I agree that it's detached from reality in its absoluteness, but there's nothing particularly left or "woke" about this take. I think you're letting knee-jerk political biases get the better of you.
And also, a datacenter causes way more pollution per square meter so how is that more efficient? They don’t pay much taxes and they don’t have many employees. Even the buildings are off the shelve imported from other countries.
> datacenter causes way more pollution per square meter so how is that more efficient
How is that a sensible comparison? Are you suggesting that if they spread out servers over a large enough area that would improve this somehow? Like let’s place a rack per every hectare of wheat..
> they don’t have many employees.
Yes. The definition of efficiency.
Then again modern agricultural is very not labour intense either, just much less efficient space wise.
> Are you saying that data centres are more efficient "space wise" at producing food?
No. They are several magnitudes more efficient at ‘producing’ money. Something you can use to buy food grown somewhere else where land is cheaper or is less desirable for urban or industrial developments.
Are you in favor of covering the entire country in data centres Trantor style, or do you favor reserving some open land just in case the country ever needs to rely on agriculture for food in the event of war | pandemic | climate | etc?
I have decades of background in agriculture, mining, energy, geophysical exploration, math consulting and public policy (not the Netherlands) .. money is great up to a point .. but like gold you can't eat it and having actual assets that are useful is something handy to keep in the back pocket.
> in favor of covering the entire country in data centres
Data centers are in fact so space efficient that it’s unlikely that covering even a couple percent of an entire country would ever make economical sense. Well maybe unless that country is Liechtenstein and we want to move all the world’s servers there for some reason.
> money is great up to a point .. but like gold you can't eat it and having actual assets that are useful is something handy to keep in the back pocket.
You are clearly right. However I might be wrong but I still believe that it could hypothetically be possibly to convert a small proportion of farmland into data centers in certain areas without causing global food shortages.
Open land is hardly a thing (unless it’s a park or a nature reserve) in most of the Netherlands. The country is very densely populated. If you exclude the northern provinces (Friesland, Groningen and Drenthe) the rest of the country is about as dense as some of the more spread out major cities in the US.
> favor reserving some open land just in case the country ever needs to rely on agriculture
Probably unnecessary if it’s a small country inside the EU.
However this is an absurd question to ask when talking about the Netherlands specifically. It’s the second biggest exporter of agricultural goods (in $ not tonnage) in the world after the US despite having several magnitudes less space and being over 10x more densely populated).
It’s probably the country which is the least likely to run out of food. Of course the food grown there is very energy intense but since it also exports more natural gas than any other country in the EU that shouldn’t be a huge issue..
Across most of Europe farmers are probably one of the most privileged social groups due to all the subsidies, favorable tax treatment and other stuff, though.
Of course there are some very rational reasons for that.
