"The Nordic states are letting go of values and infrastructure resources that are dear to the welfare state – from shared access to public resources to democratic values and universal access to communication and electricity – while intensifying digitalization and dependencies on Silicon Valley companies."
The public values of openness, affordability of connection and universal access to infrastructure are under threat by Big Tech.
In Skåne, Microsoft booked so much electricity that the local Swedish bread company Pågen could no longer build a bread baking factory in the area and had to expand elsewhere.
@gerrymcgovern Québec, Who always compared itself with the Nordic countries, is doing the same with it's electricity. The government and it's puppets at the public utility, Hydro-Quebec, are giving away huge portions of the grid to corporations while subsidizing rebates on their rate. They are planning a 50% increase of production over the next 12 years. We don't have the rivers to do so nor the qualified labor.
Big jobs announcement from Google in Norway. Its new data center in Skien will deliver a whopping 100 jobs. And for those amazing 100 jobs, all Google is asking for is 5% of the total electricity Norway consumes. “What an amazing deal,” a local politician was quoted as saying. “Even if it will mean higher electricity prices for local people, we are so proud to have Google come to little old Skien.”
@gerrymcgovern If there was any sense at all in this, they should pay a substantial climate premium tax on that energy, to the point where they just give up. That's how you deal with these businesses.
@gerrymcgovern
I politely disagree, the tax should be on the problem ~ the energy usage. If we, for example, place tax on data in transfer, you will only see the operator burn more energy on datacompression, before data is transferred. @veronica
@MrManor Since most data is already highly compressed images or video, I doubt that. But my proposal was indeed for an additional tax on the energy itself. Either way, I think we agree that the point is to force a reduction in the waste.
@MrManor
That's an interesting point. It's complicated. But there has to be some way that my teacher thinks twice about creating a half MB file for 20 words. (And, of course, all of us think twice and hard.) @veronica
Good exchange here! I am with all of you that it comes down to high taxes to invalidate their business model. Because, as Gerry writes, the average users don’t “think twice about …” — most of them don’t even know.
Only distantly related, I wrote an e-mail today telling a customer I would not use Google Meet because of their spying and selling data etc., and they wrote back, surprised, “good to know about Google.” I mean, in what universe didn’t people hear about the bad sides of Google? Well, apparently this one… Which underlines the users-don’t-know point.
@wernerprise
I tell people: "Digital is physical. That phone in your hand. It's physical. It's made up of materials."
They go: "What? Physical. How do you mean?"
How can we save the environment when we can't even feel our environment anymore? We must get back in touch with the physical, because if we don't, the physical will get back in touch with us in a very painful way.
@gerrymcgovern The philosophical nature of information aside, words on paper, magnetised surfaces on a hard drive, or the potential energy of electrons trapped in an SSD, all of them require physical material to store.
New technology producing higher data densities seems to just result in more data, not less material and energy spent. Humans are data hoarders by nature. It's a hard habit to break.
Agreed. Whenever a new chip generation is marketed, it’s about “faster, more, more reliable,” only just weeks later, new program version are developed that need more speed and storage space.
I love that in the Linux world, there’s OSs specifically designed for old computers. One way to break this vicious circle—but only a half percent of computer users even know that Linux exists…
@gerrymcgovern and the jobs will end up being temporary during construction and after that end up only being a few janitors with technical staff being flown in when needed.
@FerdiMagellan
It's in Norway, that story, but it's probably happening in Denmark too. Politicians all over the world have fallen for Big Tech propaganda. They are so happy going to meetings with Google. For a local politician that's a big thing to boast about. Big Tech is making utter fools out of our politicians and civil servants.
@gerrymcgovern A crazy deal and only Google benefits. A loud NO and force them to take care of their own energy for this datacenter. 100 jobs, by the way, seems to be a ly, maybe while building but defenitely no 100 jobs are needed to run a datacenter. And check the finances of this Norwegian politician, maybe he is bribed.
@TuutW@gerrymcgovern I’ve worked in data centres (installing environmental monitoring). They are mostly vast rows of equipment cabinets with almost nobody around.
@DigitalTaoist They will be. The whole town of Skien will be pestered by the sound from those wind turbines in eternity. But they can't provide all Google needs, far from it @gerrymcgovern
These descriptions are actually louder than the turbines I have been under, which were eerily quiet. However, they were low speed, I don't know what sort of turbines these were. Faster turbines are louder, which is one reason the large ones are favored.
Note from the scale that traffic noise is 1000 times louder.
When politicians in the Nordics welcomed Big Tech, they hoped that Googles, Microsofts, Amazons would bring jobs, wealth and brand value to struggling municipalities. Instead, the Nordics are turning into a Big Cheap processing place for the global digital economies. If China remains the place of cheap labor for Silicon Valley innovations, the Nordic countries are today the source of cheap land and cheap renewable electricity Silicon Valley data processing and AI.
They are like locusts, moving from one profitable region to the next, leaving barren land and a desert behind … that is what unconditional capitalism is like.
It does not act in the interest of people but in that of more profit only.
@xs4me2@gerrymcgovern It is everywhere. I am seeing that directly (and trying to make a new way) here where I live. In this case, with rural Nepali farmers (see my feed for more detail). It is an unsustainable method, but they don't care. Like the borg, they believe they can simply look for a new world when this one dries up.
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