Eating meat fills my belly. Setting my AC to 68 keeps me cool. A data center costs my community money, damages the environment directly and indirectly, and further enriches a few already rich people.
The estimates I've seen place the water consumption of water at such a low level that a whole month subscription consumes roughly as much water as 1-120 grams* of beef.
> Setting my AC to 68 keeps me cool.
What, is 70 not good enough?
Air con, and basically all things connected to the power grid, also "costs [your] community money, damages the environment directly and indirectly, and further enriches a few already rich people."
* yes, one to one hundred and twenty, there's that much uncertainty in the estimates for the AI.
When Amazon gets to run an offgrid power plant for a new data centre that's permitted to release more co2 than any other single power plant in the US[1], you'll pardon me for wondering what the rush is and why it becomes literally everyone else's problem as a result.
Build the data centre, sure, but if it takes you five years to build out the grid and sufficient generating capacity in a non stupid way in order to do that, sorry, but that's by far my preferred route to get there.
Rush may be FOMO. Even as one who likes using AI, I think the economics is an investment bubble and mostly avoid it.
I can't read your link, paywall, but my question regarding Musk's infamous polluting DC, I wonder why it had to be built near so many people. It's not like there's going to be a need for a huge pool of workers to commute to it.
> I wonder why it had to be built near so many people
I can't read the link either, but at a glance, the first one wasn't. It's in clearly industrial land a long way from any houses, with its closest neighbors as far as I can tell being a steel mill, a few existing power plants, and a wastewater plant.
The second one is practically right in the middle of a bunch of neighborhoods, and for that, yeah, I want to know as well. I'm guessing the land was cheap, industrial-zoned, and near a substation?
(Not to excuse what Musk is doing in either case - it's fucked and has wide ranging effects. But I think it's important to clarify the first because I've seen a repeated trend of people acting like a new DC is going to be built in the middle of a peaceful picket-fence neighborhood, and then you look it up, and it's actually being built on top of a former steel mill a mile away from the nearest house. It gets annoying.)
Because they aren't really people unless they could afford a DC of their own. When you view half the world or more as NPC then it becomes trivially easy to ignore the needs of others.
I want to understand how his mind works. Not sure what value this is, now I think about it: I'm unlikely to time a bet against him well enough to win it.
So, for this point, I don't care that the words and actions he emits have no apparent rational long-term coherency, but I do care about the coherency of the system behind them which generates them.
Think of it like me wanting to learn how an LLM works so I don't get surprised by it doing more than a Markov chain.
It can be done even in rich countries, but the point is I think the opposite of your implication: I am claiming that it is hard to avoid causing costs to one's community (and that almost everything causes more impact than one might expect), I am not claiming to have achieved such avoidance.
JTFC why are you arguing minutiae? The analogies aren't the argument.
AC and meat are bad for the environment but they deliver personal benefit. Having a DC in your community has no appreciable personal benefit, only negatives. That's it.
> JTFC why are you arguing minutiae? The analogies aren't the argument.
I'm replying to someone who themselves argued the analogies.
> Having a DC in your community has no appreciable personal benefit, only negatives.
To the extent that statement is true, it applies equally to most primary and secondary economic activity.
Having a farm in your community has no appreciable personal benefit: for scale, the UK famously gets a lot of their sheep meat from New Zealand, as far away as it is physically possible to be.
An abattoir similarly has no substantial local benefit, but worse has much detriment owing to the psychological damage it does to the workers, leading to higher rates of arrest for violent criminal offences: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/108602660933816...
Unless it's at the scale where it becomes a company town, having a factory, a warehouse, etc. these things are all heavily automated or mechanised and employ only a few of the locals as a percentage of the population. Putting anything that isn't service-sector in your community (i.e. schools, hospitals, shops, restaurants, hairdressers, etc.) is going to be of "no appreciable personal benefit" when considered in isolation.
Almost all primary (farming, fishing, mining) and secondary (manufacturing) comes with negatives (pollution, higher wear on the roads and utilities).
Does that water usage take into account all the water that went into training the models, including the electricity it took run the data centers the GPUs are housed in?
> These bad faith "but you exist and do unrelated things" fallacies are a.) bad faith b.) make people have ai people more.
> Bringing uo AC while you defend datacenters making global warming worst is just a cherry on top.of it. Just underlines anti-human fck you all ideology of it all.
You are badly breaking the HN guidelines in a dozen different ways. You should refamiliarize yourself with them:
> Bringing uo AC while you defend datacenters making global warming worst is just a cherry on top.of it. Just underlines anti-human fck you all ideology of it all.
This one is factual on both counts. All you need is to read what CEOs we talk about write and listen to what they say.
> These bad faith "but you exist and do unrelated things" fallacies are a.) bad faith b.) make people have ai people more.
This one was entirely correct assessment of the situation and proper response. It was a fallacy. It used the "but you exist and do unrelated things" argument. And yes, it makes people hate ai culture more.
> This one is factual on both counts. All you need is to read what CEOs we talk about write and listen to what they say.
What they write and say is all over the place. Some of it (IMO, everything in the last few years by Musk and Zuckerberg) is obviously nonsense.
Altman, much as people like to hate him, is presenting himself as wanting governments to figure out the rules by which this should all be restrained. Amodei put his money where his mouth is on attempted morality, and got burned by the Trump administration for his efforts.
> This one was entirely correct assessment of the situation and proper response. It was a fallacy. It used the "but you exist and do unrelated things" argument. And yes, it makes people hate ai culture more.
It's fine to care about the stated negative consequence. I sure do.
You a software developer? If so, where do you put your efforts on optimising code, the bit with 5% of the problem, or the bit with 95%?
Likewise: If you care at all about the stated negative consequence, you do not stick your fingers in your ears and moan about the people telling you the origin of 95% of those negative consequence, just because everyone's favourite target of hate this year is 5% of the total problem.
Meat in particular is way, *way* worse than most people think it is. I presume this is due a mixture of "but I like the taste" and PETA having about the same level of political nous as Liz Truss.
For most of the environmental issues under discussion, the total impact of meat production by itself has a *much* greater impact on both local and global environment than even what happens if all the currently planned data centres get built, though of course "how much" varies by both specific location and specific measure. Greenhouse gasses? Meat is 20x worse; Electricity? Meat's worse by a factor of 2; Fresh water? Meat's worse by 4000x in aggregate, with specific local stresses going both ways, wars have even started over fresh water supplies for agriculture; Biodiversity, eutrophication, deforestation, for these things DCs are obviously negligible, not so for meat; Mining/material extraction is hard to compare, given how much mineral fertiliser we go through, but the extraction of mined fertiliser has basically killed off some ecosystems; Local air pollution? Specifics matter, though planet-wide meat's still worse.
And then there's all the other things people do, and demand the right to do.
We (humanity worldwide) need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 99.9%.
Of the two, use of air con in the US is a bigger source than current data centres, and in the middle of the range of extimates for how many new data centres will actually get built over the next few years.
It would of course be much better if both AC and DC (in both senses) were powered by renewables, but y'all elected someone who thinks they're a woke Chinese scam or something, possibly because one got built near a golf course in one of his foreign properties, possibly as a favour to the people who gave him that new aircraft for his "library".
It is based on the mean lifetime of a CO2 pulse being order-of a thousand years, which is itself approximation of what IPCC says; actual decay rate behavious is not even as simple as exponential decay.
At 1000 years exactly, steady-state requires 99.9% reduction in the long term.
Good news is that in the short term, the higher partial pressure in the air means it leaves faster at first, so things stop getting worse much sooner than that.
> It is based on the mean lifetime of a CO2 pulse being order-of a thousand years, which is itself approximation of what IPCC says; actual decay rate behavious is not even as simple as exponential decay.
> At 1000 years exactly, steady-state requires 99.9% reduction in the long term.
So, that's ignoring carbon capture by means natural or artificial, and therefore is a totally irrelevant number, both to this conversation, and to most others.
> So, that's ignoring carbon capture by means natural or artificial, and therefore is a totally irrelevant number, both to this conversation, and to most others.
No, it inherently incorporates all natural processes that capture carbon.
Artificial, sure, if you want to point at them I believe current effots might reduce the required reductions from 99.9% to 99.8%. However, I wrote "emissions", and the overwhelming majority of CCUS systems are reditecting what would otherwise be emissions directly to capture, i.e. what I wrote would include that as reducing "emissions".
> No, it inherently incorporates all natural processes that capture carbon.
It literally cannot, because it's not parameterized on the amount of additional plants being planted.
> Artificial, sure, if you want to point at them I believe current effots might reduce the required reductions from 99.9% to 99.8%.
Goalpost moving (i.e. fixing a particular value in hypothetical future assumptions that was not fixed or agreed-upon previously in order to support an otherwise-false point), which solidly sets the original claim as false.
> However, I wrote "emissions", and the overwhelming majority of CCUS systems are reditecting what would otherwise be emissions directly to capture, i.e. what I wrote would include that as reducing "emissions".
Technically compatible with your statement but not how the vast majority of individuals would interpret it as you originally wrote it.
To be clear: I'm not arguing that we don't need to substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions or that carbon capture is necessary. I'm arguing that last point, that "we need to reduce emissions by 99.9%" is extremely misleading and much more harmful than hurtful for those ends.
> It literally cannot, because it's not parameterized on the amount of additional plants being planted.
Primary production of the planet, i.e. total carbon fixation, is broadly not influenced in this manner.
The things which do influence it, are included in the function.
> Goalpost moving (i.e. fixing a particular value in hypothetical future assumptions that was not fixed or agreed-upon previously in order to support an otherwise-false point), which solidly sets the original claim as false.
My point is that it is tiny in scale even at best.
Furthermore, I claim it is unlikely to get meaningfully better than it already is, given the economics at present appear to be more "how do we game government objectives to get subsidies" rather than directly performing useful work that does not require subsidy. Perhaps I am too cynical, but typically if there's a good economic reason for doing something anyway, it's not in a list of big showy projects that might happen at some unspecified time in the future, it gets implemented by people who are happy to never get noticed.
> Technically compatible with your statement but not how the vast majority of individuals would interpret it as you originally wrote it.
Can you prove that?
> To be clear: I'm not arguing that we don't need to substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions or that carbon capture is necessary. I'm arguing that last point, that "we need to reduce emissions by 99.9%" is extremely misleading and much more harmful than hurtful for those ends.
I do not accept your argument.
Especially "much more harmful than [presumably auto-corrupt and you meant helpful]".
*Net* emissions must go down approximately that scale. The common phrasing is "net zero" rather than "net 0.1%". However, your assertion that me missing the word "net" from "We (humanity worldwide) need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 99.9%" seems pedantic rather than helpful.
> Primary production of the planet, i.e. total carbon fixation, is broadly not influenced in this manner.
Plants account for roughly half of global carbon fixation. "Broadly not influenced" is straight-up false. Your follow-on arguments are consequently false as a result.
> My point is that it is tiny in scale even at best.
You are posting on a website that is hosted in a data center right now. You use data centers at your job to send email, share documents, run software. When you go home and watch netflix, that video is streamed to you from a data center. All of the internet, your phone, and modern digital entertainment and life is run through data centers. My guess is that you don't seriously want to turn all of that off because 'reasons'.
Not at all. The post being responded to completely failed to acknowledge any value brought by data centers to the general populous. That's disingenuous. To force the point: run me through the scenario where we turn off all the data centers. Consider how much more water we will have, how much less expensive electricity will be, and what other problems might arise.
But that value is subjective. If my tap water is brown as a result of a DC, I may not agree with your positives. If my neighborhood is humming all night because of a DC, again, I might not have the ability to see what you see as positive.
So, my take is that maybe the pro-DC side can do better at seeing multiple perspectives instead of acting like anything negatively said about DCs is a psychosis.
>If my tap water is brown as a result of a DC, I may not agree with your positives. If my neighborhood is humming all night because of a DC
Those things are both a result of a failure of government, not the existence of data centres. If there are externalised costs the company wants to put on people then your government should extract them from the company as a condition of permission.
Data centres are factories that turn electricity into heat and money. They're basically the nicest factories possible. There is no fundamental reason they need to harm people, any issues data centres cause should be easy to address as a fraction of the already massive sums involved.
So if I build a heavily protested foundry that spews carcinogenic lead smoke into a residential neighborhood, it’s not my fault and the operation of my foundry is unimpeachable. It’s the government’s fault for not stopping me from doing it. Since the people affected are responsible for compelling government to limit business, businesses are not responsible for anything. Privatize the gains, then socialize the losses, then blame the government for not stepping in, and ignore the company actively undermining the public’s leverage in the process. Ok, got it. That makes complete sense. It’s decidedly not nihilistic justification for doing obviously unethical things in pursuit of profit.
The third paragraph of my comment already addressed this. A data centre is not a foundry.
In a metal foundry some of the physical externality is intrinsic to doing the process. It's a continuous industrial chemical operation emitting smoke, metal fumes, VOCs, dust, sound etc. You can capture 99% of pollution, but you're still melting, casting, shaking out and finishing tonnes of hot metal and sand. Complete physical isolation is expensive and imperfect.
With data centres, most local externalities are engineering choices. With enough money and sensible siting, you could plausibly build one whose effect on neighbouring residents is extremely close to nil. The biggest remaining externalities occur upstream in the electricity/water/grid system - and those are unusually amenable to being charged directly to the operator.
If a local data centre is impacting you negatively it's a failure of your government because it didn't need to be that way. It's not an intrinsic part of data centre operation. They turn electricity into heat and money, a comparatively simple factory to have completely deal with its own externalities.
People aren’t complaining about the idea of data centers, abstractly. They’re complaining about the actual way they’re being built. To ignore the reality of what living next to GPU data centers is like, and the amount of resources they actually demonstrably use, and instead paint this as a theoretical argument is completely disingenuous.
One tylenol is good at reducing my fever. 20 tylenol will likely damage my liver and might even kill me.
I'm not saying tylenol is bad. I'm not saying it's good. I'm just pointing out that your position is equivalent to opposing a person saying "lets no shove 20 tylenol down someone's throat" with the argument "but one has reduced the fever".
Unlikely. I'm not sure where HN is hosted, but I think it's a bare metal server in a colo, not a data center.
The childish behavior is disagreeing with how datacenters are being deployed and reducing that to "more is bad", and then stretching the position to "data centers bad". I'm begging the collective here to consider what they are really asking for, because our society, from the government down, is built on the cloud. Finding a healthy way to provide compute is important, and "data center bad" doesn't get us there. We need the solar/wind equivalent for hosting. The problem is data centers have efficiencies at scale that we can't achieve with more distributed solutions, but I'm not a specialist in that particular analysis.
How much if that is true and how much of it is carefully constructed propaganda? Implanted and reinforced beliefs to make workers hustle to ensure the server fields produce enough crop this quarter.
Most people on the planet are not tech people. Their world is not built on cloud at all but ensuring there is sufficient food and stuff to satisfy their biological needs.
It's asocial terminally online tech workers who think the cloud is akin to strong and weak nuclear forces and gravity; so essential they are fundamental forces of nature themselves
Hopefully you can get the obvious bias of your perspective; species of 8 billion is not propped up by a few million script kiddies
I think you're vastly under-estimating the extent to which power grids, water systems, and global supply chains and manufacturing rely heavily on datacenters.
The Trump administration pulled a bunch of ocean sensors, whose data was aggregated in the cloud, in an attempt to save money. Except, those sensors were not only providing research data on changes in ocean currents, but helping fisheries make predictions about yield. The administration backtracked because of this.
There is a similar story with weather forecasting, and farmers being able to manage their crops.
Let's not even get started on the economic impact worldwide of datacenters were not available to process stock and bond trades.
New technologies seem optional, but once society passes some tipping point in their adoption, they no longer are. AI isn't there yet, but cloud computing is.
I think I've given you far more than you're due in this conversation, so I'll stop here.
In short, I think you're being dismissive, particularly when you try to frame my position as "society is propped up by script kiddies". Seems like a deeply inaccurate way of summarizing my points.
> I think you're vastly under-estimating the extent to which power grids, water systems, and global supply chains and manufacturing rely heavily on datacenters.
These things were with us and worked better before datacenters even existed. Datacenters are a mere convenience which is now used to force monopolization of compute while subjecting society to extremely risky, but unnecessary dependencies and centralization.
You say we're already there? A good reason to start undoing it ASAP.
That's not the proposal, and is utter fantasy. I'm engaging a hypothetical here -- none of what's being discussed is even close to reality, in the sense that it won't be implemented. There will be new datacenters, some communities will successfully resist, but many won't.
What you propose is similar to proposing that we'll solve climate change by moving back to horse-and-buggy. Theoretically possible, practically impossible.
> The childish behavior is disagreeing with how datacenters are being deployed and reducing that to "more is bad"
Why is that childish? Bubble data-center economics is bad, we have the history to prove it, this isn't the first bubble. Do you have real arguments against it besides calling it "childish" which is itself childish?
> I'm begging the collective here to consider what they are really asking for, because our society, from the government down, is built on the cloud.
You're begging "the collective" to stop worrying and learn to love the bubble... or else? OK, or else what? If everything is already "built on the cloud" there's already enough cloud to go around, built at a normal pace, without bubbles and without incurring huge debts, deficits, circular financing and what not. See, the how can be done better.
> Finding a healthy way to provide compute is important, and "data center bad" doesn't get us there.
That's a strawman, which you sneaked in here: 'reducing that to "more is bad" and then ... to "data centers bad"'
The issue is, and always has been - the bubble way of doing it as bad - slow down and do it properly. Either way the public isn't going to get the benefits of the build-out, at least try to reduce the negative externalities to an acceptable level.
But do you really think we have more datacenters now, or even an equal number, to what we'll have in the future?
It's like power consumption: it's going to scale, so we need to control how it scales. I don't know where the conversation goes when folks just talk about how useless it is and how compute is bad.
Take two steps back: do you really think we're at peak compute? If not, shouldn't we focus on how to scale in a sustainable way? The rhetoric doesn't foster that inquiry. That's my issue here.
Every single critique has said "slow down to do it right". That's similar to the DEI fallback of "Do the work". It's not that the goal is wrong, it's that it takes no effort to demand something vague like that, because it requires no thought. What forwards the discussion when implementation matters is the specifics: what do we want folks to do differently. If gas turbines in data centers are causing noise pollution that affects quality-of-life (which is absolutely appears they do - it's really bad), that's not a call to ban the idea, but rather the implementation. I see that distinction too often being dismissed in these discussions.
> It's like power consumption: it's going to scale, so we need to control how it scales.
I don't think your premise is obvious at all. Developed countries have stagnant or shrinking populations, and there is a general trend toward greater power efficiency over time. So why should total power consumption be expected to keep increasing?
Extremely resource-hungry GPU data centers have a much deeper impact on the surrounding area. The only data centers power hungry enough to install local turbines for power before the LLM craze were GPU-based crypto miners, and living next to one of those also sucks pretty hard. One person I saw interviewed described the sound of the gas turbines like having a clogged shop vac in your house 24/7. If you look into it even briefly, you’ll see that you can’t honestly equate their impact to standard CPU server farms.
Racked servers pre-GPU used about 1kW each at high load. 5-10kW for a rack (20 to 40 servers) was common, much more than this would be a special thing.
AI use has driven this to 20, 50, 100kW per rack or more. Supposedly 1000kW for the hyperscalers.
Extrapolate to the whole building and you have a lot of waste heat that has to go somewhere.
Instead of being similar to light industry, the hyperscale AI datacentre is using as much energy as a large steelworks.
What a weird line to draw. Data centres do a lot more than what you report. E.g. they might host your electronic health records. They might host census data, or weather data, or your kid's school learning management system.
In my experience, there's not a ton of overlap between people who say this and people who use AI for everything they do... but most people who say this do use social media, cloud storage, on-demand video streaming, and plenty of other things that rely on data centers :)
Not for nothing that YouTube alone is responsible for a double-digit amount of all internet traffic.
Consider that there may be large populations doing both, but the overlap might be less than the internet jockey concludes via finger-in-the-wind hypocrisy check.
The interesting thing is: they don't. Most people not on HN could give two shits about an AI generated overview on Google search, in fact if you asked most people of age they'd rather have a Google Search that worked vs what we have now.
Just because the bubble here uses AI doesn't mean it's even remotely valuable for the 80%. But they've done a great job convincing a specific group of people this.
No one was objecting when pornhub was building out data centers. Anything they like to consume, no matter how frivolous, is accepted as morally better on a metaphysical level.
> further enriches a few already rich people.
Meat eaters damaging the Earth is okay because it's "equal"? 300 million people deciding they're entitled to consume anything they want in ever-increasing quantities is a problem because... there's 300 million of them!
Listen, I am no meat advocate. I just see a very clear link between the resources required to make meat and the benefit to the person eating the meat. Where data centers cause local and global harm, while not benefitting the locale or the globe. Which is why people don’t like them.
And it’s not like non-meat is fine - the corn industry uses a blinding amount of water, as do almonds, etc.
We have a finite budget for water usage, and i’d allocate that to non-meat food > virtually anything else > meat > data centers > golf courses.
> No one was objecting when pornhub was building out data centers
I’m not entirely sure of the scale of pornhub’s operations, but i feel like one large ai data center uses more resources than all of pornhub’s data center usage around the globe. But maybe i’m wrong there, and the hub was just flying under the radar.
> And it’s not like non-meat is fine - the corn industry uses a blinding amount of water, as do almonds, etc.
Switching from meat to non-meat unequivocally lowers your GHG and water footprint and there's really no room for quibbling on this unless you are switching to a diet of exclusively almonds
What is? The opposition is to datacenters being built to meet imagined future demand for LLMs. Are LLMs directly and indirectly increasing my quality of life? Please explain how, because so far it seems to me like they’re decreasing my quality of life.
Data centers generate export revenue. For a country that has struggled to export as much as it imports, that seems very valuable to its national economic health, and sabotaging one of the few major export industries, and one that's growing rapidly at that, seems counterproductive.
Data centers also generate local tax revenue. In fact, across industries, they have the best tax revenue to tax resource burden ratio, using very little government services while paying significant property tax.
And the environmental damage, whatever that is, is negligible relative to other industries. Their only output is some noise pollution nearby and whatever emissions are produced in the power plants that give them electricity. All industries require electricity in proportion to how much economic value they produce. So unless you want degrowth and no industry, you're going to have energy consumption.
In fact, rising energy consumption is a sign of a growing economy. That's why China has seen its energy consumption grow far faster than any other major economy while its economy has also grown far faster.
They do use water but their water usage is mininscule compared to agribusiness, or even fast food restaurants and golf courses. And the potable water usage can be brought down. They just use the water for cooling. So they could use treated wastewater or recycle the water they use. Newer data centers use these more water efficient cooling systems. So water usage is not a major long-term concern. Not one that justifies crippling this key emerging industry.
maybe i'm working on software for supply chain routing. maybe i'm making a commodity trading bot that more accurately prices wheat futures. AI helps with both of those things.
> maybe i'm working on software for supply chain routing.
We have supply chain routing software already. Humans wrote it, humans can improve it. Getting ai in the loop won’t change the realities of the supply chain, except maybe they’ll hire less programmers.
> maybe i'm making a commodity trading bot that more accurately prices wheat futures
How does that benefit me? Further financializing food production seems like a bad thing.
Not to mention all of what you’ve described could be run on a $1000 consumer GPU in a PC somewhere.
This is what I mean about not understanding the second order transitive labor that goes into fulfilling people's wants.
Making supply chain routing software cheaper, improving it for less money → all of these things directly make the products in grocery stores cheaper.
"Further financializing food production seems like a bad thing." →
Why assume rather than approaching with curiosity? Commodity futures are, again, critical to global supply chains and food markets. Farmers in eastern Europe actually look at futures markets to determine when and if to plant their harvest, cargo ships that transport your food buy futures in oil & gas so that they can have stable fuel costs to provide you with your food, etc. etc. Speculating on the future gives rise to the corrections necessary for providing things that people want in the future.
A data center allows the website you're whining on to function. If they're really as inconsequential to your life as you're implying, maybe you should boycott them by not using any websites or apps that rely on a data center to function.
AC at 68F is obnoxious and wasteful. At least data centres enable me to communicate with distant colleagues, watch enriching movies, and use very strong AI tools to accelerate my research.
It's actually significantly more environmentally friendly than heating to above 68F in the winter in most cases, since most AC is done with heat pumps but most heating is oil/gas (100% fossil fuel consumption) or resistive electric heaters (dramatically less efficient than heat pumps). On top of that AC use aligns strongly with solar generation output while heating load does the opposite, which means that even when heating is done with electricity it comes disproportionately from gas turbines at natural gas peaker plants.
Data centers also enable the NSA to store the metadata and contents of every phone call you make and police to (without a warrant) to track anyone who's walked in front of your doorbell or many street corners in your city. They also store all the location data your phone collects for Google or Apple, nearly your entire internet history collected surreptitiously because many sites automatically use your GMail or Facebook logins, and your entire purchase history collected via Visa or MasterCard.
And even better: all of that data is aggregated together and stored in its entirety several times over across multiple data centers because everyone shares your data with everyone else, such that if any single of more than a dozen data centers is ever compromised, it all gets leaked to whomever compromised it.
My building is leaky. The association won't fix it. How about this compromise, you set yours to 74 to compensate for my 68. Fair enough, or will you say I should move?
Can you spot the difference?