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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

#441

Post by WarmWash »

mibsl wrote: post #432
WarmWash wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporations are the money engines of the government. I don't know of any other way the government makes money other than riding on the back of corporations. So yes, from the governments POV, using eminent domain to make corporations richer also has the direct effect of making the government richer. Just think about it a little bit.

Over 80% of the federal government's revenue comes from individuals (income tax, payroll tax). On the other hand, I guess the vast majority of politician incomes come from corporations.

And where does that income tax/payroll tax money come from?

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

#442

Post by otterley »

sophacles wrote: post #423
otterley wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dismissing them all as a single unified group of people opposed to all change is a disgusting contempt for everyone who disagrees with your comfort no matter what it may cost them personally. That may be your personal interpretation of it, but it's not my intent. > We've seen thousands and thousands of jobs cut and people laid off for AI. Those people are bearing the cost of your personal desire for a little bit of…

You're moving the goal posts and your true nature is leaking. You get to decide what too much suffering is for others, because you won't have to face any of it and monstrously will continue to refuse to care about how your chasing a shiny toy hurts other people. Losing a job due to AI is suffering, it causes hardship and stress. 1. Oracle, Block, Ford, Cloudflare, Salesforce and others' CEOs have explicitly stated th…

When I look at issues like this, I balance benefits against costs, like any reasonable person should, and I try to do so as neutrally as I can.

Using emotionally-charged verbiage like "chasing a shiny toy" and "deplorable" isn't helping your case and makes you sound frankly unhinged. There are substantive, realizable benefits from using AI. Over the past few days alone, it has played a significant role in helping me both identify and fix a thorny issue in a major open source project that 1/will see a fix soon that every user will benefit from and 2/will unblock a major initiative at my company. It has also greatly assisted me in my personal and professional life in other ways, like improving my communications (directionally, modulo AI slop that's still a problem), planning vacations with my family, and doing home improvement projects and my hobbies.

> Oracle, Block, Ford, Cloudflare, Salesforce and others' CEOs have explicitly stated that they did layoffs because of AI

They've said so, which I fully admit, but I don't believe them. AI is a convenient pretext that makes their investors happy, and it's a preferable excuse to some audiences over admitting they hired the wrong people or embarked on the wrong initiatives. Where AI taketh, it also giveth: there are new jobs, too. Competent SREs and service architects, at least, are busier than ever.

> the jobless rate is growing and job growth is low or negative the last year or so

How much of that is attributable to AI? How do you know?

> I'm trying to prevent the bad, not just "the worst"

You can't always prevent the bad. Every technological development has caused some jobs to be lost or some people to be inconvenienced or displaced, from the Industrial Revolution to "computers" (who were once human beings). When there is unquestionable value in these changes, they're simply unstoppable, and society is unquestionably better off as a whole. Perhaps not immediately, but in the long term.

Yes, this sometimes puts a toll on the individual. We should support them when this happens via a social safety net. But we shouldn't try to halt progress instead. It's like trying to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

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

#443

Post by ryathal »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #326
e40 wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Datacenter is like the cleanest and most ecofriendly business you can imagine. Tell that to the residents of Memphis.

As I understand, initially , the power production was done on-site using gas turbines. Later, these were moved to Mississippi and a high voltage powerline connected the two sites. After this change, why is the Memphis data center not clean and ecofriendly for residents of Memphis?

Later is just as likely to never happen, as happen. Billionaires have promised all sorts of things to get tax breaks for the things they want and never followed through with the parts that benefited others.

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

#444

Post by esseph »

mjhay wrote: post #336
esseph wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These AI data centers shouldn't need backup power at all. They could be training a model or two for months.

They’re assuredly checkpointing, which is SOP for any long training. Lots of things can go wrong besides power loss.

If yout backup power is unreliable it could slow down your model release by days or weeks.

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

#445

Post by Henchman21 »

tptacek wrote: post #78
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…

The funny thing about data center concerns in Chicagoland, where I'm hearing it, is that data centers are better neighbors than almost any other commercial real estate. The data centers in Aurora are surrounded with prairie green space; everything else, including the nicest office buildings, are a sea of eyesore asphalt parking lots. I get there can be real concerns, locally-specific, about energy usage (again: they…

Where in Aurora? I’m at the CME DC daily, and I am not aware of any prairie green spaces that aren’t being actively developed. In fact the area between Bilter and Butterfield Rds are so active it’s changing my commute time to the DC — making my 10 minute ride often more than 30. So as someone who visits Aurora data centers daily I’m not seeing it.

The point you’re making seems to be of “lesser of two evils” variety, aka DCs are less evil than strip malls. Debatable, but the lesser of two evils is still fucking evil.

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

#446

Post by lovich »

bruce511 wrote: post #323
lovich wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The noise is all high-frequency which means most anything will stop it. Frankly building an earth berm around the site would kill all the noise and make it better to look at. Throw in some trees and you're done. Have any of these data centers done this? All the ones I’ve seen haven’t even put up a sound baffling wall. If a data center’s owner has taken steps to ameliorate or completely prevent their negative extern…

The developer (likely) won't do it in isolation. But the point of building permits, and building regs and so on is to create requirements that let the development live in harmony with the community. If local govt is not stipulating the requirements then that's on them. People don't need to be "against data centers" they need to be "for no noise" and so on.

> The developer (likely) won't do it in isolation.

Do you not see how people might be angry at someone who dumps their problems onto your doorstep unless the government forces them not to?

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

#447

Post by itsmek »

hinkley wrote: post #439
itsmek wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walmarts have more stormwater runoff than Costcos?

I think you can do better than a whataboutism. First, Costco has some of the best employee treatment in the industry. Second, we are talking about blocking unwanted neighbors based on anything that will stick. We shouldn't have regulatory capture of socializing the liabilities and privatizing the profits, but we do and we have. Any resistance at all is by definition going to be a matter of coming at the problem sidew…

I'm just addressing the text of your comment of incredulity at Walmart's building footprint. The tone of this one is different so I'll accept that as concession.

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

#448

Post by ThrowawayTestr »

haunter wrote: post #205

Same city: >The 60,000-seat stadium is projected to cost $2.1 billion, including $1.26 billion of public money—the largest stadium subsidy in U.S. history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Stadium_(2027)

Stadiums actually provide utility to the local community

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

#449

Post by nozzlegear »

tptacek wrote: post #167
ashleyn wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reputation of datacenters precludes them due to some high-profile abuses of locals, as well as cities overcommitting brittle and unprepared infrastructure to them. Consumer energy prices in 13+ states hiked because the grid was unable to meet the sudden demand. SpaceX's datacenter in Memphis used gas turbines to rapidly deploy Colossus before the grid could be upgraded, which resulted in an increase in local air…

The infrastructure thing I get! The water thing is, I think, baloney, but depending on where you are there's energy generation concerns. Seems totally reasonable to me for local political bodies to demand that new data center projects account for what they'll do to the local power grid, and, obviously, running jet turbine gas generators is not a reasonable answer to those concerns. What frustrates me about the new po…

> What frustrates me about the new political valence of data centers is that there are reasons to be optimistic about data centers in blue states, which could move the market towards renewables and grid modernization

Companies often want to put data centers in the rural parts of blue states (like the southwest of Minnesota, where I live), where the locals are much more red and skeptical, if not outright hostile, toward renewables.

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

#450

Post by polski-g »

betaby wrote: post #356
ericcumbee wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Property Tax revenue, and they are not a drain on services like schools, roads, fire department, police department etc. I'm watching this debate in a town that i am from and where I live. Our choices are pretty much be swallowed up by growth from neighboring cities and become a bed room community or solar farms and data centers. The downside with becoming a bedroom community is you risk creating a negative tax base.…

> Property Tax revenue Property Tax revenue is surprisingly tiny from data centers in Quebec. Some how DCs have low assessment for the building, like way lower then their resale value even. > they are not a drain on services like schools, roads, fire department, police department etc. Police - definitely not. Roads on other hand, DCs are hauling new equipment / decommissioned equipment daily. I'm in fact in favor of…

Then change how property is calculated? Virginia taxes business-owned property based on the land and the contents within.
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