Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)

> Lumping together anti-data-center sentiment with anti-development sentiment in general is bullshit. Yes, there are certainly impossible to negotiate with NIMBYs who don't like apartment buildings because they cast shadows on a sidewalk corner or something. That has nothing to do with this.

I mean, you just did it yourself. You made a great point by doing so.

It's generally the same people. Your rants pretty much prove it. Plus I've been in meetings where it's literally the same people. They will use any and all reasons to stop local development and then stick with the one that gets the most popular traction.

I'm not talking about folks against residential development. I'm talking being around projects and in local meetings about industrial development - primarily electric generation and transmission. The arguments are pretty much the same.

> The people who want these data centers are telling us that the reason that they want them is to keep momentum on their plans to destroy our entire way of life.

AI is now taking rural blue collar jobs? I find it very difficult to believe this is a real grass roots concern.

I find it very easy to believe white collar folks are using their relative positions of power to amp up concerns rural blue collar folks would actually care about. Often at the expense of said blue collar folks.

These facilities would often be a win for a local community with a little bit of foresight. It doesn't matter to your power bill if they are sited 5 miles down the county road from you, or 200 miles. Chances are they are using electricity from your regional interconnect and that's where your power bills come from.

> And more importantly, what causes you to feel that it's obvious that they are only coming to these opinions through ignorance?

Only? Of course not. Primarily? Obviously. For the simple fact that dozens of people in my orbit who never knew datacenters existed near them all of a sudden Care Very Much(tm) about the subject after watching a few very low information videos. These are folks who drove past local facilities most of their lives and never had a clue.

> If this was a real, actual job-creating industrial project, people would react differently.

Not in my experience. Pretty much every single industrial project is nearly impossible to build in the US. Heavy industry sounds fun until someone wants to build an aluminum smelter, copper mine, or wind farm down the way. There are tons of infrastructure projects that need to get done which will not because they are not point-source locations that employ lots of jobs for a single community.

My previous example are wind farms. Typically those are best sited a few hundred miles away from a major metropolitan/load center. Good luck getting anything of scale built these days now that we've more or less burned up every ounce of spare electric transmission capacity leftover from before we de-industrialized ourselves. Once you get out of re-using existing right-of-way you see nearly the same backlash as AI datacenters. The difference? The urban laptop classes don't take your side and the outrage tends to stay localized.

It's very interesting to me a certain class of folks have convinced people that the closest thing to "free money" for a local community is a bad thing. Construction phase might suck, but assuming it's simply a datacenter and not a power plant with a co-located datacenter off the to side, you really can't get any lighter-touch land use than this. It's probably less environmentally impactful (in a negative way) to the local community than the 100 acre corn field it replaces. And employs more people to boot.

I would 100% agree with you on any tax abatements/credits/etc. These facilities do not need them and would be quite happy to pay full-freight on taxes on top of contributing towards upgrading local infrastructure far beyond their expected impact on it. This is where I feel that local politicians have seriously shit the bed all over their communities.

The fact that opposition to one thing looks sort of vaguely like opposition to another thing isn't completely irrelevant information, but you're just missing the actual thing that's happening if you focus on it.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/709772/americans-oppose-data-ce...

"Seven in 10 Americans oppose constructing data centers for artificial intelligence in their local area, including nearly half, 48%, who are strongly opposed. Barely a quarter favor these projects, with 7% strongly in favor."

This is another way of me countering your main point here.

It's not the same people you've seen in previous arguments.

It's those people plus almost all of the other people because overwhelming 70%+ majorities don't want these things.

So we know that. That's the given here, assuming you think there's at least some validity to Gallup and polling.

The question then becomes why? My rants are intended to illustrate why. They sound like "rants" because people are extremely fucking angry about how things are going, so accurately restating their opinions also sounds angry.

The culture has changed. People do not fucking trust tech companies and their leadership at all for extremely valid reasons. Talk about wind farms all you want. I can go ahead and talk about the Yankees. The conversation at hand is about data centers, and data centers are their own issue.

When people like you come along and say it's "free money" nobody fucking believes you because there is a rich and long history of that kind of bullshit already.

There's a point of view here that they oppose data centers out of ignorance. My countervailing point is that their distrust is almost certainly rational, considered, and correct.

Distrust is the only sane response to recent events.

I simply disagree with you. I'm not a fan of populism, and, more importantly, I think that people have had very good reason to "fucking hate us" for decades --- we are in the business of automating away people's jobs, and have been since the 1960s.

It's fine that you think the discussion is unproductive; I agree, our premises are too far apart to get anywhere. But you'd get further with, well, everybody that doesn't already agree with you if you'd stop accusing anybody who doesn't agree with you of being "disingenuous".

Well at least you're honest then. I hope your team loses because the outcomes here suck and are destroying our culture.

And on a personal level, I hope you reconsider your life decisions a little and realize the importance of a culture where people can feed their families and lead healthy productive lives of dignity, regardless of who their parents are or how gifted they happen to be intellectually.

If having your values questioned sounds like "fuck you" then that's on you.

What I actually said is perhaps you should think about the people who end up worse off under the system you advocate for.

Your call of course but this is definitely not violence.

Violence is what happens when attempting to work through civic institutions and discourse has failed so many times that people no longer try this approach.