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Residents who live near data centers say a constant low-frequency vibration is ruining their health and homes (www.nytimes.com)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 9 points 4 months ago (9 children)

I would love to see your explanation for why wind turbines have as much a negative impact on people's health as hyperscale data centers.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (8 children)

    apparently low-frequency noise causes heart rate variations. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-97107-8

    the conclusion is the same for both things too: don't build them where people live.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (5 children)

    From the first scimming, I would not give much credit to that study. Only 29 participants. But most importantly it was not double blind. The participants where instructed on what exactly the study wanted to find out and could easily see, how far they where from the wind turbine at the testing sides. Thats a programmed placebo effect.

    Also: They only measured at 2 sites. The outdoor site was only 20m from the wind turbine. That is a distance not even relevant to placement of wind turbines. The safety distance to the spinning blades will already be significantly higher, at least 100m. So the measurement at that side might be interesting, but irrelevant.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (4 children)

    yeah it's not very good. but it's one study of many and it was more to show that people are actually having issues with them.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (3 children)

    Thats not what it is effectively saying though. It says, that if you suggest, that infrasound from wind turbines is a medical problem, then people will have medical problems. That is the nocebo effect for you, not infrasound.

    Also: There are many other sources of infrasound in our lifes. For example using a car. Wind turbines at typical distances are about 75db while driving in a car is more like 100db. If you open one of the rear windows while driving 130db. Where are the adverse effects of these?

    You might want to look at these https://julkaisut.valtioneuvosto.fi/handle/10024/162329 https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2014.00220/full#h11

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

    most people aren't driving 24 hours a day though.

    also, that finnish experiment had only 26 self-selected participants so the same argument applies.

    not that this lends any credence to the "wind turbines are harmful"-side, either; that was never what i was driving at. i pointed out that the article makes the same claims about dc's as the paper i linked did about wind turbines.

    someone else pointed out that even though the claims about their effects lack merit, *we still build them away from people". which is what i think we should do to dc's as well, for the same reasons.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    Ok, then I misunderstood your arguments. I understood "Away from people" an argument for increasing the distance to wind turbines. They are already normally build 500 to 1500m away from people. I also saw it in my local context. In germany we had the conservatives argue for increasing the mandated distances further, triggered by the far rights hate for renewables, which would make it impossible to build them in large parts of the country.

    When we talk about wind turbines vs datacenters, I think a big argument is the actual direct value for the community. Providing clean energy gives more and direct value to a community, while the AI datacenter are mainly bringing the benefit of slop. Both are done in the capitalism way, but Datacenters (especially AI DCs) are way farther away from the consumer.

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