Jemmy
Google Accused of Illegally Killing a Massive Forest for Its New Data Center Project: It's "gross incompetence," or "gross disregard" for the law. Or both.
eickerhttps://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/google-accused-illegally-killing-forest-data-center
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They should be made to forfeit the land and replant every single tree they felled.
Problem is, once you destroy a forest you can’t easily recreate it by just planting trees. You lost a lot of animals and plants that you can’t just put back
Yeah, I admit my comment wasn’t really well thought out. I was angry at the situation. I guess ultimately I want to see accountability that is very painful for those who need to be held accountable. Whatever that may look like.
This is what happens when corporate crimes are punished with just slap-on-the-wrist fines that can be written off as a cost of doing business. Why should they obey the law? There is no downside to breaking it.
300 hectares — the equivalent of almost 500 football fields
Thanks for the context. As someone who lives in the US, I wouldn’t have been able to put that to scale otherwise.
500 football fields does not properly convey the size at all.
Why they choose stupid things like that or buses or whatever is beyond me.
1.15 square milea or ~ 3 square kilometers is much more easily perceived.
wheezyThe phrase was weird to start with. It’s like wearing a shirt that says “don’t be a pedophile”. It’s saying more than the words themselves.
Not really. In one way it is like mapping out rules for future members to adhere to, to keep them from straying from their original missions and philosophies.
I guess they didn’t factor in fuckheads like Sundar Pichai :’(
The personal experience my family has with Google and their data center development, from behind the curtain.
Google doesn’t give a fuck. Some of the people outside of their executive offices do, but not Google leadership. They have no conscious, no morality, no sense of duty or patronage.
They will not hesitate to lie, break promises, or hide the full truth.
They exist only to capture more wealth in any way that they can.
Imagine if we treated gross incompetence as malice.
Like, “hey Ford, prove your engineers thought putting the gas tank in a crumple zone was a good idea.”
Imagine if we had a corporate death penalty, where a company who violated the law persistently was dissolved and its assets taken over by the government before being sold off to competitors.
With AI replacing the games and VFX industries, they’ll be lots more of this stuff going on I imagine.
Holodeck-like game dev will probably eventually be a thing… And I thought I’d be happy about that. But I’m not.
Hopefully the planet and the species will last long enough that we’ll laugh about Data Centers taking up huge buildings… And how toxic everything was back in 2026…
… hopefully we’ll survive long enough to see today like we now see the 1950s (with nuclear techniques) and earlier. But I just don’t think we’re improving the world.
…and Nuclear Power hasn’t really be that great either.
Ai replacing VFX is still ai marketing as far as I’ve seen. The US vfx market is in a slump because of outsourcing, and streaming platforms that don’t need to produce blockbusters to keep people watching and paying. Ai for vfx only works on social media where one succeeds by capturing attention as quickly as possible, and it doesn’t matter if there’s 5 fingers if it drives more engagement.
Believing it can do Game Dev, but will for some reason stop at being able to transfer all those 3D modelling and animation abilities for VFX is a bit of a pipe dream. If it can model and animate characters and events in video games VFX tools will start dropping too.
I didn’t say I believe it can do game dev. I just have deeper insight into VFX. From what I’ve heard about games, the industry is also suffering more from factors other than ai, but ai marketers and hypers are happy to take credit for an industry suffering.
I’ve seen impressive demos for ai animation and modeling, but there’s a wide gulf between creating an impressive demo and replacing artists who can synthesize notes, industry knowledge and techniques, company and project-specific pipelines, workflows, and tools, and output something without visible flaws that, in the case of games, factors in hardware and software limitations. And to do that for less than an already underpaid workforce. As Cory Doctrow says, ai cannot do your job, the ai-salesmen just have to convince your boss it can.
I think the tools will eventually find-cost effective ways to support production, but I maintain I don’t see it replacing these industries, and saying so is carrying a torch for ai marketers.
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The “move fast, break laws, reap profits, socialize losses” strategy.
Fuck em. Fuck em all with a fork in the eye.
“move fast and break things” applied to the ecology and humans. Except without the “fix it” stage
This is TERRIBLE! And to make sure it DOESNT happen AGAIN we’re going to Write a SEMI STERN LETTER while they PROCEED with Construction!
-The Finnish Government?
Very likely, considering which political parties are in charge.
I call this government coalition “persrukous” (ass prayer):
pers: persut, short for “Perussuomalaiset” (Finns Party, far right)
ru: Suomen ruotsalainen kansanpuolue (Swedish People’s Party of Finland, centrist liberal, will do anything the coalition wants as long as everyone is forced to learn the language of the 5% linguistic minority, it’s always been like this no matter who the governing parties are)
ko: Kokoomus (National Coalition Party, centre-right/right wing liberal conservative, your typical neoliberal demons who only care about making the rich even richer and punishing the poor for existing, they lead the coalition)
us: uskovaiset = the religious = Kristillisdemokraatit (Christian Democrats, right wing, they’re pretty much NCP but they love Israel even more and hate everything)
Stealing persrukous. Until now I’ve settled for Ikea cabinet, but that was mostly inspired by the formation days. It took forever to build It looks like it could fall apart at any moment Dangerously leaning to right
When the fines aren’t big enough, they’re just the cost of doing business.
Penalties for fuckery like this should be at GDPR levels, meaning a percentage of global turnover of the parent company.
Just levying fines and imposing jail sentences doesn’t go far enough, it’s a 19th century solution to a 21st century problem.
Corporate personhood and limited liability need to be abolished and private enterprise needs to be re considered from first principles for the modern era.
It corporations are people, there needs to be a death sentence and involuntary psychiatric commitment .
Except psychiatric take over mean government run and we’ve collectively accept that’s a lovecraft leviathan, when it’s historically been otherwise.
Government administered healthcare has better outcomes and less administrative overhead than privately administered healthcare. Look at privatized firefighters for another example. Government is always on the forefront of messy expensive and complex systems and yes it could be improved but if half of it wasn’t trying to deregulate the other half out of existence we could probably bring some more resources to bear on the problem more efficiently.
The problem is that profit seeking enterprise explicitly doesn’t serve human values and that’s by design.
Also psychiatric commitment isn’t necessarily forever and has a restorative focus.
I don’t want government run companies unless they are utilities, and even then, I still want them to be owned by the population, not a handful of people.
Criminal penalties for decision makers. Jail time. Disgorgement of profits.
that’s the entire point of fines, to internalize external costs.
If it’s still profitable after full enforcement of fines then either the fines were not correctly set or the buisness model is a net positive.
“Incompetence” implies it was unintentional. This was completely intentional.
“Disregard of the law” implies there is some law against this. Any law that will not punish the offender is not a law. So there was no “disregard” of any law in this case.
Sundar Pichai is a conservative. His company leadership reflects conservative values, such as destruction of the environment, supporting genocide, supporting war and supporting fascism.
Conservatism is cancer. The disease has metastasized and has infected most major corporations in the U.S., including Google. I’m not sure a cure is possible, but the treatment for it is not peaceful or pretty. We would need thousands more people named Luigi to be willing to perform heroic, selfless acts.
These sociopathic bastards think that anything that isn’t explicitly illegal under the law has social consent. The asshole Microsoft CEO even said as much publicly.
I would say capitalism is the cancer, but conservatism sure supports it.
Unchecked capitalism is the direct result of unchecked conservatism. If not for conservatives, the normal people would be permitted to regulate capitalists and determin how much capitalism is acceptable in our modern culture.
Under conservatism, the normal people are not even permitted to charge capitalists with crimes, force them to pay fair taxes or force them to pay fair wages. Is it only conservatives who protect capitalists from the regulating hand of the normal people.
Conservatives are the ones who do the dirty work of union busting and passing laws that protect capitalists, even when it directly harms the public.
If not for conservatives, the normal people would be permitted to regulate or abolish capitalism as we choose. Conservatives have always opposed regulations for capitalists. They will resort to violence in their protection of the wealthy.
We cannot defeat the boss until his foot-soldiers are dead.
For those who haven’t looked at it
Google razed the forest without the environmental assessments to whether they could do that or not, aka ‘fuck your laws and the wildlife’
Fine them $1 billion per tree. Seriously. It has to really hurt them, or it will just be “the cost of doing business.” It has to be bad enough that they must sell off a division or two, and their stock has to tank 33% or more, so they, and everybody else watching, takes a hard lesson from it.
Or start holding the decision-making executives criminally liable.
Do both.
Yeah, that, too.
That, too.
Won’t happen. I hope I’m wrong. But I don’t think I am.
It’s up to us, we have to force politicians to do it.
Keep saying that, convince others to your side, and keep sending the message that if they do nothing, well accept it, and the politicians will be perfectly happy to go along with it, and do nothing. Good job.
Or you could threaten them with prosecution and prison every time they read what we say, and get the message that they’ve gone far enough.
We have to make them AFRAID of us, before they’ll do what we want. You aren’t sending that message with cowardly posts like yours.
It’s a bit more complicated. Tuike tried to argue that the project wouldn’t need that assessment as it wasn’t being done as part of commercially selling trees from a natural forest as a “natural resource” as the law was worded, and they tried to ask for a “case by case” exemption that would allow them to start the clearing without having to wait for the whole lengthy assessment process to go through the systems. That exception got rejected because “Forest nature does not only mean forests in their natural state, but also forests used for forestry” (the Finnish words being “luonnonvara”, “metsäluonto” and “luonnontilainen metsä”.)
They might have been technically fine had they not sold any of the trees. But, I mean, what else can you do with 300 hectares of trees?
Finnish source from HS.fi.
shocking no one, laws are worded in complicated ways that lawyers will take full advantage of.
Better to pay the small fine, than ask permission.
Fuck the techbros, fuck AI, fuck data centers, fuck billionaires.
Add it to KilledByGoogle.com
Google needs to be broken up and regulated. That they were not found to be a monopoly by Judge Mehta was a travesty. I probably don’t have to convince anyone here about how bad Google is, but seeing as they keep pulling nonsense like this and causing environmental harm is ridiculous. They need to keep growing forever for the sake of investors, no matter how much harm they cause. I avoid their services like the plague. Sorry to go on and on, but Google is one of the worst companies out there right now, closely tied with Meta.
Google was born from In-Q-Tel. they’re literally the CIA. How uninformed is the average internet user to not see that the entire techbro oligopoly is simply the mask dropping? Sometimes I wonder what the koolaid tastes like. To believe that things just happen uncaused, that geopolitics is the weather, and that conspiracies are better explained by emergent behavior. That it’s never malice, just stupidity. That the top 1% is not on the far end of the bell curve, that they’re not merely pretending to be retarded. You know it’s like looking at the top chess players and concluding that it’s not skill (or anal beads), but dumb luck.
In other words the thing I’m mocking (and being downvoted for) is the notion that Google can be split up when it acts as an extension of the government. It’s like asking a person to cut off their own arm. Of course they won’t.
They don’t have to be super intelligent to do what you describe. Intelligence os relative, when you make these observations, seeing super intelligence is telling on yourself.
Embrass it but don’t pretend it’s your super power.
isengard anyone.
Are they taking the Hobbits there?
What did you say…?
Yet another loophole in human trafficing laws.
If they needed a moral reminder, they were nutz from the very start.
I fixed that for you.
Gross “We did it knowing nobody was going to prosecute us because Trump and that’s what bribes are for” reasons.
Basic conservatism.
It’s in Europe.
So <insert name of different politician> then
The fact that this has 62 upvotes is making me lose brain cells.
This happened in Finland. The guy in charge is Petteri Orpo.
Edit: And his asshole cabinet of ministers.
Google’s green image looks increasingly like a marketing layer over an industrial land grab. A company worth trillions wants ever more land, power and water for AI, and now it’s accused of clearing Finnish forest before environmental assessments were complete.
🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
It’s fraud.
Remember when they put climate scores for all publicly traded companies on their Google Finance? It’s almost like they never a mean a single thing they say.
ESG scores in general do not mean anything either.
This whole ai thing starts to remind me of the paperclip game. Slowly everything is consumed and turned to ai
Yes. We’re learning rich assholes will happily turn everything to datacenters as long as the stock price goes up.
You know how people have been doing those horrible crimes where they destroy datacentres?
I hope people don’t realize the same thing can be done to places like Google’s offices. But if they do, I also hope they’d be responsible enough to make sure no low/mid level employees were in the building. I bet, and this is just too sad, that the executives would be the prime targets 😔
That would be tragic. Super duper tragic.
So tragic.
Tragic.
This is what I’m expecting with the Palantir CEO dude buying up a bunch of forest in Sweden recently. The statement is
We have “allemansrätten” here, as in you can go to and camp more or less anywhere. You don’t need to own the property to enjoy its natural beauty, or recreate there.
It’s definitely going to be used for something vile. A datacentre or something.
With that motherfucker it’ll be something vile or the kind of concentrated cringe that makes your earwax melt just sharing a biosphere with it.
Probably both.
Now I wonder why you only see ethics neglecting data-centers in the US.
Because it’s the only one currently where the governing bodies are puppets of the Epstein class.
Fair ig
Wasn’t their slogan, “Be as evil as possible” ?
google fucking up my country, as if i couldnt hate them enough already
They did the same In Finland. They don’t give a shit.
The article is exactly about that. Lol.
Why is it that it’s so hard for some people to click on the article before commenting
Ecodefense is a pretty good and relevant light read!
I used to wonder, when I was a kid what it would be like if somebody/company was rich enough to buy an entire country.
It’s not new. The Dutch East India Company was for all practical purposes in control of the Dutch government for decades, and did horrific things in countries around the world to great profit. Closer to home, “banana republic” was a real thing.
It’s disappointing it’s still so prevalent in the current day.
I know it’s not new, but it is especially easy today with billionaires buying governments, companies worth trillions buying swathes of land and the current state of the world economy.
As long as conservatives continue to exist, the horrors of conservative greed will continue to exist.
It’s both.
The things that truly “slipped their leash” recently are the fucking tech companies.
They need a good humbling, and their own hubris will be the thing to do it.
If there’s one thing big business exceeds at, it’s killing life.
Yeah, it’s negligence. They gambled on any paltry fine being worth it, and still being allowed o proceed.
This is par for the course. Pun intended. Where is our project 2025 to move the world in a more humane and sustainable direction? I want radical re-living.
Do no evilDo
noevilDon’t beevilAmazing how no one here opened and read the link but still felt they have to comment a wall of angry dogma.
I’ve read the article and I don’t really understand your comment. Could you elaborate?
Did you read the other comments here?