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cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/14304762
Over the course of several months in 2024, TIME spoke to more than 40 people in the Granbury area who reported a medical ailment that they believe is connected to the arrival of the Bitcoin mine: hypertension, heart palpitations, chest pain, vertigo, tinnitus, migraines, panic attacks. At least 10 people went to urgent care or the emergency room with these symptoms. The development of large-scale Bitcoin mines and data centers is quite new, and most of them are housed in extremely remote places. There have been no major medical studies on the impacts of living near one. But there is an increasing body of scientific studies linking prolonged exposure to noise pollution with cardiovascular damage.
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Any statewide legislation is sure to hit significant headwinds, because the very idea of regulation runs contrary to many Texans’ political beliefs. “As constitutional conservatives, they have taken our core values and used that against us,” says Demetra Conrad, a city council member in the nearby town of Glen Rose.
Maybe your core values are really stupid…
“Lack of regulations is supposed to harm only people below us in the capitalism pyramid. But now we realize we’re lower in the pyramid than we thought, so this needs to be stopped via regulation.”
It’s somehow 90 dB, that’d be horrific if I gave a shit about Repubs harming themselves with shitty legislation.
I do feel bad for anyone politically sane subjected to that despite voting otherwise. I wish it was 90 dB at the residences of Rafael Cruz and Ken Paxton instead of them.
“Who could have predicted our unwillingness to make laws against things we don’t want would cause people to do things we don’t want‽”
No, you’re reading it wrong with emphasis on against, while she emphasized the us.
What she calls values aren’t stupid, they’re malicious, but usually targeted at groups she doesn’t like
🙄 Sounds a lot like this classic example where residents complained about headaches, rashes, nausea, tinnitus, etc from a cell tower, only for it to be revealed that it was not powered up:
https://mybroadband.co.za/news/wireless/11099-massive-revelation-in-iburst-tower-battle.html
“Headaches, nausea, tinnitus, dry burning itchy skins, gastric imbalances and totally disrupted sleep patterns…”
At the meeting Van Zyl agreed to turn off the tower with immediate effect to assess whether the health problems described by some of the residents subsided. What Craigavon residents were unaware of is that the tower had already been switched off in early October – six weeks before the November meeting where residents confirmed the continued ailments they experienced.
It could be but also datacenters are ridiculously loud and the sound is very high pitched. Would drive anyone nuts if they could hear it.
On the inside, yeah maybe; but a properly designed data center shouldn’t be louder than any typical building on the outside. But hey, this is in a rural Texas town, so I won’t be surprised if the building is not up to code.
“Properly” and “should” are doing a lot of work here.
Huh? That makes no sense. High pitched sounds are attenuated VERY easily and the only sound you could ever hear outside the dozen or so I’ve worked in/around you could only hear the HVAC gear outside. There’s a reason why when you go see a concert outside there’s a linear array of horns facing the audience while the subs are under the stage.
I agree. So if people are hearing it and demonstrating it with decibel readers then there’s probably little to no sound dampening.
They are deafening but usually they are very well insulated seeing as keeping servers cool is very expensive and extremely important.
'[The Constable measures the sound level at 91dB, the max that his decibel metre can record]
This level of noise, the CDC writes, can cause hearing damage after two hours of exposure. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration advises that employees can only work in 90-decibel settings for eight hours a day and are required to wear ear protection. And Texas state penal code deems any noise above 85 decibels unreasonable. Over the course of 2024, [the Constable] has recorded a noise above 85 decibels coming from the plant more than 35 times. "
Whilst the health concerns reported are the thing that would make these complaints more serious (if true), this level of noise is also just insanely high from a nuisance perspective, even if the health problems of the town are unrelated.
Happened outside Paris too.
I’m no bitcoin mining apologist for sure but this is just crap journalism. There’s a story like this for all kinds of industries in small towns with poor health. There are lots of industries that noise pollute (a lot of people live near airports) and I’m all for reasonable regulations to limit noise pollution, but this has boogeyman tinfoil hat nonsense all over it.
Yeah while I don’t doubt that noise pollution can affect one’s health I have to wonder how much of this is just the placebo effect, like with people complaining that cellphone towers are giving them migranes or rashes.
You’re thinking of the nocebo effect. Placebo is positive. Nocebo is negative.
Ok, but that’s a drum that is you are going to wear thin beating.
What, why? I’ve never heard anyone call a negative effect a placebo effect before in my life, and the people I’ve told about the nocebo effect have all been just as glad as me that we finally have a word to describe the opposite of placebo.
I lived next to a cell phone tower and I can tell you it certainly shriveled up my penis, so there’s that. If Time wants to run an article about it I’d be happy to talk to them or show them pictures or let them talk to people on my tindr about it. I’m sure it’s happened to a lot of people.
‘Why are these journalists bringing light to problems that basically harm everybody?’ is quite a fucking take.
nice to see bitcoin is following the traditions set by coal
can you imagine those losers that downvoted you? Probably have their investments in Bitcoin and will forever be hopeful that they are going to be rich one day
Well, if you manage to retrieve my old phone I accidentally dropped off a sailboat into the Chesapeake Bay in 2013 and somehow retrieve the flash chip’s contents, you can be semi-rich. There’s no password on the wallet. And I made no backups. I’m poor now due to my own stupidity.
Size: 4,480 square miles
Max depth: 174′
I’ll admit I’m tempted.
My friends and I would bullshit with the coin when they first started and they only cost a few cents each. Then one of us started collecting all of them. IDK what happened to that guy, he stopped coming around. But we figured he had at least 20 or 30 coins from us. He had gambling issues so I don’t think he ever saw the big payout but I always remember goofing off and giving someone a coin that’s worth thousands now.
A question that comes to mind: Is there a power plant nearby that’s been running at a higher level since the Bitcoin mine settled there? The issue might not be just noise pollution.
“Technically there is federal mandate to regulate noise, which stems from the 1972 Noise Control Act—but it was essentially de-funded during the Reagan administration.”
Of course it was. It’s always fucking Reagan (or Thatcher)
In other news, 40 out of 11,000 people have medical issues that most Americans already have.
I think i got the black lung pop
Mer-man!
All for something so speculative and stupid that has no tangible benefit to society as a whole.
You mean like stock markets?
Decentralized finance could save the planet a massive amount of grift and wasted resources.
How? Corporations would still (and are) involved. Please detail.
Burning nation-state kinds of energy to handle zero percent of global transactions is not less wasteful.
Like almost any other thing being done massively by humans currently .
I wonder when the locals will start sabotaging that facility if they have no remedy with the law
It’s crazy they could find so many video cards that are fireproof.
oh hey, granbury, i used to live there!
Whoa… pretty horrible.
Another wonderful result from the fake currency designed for criminal activity
What makes a currency “real”?
Not being endorsed by Andrew Tate
There’s one two guarantees in life: Death and taxes. Real currencies are the ones you can use to pay the latter.
If you live in El Salvador you can pay your taxes in bitcoin… that makes it a “real currency” according to your test.
Won’t last for long because deflation is built into bitcoin and every sane state matches monetary supply to economical output to keep prices stable. El Salvador isn’t doing that anyway, though, otherwise using USD, or getting many tax payments in bitcoin, the thing being about as liquid as asphalt, so it doesn’t really change much.
The root cause issue could be power plants used to supply energy to the datacenters running the computers (there are many things a power plant can do to harm its environment), or if we consider electromagnetic hypersensitivity not being a pseudoscientific term but an actual thing; electromagnetic waves coming from all the computers at the same time in a concentrated space could have triggered this whole ordeal.
I can’t really think of any other possibilities, and I highly believe first one is the case.
Edit: appearently if was noise whoops
Yeah but how is this any different than living next to ANY data center? Bitcoin mining is just racks of servers doing what servers do- sucking power, venting heat. A GPU farm for ai training or an AWS data center wouldn’t be any different, and this isn’t being widely reported as an issue. I wonder how the leap from chest pain to “it’s the bitcoins!!” happened.
Edit: ok I’d be mad too if there was some screaming loud fans next to my house 24/7 too, sounds like that’s the real issue.
Data centers are normally built with good security, and solid walls that keeps the roar of the fans inside. It seems like this mining outfit took the cheap road, and just set up shipping containers with servers inside them instead of building an actual building.
Still, these people shouldn’t be mad at the bitcoiners, they should be mad at the state laws that allow these machines to be as loud as they are with no real penalty. Maybe they should write their State Legislature and tell them the bitcoin mines are killing innocent child processes in broad daylight, since abortion is all they seem to care about.
But a child process is already a child, not an unborn fetus. So they don’t care.
Didn’t you listen to the other old man in the debate? Liberals advocate for termination of child processes even after they have spawned!
They should be mad at both?
But this has nothing to do with bitcoin, other than the pop-up datacenter’s purpose is to mine it. They could have popped up a datacenter for any other purpose, and it would have the same issues.
OTOH, the State can solve this today, either by instituting regulations or allowing the county to. Heck, just putting walls and a ceiling around the thing will help. But the mining outfit, like any good Capitalist, will not spend a dime unless it is forced to, and this state thinks regulations are a tool of the devil herself.
I think it’s fair to be mad at the data center. Whether that nuisance is legal or not, and the lawmakers as well
Normal datacenters aren’t constructed out if metal shipping containers with external fans blowing through them. Most just look like big warehouses and don’t emit 90db of noise (between a lawnmower and a chainsaw as noted in the article).
I wonder how the leap from chest pain to “it’s the bitcoins!!” happened.
CryptoFUD or clickbait or both.
Constant exposure to loud sounds can absolutely lead to other health conditions.
Didn’t claim otherwise, but the title is clear clickbait. It’s a matter of a crap “datacenter” regardless of the data being processed. Could be AI of your tax returns, it just so happens to be cryptocurrency so let’s put that in the title.
Well there is not really any reason to speculate if you read the article. They say it’s the sound. It reaches 90 decibels right outside of people’s homes. Some people are literally losing their hearing, and doctors in the article say that exposure to loud sounds can cause all of these heart issues.
90 decibels right outside of people’s homes
This is torture. No wonder people get sick and die every day there.
Don’t they have any laws to protect people’s homes?
The article says that in Texas, only a city government can enact an enforceable noise ordinance. Since this thing is nowhere near any city, all the local sheriff can do is write tickets, he can’t force them to turn it off.
OK but noise ordinances are just a small detail here!
This “mine” makes people suffer physical and psychological damage every minute of every day. Imagine a machine gun rattling day and night into all directions, eventually killing some people accidentially…
Police should therefore shut this thing down immediately without any questions. And then they can ask all questions and discuss all details afterwards.
No, noise ordinances are the entire point, because the excessive noise is the only thing that can be causing these problems in the community. There are thousands of data centers all over the world, with fans running 24/7, and staff on hand 24/7 to tend to them. They don’t cause these problems in the community, but they also have actual walls. And I bet their employers mandate good hearing protection so their staff doesn’t have these problems.
There is no statute local police can use to shut it down, because Texans love their freedom so much, and elect freedom-loving politicians who abhor any regulations at all. Maybe if they paint the trailers black, the cops will think they are a threat and shoot them or something.
There is no statute local police can use to shut it down, because Texans love their freedom so much
When lives are in immediate danger, police must act immediately. Isn’t that a general principle, independent of small details?
What you are saying comes down to “murder is allowed unless there is a specific law against your specific method of murdering” and this appears still quite unbelievable to me.
