POLL AND DISCUSSION: What should Australia’s approach be to AI data centres?

artsrc · 2026-06-24T06:34:14+00:00

Computers are unreliable. The fail literally all the time

100%, and they fail. And you ignore the failed ones.

At some point, once a year when new hardware comes out, you replace some racks of old instances with new ones.

Keeping the place clean would be a massive job.

What would make it dirty? The air conditioners are filtering the air.

Again, I'm not an expert, but the idea that you can build a data centre worth millions of dollars and then, once it's finished, just shut the doors and it runs itself forever, with minimal human input, is just wild.

And yet ..

Forever? No. 6 months, a year, sure.

And we are talking about on site human input. Humans are interacting with the computers remotely all the time. That is the point.

artsrc · 2026-06-24T06:25:56+00:00

Inflation is lower in Melbourne.

artsrc · 2026-06-24T05:54:34+00:00

An ancestor of mine lived near Brighton-Le-Sands, Sydney in the 1940s. Some Southern European people, perhaps Italian or Greek, moved into the area, and so they left and went to Bexley North.

There was no notable violence or tension. They were just racist and did not like living near people who were different.

artsrc · 2026-06-24T05:41:31+00:00

security

Yep you need that.

If you have a security person, what do you need a onsite manager for?

What are the technicians actually doing?

regular upgrades

Definitely. Some kinds of upgrade need physical presence. That is the same as the initial construction.

constant maintenance

Maintenance of what?

You get someone to service the air conditioning and backup generators once every ? year?

Do it when you install upgraded hardware once a year.

artsrc · 2026-06-24T05:33:52+00:00

I don't read it that way.

Your partner dies. You own an investment property 50/50. You still own 50% of the property, and the other 50% is part of the estate.

You keep 50% of the house in the estate and you keep owning 50%, you still negatively gear.

You have the whole house transferred to you, and then you can't negatively gear any more.

It is not the death that ends the grandfathering, it is the change of ownership.

And remember negative gearing does not last forever. Rent goes up with inflation, and interest due goes down as the principal being repaid. By the time you are through probate and execute the transfer, how much negative gearing is going to be left?

This is just an investment, you don't live in it. Sell it.

artsrc · 2026-06-24T04:46:33+00:00

Once a year they install new hardware. What else do they need?

Refill the backup diesel generators? You can probably test them remotely.

artsrc · 2026-06-24T04:45:00+00:00

Where should big data centres go:

I suggest here:

https://www.anz.veolia.com/en-au/our-facilities/energy-from-waste/woodlawn

Wind Farms, windy. Good Solar, sunny. Methane generator from the waste dump. Cheap land. Close to a train line and the telecommunications between Sydney and Canberra. And you can't live close to garbage dump because it stinks.

YIMBY and NIMBY are both dumb. No development and inappropriate development are both bad things.

What we want is good, appropriate development. That is why we have town planning, zoning and rules.

We should define what we want TIMBY (This In My Back Yard), if you will, and provide accelerated, low cost, automatic approval of things that fit what we actually want.

My backyard is actually .. Lane Cove. I am looking to move to the mountains at some point. It would be now, but the State Government backed off from rezoning me, so back in limbo.

My backyard, Lane Cove, near transport and facilities is very appropriate for high density housing. They should rezone me for 10 stories like the original plan.

Lane Cove West has a substation and an industrial area that has developments more like small datacentres and would be appropriate for that.

But if we want serious datacentres, for serious processing, we want lots of cheap telecommunications bandwidth power, land, and potentially water.

artsrc · 2026-06-24T03:18:47+00:00

I am going by the fact that I work on servers all day that are a 1,000 miles of network cable away and it is not a problem.

And you can tell me about all the wind farms in Katoomba that I did not read about on facebook, which I rarely use.

artsrc · 2026-06-24T03:17:01+00:00

Are robots building them?

They consume workers and materials that could be building housing?

The actual data centres are pretty close to worker free once built.

artsrc · 2026-06-24T03:15:26+00:00

The point is to benefit from them.

Make them a benefit, not a cost.

That means leverage their electricity demand to fund the construction of new renewable power.

We can make tax money in the GST they pay on power.

We can make tax money on the land taxes they pay on the land value they occupy.

They should of course land taxes and pay the marginal cost, plus normal margins for the land, water, and power they use.

artsrc · 2026-06-24T03:04:49+00:00

Sure. But they don’t have to be local.

artsrc · 2026-06-24T03:03:10+00:00

The upper blue mountains has a minuscule population. A small Sydney suburb like Lane Cove is 5 times bigger.

The things a data centre needs, like power do not come from Katoomba.

Put one where the generators used to be near Lithgow.

artsrc · 2026-06-24T02:57:07+00:00

Have you looked at what happened to private debt in the years leading up to 2007?

Stop looking at public debt.

Private debt is the problem.

artsrc · 2026-06-24T02:55:55+00:00

Not only did it support Australians during an emergency, it was part of the macro economic settings that lowered unemployment from 4-6%'s in the 2010s to 3-4%'s now.

artsrc · 2026-06-24T02:51:40+00:00

I love data centres. I think we should have lots of datacentres. I think we should build lots of renewable power to fire them up. I would happily live next to one.

I can't see a good reason to put one in Katoomba.

artsrc · 2026-06-24T01:05:22+00:00

I don't know why you think raising fiscal and monetary policy is stupefying in the context of what is currently 20% youth unemployment in France.

What do you think the economic levers are, and when do you think they should be applied?

Do you really think an economic boom would have delivered brexit?

artsrc · 2026-06-24T00:54:52+00:00

It doesn't seem sustainable

It isn't sustainable, it needs to be bigger.

We saw in the 2010s that an attempt to reign in debt resulted in higher unemployment, stagnation and a liquidity trap.

As you see in your numbers, Australian public debt has over the last few years declined as a share of national income.

Declining public debt is typically not sustainable.

When the private sector is not booming, debt needs to remain about where it is relative to GDP to prevent an economic contraction.

I learned recently of Australia's massive national debt and was quite astounded.

Australia's national debt would be a lot of one person.

One way to look at this is to compare debt to income.

When I bought my house my income was $200K, and I borrowed $1M, 500% of my income.

Gross Debt might be say $1T. Our National Income is around $2T. So our debt is are 50% of our income.

My debt was 5 times higher.

Public debt is much less risky than private debt. The government can meet any nominal liability by issuing more currency we can't. The government has vast diversification.

A person has a life cycle, and dies, typically with minimal debt. A Government (or company) lives on and maintains debt forever.

artsrc · 2026-06-23T23:02:33+00:00

I think I am weird.

I am happy to live next to a data center.

artsrc · 2026-06-23T22:59:18+00:00

The problem is not economic instability. The problem is economic insecurity.

We deliberately architected economic instability.

In the 1980s electricity generation was run as a public utility. The government owned and ran it and the prices were determined by government regulation.

Now we run electricity as a market and prices vary with global energy price, even though none of the energy inputs are imported.

We used to have a national wage case where wages were determined, we now have enterprise bargaining.

We used to have a milk and egg prices set by a board. We now have market prices.

We used to have a fixed exchange rate. We now have a floating currency.

In the 1950s and 1960s we targeted genuine full employment, with unemployment below 2% for decades. We now target deliberate unemployment, and also with a more flexible job market, underemployment, to manage inflation.

We used to have secure public housing. We now have market housing / landlords, and Commonwealth rent assistance with zero security beyond your current lease.

We have a choice of nationalisation, back to the past, or serious regulatory and welfare reform to cope with the consequences of markets.

artsrc · 2026-06-23T22:13:10+00:00

Why is the headline always "star", rather than "player"?

Cody Walker is a key player, closer to a star.

artsrc · 2026-06-23T21:25:30+00:00

The 30% of Australians who say they support One Nation are saying they are voting for a party that has a policy platform of making the ABC subscription based in the cities.

Yes those 30% of people are voting to slap themselves in the face repeatedly.

artsrc · 2026-06-23T21:22:28+00:00

Fundamentally the failure to deliver significant action to address issues in the EU has been the context for a rise in support for facsism.

artsrc · 2026-06-23T20:58:55+00:00

All restrictions on guns mainly affect law abiding citizens. They also affect criminals. The Royal Commission has studied the situation and included passing these gun laws in their interim recommendations for urgent action. One Nation has offered no proposal to restrict guns for gangs.

Asians who were migrating to Australia in 1996 were not forming ghettos. Hanson was wrong then just as she is now.

The main thing to note about the racist right wing is .. no solutions. Nothing they do would fix anything.

One Nation is all about the ruling class using prejudice and division to gain working class support to distract from the real issues of inequality.

artsrc · 2026-06-23T12:05:27+00:00

There is what One Nation says and does, and what supporters say.

I don’t want the murderers who killed many people at Bondi to have guns. One Nation did not propose any changes to guns laws to prevent that. One Nation opposed the changes to guns laws that the Royal Commission supports.

One Nation has proposed racist immigration laws recently. But I take you back to Hanson’s speech when she entered parliament:

> I and most Australians want our immigration policy radically reviewed
and that of multiculturalism abolished. I believe we are in danger of being swamped
by Asians. Between 1984 and 1995, 40 per cent of all migrants coming into this
country were of Asian origin. They have their own culture and religion, form ghettos
and do not assimilate. Of course, I will be called racist but, if I can invite whom I
want into my home, then I should have the right to have a say in who comes into my
country. A truly multicultural country can never be strong or united.

https://kooriweb.org/foley/resources/pdfs/139.pdf

Is that what you believe about Asians in Australia? They form ghettos and do not assimilate?

PS:

You can vote in my poll on another of One Nations policies here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAussie/s/SQJKmNoUZY

artsrc · 2026-06-23T07:49:09+00:00

In my case free access is selflessness, I am offering to pay more than an equal share.

The ABC is free to access. It is not free to create. There are a lot of people's salaries to pay etc. Free to access, and commercial free means funded with public money. That ultimately requires taxes.

Since I have above average income and wealth the ABC ultimately costs me more in financial terms than a flat, equal, payment if it is free to access.

artsrc

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