alt Hacker NewsYeah agriculture is bad for the environment, but at least it feeds us to keep us alive, so we can say it's worth it. Datacenters don't.
They don't even create that many jobs like a factory for instance so we can say the mass employment offsets the environmental damage.
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Please at least pretend to read the article before posting something like that.
Tens of millions of acres of agricultural land goes to things like production of corn ethanol. It is disingenuous to pretend we need this land to feed anybody.
We have vastly more arable land than is needed to keep people from starving, even when used inefficiently to produce things like cattle feed.
The services provided by a data center do provide jobs. My job for one, and I'm guessing a majority of posters here too.
One can say that food can be produced elsewhere, but also data centers might be a critical component of future society if we don't solve birth rates. Also, fewer births mean less food required.
> Yeah agriculture is bad for the environment, but at least it feeds us to keep us alive
This is true, but don't forget a _lot_ of agriculture feeds _animals_ that we in turn eat. If you want to make optimal use of land for human needs, most modern agriculture is not that.