and also the necessity of surplus and accidental (necessary) waste:
you need spare parts, and some machines are critical… think of data centres: they often have many spare hard drives on hand to deal with failure, which means that there are more than 100% of the required drives in use… some of the workloads running in that data centre service very important workloads - for example because it’s fresh in everyone’s mind - handing SNAP payments… so what, you redistribute those drives so that we are using all that we have? no we certainly don’t… we eat the inefficiency in the case of redundancy (same argument could apply many more times over when you also think about things like mirrored drives, backups, etc: all of that is under-utilised capacity and “waste”)
the same is true for supermarkets: food that is perishable can’t just be allocated where it’s needed. it exists in a place for a period of time, and you either run out a lot or you have some amount of spoilage… there’s a very hard to hit middle ground with overlapping sell by dates, and overall these days were incredibly good at hitting that already!
… and that’s not to mention the stock on the shelves which is the same thing as spare disk drives!
i guess that’s all distribution on the planet
we could certainly do better, but it’s so much more complex than the fact that these things exist so it must be possible to utilise them 100% efficiently
I would argue we don’t actually need data centers. At least the vast majority of them only exist to maintain bullshit nobody needs and most people don’t even want.
Food can be canned, and remain nutritious and safe for much longer than fresh fruits and vegetables can be.
The argument isn’t that it would be easy, it’s that were the will there to do so, it is possible.
data centres were kinda just a stand in for a concept: spare parts and redundancy are necessary… you need spare parts for pretty much any machine that can’t be offline for longer than it takes to get replacements parts. that’s as true for farm equipment and hospitals as it is for tech
and you have to have extras to meet peak demand: restaurants have extra pans, crockery and cutlery to cover a full house and then some extra for example
but data centres do also provide a lot of good:
connected software has made supply chains much more efficient which means less food waste, supporting the original premise
websites support not for profits immensely to reach people and automate self service… eg homeless people are actually reasonably likely to have access to a smart phone and free wifi, so it gives them a platform to access resources very efficiently
provisioning of disaster relief as well as early warning systems are now heavily reliant on servers in data centres
even modern agriculture has a lot of automation involved which relies on a lot of connected servers and databases running in data centres
a huge amount of that “for 30% of the work we currently do” is certainly reliant on data centres
and as much as they do take a lot of energy, they’re actually very efficient too: compared to a similar amount of processing power running on individual computers (if we somehow managed to replace all servers with peer to peer software) they likely use a lot less energy because energy use is actually a huge factor in server design, and chips get more energy efficient per FLOPS (or ghz) the larger they get
The argument isn’t that it would be easy, it’s that were the will there to do so, it is possible.
and my argument isn’t that it’s impossible, it’s that waste is both inherent and necessary. we try and reduce it, but some of that waste isn’t just dumb shit like throwing away product to keep value high: some waste and redundancy are his inherent to feeding and providing for a planet of 8bn people
heck i’ll bet you have at least 10x as many toilet rolls in your house than are on holders (in use) right now… and you wouldn’t likely buy them 1 at a time as you use them… that’s redundancy too: more of these exist in the world than are currently needed
and that the “30% of the hours” figure is similar: some jobs have busywork that could be cut down on, but sometimes busywork waste is also necessary because staffing also needs to be redundant, or over-provisioned to meet peak demand
yeah i tend to think today that food waste is actually a good thing because it creates buffers and prepares us for unexpected food shortages (such as during a volcano eruption)
and also the necessity of surplus and accidental (necessary) waste:
you need spare parts, and some machines are critical… think of data centres: they often have many spare hard drives on hand to deal with failure, which means that there are more than 100% of the required drives in use… some of the workloads running in that data centre service very important workloads - for example because it’s fresh in everyone’s mind - handing SNAP payments… so what, you redistribute those drives so that we are using all that we have? no we certainly don’t… we eat the inefficiency in the case of redundancy (same argument could apply many more times over when you also think about things like mirrored drives, backups, etc: all of that is under-utilised capacity and “waste”)
the same is true for supermarkets: food that is perishable can’t just be allocated where it’s needed. it exists in a place for a period of time, and you either run out a lot or you have some amount of spoilage… there’s a very hard to hit middle ground with overlapping sell by dates, and overall these days were incredibly good at hitting that already!
… and that’s not to mention the stock on the shelves which is the same thing as spare disk drives!
i guess that’s all distribution on the planet
we could certainly do better, but it’s so much more complex than the fact that these things exist so it must be possible to utilise them 100% efficiently
so i guess we’d need 40%, maybe even 50% of the current global resources? what’s the point even
I would argue we don’t actually need data centers. At least the vast majority of them only exist to maintain bullshit nobody needs and most people don’t even want.
Food can be canned, and remain nutritious and safe for much longer than fresh fruits and vegetables can be.
The argument isn’t that it would be easy, it’s that were the will there to do so, it is possible.
data centres were kinda just a stand in for a concept: spare parts and redundancy are necessary… you need spare parts for pretty much any machine that can’t be offline for longer than it takes to get replacements parts. that’s as true for farm equipment and hospitals as it is for tech
and you have to have extras to meet peak demand: restaurants have extra pans, crockery and cutlery to cover a full house and then some extra for example
but data centres do also provide a lot of good:
connected software has made supply chains much more efficient which means less food waste, supporting the original premise
websites support not for profits immensely to reach people and automate self service… eg homeless people are actually reasonably likely to have access to a smart phone and free wifi, so it gives them a platform to access resources very efficiently
provisioning of disaster relief as well as early warning systems are now heavily reliant on servers in data centres
even modern agriculture has a lot of automation involved which relies on a lot of connected servers and databases running in data centres
a huge amount of that “for 30% of the work we currently do” is certainly reliant on data centres
and as much as they do take a lot of energy, they’re actually very efficient too: compared to a similar amount of processing power running on individual computers (if we somehow managed to replace all servers with peer to peer software) they likely use a lot less energy because energy use is actually a huge factor in server design, and chips get more energy efficient per FLOPS (or ghz) the larger they get
and my argument isn’t that it’s impossible, it’s that waste is both inherent and necessary. we try and reduce it, but some of that waste isn’t just dumb shit like throwing away product to keep value high: some waste and redundancy are his inherent to feeding and providing for a planet of 8bn people
heck i’ll bet you have at least 10x as many toilet rolls in your house than are on holders (in use) right now… and you wouldn’t likely buy them 1 at a time as you use them… that’s redundancy too: more of these exist in the world than are currently needed
and that the “30% of the hours” figure is similar: some jobs have busywork that could be cut down on, but sometimes busywork waste is also necessary because staffing also needs to be redundant, or over-provisioned to meet peak demand
yeah i tend to think today that food waste is actually a good thing because it creates buffers and prepares us for unexpected food shortages (such as during a volcano eruption)