ even in the UK on the most favourable cards. When you're on interchange pricing with either Stripe, Adyen or another big boy you're paying extra for AVS, 3DS, and several other scheme services. No one is walking away with 0.2% all in. A lot of people find these Visa and Mastercard published PDFs for interchange and think that's cheap, but reality is when the schemes got their nuts tightened on interchange fees they just spread the loss by marking up various scheme services and mandating them. John still want's his Avios points even in Europe/UK.
The gov.uk runs card transactions for dozens of services - which add up - from car tax, driver license renewal, passport replacements, to paying previous NI years (do you consider this tax?) and so on..
By credit card, it's quite useful for the reward points - I'm fairly sure it was MC and Visa only (no AMEX) last time I did it, though that may change with this new payment provider
Payment processing costs are a scam. They're 10x as expensive as they need to be to fund rewards programs and fund the financial system.
EU max credit card transaction fees are 0.3%, in the US they can be up to 4%.
It just doesn't cost 4% of a transaction to handle the exchange of funds. Just wealth transfer to finance people and the upper class who take advantage of credit card perks.
Can someone explain to me if EU card transactions are capped, why Stripe charges me (US) the full ride on my EU customer's cards? In fact, I get charged even more for EU cards – perhaps as much as 2.5% extra.
I just checked and I get charged ~8% in fees on a 10 euro transaction on Stripe. Of course some of that is the low transaction amount (flat 0.30), but it's brutal for a small business like myself.
The EU only capped interchange fees, which is the amount that goes to the bank that issued the card. It did not cap the fees that go the your PSP. Which makes sense, since you can pick the PSP you do business with, but you can't pick the bank that issues your customers' cards.
(And I don't think it applies to US merchants like you anyways)
perhaps they are capped only for EU merchants, because EU government works to protect their own companies and citizens from foreign artificial unregulated monopolies.
in US, the government is more protective of private monopolies due to lobbying
How are you defining monopolies? Companies that are successful? Because you seem to be defining most US companies that do business in Europe as monopolies. It seems that this is the kind of mindset that has kept Europe behind. Too bad. Regulation that keeps out competition or needlessly puts obstacles in place is bad for the consumer, bad for employment, and bad for the general standard of living. And If you think US companies are unregulated then you haven't seen the 20 ft of federal CFR regulations together with the regulations of 50 different states that US companies have to deal with everyday.
Interestingly, the EU did manage to cap interchange on US cards paid by EU merchants to pretty much the same rate as that paid for domestic/intra-EU cards, at least at the POS. Many things are possible with a regulator with teeth.
The funny thing about that is that HN used to say if the fee was 4% it's because that's what it costs and if it was any lower the card networks would just abandon the country that forced it to be lower, since they'd lose money.
Except in the US, it does. Depending on the card, it can cost as much as 4.5% (or more!) to run the card. You can argue that it shouldn't, but that's a different statement than it doesn't.
it is illegal for Merchants to charge credit card processing fees by law, they have to absorb these fees and cannot display them to the customer.
This naturally protects the artificial oligopoly of visa/mc/discover systems.
The moment you allow Merchants to charge cc fees (even 2-3%) and allow customer to choose low processing option (ACH/debit card/cash), the whole scheme falls apart and Visa/MC will slowly go bankrupt
the typical Merchant<->bank agreements all have clauses forcing them to absorb these fees and explicitly barring them from separately charging customer CC fee.
and most small/med businesses dont have clout to protest that, so they have to accept these terms in order to earn money
> the typical Merchant<->bank agreements all have clauses forcing them to absorb these fees and explicitly barring them from separately charging customer CC fee.
These clauses would be illegal in many states and countries these days, so they don’t.
This hasn't been the case for a wide variety of payment processors for quite a while now. Many of the new startup-based ones have features to help you pass through the fees even. Small business can use Stripe, Square, Clover, or one of many other payment processors that don't ban them from passing credit card fees forward to consumers.
The only good use case for a credit card is if you are buying something from someone you do not trust. I have a CC and it use it a few times a year. But using them to pay for groceries or ordering something from Amazon is just moronic.
The way I see it: you are either rich and don't care or you are poor and need to spend money that is not in your account (no judging I grew up poor and had to hide from debt collectors when I was a kid).
Note that this is highly location dependent. In most of Europe, credit cards are basically all that exists (that is, even "debit cards" are just credit cards with a balance); and regardless of the type of card, because all payments are either chip & pin, biometric based, or verified with some additional 2FA, it's extremely hard to dispute a charge, whether a charge to a credit or debit card.
In some places Visa/MC is the default way to pay. Such as large parts of Europe now that the fees are capped. The cashier asks you to pay, you hold your card up to the terminal, and you've paid. Some places like Australia have their own local systems that are more commonly used by locals and probably have lower fees, but those POS also support Visa/MC. It's just the default way to pay internationally now.
The irony is that every couple you shop with just increases the prices of their items to deal with the fees, so you're just paying more for items to feel good about getting reward program benefits.
Much more common in Europe, which is partly cultural, and partly because there's not the same single/dual message technical distinction between debit and credit cards, so you don't "need" a credit card in the way you would for certain things in the US (e.g. a hotel that wants to preauth it).
Most places other than the USA, when they use these card networks or their local country networks, are normally using debit cards. There's just no reason to overcomplicate a payment card by making it also a loan.
I briefly skimmed this, but why are you wasting my time? What does this have to do with me earning free trips from being smart about how I buy things? does not compute.
Brazil's central bank operates their instant payment network Pix [1] [2] [3] for ~$10M/year [4]. Its not that these are small contracts, but that large, inefficient, unnecessary contracts have become the norm (I argue). Similar example from India's UPI payment system [5]. The US has FedNow to move instant payments for pennies, but banking and payment system participants in the US ecosystem are avoiding it to continue to private payment system rake [6] (cc networks, Zelle commercial bank network, private wallets, etc).
The evidence is clear you don't need to skim 3% off of an economy to provide instant payment capabilities. The enterprise value of US payment companies is a function of how long they hold onto this volume for, when competition is ramping up. You're just pushing ISO 20022 XML messages around a bus.
> This makes the American dispute more sophisticated than it may first appear. Pix certainly puts pressure on private payment models, card networks and acquirers. It also reduces friction for consumers, small businesses and person-to-person transfers. But its deeper effect is institutional. It turns the bank deposit into an even more efficient payment instrument — and, by doing so, changes the role of banks in liquidity intermediation.
> There is an irony here. For decades, the United States built the narrative of private financial innovation. Brazil, through a public, interoperable and massively adopted system, produced one of the world’s most efficient payment infrastructures. The study notes how unusual Pix adoption was: more than 150 million users in its first year, use by nine out of ten small businesses, and daily volumes capable of reaching about 1% of annual GDP on a single peak day.
> The reading should not be triumphalist. Pix is a powerful innovation, but it is not cost-free for the financial system. It improves the user experience, reduces transaction costs and increases competition in payments. At the same time, it requires banks to hold more liquidity and may reduce the transformation of deposits into credit. For the United States, Pix appears as a digital-trade issue. For Brazil, it is a question of financial sovereignty. For banks, it is a question of liquidity. Pix began as a button inside an app. It became a piece of financial policy — and now, of geopolitics.
The BCB in Brazil does very little to operate Pix. It's effectively a P2P system, where the BCB forces all the banks to interop with one-another (and all the banks directly call eachother). They can operate it that cheaply because they do close to nothing technically (they host the main discovery endopints). The only place the BCB actually ingests data is via their reporting mechanisms.
UPI is a bit more centralized, where the NPCI does the top-level routing between banks, so their operating budget is likely much higher than Pix. It also is drastically more simple to be a participant in UPI compared to Pix.
For Pix adoption: you can thank Covid for that. The Brazilian government said if you wanted to get free money from the government, you had to set up and use Pix.
US Financial Innovation: I'd say the hard thing here is that the government is extremely strict (lots of regulation) when you start looking like a bank. Lots of companies have tried to innovate here, but regulation makes it really hard to do. There's a lot of regulator capture going on.
In both Brazil and the US, making something like Pix mainstream requires regulation. Brazil did its part, but it’s unclear whether the US will do the same anytime soon, I don't think so, unfortunately. Technically, it would benefit the American population (the process of making pix payments is so smoothless), but payment companies may have little incentive to support it, and could lobby against it.
In Brazil, the Central Bank overpowered the coordination problem. In the US, it may be the opposite: the government seems to have less power over the payment lobby, or at least less willingness to confront it directly.
Thanks for that. I am wondering if anyone have written up a high level technical comparison between different payment systems including Pix, UPI and others.
Feels odd that you exclude mentioning the EU, which has had instant transfers for more than a decade. More than two decades, if you include things like iDeal from The Netherlands.
Wasn't intentional, I mention SEPA and Wero in other comments, not intended to be an enumeration of all instant payment systems currently active globally. My apologies!
> not intended to be an enumeration of all 54 instant payment systems currently active.
Even then, not mentioning those who pretty much started / invented instant transfers still seems odd :) but no need to apologize haha, maybe I was a bit too abrasive.
I get why you prioritized to mention those though. The Chinese and Indians have leapfrogged us. No more fussy legacy (digital) cards, just scan a QR and go. Even illicit food stalls and street wanderers have accounts, when they wouldn't be able to get a 'real' bank account.
And the Chinese and Indians don't have to pay tribute to the Mastercard-Visa overlords either. Although Wero and the digital Euro might eventually change that for Europe too.
Can you imagine how cumbersome conversations would become if people felt obligated to qualify ad-hoc statements with what amounts to a historical ledger?
Every new entry would open up an opinion around “if you included that, why didn’t you include this?”
The comment literally mentioned how unusual Pix adaption is and how innovative it is. It is neither of those things. Because of aforementioned history.
don't centralized payment systems like this reduce the overall resilience of the ecosystem and prevent future innovation? You hint on those lines with the possible future transformation of deposits into credit.
Why doesn't the US private ecosystem manage to lower costs similarly? (Zelle comes to mind). It is interesting that this has happened in more highly regulated countries where the free market likely could not have come up with a cheaper solution on their own due to the same overbearing system that effectively forces adoption of this centralized solution.
All payment systems are centralized. Zelle is owned by the largest US commercial banks ("Early Warning Services"), Congress directed the Federal Reserve to build and offer FedNow as a utility so smaller banks would not be excluded from offering instant payments. It costs $~30/month (last I checked the rate sheet) to plug into it. The instant payments are the utility, your opportunity to innovate is using this as a component of your user experience.
Propose some innovation here, I am interested, as someone adjacent to payments in financial services. Besides instant payments, the most we've seen is closed wallets (Venmo, Cash App) no longer needed with broad instant payment access from most demand deposit accounts and Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) (and I argue BNPL is simply dressing revolving credit card debt up as innovation).
> Why doesn't the US private ecosystem manage to lower costs similarly? (Zelle comes to mind). It is interesting that this has happened in more highly regulated countries where the free market likely could not have come up with a cheaper solution on their own due to the same overbearing system that effectively forces adoption of this centralized solution.
Because it is a grift ("regulatory capture") [1] [2]. The "overbearing system" is the result of regulation to bring the consumer excess of cheap payments to an entire country's financial user population. Why does Jamie Dimon not like stablecoin yield [3]? Because JPMC makes almost $100B/year in interest income taking customer deposits and lending against them, which stablecoins would compete against by operating as a form of narrow bank, parking the underlying deposits in risk free US Treasuries [4].
As a US financial services consumer, it is hard for you to avoid the rake of the machine built to skim off of you as you hold onto fiat or move it, but the rest of the world can avoid being captured by it (as this piece demonstrates). Also, Europe can't regulate Stripe as easily as they can Adyen. You don't have to be the biggest or the greatest, it just has to work "good enough".
> Propose some innovation here, I am interested, as someone adjacent to payments in financial services.
Well, as a brazilian who is used to pix and has also faced the bad payment ux in american, I think a possible solution should be adding the missing Pix-like layer above the existing US rails.
One of the best part that makes Pix an incredible experience, It’s that the app almost doesn’t matter. I can use one bank, you can use another, a merchant can use a different provider, and it still works through the same basic language: QR code, Pix key, payment request, confirmation screen. I can even transport my "pix key" to another app/bank provider.
So maybe the US opportunity is a agnostic interoperability layer on top of FedNow/RTP/Zelle/bank APIs: universal aliases, QR payments, routing, fraud checks, receipts, and reconciliation. Making instant account-to-account payments feel universal before the government forces a universal standard.
I don't think consumers broadly should be the main goal first, the best initial path should be small-business, marketplaces, rent, etc.
If someone could own that neutral UX/addressing layer, that seems much closer to the useful part of Pix than just another closed wallet.
> Propose some innovation here, I am interested, as someone adjacent to payments in financial services. Besides instant payments, the most we've seen is closed wallets (Venmo, Cash App) no longer needed with broad instant payment access from most demand deposit accounts and Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) (and I argue BNPL is simply dressing revolving credit card debt up as innovation).
UPI for instance only works with a physical SIM. Your phone number on the account must match the physical SIM on the device. This indirectly relies on India's insistence on KYC (for accounts naturally) on issuance of physical SIMs. "Innovation" here would be a player who can support VOIP based phone numbers (maybe by complying with phone number KYC in some other way).
UPI also makes it quite confusing to deposit money to a particular account you own. You could share a specific identifier (string or qr) based on your account but the other party generally assumes they can send you money using your phone number, and sometimes follows through with that.
(I don't have a finance background.) There any multiple instances of a one-size fits all user experience decision which strikes me as a result of the centralization and removal of competition (in efforts to drive up adoption).
I don't disagree with most of your reply (thanks for the thoughtful citations too). But i wonder why the free market cannot lower cost/settlement time similarly.
> UPI for instance only works with a physical SIM. Your phone number on the account must match the physical SIM on the device. This indirectly relies on India's insistence on KYC (for accounts naturally) on issuance of physical SIMs. "Innovation" here would be a player who can support VOIP based phone numbers (maybe by complying with phone number KYC in some other way).
The Indian government has mandated this for strong identity assurances. Your only hope at "innovation" (ie violating financial services regulators and laws) here is cash or something like Monero.
> UPI also makes it quite confusing to deposit money to a particular account you own. You could share a specific identifier (string or qr) based on your account but the other party generally assumes they can send you money using your phone number, and sometimes follows through with that.
I haven't used UPI recently, but I imagine this is a UX issue around aliases (phone numbers, email, and other human identifiers that associate to an underlying account).
TLDR People problems cannot be fixed with tech (in this context, regulatory requirements or alias UX, submit a public comment to the regulator if you can).
> I don't disagree with most of your reply (thanks for the thoughtful citations too). But i wonder why the free market cannot lower cost/settlement time similarly.
Because without regulation, it turns into Monopoly (the board game). Sometimes, competition can be encouraged, but in some cases (broad, shared infrastructure) it cannot and regulation must fill this gap to ensure the target outcome. This is why we regulate electric utilities similarly. Happy to help, I am very interested and curious on this topic.
Most blockchain systems are fairly or even extremely centralized as well and amount to little other than decentralization theater. Bitcoin and Ethereum are arguably more of an exception than the norm.
None of which are in production at scale. I admit crypto is optimal for less than legal transactions and speculation, but the volume for legal payment transactions is negligible.
Solana mainnet was shown to have capability to handle 100k transactions per second [1]. Granted, it was a synthetic benchmark of noops, but it shows the capability is there.
For reference, Visa claim 83k TPS [2] for their system. It also has the advantage of being vastly cheaper than tradfi payment networks at ca. $0.0005 per transaction [3] irrespective of transaction amount.
Until it is in prod, it is a proof of concept. Blockchains solve for low trust; if you have trust, you don't need the efficiency loss of a decentralized ledger or blockchain. Central banks provide trust.
As mentioned in one of my other comments, Pix in Brazil costs ~$10M/year. They process ~6-8 billion monthly transactions and roughly $6.7 trillion in payment volume a year [1]. That's roughly ~$0.0015/transaction based on the math in this comment, and we don't know what the ceiling is based on existing capacity (which would drive per transaction costs down further). Choose boring technology, when possible [2].
The innovation in this context is nuking the profits of Visa and Mastercard (their margins are ~45-50% [3] [4] [5]), replacing them with central bank instant payment systems run at cost. The reduction in their revenue is money back in the pockets of everyone paying unnecessarily to move value around. I highly recommend the book "The Innovator's Dilemma" on this topic [6].
Pix is really good but I don't think it beats Solana or Ethereum L2s.
Most recent indicator of peak Pix transaction volumes I could find [1] was 227M/day (=2700 TPS). You can see yourself that Solana does 130-140M/day consistently. Pix fees you quote are still triple Solana's.
Not to mention there is the entire decentralization aspect, which means the government does not control your money as with other blockchains.
Common misconception - it's the merchant who pays for fraud and the 3% is pure bank profit. If there's a fraud transaction, the merchant has to pay the whole amount back and ends up negative the transaction fee and the chargeback fee. The banks just want you to think they're earning the 3% but actually it's pure profit.
Fraud can be managed at instant payment rails, you don't need credit card rails to manage it; fraud must be managed on any rails utilized, so it is somewhat agnostic. If you as a consumer want credit card chargeback protection insurance, push the fee onto the consumer with a surcharge to cover the cost. I believe the evidence is robust credit card rails are unnecessary in today's world, plain and simple. They are a bloated legacy holding on for relevance (and their grossly excessive margins) imho.
Well, obviously it’s cherry-picked. It’s an example of something that challenges my intuition. Most things align with my intuition because I’m in my late 30s and have seen enough of the world to have a fairly good idea of the rough numbers. Here’s another one: the London Underground is older than the telephone.
There’s a light board game called Timeline where you have stuff like this and there are so many surprises. Temporal stuff is hard to reason about and the game catches that. But with large numbers one loses intuition easily: NYC’s subway vs. all domestic and international US air travel is closer in total passengers than one would think. The median American did not fly last year.
Stuff like this. It’s just Gladwell-fodder but numerically fun.
I misinterpreted your intent here, and that’s on me. Thank you for explaining, you clearly picked the sample as a comparison of fact, not as narrative. Apologies
Okay, there were two things that bothered me with these KVM switches: the power adapters are massive so there's too many cables, and the cables don't go always in the same side of the thing. Your post covers both and I'm thrilled. The final thing I recognize is a bit of a nice to have but the only thing that I want to rack that doesn't have a BMC is my Mac Mini which I've hesitated to put in the Sonnet RackMac and run because I don't know how to KVM power it on/off. My cabinet is an hour away from me and the Mac Mini runs the family AI agent so I need it to be available all the time. So far, it hasn't ever needed any attention (it comes back on after power outages at home) but I'd prefer to be able to turn it on/off remotely ideally.
Do you know which one of these works well with that?
Could you get a kvm connected to a networked PDU with per-outlet control? Then a power cycle on the plug for the mac would accomplish the same thing. Or just use the network port on the PDU directly w/o kvm.
The annoying thing with Macs is they don't have the ability to 'Power on after clean shutdown and power cycle'. They can power on after a power fail, but that's not the same thing.
I want to be able to have power toggle on my Mac remotely, but without soldering in a jumper on the power button, AFAIK there's no way to do it :(
They mentioned Gil’s Fingerbot. It’s literally a remote controlled “finger” that can be commanded to press your power button. Obviously, if your MacBook goes with you everyday rather than living on a rack, this isn’t a practical solution.
You're right. I just need to upgrade my PDU. But as you can imagine, I'm hesitating because I don't want to power down the rest of the hardware either.
That's a logical thing for governments to do. Governments are under pressure on different axes than the companies they contract to do things. Governments switching contracts won't ever make the news, but it's much harder for them to fire people in order to take advantage of increasing efficiencies. Likewise, they cannot short-term employ people easily without this structure.
I think there's a reasonable argument to be made that if the civil service doesn't have a decent amount of technically proficient people on staff, that they can't know what's possible - You just end up with a hollowed-out political class that has no idea what they're out-sourcing, and can't learn lessons post-project.
Am I the only one who wants a datacenter in his backyard? I actually went down a little over a year ago to get a cabinet down at Hosting.com’s old location round the corner only to find that they’ve been gone from there (and the DC business) for a few years now and the new owners have kept it fallow. I have to drive down to Fremont for a similar price point now. I would gladly have paid 30% more to just go down the street in SF’s SOMA. Perhaps I should have considered Digital Realty’s facility down on Paul Ave but they’re harder to get a small system up on.
It does mean I try to make sure I get it right when I set up. But it also means that if I goofed some cable management then that’s it because I’m not going back to fix it till next time.
Something that would be cool for the future would be if luxury apartment buildings offered their own cabinets for the use of residents. Haha, a man can dream.
It would be worth separating out the “traditional” data centers (which offer things like colocation, and mostly run pretty standard CPU-bound or network-bound workloads) from “AI” data centers (which have racks and racks of extremely dense GPUs or accelerators). It’s really the latter that people should be concerned about due to their much larger scale, higher power draw, and propensity to use dirty, on-site power generation.
I do have GPUs running there and I'd be running them denser if I'd already paid for the power. To be honest, there's no room on 3rd Street to put turbines next to the DC there so if they wanted to put in AI they'd have to upgrade the power delivery. I don't mind that so much. Besides, most DC operators would rather pay for power than do on-site generation. That's just an artifact of what we disincentivize. Water always finds the lowest point and so on.
> higher power draw, and propensity to use dirty, on-site power generation.
It speaks volumes about the degree to which we've regulated and NIMBY'd and everything else'd utility build out that on site generation in any case other than a blackout so pencils out anywhere in the US save perhaps remote regions of Alaska
I’d love more datacenters so I can colo my pet projects and startup like I was doing in the early 2000s
The point where we decided we would put all infrastructure in N. Virginia, stop owning hardware and rent it from a corporation charging 10x markup was right about when the Internet started going downhill.
I live in rural Ohio and there is like 6? Colo places within an hour’s drive.
When I lived outside of Orlando there was like a dozen in Orlando alone.
If you look up Colo options in your area, what is lacking? These new datacenters are high density AI hypercalers. They are not traditional Colo DC’s. It’s more like a whole new AWS AZ is getting slapped down. More of the same cloud computing you’re complaining about.
If anything, existing colos are going to be hurt by what's going on right now, as they're getting all of the political backlash from the AI hyperscaler bullshit going on.
Realistically, I'm not going to watch a video by a fellow whose entire content reel is big yellow and red capital letters saying "capitalism sucks" imposed on a horrified face. I find that these people have poor epistemic discipline. Besides, the chap has never been inside a datacenter, and not only is that a pretty big difference from me but all the significant events of my life have happened within one kilometre of one here in SF.
Datacenters are extremely loud, you definitely don't want one in your approximate backyard. Ever considered fan noise while shopping for laptops? If so, then you don't want to live within a mile of a datacenter.
> Ever considered fan noise while shopping for laptops? If so, then you don't want to live within a mile of a datacenter.
Or we could regulate that data centers be sound proof.
These are things we can solve. They just cost a little money so businesses will fight tooth and nail against it. But hey look we also used to dump slaughterhouse refuse and factory runoff straight into the river in the middle of cities. We don’t do that anymore because at some point it became illegal.
Easy peasy. Just make the things you don’t want businesses to do illegal and they’ll stop doing them.
We could even regulate that all data centers have a large public park and green space on its roof! Or be covered in solar panels to make its own power. Or a huge parking lot. Whatever we need or wish for, the billion+ dollar investment into the data center can provide.
I know others also do this - though often they are kind enough to auto-fold.
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