Value of a mature tree is normally several thousand euros here (I don't know about Finland).
Multipled by 250K. Times 3 -- a decent factor for illegal acts.
Would be a appropriate compensation for Finland.
That's a perfectly normal and environmentally conscious thing to do before laying down concrete foundations. Topsoil is recycled and sold to farms. To leave it in place would pointlessly waste an ecological resource.
The environmentally conscious thing to do the necessary environmental impact assessments before clear-cutting the land.
According to the Guardian article, which it the source the NY Post used, if those trees were illegally logged, they cannot be sold to wood-processing plants.
Do you know if the law also prohibits the topsoil from being sold to farms?
Extrapolating to Finland’s entire forested area, Finland is sitting on hundreds of trillions of wealth!
Or maybe this is a bad measure?
You also forgot that Google owned the trees that they cut down, so they would be compensating themselves.
The debate is about the order in which a contractor pulled permits. It’s silly how much people are obsessing over some trees being cut down. This happens with all development.
a true punnishment for google would be bieng forced to perform a total ecosystem restoration, every bug, worm, critter, plant, and micro organism, cm by cm, trees ,mosses, the whole thing, purchased from indivuals one tiny bit at a time in a way thatcaused zero further damage.
minimum cost will be 500 billion dollars and would serve notice on the real value of ecosystems, ie: replacement value
It's incredible how this story has incessantly made the rounds while the actual story is so incredibly small and insignificant. Like it probably would even make the town newspaper level insignificant.
"A Finnish contractor working for Google failed to get the correct permits for clearing 1.5sq-mi of man made forest that was rezoned to industrial"
The actual takeaway is how desperate the media is for clicks. They do don't report based on importance, the report based on attention potential.
The story here is that companies act with impunity. Anyone who fails to get a permit to do a thing should not do the thing, if they are rich enough, they can do the thing anyway and face no significant consequence. Hence people get mad, and understandably so.
„Contra data center“ is just one more leftist position that the herd picked up.
Its ridiculous and insane if you think about it for five seconds.
They bring substantial tax revenue to their towns, while having basically zero environmental impact. After the „water usage“ thing becomes old (since they barely use any) apparently they’re going for „chopped trees“, nevermind that land use is very modest and rounds to zero when considering a country’s forrest inventory.
And no, they don’t even drive up electricity bills in any meaningful way.
I think the data center hate is widespread, popular, and rather uniquely non-partisan.
I don't 100% understand it, but it seems to be driven partially by AI hate, and partially by bad experiences and stories making the rounds, like backup generator exhaust and noise making people nearby angry.
This is misinformation. The Guardian article explains that very little corporate taxes go to Finland.
Jussi Kangasharju, head of computer science at the University of Helsinki, said that while datacentres brought a limited number of jobs, potentially boosting the local economy, the benefits on a national level were minimal. “Really, for Finland, there are no benefits,” he said. “They are international companies serving international customers. Very little corporate taxes go to Finland. Datacentres ultimately have very little benefit for others except the datacentre operator.”
>By a 40-point margin, voters oppose building data centers in their area to support artificial intelligence (30% favor, 70% oppose).
>MAGA supporters (46% favor) and Republican men (45%) are the groups most likely to favor data centers, while White women with a college degree (84% oppose) and liberal voters (80%) are the most opposed.
Overall opposition is at 70%, and opposition of "MAGA supporters" and Republican men is around 55% (~45% support). It's a difference but it's not like many issues where these numbers could be opposing 90/10s in these groups.
Until it is not; some companies are actually putting environnemental & employees health issues with sincerity in their contracts. With shared responsibilities.
> It was about making an environmental assessment before starting on the clearing.
Proof? Because it was already rezoned to industrial from what OP said. Why would it be rezoned if the municipality didn't intend for the trees to be cut and a DC built there?
Basically the law says you need to do the assessment if you're removing the trees permanently from over 200 hectares. The company asked for an exemption, the relevant bureau said nope, they cut anyway.
Yes, generally that's how you make public aware of illegal activity.
Not having news about companies braking laws mean generally that the country is likely quite corrupt.
So I don't know where you are from but in Finland anyone breaking a law is expected to be treated equally.
If an individual had ignored the process to this extent they would be in quite hot water.
A large multinational company avoiding the official process feels unjust and is exactly the thing public has been extremely worried of happening regarding the environmental impact.
So it's not because news inflamed something.
It's because something like this is exactly what the public has been alarmed about for a long time.
Yes, obviously people are only angry about things they know about. This says absolutely nothing about the news articles, as the same thing thing can be said about any event, no matter how justified the anger would be.
An article making people angry doesn't automatically make the article rage- or clickbait.
They definitely intended to cut down the trees. The municipalities far away from cities are poor. And Google is giving payoffs to/threatening local politicians/bureaucrats to get these permits quickly. They promise to fund whatever projects/schools/roads which is pennies to them. While skipping the law set by the central government.
Around here we think that those who pay money to avoid the law have a spot behind the Sauna. I’m quite sure after the next election, because of these shenanigans, we start taxing these DCs to oblivion.
Yes, my point, the media fosters misinformation and deceit to foster rage all in the name of getting people to view ads.
The logging forest was getting cleared not matter what, and it's microscopic compared to total forested land. So the actual story is a permitting fumble.
And entire country getting outraged over a permitting fumble (a parking ticket level occurnace) is something only institution that lives and dies by hijacking eyeballs could orchestrate.
How many times do we get to take “microscopic compared to total forested land” away?
Boy I sure hope it’s infinity times!
Anyway it seems like you’re incorrect. They actually didn’t have the approval necessary, and no, a zoning approval does not grant all other required forms of approval (obviously).
I don't think people realize that there was no option of do we not log the forest, but imho the issue is any forest being cut down for data centers is a waste of sand and effort, make them in deserts or dry land. In the middle of oceans works as well, we are getting data centers in all sorts of weird and imho wrong places.
I find this issue small but the choice of these companies to pick the convenient location for them to build a data center concerning, and govts shouldn't be bending over. If these things can be built in space we can build them in places where no one lives and no living being is harmed or logged.. cough.
On the contrary, north is exactly the right place to build them. There's plenty of space with low ecological value, more electricity generation (wind), cooling needs are reduced, and the heat can be used (and is used) for district heating.
Now one can argue whether we should build that many data centers or not. But when one is built, the north is a good choice.
It was commercial timberland before this. It was going to be harvested anyway, which may not be as heavy impact as fully clearing it, but it is not natural forest.
Notably, these kind of hit pieces are almost always about extracting some concession from the targeted organization (Google, in this case).
The assessment also concerns assessing for example runoff into rivers and neighbouring areas which include natural peatland. The culture in Finland respects the rule of law and people are often quite informed and detail oriented about matters of land management. The process exists for a reason and if people try to shortcut it the land should be forfitted although clearly there is so much money involved that it won't be. If they don't send a string message now, it errodes people's trust in the law and society which as said is very important in Finland. It keeps things working well.
It's not the missing assessment itself that makes people frown, it's mainly the skipped bureaucracy by the company, and secondarily the poor enforcement of said bureaucracy by the local administration.
A small minority might be concerned about the trees in the area, but it's not a big topic. Main topics are, again, the bureaucracy and the center's electricity consumption with its effect on consumer electricity bills.
This. Today is this, tomorrow is people doing car turns where it's not allowed, the day after tomorrow there's chaos like in Mexico (my country) because nobody gives a fuck about crap.
I have huge respect for cultures/countries where the rule of law is observed by its citizens just because it is the right thing to do. If other societies were more like that, every thing would be better.
[I visited Finland, Sweden and Denmark some months ago.]
Google - and all the many companies like them - only have themselves to blame for why they lost the benefit of the doubt. Play shitty games, win shitty prizes.
> That sounds ridiculous though, no? Look at how much forest the country has.
The British isles where once covered in forest, too. Then they decided to build a big fleet. Then came the industrial revolution. Now they're down to some 13% of forest...
Yes, Finland might be one of most forested countries in the world (by percentage of land area) now, but history shows that can change quickly if one is not careful about it. Death of a country's forest by a thousand cuts, if you will :)
To an outsider this might sound like an overreaction, but it has to be taken seriously - keep in mind that Finland is one of Europe's premiere locations for grand scale datacentre buildout. Cool climate, lots of available land, politically stable, easy access to cheap and clean power; many very good reasons to assume that this will not be the last datacentre being built there. So yeah, stories like this concern people.
It is absolutely ridiculous that a permitting mishap over a miniscule piece of land is a major story. It speaks more to the media and political environment than anything else
In my world, ignoring the law isn't "a permitting mishap". Or do you also call speeding "an accelerator mishap"?
Google didn't do the environmental impact assessment the law required. Google asked the regulators if they could get a case-by-case decision to not do it. Regulators shot down Google's idea, emphasising how a clearance as large as the one they planned would specifically require it. And Google continued to log for months after this.
Maybe this is just a cultural thing because yes, speed limits are irrelevant in the US. I do not expect people to follow all the laws all the time. Do you not have jaywalking laws?
This project has repeatedly appeared in the national news since 2024, when Google first acquired the land. It's the largest investment ever made in Finland (at least by some metrics), so people are obviously paying attention.
And now it's probably going to be delayed by months or even years. Whatever Google was trying to accomplish, this wasn't a smart way to do it.
Pretty clickbait. No fan of Google, but it sounds like they just jumped the gun slightly on the clearing and it would have been/will be perfectly fine once the permit comes in, which I'm sure it will unless their planning process is totally broken. If you sell Google a great big slice of land to build a DC, I don't think it's very surprising they cut down the trees to build the thing you sold them the land to do.
Finland has something like 20 billion trees and plant tens of millions a year for forestry. The bloody country is nothing but trees. 250k isn't nothing but it's hardly the end of the world.
> If you sell Google a great big slice of land to build a DC, I don't think it's very surprising they cut down the trees
When you own a piece of land containing a forest area there are typically (in most of europe at least) certain rules and regulation as to what you can do and what sort of permissions you need. Eg you may be required to keep some patches of the forest vs just cutting down everything, there can be places you cannot clear the forest completely etc.
Even if google could eventually anyway build some datacenters in that area, it does not mean that they were allowed to do what they did.
But otherwise I agree that this transaction should never have happened in the first place.
I don't get it, what did they expect when they sold a 3x2km area to Google to build a data center?
The space around the town is entirely cultivated land for tens of kms across, hundreds of times the land that they sold to Google- and that land too once had been forest and was felled by the Finns to make space for agriculture. Is anyone outraged about this?
Difference is that most people/companies try to follow laws while doing that.
Also the entity selling the land is ofc not the same as the entity enforcing the law. I assume that everyone was kind of expecting that they would follow the laws.
With 8 billion of them, people are going to have different attitudes than you towards the sanctity of life then you, so while I'm not advocating for killing random people for the fun of it, I'll say that life is cheap when you're in the middle of a war.
The question is, if there was a button that gave you ten million dollars but someone, somewhere, would die, would you press it? It's an abuse of the trolley problem but ask all your friends next time there's a lull in dinner conversation.
Still, I hope that we're r
planting trees elsewhere to make up for the lost of trees in this instance.
This. AI development is absolutely vital for EU national security. With Russian threat in the east, it is high time that Europe stopped putting excessive environmentalism in front of the needed industrial developments.
This building will stick out as a sore thumb, a blind drone operator would hit it in their sleep. It literally does nothing for EU national security, as we’ve seen with how easily Ukraine destroyed Russian datacenters.
Oh and it turns off in a second given orders from the US government.
In case of a large war, data centers (even foreign ones) can be commandeered by the government to train military AI for autonomous drones or combat robots ASAP. This is clearly where the future of warfare is heading.
Protecting it could indeed be an issue, but destruction is not guaranteed. Finland has advanced air defense.
The New York post should basically never be used as a source and this article is a great example of why. It is just obviously not journalism as most people would recognize the concept. Everything they post is ragebait, clickbait or both. They are institutionally allergic to any form of nuance.
I was completly with you till the last moment when you posted... Exactly another of the same type of article.
Can we have a news feed the is parsed and checked again other sources to deliver the highest proportion of base factually unambiguous data, with maybe a tier 2/3 probable analysis/opinions as optional overlays?
Seems doable
Can you provide citations for all you claim? Ground News was founded in 2017 by Canadian siblings Harleen Kaur and Sukh Singh, through the University of Waterloo's startup ecosystem. I cannot find any evidence of what you say about its origin story, and to be honest I think you made it up (or are passing along claims that someone else made up)
Receiving investments from people affiliated with the GOP doesn’t seem itself that bad, unless you are so partisan that you yourself are infected with exactly the thing the site aims to combat. Left wing bias is also toxic in certain media sources and should be avoided unless you don’t actually care about bias and are more interested in an agenda.
Hmmm... normally I would dismiss this type of comment. But such a service really shouldn't have to be funded by anyone, let alone political donors to any party.
Ideal service should be local small model run as a self hosted federated instance, piped data to your terminal of choice. The opinion layer could be pulled from federated comments, the analysis layer from sources based on some sort of trust rating. Variance from unambiguous data for instance. RSS friendly maybe?
If I have nothing better to do later I will try to start writing it maybe.
> I was completly with you till the last moment when you posted... Exactly another of the same type of article.
Heh yeah. Sounded to me like “I agree with everything but realized this is a right wing article and just can’t.. so here’s a left wing rage bait instead”
I said nothing about politics, you are reading your own stuff into it. I linked to the original reporting that every other article is a rewrite of. Sorry that you find it biased.
Calling out the Post and linking to the Guardian is borderline a comedic bit. "That right wing tabloid is totally deranged, instead read something like my left wing tabloid."
It's technically journalism. It's just not good journalism -- it's a tabloid, unapologetically/blatantly biased, sensationalist, and pop culture/gossip heavy.
Their current obsession is Mamdani, and there seems to be nothing about him they won't print, no matter how petty and ridiculous.
> the cool climate makes it especially attractive for saving on energy costs.
How cool climate helps saving energy ? My naive understanding is it helps with cooling which is mostly done by evaporating water. Does they also cool DS by compressing and expanding fluids?
Even orgs like AP or Reuters cannot always be trusted. They do a more reasonable job in most cases, but this just makes it easier for when they do inevitably deploy influence operations bc they can hide behind their credibility.
The article seems to just say, google cleared trees without a permit, it says where they did this and when.
At most maybe the headline implies they did it evily, where it sounds more likely it was beuticratic screw up. But on the whole the article seems to stick to the facts.
First time hearing of number of trees as a measue in forestry. In scandinavia we use hectars (100x100m). There’s also several different m3 measurements (with and without bark), that is used along with timber quality.
Finland has trees in billions. Still google should follow the laws and hand in the right permits.
This wasn't some ancient oak forest, but rather a pine tree plantation that would be cut for timber in a timely rotation of cutting and planting anyway. If you want to build anything in Finland, you first cut the trees. Because trees grow everywhere, and if you leave a place unattended for a little while, it gets reclaimed by the forest.
So no, cutting the trees isn't the topic. The topic is the skipped bureaucracy. Outcome would be the same, but of course you need to follow the steps first.
2. Google starts construction, fails to file paperwork at some level.
3. 1,000's of trees decompose naturally somewhere.
4. Local community upset that Google is building what Government welcomed while allowing tree decomposition to reign unchecked. The horror, the horror.
5. Sea levels rise, 86.5% of humanity is wiped out, and a great famine ensues.
6. Meanwhile, in the State of California, taxpayer funding is squandered on supertrains to nowhere that noone wants, instead of clearing fuel from forests, while the electric company shuts off the electricity, to prevent forest fires.
As much as I dislike big evil corporations, I'm gonna give google a pass on forgetting to hand in their homework this time.
Compared to the State of California, they seem to be doing a good job.
disclaimer: this summary contains at least one forward looking statement :|
A lot of the regulatory footguns European legislators have implemented over the past ~35 years were ideologically driven by progressive US/UK academia and media.
Unfortunately the distance between stupid, self-defeating Anglo-American activism and European legislation is shorter than the distance between that activism and American legislation.
Generally, Europeans would benefit from being as critical of progressive Anglo-American activists, academics, and media as we are of American corporate interests.
The corruption from politicians and the greed of big companies are literally destroying the world. How is it possible that something like this could happen? 250k trees cutted down on Muhos and other 150k on Otanmäki just to build data centers? This is madness, absolute madness.
122 comments
[ 67.4 ms ] story [ 109 ms ] threadFor Google, a fine of ~EUR 5 billion is a rounding error in their cost of doing business.
That's a perfectly normal and environmentally conscious thing to do before laying down concrete foundations. Topsoil is recycled and sold to farms. To leave it in place would pointlessly waste an ecological resource.
According to the Guardian article, which it the source the NY Post used, if those trees were illegally logged, they cannot be sold to wood-processing plants.
Do you know if the law also prohibits the topsoil from being sold to farms?
You can buy a similar sized forest for €50-150K.
https://www.metsatilat.fi/en/osta?property_type=forest&area_...
What the news is about is "environmental impact study".
Or maybe this is a bad measure?
You also forgot that Google owned the trees that they cut down, so they would be compensating themselves.
The debate is about the order in which a contractor pulled permits. It’s silly how much people are obsessing over some trees being cut down. This happens with all development.
183 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50048638
253 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50196837
Journalists used to stick the word "allegedly" in their headlines if that was not the case. It looks like that habit is not in fashion anymore.
"A Finnish contractor working for Google failed to get the correct permits for clearing 1.5sq-mi of man made forest that was rezoned to industrial"
The actual takeaway is how desperate the media is for clicks. They do don't report based on importance, the report based on attention potential.
In other words, a plantation?
Its ridiculous and insane if you think about it for five seconds.
They bring substantial tax revenue to their towns, while having basically zero environmental impact. After the „water usage“ thing becomes old (since they barely use any) apparently they’re going for „chopped trees“, nevermind that land use is very modest and rounds to zero when considering a country’s forrest inventory.
And no, they don’t even drive up electricity bills in any meaningful way.
I don't 100% understand it, but it seems to be driven partially by AI hate, and partially by bad experiences and stories making the rounds, like backup generator exhaust and noise making people nearby angry.
Jussi Kangasharju, head of computer science at the University of Helsinki, said that while datacentres brought a limited number of jobs, potentially boosting the local economy, the benefits on a national level were minimal. “Really, for Finland, there are no benefits,” he said. “They are international companies serving international customers. Very little corporate taxes go to Finland. Datacentres ultimately have very little benefit for others except the datacentre operator.”
>MAGA supporters (46% favor) and Republican men (45%) are the groups most likely to favor data centers, while White women with a college degree (84% oppose) and liberal voters (80%) are the most opposed.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fox-news-poll-cool-your-ser...
Would Fox News have reason to overestimate rightist opposition here?
Until it is not; some companies are actually putting environnemental & employees health issues with sincerity in their contracts. With shared responsibilities.
It was about making an environmental assesment before starting on the clearing.
Which is mandated by law.
Now the environmental impact cannot be assessed.
This is making the entire country quite angry.
Because of the news articles.
> It was about making an environmental assessment before starting on the clearing.
Proof? Because it was already rezoned to industrial from what OP said. Why would it be rezoned if the municipality didn't intend for the trees to be cut and a DC built there?
Basically the law says you need to do the assessment if you're removing the trees permanently from over 200 hectares. The company asked for an exemption, the relevant bureau said nope, they cut anyway.
Yes, generally that's how you make public aware of illegal activity.
Not having news about companies braking laws mean generally that the country is likely quite corrupt.
So I don't know where you are from but in Finland anyone breaking a law is expected to be treated equally.
If an individual had ignored the process to this extent they would be in quite hot water.
A large multinational company avoiding the official process feels unjust and is exactly the thing public has been extremely worried of happening regarding the environmental impact.
So it's not because news inflamed something.
It's because something like this is exactly what the public has been alarmed about for a long time.
Yes, obviously people are only angry about things they know about. This says absolutely nothing about the news articles, as the same thing thing can be said about any event, no matter how justified the anger would be.
An article making people angry doesn't automatically make the article rage- or clickbait.
Around here we think that those who pay money to avoid the law have a spot behind the Sauna. I’m quite sure after the next election, because of these shenanigans, we start taxing these DCs to oblivion.
Yes, my point, the media fosters misinformation and deceit to foster rage all in the name of getting people to view ads.
The logging forest was getting cleared not matter what, and it's microscopic compared to total forested land. So the actual story is a permitting fumble.
And entire country getting outraged over a permitting fumble (a parking ticket level occurnace) is something only institution that lives and dies by hijacking eyeballs could orchestrate.
Remember Finland is the country where we scale fines based on income, as the famous article says "Home of the $103,000 Speeding Ticket."
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland...
Not appropriate for this specific issue, but for "traffic ticket" it's worth remembering.
Boy I sure hope it’s infinity times!
Anyway it seems like you’re incorrect. They actually didn’t have the approval necessary, and no, a zoning approval does not grant all other required forms of approval (obviously).
I find this issue small but the choice of these companies to pick the convenient location for them to build a data center concerning, and govts shouldn't be bending over. If these things can be built in space we can build them in places where no one lives and no living being is harmed or logged.. cough.
Now one can argue whether we should build that many data centers or not. But when one is built, the north is a good choice.
Notably, these kind of hit pieces are almost always about extracting some concession from the targeted organization (Google, in this case).
A small minority might be concerned about the trees in the area, but it's not a big topic. Main topics are, again, the bureaucracy and the center's electricity consumption with its effect on consumer electricity bills.
I have huge respect for cultures/countries where the rule of law is observed by its citizens just because it is the right thing to do. If other societies were more like that, every thing would be better.
[I visited Finland, Sweden and Denmark some months ago.]
We all know It's okay to subcontract evil, like having poor paid workers in Asian countries. The big company is never at fault in such cases /s
The British isles where once covered in forest, too. Then they decided to build a big fleet. Then came the industrial revolution. Now they're down to some 13% of forest...
Yes, Finland might be one of most forested countries in the world (by percentage of land area) now, but history shows that can change quickly if one is not careful about it. Death of a country's forest by a thousand cuts, if you will :)
To an outsider this might sound like an overreaction, but it has to be taken seriously - keep in mind that Finland is one of Europe's premiere locations for grand scale datacentre buildout. Cool climate, lots of available land, politically stable, easy access to cheap and clean power; many very good reasons to assume that this will not be the last datacentre being built there. So yeah, stories like this concern people.
Google didn't do the environmental impact assessment the law required. Google asked the regulators if they could get a case-by-case decision to not do it. Regulators shot down Google's idea, emphasising how a clearance as large as the one they planned would specifically require it. And Google continued to log for months after this.
To be fair, it actually did make the town newspaper and the people who live there actually do have something to say about it.
And now it's probably going to be delayed by months or even years. Whatever Google was trying to accomplish, this wasn't a smart way to do it.
Finland has something like 20 billion trees and plant tens of millions a year for forestry. The bloody country is nothing but trees. 250k isn't nothing but it's hardly the end of the world.
When you own a piece of land containing a forest area there are typically (in most of europe at least) certain rules and regulation as to what you can do and what sort of permissions you need. Eg you may be required to keep some patches of the forest vs just cutting down everything, there can be places you cannot clear the forest completely etc.
Even if google could eventually anyway build some datacenters in that area, it does not mean that they were allowed to do what they did.
But otherwise I agree that this transaction should never have happened in the first place.
The space around the town is entirely cultivated land for tens of kms across, hundreds of times the land that they sold to Google- and that land too once had been forest and was felled by the Finns to make space for agriculture. Is anyone outraged about this?
Also the entity selling the land is ofc not the same as the entity enforcing the law. I assume that everyone was kind of expecting that they would follow the laws.
The question is, if there was a button that gave you ten million dollars but someone, somewhere, would die, would you press it? It's an abuse of the trolley problem but ask all your friends next time there's a lull in dinner conversation.
Still, I hope that we're r planting trees elsewhere to make up for the lost of trees in this instance.
Protecting it could indeed be an issue, but destruction is not guaranteed. Finland has advanced air defense.
Us data center stans need to accept the public's worries and make a more collaborative argument.
Here is the (much, much higher quality) original reporting that this terrible ny post writeup is based on: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2026/...
Or did China spark the fire in western countries to care about this stuff?
Can we have a news feed the is parsed and checked again other sources to deliver the highest proportion of base factually unambiguous data, with maybe a tier 2/3 probable analysis/opinions as optional overlays? Seems doable
Here's their page for this story: https://ground.news/article/google-knocks-down-250-thousand-...
It also links to related coverage, such as the project being cancelled in response to the outrage.
Receiving investments from people affiliated with the GOP doesn’t seem itself that bad, unless you are so partisan that you yourself are infected with exactly the thing the site aims to combat. Left wing bias is also toxic in certain media sources and should be avoided unless you don’t actually care about bias and are more interested in an agenda.
Ideal service should be local small model run as a self hosted federated instance, piped data to your terminal of choice. The opinion layer could be pulled from federated comments, the analysis layer from sources based on some sort of trust rating. Variance from unambiguous data for instance. RSS friendly maybe?
If I have nothing better to do later I will try to start writing it maybe.
Heh yeah. Sounded to me like “I agree with everything but realized this is a right wing article and just can’t.. so here’s a left wing rage bait instead”
Disagree.
Most people would think this is journalism. This is the kind of journalism most people are interacting with in 2026.
Their current obsession is Mamdani, and there seems to be nothing about him they won't print, no matter how petty and ridiculous.
How cool climate helps saving energy ? My naive understanding is it helps with cooling which is mostly done by evaporating water. Does they also cool DS by compressing and expanding fluids?
Also evaporative cooling is not used in most of the world, only in very hot and dry places
Why not news sources that eschew emotional manipulation, like Associated Press or Reuters. They aim for information rather than propaganda.
The article seems to just say, google cleared trees without a permit, it says where they did this and when.
At most maybe the headline implies they did it evily, where it sounds more likely it was beuticratic screw up. But on the whole the article seems to stick to the facts.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2026/...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50048638
Finland has trees in billions. Still google should follow the laws and hand in the right permits.
Also sucks to think that mature trees take a really long time to grow. For example, Oak trees often live 150 - 300 years.
So no, cutting the trees isn't the topic. The topic is the skipped bureaucracy. Outcome would be the same, but of course you need to follow the steps first.
2. Google starts construction, fails to file paperwork at some level.
3. 1,000's of trees decompose naturally somewhere.
4. Local community upset that Google is building what Government welcomed while allowing tree decomposition to reign unchecked. The horror, the horror.
5. Sea levels rise, 86.5% of humanity is wiped out, and a great famine ensues.
6. Meanwhile, in the State of California, taxpayer funding is squandered on supertrains to nowhere that noone wants, instead of clearing fuel from forests, while the electric company shuts off the electricity, to prevent forest fires.
As much as I dislike big evil corporations, I'm gonna give google a pass on forgetting to hand in their homework this time.
Compared to the State of California, they seem to be doing a good job.
disclaimer: this summary contains at least one forward looking statement :|
It's like they don't care about climate change or global warming.
Unfortunately the distance between stupid, self-defeating Anglo-American activism and European legislation is shorter than the distance between that activism and American legislation.
Generally, Europeans would benefit from being as critical of progressive Anglo-American activists, academics, and media as we are of American corporate interests.