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Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo

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Re: Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo

#31

Post by paimapi »

kortilla wrote: post #3

[flagged]

my state power commission just passed a plan to build out 9.5 gigawatts of daily production that will be purely generated by gas turbines [1]. this is at the behest of paid lobbyists for the energy sector and commissioners who, according to open records, have received upwards of six figures from the energy company that is granted a monopoly over our energy here [2]

this is after a strong push for clean energy options like a nuclear plant, solar, and wind by, well everyone, even rural communities who don't want the ambient pollution of those gas plants. but given this 'demand' for data centers, that transition to clean energy is all but abandoned. each of those turbines have an estimated lifetime use of 25-30 years [3] so we'll be emitting multiple times the amount of carbon we do today until at least the 2060s and all of it funded predominantly by taxpayers

if you're not a believer in what people now call 'communist' politics such as believing that anthropogenic climate change is real, public health initiatives save lives, and vaccines are effective then I suppose you'd find this all very good and silly

regardless, claiming anti-data center organizing comes from astro-turfing is exactly the opposite of what's happening. if you went to a single hearing or were engaged with your local community politics, you'd see as much

[1](https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/utilities/georgia-power...) [2](https://energyandpolicy.org/georgia-psc-incumbents-majority-...) [3](https://rmi.org/resources/you-might-be-paying-for-a-worthles...)

Re: Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo

#32

Post by sophacles »

kortilla wrote: post #3

[flagged]

Perhaps, just maybe, all the price hikes in electricity, city provided subsidies without any public meetings, and shady dealings (NDAs, encouraging city officials to arrest people commenting against the dcs, and so on) make people wary?

Maybe they remember all the promises during the 90s fiber glut that cost them billions in taxpayer funds and only resulted in thousands and thousands of miles of fiber still unused (and often even lost and forgotten!) to this day, and don't want a repeat?

Maybe they aren't the braindead zombies you propose and are in fact just regular humans not stupid enough to be utterly sucked into the bubble religion so many AI fanatics are babbling in tongues about?

Maybe they look at things like Flock and palantir and other overt fascism and want to stop the evil. Some people aren't masochist freaks and don't want to be forced to participate in the sick little fetish all the AI sycophants try to abuse them with. Could it be that?

Re: Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo

#33

Post by Gigachad »

Avicebron wrote: post #11
kortilla wrote: post #3

[flagged]

DC's are being used as a proxy for power and wealth disparity. Fix that. Have an actual measurable plan for general prosperity (health care, QoL, housing, you name it) and the data centers won't be a concern

Pretty much, disrupting datacenter builds is one of the few ways people can fight back against evil tech billionaires.

Re: Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo

#34

Post by menthe »

Unfortunately - the widespread propaganda seen around both nuclear power plants and datacenters is ultimately going to cost America everything - the American way of life our child’s will inherit is going to mean something very different than what it meant for us.

China controls 90-99% of the rare earths - which are necessary for everything from cars to defense, chips, energy and even construction steel;

China controls 70%+ of critical minerals (99% of galium/magnesium, 85% tungsten, etc, etc).

China owns the world’s manufacturing - with the associated skilled tradesmen (hard to produce anything fully locally - the experts are retired / passed already).

China has abundance of power and energy.

China has got both power, energy, and they’ve got the will.

China has got the best intelligence models today (as of this month) - which means scientific superiority, increased productivity, and military superiority.

What does America have, and what does that mean for our economy in the coming 20-40 years?

The reality is that we are in a new race to intelligence and re-industrialization, but we seem to be anti-everything at this point. Nobody wants to hear it, I know I am going to get downvoted to hell with this, but this is ultimately the new reality, and our eternal debating / 4-years cycles vs. life-long strategies in China, is going to cost America everything.

Re: Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo

#35

Post by sophacles »

dosisking wrote: post #28
mikeweiss wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean.... I don't know about where you live but where I am in the North East, electric prices have near doubled in last few years... the people are blaming AI and data centers for this, I'm sure it's not 100% the culprit but the people are looking for someone to blame and some sense that they can control it. Local zoning and municipal ordinance are one of the few ways small folk can assert power.

I put the blame on AI and data centers. The Powers That Be want the AI surveillance state. Funny how they don't care about the Climate Change agenda anymore, now that they have AI.

Companies will always adopt the stances of the ruling party, its part of the core concept of limited liability ownership. Its one of the primary reasons people hate actual capitalism (by which i mean the thing that actually exists and is called capitalism).

Re: Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo

#36

Post by AppAttestationz »

kortilla wrote: post #3

[flagged]

1. A concern is not invalid merely because something else is worse. 2. Leaping to influence by foreign state is non sequitur. What evidence have you observed for that? How do I know you haven't been sent by the corporate tech elites? 3. Focussing on water strawmans the other arguments against data center imho.

I tend to agree with your sentiment, I think datacenters are getting more shit than they deserve, but there are better arguments to be made.

With patience, love and a bit of humor. X

Re: Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo

#37

Post by phire »

iamdelirium wrote: post #7
fred_is_fred wrote: post #2

What stood out to me was this: "By a 27-5 vote". That number seemed really high, so I looked it up - this isn't a city or a county or some kind of private tax distict - its was the nation's first city-county government. "The Metropolitan Council is the legislative authority of the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County, the nation’s first, fully consolidated city-county government, established in 19…

This isn't true? San Francisco is consolidated in 1856 and according to Wikipedia, a century before Nashville (1963). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco#cite_note-Coy_19... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashville,_Tennessee

I think they are claiming it was the first merger of a multiple cities and a county. Rather than something that was originally created a merged county/city (like San Francisco) or a merger where the city/county boundaries were already identical (like Philadelphia and Philadelphia County)

Which might be true? But it's a really hyper-specific claim that's far less impressive than it first sounds.

Re: Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo

#38

Post by indoorfish »

menthe wrote: post #34

Unfortunately - the widespread propaganda seen around both nuclear power plants and datacenters is ultimately going to cost America everything - the American way of life our child’s will inherit is going to mean something very different than what it meant for us. China controls 90-99% of the rare earths - which are necessary for everything from cars to defense, chips, energy and even construction steel; China control…

It's a religious belief that we're going to invent a machine god and our machine god will fight china's machine god.

Re: Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo

#39

Post by wlesieutre »

userbinator wrote: post #10
kortilla wrote: post #3

[flagged]

There is basically zero truth about the water use propaganda. Liquid cooling is closed-cycle, just like in a car.

Having a closed coolant loop and using evaporative cooling which expends water aren't mutually exclusive. It's possible for a datacenter to manage heat rejection by blowing air over a radiator like a car does, but it's much easier and cheaper to cool by evaporating water.

This can be set up using a closed coolant loop that takes heat out of the servers, then cools back down the coolant by exchanging that heat into a second separate coolant stream. That way you don't need to care as much about the purity of the water you're drawing and evaporating for evaporative cooling, only the first sealed loop gets pumped though your server racks.

This is the type of setup they're talking about with the much discussed xAI datacenter in Memphis, where xAI pinky swears they are definitely going to resume construction on their wastewater treatment plant [1] and use that for cooling instead. It definitely is designed to consume water and evaporate it, not a closed system like a car radiator that puts its waste heat into ≠the air with no evaporation.

[1] https://wreg.com/news/local/xai-to-resume-construction-on-wa...

Re: Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo

#40

Post by ElevenLathe »

mixdup wrote: post #24

I don't know what DC Blox was going to put in this particular datacenter, but they are a "traditional" colocation datacenter company. Maybe this one would've been superdense GPUs with a jet engine as electrical generator causing all kinds of noise, but it's also just as likely this would've been a project that 5 years ago no one would've batted an eye over, and wouldn't cause any issues in the local neighborhood That…

I wonder if this will incentivize pushing compute back toward the user instead of in big centralized facilities, sonething like a repeat of the PC revolution.

Or will it just incentivize harsher treatment of noncompliant parts of the population?

Or just pushing these things far from urban areas where they probably should have been already?

Probably a bit of each, and some more I'm not thinking of.

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