51–60 of 148 posts
The rumor is going around on X that foreign enemies of the US (especially China) are trying to influence Americans through social networks against building data centers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least in my part of the US, the datacenters built (and planned) are not running their own gas generators, but are just as hated here as they are most other places due to the other adverse impacts they have.
I don't really think it's about the adverse impacts. That one in utah everybody hated was gonna be built in an empty valley. There would have been no impact to neighbors because there weren't any, and no impact to the grid because they planned to build their own nuclear power plant.
It is in a remote valley. And, it's going to use less groundwater than the previous use of the land. The only things to really complain about are huge amounts of gas consumption and AI bad. If the locals pinned them down to building out solar and mini-nuke power, the only thing left would be AI bad.
If there's one thing Americans can agree on, it's that we don't like building things.
Why should we? Corporations steamroll the public, take their tax breaks and ask for more.
We give tax breaks because we recognize that these things are beneficial to the economy and want to incentivize their construction. Some countries go even farther and directly subsidize development.
Coming from a third world country (emerging/developing for the sensitive souls) .. and having many friends from former Soviet countries, one thing we all seem to agree on is the sheer luxury rich countries have .. it’s like a cancer of prosperity .. where a society becomes so successful that it starts attacking the very things that created its success ..
I think it can't be categorized as NIMBYism because the underlying sentiment is not just no data centers in my backyard, but anyones backyard. It's about the AI project itself, even if it expresses itself differently for a local context.
I’m fine with datacenters being built as long as we have some rules: they have to be quiet enough to not be audible beyond the border of the land owned by the datacenter. They have to pay for new electrical capacity so that they don’t burden locals with that externality. Really, that’s it. I think most people could get behind that.
The rumor is going around on X that foreign enemies of the US (especially China) are trying to influence Americans through social networks against building data centers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why should we? Corporations steamroll the public, take their tax breaks and ask for more.
Because ultimately those things (apartments, high-speed rail, mines, factories, datacenters, etc) exist for the benefit of the public. We give tax breaks because we recognize that these things are beneficial to the economy and want to incentivize their construction. Some countries go even farther and directly subsidize development.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why should we? Corporations steamroll the public, take their tax breaks and ask for more.
Because ultimately those things (apartments, high-speed rail, mines, factories, datacenters, etc) exist for the benefit of the public. We give tax breaks because we recognize that these things are beneficial to the economy and want to incentivize their construction. Some countries go even farther and directly subsidize development.
So many of these things DON'T benefit the public, especially as automation reduces the number of jobs they produce. They mostly benefit the capital holders and they'll take steps to increase their profit even if they hurt the public in the long run.
The rumor is going around on X that foreign enemies of the US (especially China) are trying to influence Americans through social networks against building data centers.
When I see stories about how a hardware startup like SpinLaunch has had to move over and over because no matter where they go, locals flood the town hall meetings to declare their relatively boring technology is too scary, I'm not surprised town halls are being flooded over AI datacenters.
It's sad. For all the lamenting that the US is losing industrial capacity (or lost it long ago), we can't even handle some of the lightest industry possible. A big building that hums and releases slightly warm water, and the only sector in which we could still be called a world leader. Instead of trying to find property tax arrangements that work to give municipalities a big payoff, and power supply arrangements that…
If only the LLM-peddlers didn’t slurp up all tech supplies using VC money leaving regular people scraping up a small fortune for a heavily used DDR3 1GB stick, we wouldn’t be where we are.