Americans Have Grown Dramatically Anti-Data Center
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Re: Americans Have Grown Dramatically Anti-Data Center
#2It seems like there’s very little upside to allowing one in your state. They don’t bring in large amounts of new jobs once construction is done, they leech power and water like vampires increasing costs and depleting resources, they add noise and light pollution to nearby areas, they’re ugly. They only seem to benefit large tech companies.
Re: Americans Have Grown Dramatically Anti-Data Center
#3Yet they still love ordering from Amazon.
Re: Americans Have Grown Dramatically Anti-Data Center
#4Media: "X is horrible!"
Media: "Americans Don't Like X"
Re: Americans Have Grown Dramatically Anti-Data Center
#5Yet they still love ordering from Amazon.
Amazon seemed to work just fine before this AI datacenter boom
Re: Americans Have Grown Dramatically Anti-Data Center
#6It seems like there’s very little upside to allowing one in your state. They don’t bring in large amounts of new jobs once construction is done, they leech power and water like vampires increasing costs and depleting resources, they add noise and light pollution to nearby areas, they’re ugly. They only seem to benefit large tech companies.
The US has been dragging its feet in increasing power capacity and modernizing the grid. Data Centers (and one day EVs) are the kind of push we need to get the complacent monopolies to do the work.
The water concerns are absolutely overblown, the paper that everyone draws their numbers from had to be ammended because they had a 1000x water usage error.
When a poor town has an empty lot get converted to a data center, they are getting some jobs. 20 jobs of remote hands, plumbers, and security guards is better than zero. And there is increased tax revenue (this point I disagree with, because property tax is wrong and we need a land value tax).
Long term these changes are good.
Re: Americans Have Grown Dramatically Anti-Data Center
#7It seems like there’s very little upside to allowing one in your state. They don’t bring in large amounts of new jobs once construction is done, they leech power and water like vampires increasing costs and depleting resources, they add noise and light pollution to nearby areas, they’re ugly. They only seem to benefit large tech companies.
The US has been dragging its feet in increasing power capacity and modernizing the grid. Data Centers (and one day EVs) are the kind of push we need to get the complacent monopolies to do the work. The water concerns are absolutely overblown, the paper that everyone draws their numbers from had to be ammended because they had a 1000x water usage error. When a poor town has an empty lot get converted to a data center,…
I’m not against data centers, but they need to come with their own clean power supply, and export minimal pollution to its neighbors .
If you can’t provide that it’s not worth the downsides for the community.
Re: Americans Have Grown Dramatically Anti-Data Center
#8It seems like there’s very little upside to allowing one in your state. They don’t bring in large amounts of new jobs once construction is done, they leech power and water like vampires increasing costs and depleting resources, they add noise and light pollution to nearby areas, they’re ugly. They only seem to benefit large tech companies.
I agree with this, and it really exposes how two faced and scandalous these companies are.
They all love green energy, but will they use that for their data centers in your backyard?
Rules for the and not for me !
Re: Americans Have Grown Dramatically Anti-Data Center
#9I have several friends who used to lament the loss of manufacturing jobs as a ticket to the middle class, but now say they're going to protest a proposed data center, which feels a bit ironic. None really link it to AI's social impact like Gizmodo does here, the argument always starts with "I don't understand what they need a data center for" (often genuinely wanting me to explain it since I work with computers) and then goes into noise, water use, or loss of farmland. I'd probably not want to live near the noise pollution of a data center or any other kind of noisy industry either, so their views aren't incomprehensible or anything (though the farmland one makes zero sense to me), but it does seem like an instance of the revealed preference that many Americans are just deeply skeptical of anything more intensive than an Amazon warehouse going on in their area, even if they enjoy a fantasy version of the country where (usually other) people have a nice union job in a widget factory. It's good to remember when political extremists try to claim there's some easy fix that will make America an industrial powerhouse again; in reality, most of us don't want anything close to that.
Re: Americans Have Grown Dramatically Anti-Data Center
#10I have several friends who used to lament the loss of manufacturing jobs as a ticket to the middle class, but now say they're going to protest a proposed data center, which feels a bit ironic. None really link it to AI's social impact like Gizmodo does here, the argument always starts with "I don't understand what they need a data center for" (often genuinely wanting me to explain it since I work with computers) and…
Datacenters don't create jobs and drain local resources.
It takes a couple dozen people to fully staff a datacenter. That's literally a rounding error in employment statistics.
Framing it as an argument against American manufacturing or jobs is complete nonsense.