Amsterdam activists throw acid at Microsoft datacenter project In the United States, we usually protest datacenters peacefully - picket signs, council meeting comments, and all that - with mixed results. In the Netherlands, activists throw water balloons filled with an acidic mixture at datacenter foundations, also with questionable effectiveness. The Dutch arm of international climate …
Acetic acid, especially if they're just getting it from vinegar, is probably not concentrated enough to do much damage to the balloons or, for that matter, the concrete unless they had a ton of it and hosed down the building with it. From the description, I'm guessing they wanted it to react with the hydrogen peroxide to generate peracetic acid which is somewhat more corrosive, but residue from burst balloons is not the best way to make that.
I have found hydrogen peroxide both both cheap in volume and effective and curing toe fungus Pour it in a plastic bag tied around my foot, add a little iodine too, and leave it there for 30 minutes. I've done it three times over the past half a year after being unable to make a dent with regular medications for years.
Democracy is undermined by rich cowards.
Contracts are undermined to the point where stealing is okay if you are rich (which has some implications to society as a whole).
Quarterly growth at all costs, fire more people, socialise the losses.
Desperate people do desperate things, I suppose.
Microsoft? Doing things legally*?Are you partaking of dutch smoking mixtures?
* lets see, so we have browser wars, office format wars, illegal contracts precenting other operating systems frrom being installed by oems, lying about linux being dangerous, the current spat about license reselling, the microsoft platform key signing debacle, trying to sell cloud stuff as "secure" when the us cloud act exists, ignoring copyright law when training LLM models.
The list goes on
The law is only applied to the plebs these days.
“Intelligence tests for voting have been tried, their history is rather unpleasant.”
I wasn’t suggesting they are a good idea.
Though I can see why you may have thought so.
I should have used a joke icon, or at the least put the word ‘could’ in bold.
That error is mine, apologies if I caused you any offense.
"Democracy is undermined by anyone who reverts to violent actions just because they don't like what other people are doing legally"
Pretty sure many of the countries the USA like to blow up / infiltrate have been democratic countries. They just didn't like the results.
Oh Poll Tax riots anyone?
If the computing power is being used to target IDF strikes on Hospitals and children (things that are classed as war crimes and crimes against humanity when other states do it) and yet the state looks the other way i.e. abdicates responsibility then does that ot does that not undermine democracy, particularly when the majority of the public across Europe oppose the actions of the IDF?
They are motivated by money as well as cause. They are paid to do these things by various sponsors, at least in the UK, I won't name the person here, but he's an affluent green lobbyist, it's well documented.
All this is leading to the rapid de-industrialisation of Europe. Cui bono? Certainly China and the USA.
> I can't fathom the type of person who thinks it's okay to communicate by throwing balloons filled with acid at anything. Are such social norms the result of AI-driven astroturfing, influencer operations and generative propaganda sponsored by a hostile foreign nation?
Moving marginal/chaotic ideas to the center of the culture. Flooding it with high-chaos, destructive tendencies. Pushing people into nihilism, fragmentation or pathological responses leading to cultural disintegration.
Angry people do that sort of thing, sometimes poorly informed angry people.
I was once part of a group who were pelted with raw eggs as we entered a building that contained a lab where live animals were used in tests for various things.
The building also contained an anatomy lab where the self donated cadavers were used for teaching purposes.
I was heading to the anatomy lab. The pelters didn’t seem to care and quite possibly didn’t know the building was multi use. We were under instruction to ignore them as best we could and not engage.
They didn't say what concentrations the acetic acid and peroxide were, but the peroxide will quickly degrade to water and if acetic acid was the normal 3% concernation, it's not going to do a whole lot and will be gone with the next rain. Worst case there is a little extra rust on some rebar (assuming it isn't pastic coded). The paint is probably the most damage part of it.
I imagine by the time it is operational, the goal will be to completely remove people from the facility. Already DC's had very few, maybe a dozen actual workers. And as I said, by operational time I am sure the plan is to replace even those few with robots. The only people will come in when a rack needs replacing, although even that, I'm sure the goal is to have robots with the ability to swap in spares from some dock. 24x7, no need to wait for a tech to show up.
Automated "defence" systems, no different to a dystopian sci fi where step off the "approved route" or the AI decides you are a threat then BRAAAP.....
Already they have "man traps" listed on planning applications, no different to treating humans like hunted animals with zero consideration towards someone suffering a medical emergency or injury....
“Extinction Rebellion spokesperson Martijn Dekker justified the attack by saying datacenters and the AI they power are exacerbating the climate crisis, as well as playing a role in the killing of Palestinians by Israel. “
What the actual fuck? What in lord Jesus H Christ in heaven has Israel/palestine got to do with it? Absolute nut jobs.
My guess is that they're referring to Microsoft DCs in Amsterdam reportedly being used for phone surveillance by Israel targeting people in the West Bank and Gaza, though as that article was about Microsoft kicking them out and them moving to Amazon (again reportedly), that would have a few logical gaps. I'm not really surprised about logical gaps, given that many of the protests the same groups took credit for seemed focused on getting attention first and making their arguments later, even if, to get attention, their actions ended up not having much or sometimes anything to do with their stated goals.
Oh hey, it's the old "any criticism of Israel including its treatment of the Palestinians is synonymous with anti-Semitism" card.
Noticeably popular with many on the right these days- who wouldn't have been able to take advantage of it in the past- now that Israel itself has a far-right government aligned with their own sympathies and it's marketed itself as part of the West in opposition to other darker-skinned people you hate more.
Such as pro-Israeli company Wix, which...
encouraged employees to “show Westernity” in social media posts backing Israel, as “unlike the Gazans, we look and live like Europeans or Americans”, it said."
https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2023/10/24/internal-wix-chat-encouraged-staff-to-support-israels-narrative-in-hamas-conflict/
Ahhh, now I get why all the thumbs down. I wasn't trying to get into the debate about who are the baddies. More just trying to agree that these people are cosplaying retards who want to "do something" when in fact they are making no difference to anyone and just being annoying.
Write to your MP. Go on a protest. Write letters. For all the good it will do, at least this might influence *some* people towards your cause.
Throwing acid balloons at a data centre just makes you look like a dickhead and will make people more likely disagree with you (if anything). Same with gluing yourself to a road of throwing paint at a work of art.
Oh hey, it's the "'lefties' are foreign-funded and/or on it for the money" card popular with right-wingers trying to turn round and deflect from the obvious fact most of your figureheads are grifters.
And the projection of your own self-centred, grifting mentality (hence anyone not being an obvious POS must be "virtue signalling" because you can't imagine otherwise and your entire strategy is to bring everyone down to your level).
Oh, and the aforementioned "we're best mates with Israel now their government is far right and positioning itself as part of the West against the Gazans/Palestinians et al and suddenly keen to throw about the "all criticism of Israel = 'anti-semitism'" card."
Did I miss anything?
Oh hey, it's the "'lefties' are foreign-funded and/or on it for the money" card popular with right-wingers trying to turn round and deflect from the obvious fact most of your figureheads are grifters.
Ah, err.. so.. you're not turning this around and deflecting because some on the right might also be grifters. Whataboutery at it's finest.
But this was a bunch of Dutch lefties committing terrorism under the banner of an 'Extinction Rebellion' franchise. So this lot-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_Rebellion
Government must create, and be led by the decisions of, a citizens' assembly on climate and ecological justice.
Ah, right. I mean left. Call me old fashioned, but I thought the usual democratic way to do this was to stand for election, get elected, and do the democratic thing to drive change. Not use terroism and political violence. But XR is a foreign entity, largely created by this Marxist-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Hallam_(activist)
Who previously failed at sheep farming, and found his politics are a tad unpopular when he created a political party 'Burning Pink', which launched with a shoplifting stunt. It did try contesting a few elections, but came last in every one, lost their deposits and eventually folded. XR also tried the democratic thing-
In May 2019, Roger Hallam and eight others stood as candidates in the European Parliament elections in the London and the South West England constituencies as Climate Emergency Independents. Between them, they won 7,416 out of the 3,917,854 total votes cast in the two constituencies.
So, err, 0.18% of the vote. Thus demonstrating democracy is a tad harder than convincing useful idiots to commit terrorism. They're very keen on 'citizen assemblies' though, which democracies pretty much are already. Citizen runs for office, gets elected, assembles in Parliament. XR-style Parliaments differ in the Politburo kinda way where XR chooses the candidates and dictates policy. And then there's funding, so a hedge fund billionaire, and if you add 'Just Stop Oil' into the mix, a chappie very invested in 'renewables'.
Such is the way 'grass roots' campaigns spring up to serve their donors interests..
Oh, hai Jellied, fancy seeing you here!
As if by magic, a wild troll appears. Anonymously, of course..
As El Reg's resident and most ardent supporter of Putin's Russia, I suspect you *would* be an expert in their favoured tactics of whataboutery
At this point, I could ask 'what about Putin?', unless you've got some evidence that Russia bankrolls Extinction Rebellion I guess.
It's not that hard to concentrate supermarket vinegar to lower the PH. I didn't go far enough along in chemistry to want to add H2O2, NaCl and other things willy nilly. Just higher strength acetic acid should do well enough on a hot day in quantity, a few loaded balloons isn't likely to do squat.
40%* solution Acetic acid is available via the big river advertised for perfect for general cleaning*.
There are not many domestic uses at that strength and I agree that anything that will stay in a balloon long enough to be thrown at a building site isn't going to worry the concrete.
* PPE required here is more than a pair of marigolds.
If the concrete had already hardened, that would work.
If the concrete was in the middle of a pour, and still wet - well, wet concrete is strongly alkaline*. The effect of a small quantity of acid in engineering terms would likely be undetectable.
Washing it off would not be feasible - water:cement ratio is a critical factor in the properties of concrete, so hosing water over concrete before it hardens would be a Bad Thing.
However, in practice, everyone might well worry about their PI insurance, and, not immediately knowing what was in the substance dropped into the concrete, agree that the concrete had to be dug out (and dumped), and that new concrete brought and placed.
Thus increasing the usage of materials, production of waste and the emissions of carbon.
So the achievement of the activists was likely to have deliberately caused harm to the environmental.
*Wet concrete is also strongly hydrophilic. Also, it doesn't 'dry', it hydrates - the water is used up chemically. If you ever get wet concrete on your skin, wash it off immediately - it will cause a chemical burn very rapidly.
And thankfully that's true, or no life would be able to survive. Fortunately most of the fire is inside the crust, so it keeps us at a liveable temperature.
As for being ON FIRE on the outside, not so much. As a percentage of the surface anyway. If I turn on a gas hob, I don't normally say "My house is on fire". And that's probably an exaggeration.
Isn't that kind of scaremongering?
0.006% of the world's land surface.
As for being ON FIRE on the outside, not so much. As a percentage of the surface anyway. If I turn on a gas hob, I don't normally say "My house is on fire". And that's probably an exaggeration.Isn't that kind of scaremongering?
Yep. It's just the way extremism can lead to terrorism. So-
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5ywdl9ne3yo
Extreme and long-lasting heat draws more moisture out of soils and plants – this dry vegetation acts as fuel for fires.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/articles/ckg4gqlye02o
Comparisons are being made with the historic hot summer of 1976. Whilst that year still holds the record for the longest heatwave, this year has seen higher extreme temperatures, and more "very hot days".
Or an explanation of the extremists claims here-
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2026/07/16/met-office-state-of-climate-report-just-more-gaslighting/#more-92252
Last summer was not even as hot as 1976’s in terms of daytime temperatures. So far this year, there is no evidence that the heatwaves have been any more intense than in 1976 – back then, the hottest day on CET peaked at 33.1C, compared to 32.8C this summer. This summer so far, there have been eight days on CET over 30C, compared to nine in 1976 by this date.
So extremists at the Met Office whip up hysteria, which is then amplified by extremists at the Bbc, which then filters down to left-wing extremist terrorists who attempt sabotage, thinking the world is on fire and they're going to save it. Except they're just poor, deluded fools who've been lead astray by activists using sensationalism to make extreme claims that can't be supported by science. So no 'extreme temperatures' and as for the Met Office-
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2026/07/12/met-office-class-1-sites/
Only 19 of the Met Office's weather stations are Class 1 locations, per WMO siting guidelines.. And if you look at the comments, many of those supposed Class 1 sites aren't, so have an accuracy of +/-2C or worse. But there's been a very high pressure system to beat the UK's 1976 heatwave, which extremists are pushing hard.. And glossing over minor details. Like the weather stations now are different to the ones in 1976 and use more sensitive PRTs. Or this is just weather, not climate, and caused by the jets stream, not CO2.
But such is politics. It's easy to use misinformation to create hysteria and get ignorant people working their thumbs, or throwing acid bombs and committing terrorism.
As a brief break from the whataboutism, the reader may find it instructive to check the the temperature records for the UK. Here one may sort the hottest records by the date column and find it shows that most of the records have been broken in the last 25 years and 1976 doesn't even make the list. Likewise one may sort the coldest records by the date column and find that none of them are within the last 25 years.
We now return you to your regular scheduled whataboutism where there readers will be told that the thermometers are in on the conspiracy and all new thermometers report the temperature higher that it really is. 40 degrees is the new 30 degrees and you could never really tell the difference anyway.
Where to begin?
- Most of the weather stations in the UK have "junk" status.
- Many of them don't even exist any more, so they just guess.
- The so-called 40 deg record at RAF Conningsby was just for one minute right after two Typhoon jets had taken off.
- Urban heat island effect. Many stations have tarmac and buildings around them.
- The one in the Botanical Gardens in Cambridge is quite close to a greenhouse with automatic vent openers which let out the very hot air.
I still believe it's getting hotter, just not at the "oh my God" Scaresville rate that the Met Office seem desperate to promote.
I could go on.
We could build a nuclear power station every year, and ease off the accelerator a bit with the rush to electrify everything and switching to se-called renewables. It's really not a radical idea. What Ed Miliband is pushing us towards right now is truly the radical path, and hardly anyone else in the world is going down that path, so what's the point anyway? If we aren't competitive and we have to import all our stuff from countries that use dirty coal, then we are just making ourselves poorer and *increasing* emissions.
And don't start on China solar "capacity". Just because the solar panels on my roof have a "capacity" of 4 Kw, that's not what they are generating 24x7x365. Not even close. Their actual generation is *way* lower. Same for China.
As a brief break from the whataboutism, the reader may find it instructive to check the the temperature records for the UK.
Cool! No, wait, that's a wiki link. And-
England 40.3 °C (104.5 °F) 19 July 2022 Coningsby, Lincolnshire
That would be RAF Coningsby, where-
https://dailysceptic.org/2022/11/27/fresh-doubts-emerge-about-40-3c-u-k-temperature-record-next-to-airfield-runway/
Doubts are rising about the recent U.K. record high temperature, measured by the runway at RAF Coningsby on the afternoon of July 19th. Over six minutes, the temperature jumped suddenly by 1.3°C to 40.3°C at 15.12 (3.12pm), and was 0.6°C lower just a minute later. In just two minutes from 15.10 the rise was 0.6°C.
So very much man-made, and caused by 3 Typhoons taking off at that time. But those pesky PRTs again, and although the Met Office 'confirmed' the reading, they never could explain any weather phenomenon such a large and rapid temperature excursion. But given Coningsby's thermometer is right next to the flight line, jet exhaust is a far more plausible explanation, especially if the aircraft were taking off on afterburner (aka reheat).
It never ceases to amaze me how easily useful idiots are fooled by junk science..
The Daily Sceptic analysis of the temperature has been totally debunked.On that day 46 weather stations exceeded the record.
What record? And who provided the debunkiing? I kinda know the answer already, but also how the Met Office gets away with 'white lies'. So Coningsby is what it was, and caused by aircraft. It still recorded what it recorded, it's just it bears no relevance on weather or climate. But records aren't what you think they are. So if you've got 46 individual weather stations, having 1 setting a record due to jet exhaust lets you move the average higher and distort 'the record'. Not that a UK average is at all meaningful. Then it's the WMO station classification system and why that classification matters for anything climate related. So Coningsby isn't a Class 1 site, and doesn't need to be given temperatures on the flight line are what matters. But if you take 1x Coningsby and 'confirm it' with 45x Class-5 stations, with an uncertainty range of +/- 5C, then they could 'validate' Coningsby because their temperatures would have been in the range of possibilities.
Take those contaminated records out of the data, and 'global warming' kinda vanishes..
It doesn't vanish, but it does throw off models using that data.
It throws off many things. So short & medium range forecasts rely on, well, reliable inputs. The very long range models, less so, except when it comes to hindcasting and reanalysis. Which gets to be another issue when temperature measurements are 'adjusted' based on model outputs. It also throws off proxy records. So take the wooden thermometers as used in the infamous Hockey Stick. Take a core sample from a convenient tree. Isolate the wood from each tree ring and measure the wood density (MxD) for each growth ring in the sample. Compare that to the instrumental record to calibrate, then run that back to create a hockey stick.
If the temperature records are wrong, then obviously the calibration is wrong, and thus so is the entire proxy record, other than perhaps the general shape of the hockey stick. You might be able to claim that 1742 was cooler than 1942, but claims of an exact temperature to the precision possible by a PRT is a very big stretch. It also makes a huge assumption that tree growth is dominated by temperature, and can't account for differences in say, rainfall, nutrient availability, sunlight etc. It also makes huge assumptions with calibration, eg tree core samples from the Yamal Peninsula played a big part in MBH Hockey Sticks, but there's no long-term instrumental temperature record from that region, so those trees get calibrated against instrumental records from 1,000km+ away.
But see also-
https://climateaudit.org/2024/04/18/twisted-tree-heartrot-hill-revisited/
PAGES2K, including its 2019 version, reverted to the TTHH data version already obsolete in Mann et al 1998 – the data ending in 1975, not 1992. The figure below compares the TTHH version in PAGES2K (2019) – on -right – to the TTHH versions discussed above. The PAGES2K version uses the same measurement data (ending in 1975) as the MBH98 version. The PAGES2K chronology is very similar to the MBH98 version in the period of overlap (1550-1975) but is not exactly the same. Notice that the PAGES2K version (like MBH98) avoids the post-1975 data with the severe “decline”.
There's a limited number of tree samples, so they tend to get recycled, which introduces errors into supposedly 'independent' reconstructions. But Climate Audit and proxies also demonstrate some Internet science issues. CA uses Imugr for hosting, and Imugr's decided to block users in the UK, so the graphs can't be viewed. But could also allow dynamic science. So temperature records get 'adjusted', new values could be read, calibration adjusted, proxy model re-run and results updated and automatically re-published.
Which is also the WMO / Met Office station siting and classification thing. A Class 1 site data should be reliable. Coningsby isn't a Class 1 site, but still gave an accurate temperature reading when the jets took off. But obviously nothing to do with the weather, or climate, hence the WMO stating that 'junk' sites should not be used for climatology, ie model or proxy reconstructions. And yet they are. And I guess they could be used, providing the uncertainty range is factored into the reconstruction. Which they sometimes are, ie the wide uncertainty ranges shown in some reconstructions. So wide ranges in graphs like this-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:T_comp_61-90.pdf
Reflecting the wide uncertainty in the past, and no uncertainty in the recent past because of a false assumption that those temperatures are reliable. They're not. Which then gets back to the story and people making false assumptions based on deliberate misinformation, and using that to justify chemical weapon attacks on buildings. Those activists/terrorists are being badly mislead, and often deliberately.
ps.. also see-
https://climateaudit.org/2024/06/02/tracing-the-esper-confidence-intervals/
As discussed in previous article, Esper et al (2024) link, the newest hockey stick diagram, asserted that 2023 was the “warmest summer” in millennia by an updated version of “Mike’s Nature trick” – by comparing 2023 instrumental temperature to purported confidence intervals of temperature estimates from “ancient tree rings” for the past two millennia. In today’s article, I will report on detective work on Esper’s calculations, showing that the article is not merely a trick, but a joke.
Which shows how false confidence can be created.
> "But such is politics. It's easy to use misinformation to create hysteria and get ignorant people working their thumbs"
Says the person who- purely coincidentally- constantly regurgitates Putin regime talking points or selects perspectives that push in a direction consistent with their propaganda. Someone who, out of countless comments, I don't recall *ever* having meaningfully disagreed with nor been critical of Russia under Putin.
So, maybe you know what you're talking about. Then again, going by the downvotes you generally receive for your longwinded rationalisations, maybe not.
Says the person who- purely coincidentally- constantly regurgitates Putin regime talking points or selects perspectives that push in a direction consistent with their propaganda.
Objection, relevance. What exactly does Putin have to do with this? Also coincidences do actually exist. LIA or Ice Age ends, temperatures and CO2 levels rise. Temperatures rise first, but that's just the way the carbon cycle works. But when effect precedes cause, that's not how science usually works. So back to the story in hand-
Extinction Rebellion spokesperson Martijn Dekker justified the attack by saying datacenters and the AI they power are exacerbating the climate crisis, as well as playing a role in the killing of Palestinians by Israel.
And I'm sure Dekker can point to the good'ol 'peer reviewed literature' explaining how an unbuilt DC is exacerbating the climate crisis. Or why he thinks there's any crisis, because this isn't showing up in the temperature record. But then Dekker isn't a climate scientist, he's this chap or person-
Political Anthropologist | University of Amsterdam | Scholar of Contentious Politics | Rebel | Feminist | Amateur Musician | Nail Polish Lover
Presumably organic, free-range nail polish, not any product of the evil petrochemical or mining industries. Oh, wait-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nail_polish#Ingredients
So why isn't he campaigning against nail polish given it's full of chemicals, and arguably unnecessary? But being an 'amateur musician' might explain his love of bandwagons. He doesn't seem to have much in the way of a publication record though, possibly because he's been too busy with extracurricular activities like throwing acid bombs at buildings. So seems like another middle class poseur suckling on the public teat.
So, maybe you know what you're talking about
Yep. Kinda why I explain my position and try to cite evidence. Or, given your strange fixation with Russia. There's a bit of an environmental crisis developing in the Black Sea (and Persian Gulf) at the moment with Ukraine busy sinking tankers. Normally whenever there's a tanker incident, the 'environmentalists' are up in arms. They're strangely silent about this one, wonder why?
If there becomes a growing perception that the data centres are the reason for job losses, water shortages, energy price rises and other societal issues then it's inevitable that they will become a target.
Sadly I suspect this is already factored in. The sad bit being the owners already know the data centres will cause these problems and are gearing up to deal with the fall out rather than doing anything to prevent it.
Slighltly O.T. If a developer wants to build a large estate of houses normally planning requirements will stipulate that they have to contribute to local infrastructure by funding or building schools, surgeries, parks, shops etc (I'm well aware there are loopholes and they squirm out of these obligations). Then why do these huge data centres not have to contribute to new utility infrastructure?
Why isn't funding energy generation, transmission and water mangment a cast iron part of the planning permission?
Interesting point. I know San Jose years ago when I lived there required the Hilton when they built a hotel to spend a certain percentage of the cost of the hotel towards artwork for community benefit. It is odd how everyone gets a tax break to build large stuff(and probably the Hilton got one too), but some things like a hotel also get required to do some good community stuff. DC's not so much. All they do is tout the jobs (which are just short term construction) and how fantastic it will be to have such a futuristic blob in your town.
Irony is that, once construction is over, data centres provide a relatively piss-poor number of *local* jobs relative to their size, prominence and disruption of local infrastructure with most "real" jobs using them from hundreds of miles away.
The sooner people realise that- as well as all the other negatives of AI driving opinion against data centres- the better.
