- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
Sorta like how corporations pushed recycling onto the public to deflect from their own culpability for pollution. Why would we regulate the companies building huge data centers when we can get average people to absorb the cost? It’s not like they’re making obscene profits while laying off untold thousands.
I mean, if that was the case, sure, let’s have them pay to clean up the waste they generate. But have you seen NVIDIA, Microsoft, or Meta lately? These companies are barely staying in business. Their CEOs can hardly afford to ride the bus to work. Let’s cut them a break.
TLDR: It’s your fault the earth is dying because you horde emails.
triggering the server to delete your email is more energy than leaving it in storage (on a platter disk in some array in a raid)
the people who thought of that example are ignorant of how data centers work
The British Government are Authoritarian and Incompetent.
As is invariably the case with Fascists.
Almost all politicians are ignorant about tech, yet we let them regulate it. In the worst ways. And fail to regulate it where it ought to be regulated.
Competent Politicians are well aware that they’re not experts on everything and hence hire domain experts to help them understand those domains and actually make informed decisions about them.
Mind you, I suspect this specifically is more a side effect of the profound problems with Dishonesty and Cronyism that the UK has: basically they tackled drought as a negative perception of the Government problem, so set up a talk group to project the impression that the Government was doing something about it and chose as head of it (and to be well paid for it) somebody whose greatest qualification for it was being their mate, all of which is very typically in British power circles.
The natural consequence of such things is them producing fancy press releases which look absolutelly moronic for domain experts, but since most of the people who read such releases are not domain experts, that’s usually fine and in fact advances the true purpose of that “group” (managing perceptions).
Even with the Tech Press internationally picking this up and making fun of it, since the very same people who play these power games over there also control the local Press, they might very well get away in Britain itself with a press release with even such a moronic idea as this, as it will be spinned to make them look good.
Also super long term archives are stored on magnetic tapes, they consume virtually 0 energy
That’s for backups. You wouldn’t have it as the only storage method because it’s so inconvenient to get the data.
tape storage is for offline storage, and any data storage on it would also be redundant
writing and reading tape archives takes a lot of computing. usually you have your tape library server and a server hosting the app and then the tape sled. tape takes a lot of energy
so deleting it electronically is going to take a more energy
it’s more efficient to overwrite it or use a degaussing device to wipe the tape