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xAI, SpaceX, and the Race for AI Buildout

illegal.solutions

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Re: xAI, SpaceX, and the Race for AI Buildout

#71

Post by elorant »

culi wrote: post #2

> In the latest example of corporations existing outside of the law, SpaceX (who is for some reason the controlling entity of xAI now) announced they'll be removing the illegal, unpermitted gas turbines they've been running at their Memphis Colossus data center... by July 2027. This is the thing the HN crowd doesn't seem to get whenever a post is on here about data centers. They are often times doing outright illegal…

“Move fast and break things”. That was the gospel of Facebook that drove an entire industry and was preached by every entrepreneur in existence. So now that it’s applied on a global scale the things that are broken are society itself. Well we reap what we sow.

Re: xAI, SpaceX, and the Race for AI Buildout

#72

Post by letmevoteplease »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #19
tommica wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, its a valid way to manage ones time, because if you deem the message to not be I the quality you expect, you can just find a better article.

Sure, but you can hardly expect to interact with the world in a rational way if you explicitly decide to ignore it

Look at this statement from the article:

>These racks are needed to keep up with the ballooning requirements of each new "frontier" (a buzzword label with no actual inclination of performance of improvement) model developed, which everyone bought into the AI hype will immediately hop to because it's all novelty over utility.

This is a mind-blowingly clueless assertion. This is not a person capable of rationally assessing facts. At best this kind of writing is interesting as an artifict of human delusion and cognitive bias.

Re: xAI, SpaceX, and the Race for AI Buildout

#73

Post by kg »

deepsun wrote: post #17
culi wrote: post #2

> In the latest example of corporations existing outside of the law, SpaceX (who is for some reason the controlling entity of xAI now) announced they'll be removing the illegal, unpermitted gas turbines they've been running at their Memphis Colossus data center... by July 2027. This is the thing the HN crowd doesn't seem to get whenever a post is on here about data centers. They are often times doing outright illegal…

Yes, and big part of it is public is ok with that. For example, did you protest while Uber was breaking many local laws while growing?

Lots of people did complain or actively take steps to punish them for lawbreaking, yeah?

Re: xAI, SpaceX, and the Race for AI Buildout

#74

Post by jackb4040 »

BeetleB wrote: post #54
jackb4040 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The applications are not tangential, they're an irreplaceable tool the hyperscalers relied on to get us where we are now. Pollution is bad but it's a different story if it's curing cancer vs making nudes of female politicians. This is like the fundamental principle of effective altruism, which everyone in tech industry leadership used to justify their negative externalities on the way up. Now that they're being asked…

> Pollution is bad but it's a different story if it's curing cancer vs making nudes of female politicians. Completely disagree. That sort of reasoning is why plenty of African Americans were forcibly moved from their own properties in the 20th century. "The land will be put to great use!" (And in a lot of cases, it was - still wrong).

(I also disagree, I'm just using it to argue with the guy above claiming it's irrelevant)

Within your metaphor, the person I'm replying to would say "I did nothing to stop the land theft because I found it annoying how people made irrelevant arguments about what the land would be used for". Really calls into question if their real position is what they say it is.

Re: xAI, SpaceX, and the Race for AI Buildout

#75

Post by johnnyanmac »

culi wrote: post #2

> In the latest example of corporations existing outside of the law, SpaceX (who is for some reason the controlling entity of xAI now) announced they'll be removing the illegal, unpermitted gas turbines they've been running at their Memphis Colossus data center... by July 2027. This is the thing the HN crowd doesn't seem to get whenever a post is on here about data centers. They are often times doing outright illegal…

>we simply don't have the mechanisms to punish "white collar crime" the way we punish other crime.

Sure we do. We just don't use those mechanisms because the law doesn't move fast enough. That 7/2027 deadline was probably calculated as being not worth it to pursue legal damages for since court fights work slowly.

Now closing up those "stalling" loopholes... I don't know enough about the justice system to really make a judgement call on that.

Re: xAI, SpaceX, and the Race for AI Buildout

#76

Post by ceejayoz »

efitz wrote: post #63
culi wrote: post #2

> In the latest example of corporations existing outside of the law, SpaceX (who is for some reason the controlling entity of xAI now) announced they'll be removing the illegal, unpermitted gas turbines they've been running at their Memphis Colossus data center... by July 2027. This is the thing the HN crowd doesn't seem to get whenever a post is on here about data centers. They are often times doing outright illegal…

Of course the government has permission to punish crime. However government officials might find themselves in a courtroom having to demonstrate how they applied the law equally, and would be subject to discovery to see if they were being corruptly influenced (there is organization and international funding for the anti-data center movement in the US”; there is very little grassroots opposition other than typical NIM…

> However government officials might find themselves in a courtroom having to demonstrate how they applied the law equally…

I wish I lived in your world.

Re: xAI, SpaceX, and the Race for AI Buildout

#77

Post by palmotea »

efitz wrote: post #63
culi wrote: post #2

> In the latest example of corporations existing outside of the law, SpaceX (who is for some reason the controlling entity of xAI now) announced they'll be removing the illegal, unpermitted gas turbines they've been running at their Memphis Colossus data center... by July 2027. This is the thing the HN crowd doesn't seem to get whenever a post is on here about data centers. They are often times doing outright illegal…

Of course the government has permission to punish crime. However government officials might find themselves in a courtroom having to demonstrate how they applied the law equally, and would be subject to discovery to see if they were being corruptly influenced (there is organization and international funding for the anti-data center movement in the US”; there is very little grassroots opposition other than typical NIM…

> However government officials might find themselves in a courtroom having to demonstrate how they applied the law equally, and would be subject to discovery to see if they were being corruptly influenced (there is organization and international funding for the anti-data center movement in the US”

Bring it on. Data center developers are getting government officials to sign NDAs as an end-run around the democratic process (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...).

And that sounds like pro-datacenter corruption to me, and it's way better documented that the aspersions you're casting.

> there is very little grassroots opposition other than typical NIMBYism you see in all development projects

That's bullshit. About the only thing Americans agree on is that they hate datacenters: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/12/opinion/data-center-ai-de...:

> Americans hate data centers. They really, really hate them.

A Gallup poll from May found that 71 percent of Americans would oppose a data center being built in their area. In rural communities in Utah and North Carolina, regular people are organizing to stop data center construction, speaking out at public hearings and pressuring politicians for bans....

> According to polling by Heatmap News, more than half of all Americans support a national ban on data centers. The public seems to agree that data centers are giant, ugly, noisy, smelly altars to industrial-scale hostile architecture. In our virulently partisan country, this constitutes a rare show of consensus.

Re: xAI, SpaceX, and the Race for AI Buildout

#78

Post by BeetleB »

ibero wrote: post #68
BeetleB wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The things you're calling irrelevant actually flout a number of regulations in various jurisdictions Elon (or Grok) espousing racist views is not flouting data center related regulations. His business practices are.

you don’t think “Creating widespread non-consensual nude images of primarily women and children“ is illegal somewhere/anywhere?

> you don’t think “Creating widespread non-consensual nude images of primarily women and children“ is illegal somewhere/anywhere?

Are you reading any of my comments? I'm having trouble tying your question to anything I've said so far.

Re: xAI, SpaceX, and the Race for AI Buildout

#79

Post by mdasen »

mft_ wrote: post #29

While organisations are only ever hit with affordable financial penalties, it's rational for them to weigh up the likely penalty vs. the opportunity cost of not doing something illegal in their decision-making. If we want to prevent such behaviour (and in case it's not clear from the above, I think we should) then we either need far more brutally punative financial penalties, or for executives to be held personally a…

There's also other options than brutally punitive financial penalties or holding execs personally responsible.

For example, if a data center is illegally running gas turbines, the penalty could be that the data center must be shut down for 3 years and no equipment can be removed from the data center during that time.

With financial penalties, there's always calculus on whether the penalty is high enough to deter the action. But the only reason they'd want to, for example, use illegal power generators at a data center is to run the data center. Losing access to 100% of the value of that data center for 3 years would make the calculus easy: it wouldn't be worth it for the companies. They'd lose the entire reason for doing it and so much of the capital investment in equipment as it depreciated during those 3 years.

With AI companies believing the market is worth trillions, it's hard to imagine a financial penalty high enough to deter illegal actions. It might need to be in the hundreds of billions - a level which they probably can't pay given their current resources and which governments wouldn't levy. Not that they'll essentially confiscate a data center and its hardware for multiple years as a penalty either.

Re: xAI, SpaceX, and the Race for AI Buildout

#80

Post by alex1138 »

pseudosavant wrote: post #57

It's been flagged now. Upset too many Elon bots and fanboys.

Unaccountable flagging is a massive problem here and it's amazing the site doesn't have more protections for astroturfing

Comments that people don't like, which are clearly not just "spam" get flagged all the time. It's ridiculous

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