Data centers contain 90% crap data

sudo rm -rf /data

I’m imagining Data from Star Trek being deleted…
Captain, this is most illogical.

That depends on the problem.

I disagree w/ the author that storing blurry cat memes is what's "destroying our environment." Transportation is our biggest net polluter in terms of CO2, which is higher than all electrical generation combined. If we're want to solve CO2 emissions, we have to solve transportation, since that's the 500 pound gorilla in the room.

If we look specifically at datacenters, storage makes up a tiny fraction of the overall energy use. That article mentions that datacenters probably have a similar CO2 footprint as the aviation industry, which makes up about 2.5% of the world's carbon emissions, or about 10% of the total transportation emissions from the above link.

If the goal is to fix climate change, data centers are pretty far down the list in terms of priorities. Higher priorities are, roughly in this order:

ground transportation - electrify or switch to something like hydrogen
electrical power generation - this will directly reduce the impact of data centers, be part of 1, and solve a number of other issues
residential heating - switch from fossil fuels to heat pumps for heating, which should be a relatively "drop-in" replacement and could save customers money
industry - largely solved by 2, but there may need to be some shifts in certain types of production processes to reduce emissions

Changing anything about data centers is way down the list of priorities, and it'll be largely solved by something much higher up. So it's really the wrong target to attack.

You forget the production and disposal stage of datacenters which are the biggest polluters.
- Sure, but how does that compare to all the plastic crap people buy? Or electronic waste from consumer goods? Businesses keeping offices open when WFH is a thing?
  I haven't looked up the supply chain stats here, but I imagine it's also relatively small potatoes when compared to other 500 pound gorillas in the room.
  We should certainly deal with it, but it should be much lower priority than the larger sources of pollution.
- How is that different from producing and disposing a modern car? Those things are essentially large computers with wheels and a combustion engine

Solutions?

Carbon tax.

In this micro example, imagine if you could access all of your data for free when there as abundant sunshine (carbon free), or had to pay for carbon based energy at night. You'd start to sort your data for what you really wanted so that you'd only be paying a small amount for a small amount of data.

I don't see one unless our society because less dependent on bullshit and honors privacy. I don't know about anyone else but I constantly bullshit specifics about myself on line to dirty up any data collected on me.

charge more to customers for long term data storage. allow short-term for free.

How do you differentiate old from new? I can just create a fresh copy of whatever I'm storing and it'll look new.
- It doesn't matter, strict enforcement is not the point. we're talking about reducing "crap data" which is data people don't care about long-term. If you care enough about the data to copy it manually more power to you. If you don't care that much, you'll let it get purged, whch is the goal.
- If the files are exact copies, then MD5 checks will catch them; tweaking so many files just to bypass this could prove to be too tedious of a process for people to bother exploiting it.
  However, people could create scripts for others to mass-download, -edit, and -upload their files accordingly to reduce this tedium.
  
  then MD5 checks will catch them
  That can be trivially defeated.
  
  I know; I just gave an example of how immediately after in the same comment lol.

We fully transition to clean energy like nuclear and build more power plants to allow us to store our online stuff.

The author of this article is not a serious person. He's in the same bucket as Greta Thunberg. They just like to scream and blame people instead of providing practical solutions. It's frankly tiring to hear them despite their honorable intentions.

Thunberg's solution has always been "listen to the experts who have been screaming at you for 50 years." You don't have to be an expert to care about things or to want to listen to people who are experts.
- "listen to the experts who have been screaming at you for 50 years."
  That would be fine provided that it's done correctly and civilized. Which is my point. Raising awarness is fine.Throwing insults loudly left and right to raise awareness is not. It only makes you seem delusional and sheds a bad light on your cause. This allows climate change deniers to take advantage of that to further their agenda.
  
  People have tried to politely call attention to the climate crisis for decades. They were ignored. Sometimes, you have to be chaotic to get noticed. See also: Stonewall, the Black Panthers.
  
  That would be fine provided that it’s done correctly and civilized.
  Tone-policing is never a good look. If you're opposed to something, just admit it.
He’s in the same bucket as Greta Thunberg. They just like to scream and blame people instead of providing practical solutions.
Greta Thunberg is 22 years old right now, and was "screaming" and "blaming people" when she was 11 years old.
She saw the world she was going to inherit and forced conversation to work toward solutions. Expecting an 11 year old to provide answers that none of the established world has is silly.
- Greta Thunberg is 22 years old right now, and was "screaming" and "blaming people" when she was 11 years old.
  Expecting an 11 year old to provide answers that none of the established world has is silly.
  Fully agreed.
  She saw the world she was going to inherit and forced conversation to work toward solutions
  I disagree. I saw her speak and the reactions to some of her speeches. Her inflamatory and derogatory speeches did nothing more than help opponents of the energy transition. To give you an example, when asked about it during an interview Putin jumped at the opportunity to discredit the energy transition. While the public saw Greta behaving like a petulant child during the speech, they then saw Putin speaking calmy, asking real questions like "How are poor nations going to transition when they need cheap fossils to sustain themselves?". They then take this bit and plaster it on every social media site. People see it and are inclined to take Putin's side since he appears more knowledgeable and in control of himself. And just like that he gets a boost in his reputation.
  This is why I don't like activists like her and the author of this article. They do more harm than good by expressing themselves in such a violent manner.
  
  Wait, you think Putin has credibility when speaking on climate change? To quote the late Sen. John McCain describing Russia as “a gas station masquerading as a country”. Putin's life and livelihood depend on continued world's unchecked consumption of fossil fuels. Putin has zero credibility on the subject. Why would anyone consider him an objective source?
  While the public saw Greta behaving like a petulant child during the speech
  You and I must have seen different speeches. Part of Thunberg's appeal was her eloquence in speech especially speaking truth to power. Here's part of 16 year old Greta Thunberg's speech in the UN:
  "The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees [Celsius], and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.
  "Fifty percent may be acceptable to you. But those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of equity and climate justice. They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist.
  "So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us — we who have to live with the consequences."
  source
  I can't imagine a world where you're calling that "petulant". At 16 years old she had more poise and gravitas than many of the world leaders she was speaking to. You say she hasn't done anything. I beg to differ. Further, if what she has done is nothing, it raises the obvious question: what have you done to avert climate catastrophe?
  
  Wait, you think Putin has credibility when speaking on climate change?
  I never said that. I said that to the general public he may appear as more credible based on his behavior when adressing the issue compared to Greta which would undermine environmental efforts. This is what I'm concerned about.
  I can't imagine a world where you're calling that "petulant". At 16 years old she had more poise and gravitas than many of the world leaders she was speaking to. You say she hasn't done anything. I beg to differ. Further, if what she has done is nothing, it raises the obvious question: what have you done to avert climate catastrophe?
  Ok, usually I welcome debates, but I can see that you were very angry when you wrote this so I think it's better that we stop here. Before finishing off, I would like to clarify one more time that I'm not a climate change denier. I just don't like the way Greta and others like her operate since it's my belief that their aggressiveness undermines the movement and increases the risk of turning people into reactionaries. That's my opinion. I'm entitled to it just as much as you're entitled to your own.
  
  I can see that you were very angry when you wrote this
  I'm not angry. I'm shocked at your position though. I see your position as dismissive of someone who is actually doing something about the crisis she will inherit with the tiny fractional power she had before adulthood. She, and her generation, have no time for a timid approach. We're going to be long dead and she'll still be here trying to live through the mess we, and our parents, have cause her and everyone else her age.
  so I think it’s better that we stop here.
  Thats fine. I don't see a path to anything that would yield productive conversation from here.

Massive deduplication across all accounts on all servers of image, audio, and video data would theoretically be possible, but ain't gonna happen. Or we could just discourage people from posting cat videos and bad memes (even less likely to happen).

I would argue that duplication of content is a feature, not a bug. It adds resilience, and is explicitly built into systems like CDNs, git, and blockchain (yes I know, blockchains suck at being useful, but nevertheless the point is that duplication of data is intentional and serves a purpose).
- If the data has value, then yes, duplication is a good thing up to a point. The thesis is that only 10% of the data has value, though, and therefore duplicating the other 90% is a waste of resources.
  The real problem is figuring out which 10% of the data has value, which may be more obvious in some cases than others.
- explicitly built into systems like CDNs, git, and blockchain
  Git only duplicates blobs; textual content is generally stored as deltas (look at git_repack for more details). And it's bad practice to version-control blobs: the more correct approach is to control the source from which the blob is generated.
  CDNs don't all work alike so it's impossible to generalize. I won't comment on blockchain, since in my work as a developer and architect, I've never encountered a valid use case for it.
  
  You're missing the forest for the tree here.
  Given identical client setups, two clones of a git repo are identical. That's duplication, and it's an intentional feature to allow concurrent development.
  A CDN works by replicating content in various locations. Anycast is then used to deliver the content from any one of those locations, which couldn't be done reliably without content duplication.
  Blockchains work by checking new blocks against previous blocks. In order to fully guarantee the validity of a block you need to guarantee every block, going back to the beginning of the chain. This is why each root node on a chain needs a full local copy of it. Duplication.
  My point is that we have a lot of processes that rely on full or partial duplication of data, for several purposes: concurrency, faster content delivery, verification, etc. Duplicated data is a feature, not a bug.
- Technically git is a blockchain
Deduplication is trivial when applied at the block level, as long as the data is not encrypted, or is encrypted at rest by the storage system.
- If the storage all belongs to one machine, yes. If it's spread across multiple machines with similar setups that share a LAN, then you need to put in a little thought to make sure that there's only one copy for all machines, but it's still doable.
  In this case, we're talking millions of machines with different owners, OSs, network security setups, etc. that are only connected across the Internet. The logistics are enough to make a hardened sysadmin blanch.