131–140 of 176 posts
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You know as well as I do that your server room is not the same as the cut-all-corners AI DCs getting built right now.
You never know, they might have a gas jet turbine in the parking lot blasting away 24/7
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Data centers don’t cause water pollution generally or turn entire towns into industrial zones. There is more than enough room in rural WI towns for industrial and non industrial parts. > No one wants to live near one, especially not doctors and teachers with young families who can choose to live anywhere. Northern Virginia is one of the top locations for the kind of people who “can live anywhere” and is the world cap…
I mean, how do you explain the backlash then if their byproducts don't generally bother people? > Northern Virginia is one of the top locations for the kind of people who “can live anywhere” and is the world capital of data centers. People live in NoVa despite data centers, not because of them. Its proximity to DC makes it intrinsically attractive. Towns in rural nowhere don't have the same innate draw and I don't se…
I think the general populace has pretty irrational political stances. For example in NYC where I live "gentrification is bad because it will raise the rent" is a fairly common stance, despite the cause of high rent being restricted housing supply. There's a popular case of residents being OK with a truck stop but blocking any new housing [1].
Congestion pricing was incredibly unpopular and controversial, despite most New Yorkers not being drivers and the policy being very effective in many other cities. Now it's extremely popular.
There is also just a lot misinformation that goes around, the water aspect being one of them. Data center use something like 1/8th the water of the California Almond industry [2]. There is some limited indications anti data center sentiment is spread by US adversaries [3].
[1]. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/18/nyregion/harlem-truck-dep... [2]. https://tech.yahoo.com/science/articles/data-centers-less-wa... [3]. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-...
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mostly unrelated but amusing: I keep getting fliers from Google fiber trying to get me to switch. Every one has this one bizarre line in it: "our customers have never had their rates go up!"---as if I am too stupid to realize that is not a promise. Now, I have no idea if that works on other people. Maybe enough other people are stupid and don't notice that that's not a promise that turns out to be good ad copy. But I…
You should switch to whatever is cheapest right now. If it gets more expensive, you should switch to whatever is cheapest right then. That's the market price signal that drives the good parts of capitalism.
As it happens they are competing on service quality and goodwill more than price (all will drop the price quite a bit if you ask because it's well over their costs and, bless, they are actually competing on price for once). I know that fiber's service is technically good but I resent Google enough that I will not give them money, all else being equal. Of course if I end up resenting the other providers more, maybe I would.
A good portion of this movement is irrational and driven by viral media. Last week a coworker was talking about how unbearably loud data centers are. I asked them if our parking lot is loud. (There’s a decent sized server floor in our building and a bunch of cooling equipment in the parking lot.) They had never noticed the cooling system. On the other hand, my city gave the local data centers big tax breaks to come h…
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TFA cites "Each project requires thousands of skilled workers during the two to six year construction period (nearly 10,000 in Mount Pleasant)" so maybe it's not totally fiction (at least during build time).
To me that's not sustainable. It just brings in outside workers, distorts the economy in bad way for locals through increased costs, distorts their daily life in a bad way and then it all goes away leaving a void in its wake. Like the olympics.
For data centers you get a medium term boost to the economy + long term tax revenue. The externalities of data centers are quite low if you don’t put them right in someone’s neighborhood.
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This is an example of the same problem as the article; you're treating trust as entirely unrelated to reality. It can get out-of-step, but that's not the only possibility, and it's not the one we're facing here. The problem with conspiracy theories is not that they're based on a lack of trust, but that they're not rational. Sometimes a lack of trust is perfectly rational. Cell towers don't actually fry your brains. S…
>problem with conspiracy theories is not that they're based on a lack of trust, but that they're not rational. Rationality isn't some sort of absolute parameter, it's determined wrt available information. And with information coming from outside it's certainly an issue of trust. FWIW such unconditional claim as "DC will harm your community" is a shiny example of this, as you don't even care to talk about a particular…
The available information is very clear that cellphone towers are not mind control and that the current leaders of the tech world do not have the best interests of people in mind.
We don't need to talk about a particular DC, because that's beside the point: people have very legitimate reasons to oppose them on principle.
The article is interesting, but I think it dances around what should be a central point, only approaching it obliquely. A lot of the opposition to data centers isn't about specific claimed benefits/drawbacks, but the fact that the people behind them are known to be bad actors. > My conversations make me wonder if the technical content of data center deals is mostly beside the point. Closed-loop cooling systems? “I do…
I feel like this is projection. If you look at the list of top brands ranked by a variety of dimensions (trust, innovativeness, brand value, etc.) over the past multiple years, Big Tech companies regularly rank amongst the top 100.
The HN population, being mostly in the tech industry, is aware of all the shenanigans these companies pull and that has colored our views. But the rest of the general population... not so much. I mean, even Meta properties still rank highly despite all the things we know Meta has been doing pretty much since inception.
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Which would be a good argument if the datacenters actually paid any taxes. They shop around for tens to hundreds of millions in tax breaks from officials who believe the lies like "we'll create thousands of jobs!".
TFA cites "Each project requires thousands of skilled workers during the two to six year construction period (nearly 10,000 in Mount Pleasant)" so maybe it's not totally fiction (at least during build time).