And very few people work there relative to the impact. Sure nobody liked living near factories in ye olden days, but they did like the employment opportunities.
You can see how few work there when you compare the size of the data centre and the size of the car park.
I don't think that the data centers are having a negative economic impact on Louden County residents. It's the richest country in the US with a median household income of $156,821. They also get really low property tax rates because the data centers are paying a lot of taxes compared to their costs. If there were lots more people working there, the county would need to spend a lot more money on roads and such. Instead, they're getting close to free money.
I'm not saying that anyone should want data centers to take over their city/county, but there isn't a strong economic argument against them in Louden County. The people there are the richest in the US and they're getting great economic benefits from it. The question isn't economic. The question is whether that's the community they want to live in: rich and making lots of money off data centers or an area where they don't have as much money and don't have to look at the data centers.
To be clear -- the data centers aren't even a slight cause of the high incomes in loudoun county, that long predate the datacenters and the data-center salaries likely bring that number down.
Also the county west of loudoun (Clarke), which has no data centers, has even lower taxes than loudoun. If you compare tax rate in loudoun in 2006 versus 2025 it's 1 percentage point lower now.
>It's the richest country in the US with a median household income of $156,821
Indeed, and it is not a place for average people to live. Loudon county is dominated by the rich and the legacy of the beltway bandits. It's a sad place centered around commuting to Washington D.C. or serving those who do.
But there is an upside to this - you get the benefits of being a city with big business (tax revenue, donations to the local schools, investments in infrastructure), but don't have increased commuter traffic.
Are those benefits the norm in most cases though? I'm genuinely asking and don't know either way, but the companies building these data centers have quite a reputation for aggressively pursuing subsidies and tax avoidance strategies. Amazon for one has paid little to no federal taxes some years and they wouldn't be my first pick as an example of a magnanimous corporate entity, to say the least.
Whatever benefits there are have to be weighted against the very real costs. Residential power bills spiking is a hugely regressive burden for many struggling households.
And not the locals - as the local community can't sustain that amount of building. People come in temporarily while the work goes, then leave. This adds more pressure on the local community for again very little gain.
If I want a report of what happened at a specific time I need that report at local time
I get a daily status report of various things from our 24 hour operational management team which runs at 8am UK time every day. That means last week it ran at 0700UTC and this week at 0800UTC
This is built around operational events, shift changes, etc.
I've got another system which is in operation in Sydney from 0630 to 1630 local time, this means that maintence windows which overlap with UK shift patterns depend on the week but mean the system is operating 2130-0730 UK time at some times, 2030-0630 UK at others, and 1930-0530 at others.
UTC is not "the answer". Sometimes you want things running at a UTC time, sometimes you want them running at local time.
I have a regular meeting at 10am London time on Tuesday and Thursday. That can't be stored in UTC as it varies depending on the time of the year. It has to have the timezone stored and actioned.
How about I use some form of library to do it. I tell it I want to run at 0800 London time, and it runs at 0800 London time
If I tell it I want to run at 0130 London time (or 0330 Athens time) I still have a problem -- do I run it twice when the clocks go back, do I skip it when clocks go forward?
But that's a business logic problem, and defining it as UTC and having another job to update the time twice a year doesn't actually solve the question of "what do I do at this point".
You don't have any choice in the matter. If you control the time you want the jobs to run externally from the server, then you can have control over it. Otherwise, you're getting jobs that run 2x or not at all.
No matter where you run the job from, you run it in the required timezone, not UTC, and you still have the issue with what to do with the change in the local timezone.
This isn't a problem that can be solved with a single technical solution.
It certainly is, but that's a business question, not a technical question
If the business requires it to run at 01:30 and there are two per day, or zero per day, then the business rules needs to define what happens. You can't solve this by running it at UTC.
Technically correct, but the business needs to be aware and a solution needs to be proposed beforehand IME. UTC is such a solution, imperfect, but usually workable. Business rules are sometimes unexpectedly elastic when confronted with a particularly explosive mix of logic and legislation.
I'm not convinced something that's been tried multiple times on and off in the UK (last time ID cards were being brought in - by Labour and the 2006 act - it was cancelled by the coalition), and happens in many countries, is a "conspiracy theory"
Who exactly is conspiring and what exactly are they conspiring for?
I mean that as a customer, you buy "one Internet" and get the "whole thing", you don't have to connect to various internets depending on what you want that day (as you did before by dialing into BBSes).
Companies and countries are doing their darnedest to break the Internet up into separate, smaller networks.
In 1999 I paid (inflation adjusted) $20 per episode in DS9
If you are only wiling to pay 10 cents then that's a major problem - viewing figures just aren't that high any more. A modern scifi show would need 100 million viewers to cover the production budget at 10 cents a person
The post popular scripted show on US TV - George and Mindy - gets about 5-6 million viewers when it's on for free. At 10c/episode or $2 for the year that would be $10m for the entire season. TV costs a lot more than that to produce.
In the 90s we clamoured for being able to subscribe to what we want rather than a single
We broadly have that now.
I subscribe to Youtube, Spotify, Netflix, Disney, Apple, Paramount, BBC. Only Apple and BBC force adverts on me, and Apple I'll be cancelling because of it. I keep BBC more out of moral reasons as I think it's a net good for the UK.
The monthly cost is very reasonable to me, inflation wise its about the same as I paid for BBC and Sky in the 90s.
Last night we wanted to watch the 2012 Les Mis film, £3.50 to rent it from Apple. In the 90s, inflation adjusted, it cost £8 to rent the tape.
If I can subscribe to watch something without adverts, I will. If I can buy or rent it, I will.
If I can't do that though, then I'll get it elsewhere.
I would hope that data centre has multiple power supplies from multiple locations - as well as UPS and on site generators, certainly mine do.
However given AWS is so complex (which is required because they want to be a gatekeeping platform) leading the uptime to struggle to match a decent home setup, I'm not sure. I'm sure there's no 6 figure bonus for checking the generators are working, but a rounded corner on a button on an admin page?
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