Almost everything in our society should be by-right not discretionary. We should make a set of rules (ideally policing by outcome - e.g. x dB and y NOx) and then allow anything that meets the rules. Our current approach allows for too much rent extraction.
Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers
261–270 of 383 posts
Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you have no clue why he's doing it? He's putting money in a thing that will obviously fail. Either you are way way smarter than him, or he's doing this for some other ulterior motive.
You didn't answer my questions. How is The Boring company going? And in this context, you can also ask: "Is he putting money into something that will obviously fail?" Also, go back and read how many people who were "smarter than him" there nine years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14223020
Here Bezos, sundar, Jensen all are invested.
On boring: it’s easy to say in hindsight.
Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers
#263Things like this have had me scratching my head for decades. Why would local governments annex property, upgrade utilities, and build new roads without moving that burden to the entities driving those things? They routinely do this for new residential developments in many jurisdictions, refusing to annex subdivisions until the residents have paid for the utilities and roads. There seems to be no reason that the curre…
Gobsmackingly poor deals made by city and town politicians are par for the course, and why https://www.strongtowns.org/ should be prerequisite reading for any council member, mayor, or board member approving deals that impact their community. It's easy to look at a glossy project 2-pager and only see the immediate tax revenue. It's much harder to glean a nuanced understanding of future financial burdens from a given…
Thanks for that link. Great starting point for me.
Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. The company surveyed a number of surrounding locales, looking for a favorable situation. Harwood had the existing Fargo infrastructure and the mayor of Harwood was happy to take a payout. I think the company predation was transparent.
How is that predation if the people in that city democratically elected the mayor who made that choice? Isn’t that representative democracy decisionmaking working as intended?
> How is that predation if the people in that city democratically elected the mayor who made that choice?
Find a small town politician, bribe them. Corruption pure and simple with no chance for accountability. The economically strong predate on the economically weak.
Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers
#265There is no need for this many data centers. LLMs are a scourge on humanity as they are currently implemented, and what will they do when these are no longer needed? I can't wait until OpenAI, NVIDIA and Microsoft all go belly up.
A scourge? I get some kind of valuable use from it almost every day. This criticism sounds completely out of touch.
It’s no more useful than when google and stack overflow was at its peak! All I want is to find docs. The coding performance is lackluster, oversold and under delivered. Everything else gen AI is dystopian.
Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers
#266[deleted]
Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same reason the F35 manufacture is awkwardly distributed throughout the US - the shore up political support (voting to kill jobs in your state is usually unpopular) and dip into as many subsidies as possible.
Data centers don't create local jobs once construction is complete. 40 people, most remote, can run a data center. The F-35 program claims to have over 250,000 people employed in its supply chain in the US and has large factories with high paying, often unionised jobs.
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Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
this will age poorly. you have both Google, Tesla/X betting on it. They are not stupid and probably have given it way more thought than people's whose paycheques not tied to this have thought about. This is an ambitious bet, with some possibility of failure but it should say a lot that these companies are investing in them. I wonder what people think, are these companies so naive? Edit: Elon, Sundar, Jensen, Jeff are…
Serious question: If you are so sure that this is a big payday, have you put all your net worth into SpaceX? Seems like a no brainer if you fully believe it. The reason for this "data centers in space" is the same as the "sustained human colony on Mars". It is all pie in the sky ideas to drive valuation and increase Musk's wealth. Just a small sampling of previous failed Musk promises: - demonstration drive of full a…
The demand for allocation in any of SpaceX private funding raises is practically unlimited. It’s just not something you can put your money in.
Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers
#269I'd like to hear the argument for why this is needed. I can imagine a number of reasons, but this is all I found in the article: > If I’m a company considering making strategic investments... I don’t want my competition to know where I’m going, what I’m doing, what pace I’m doing it at... You want to make sure everything is buttoned up and bow tied before that type of information is put into the public realm. I'm hav…
What I've come to realize is that the rust belt states have been in huge trouble for decades.
They were living in "benevolent feudalism" when GM, Ford, etc all had factories there. The problem is that these companies effectively owned the cities in which they operated. And then they left.
Since the Reagan years we decided to export everything that built our economy so the landlords in power could have even more profitable quarters in the short term. What this did however is destroy the economies of the non-software states.
The rust belt states are currently being subsidized by the rich states. This has been going on for decades. This vacuum of power has allowed the new landlords in power to swoop in and play city governments against each other with impunity.
The negotiating power of these states is so poor that they present an opportunity for the Metas of the world to make them even worse while becoming the new "benevolent" landlords. There doesn't need to be an NDA and secrecy, and in theory the city could get a good deal out of it, but realistically their utilities will just be abused because the words "civil rights" and "justice" have exited the lexicon.
Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because "investors" are a large group. Many of them are not involved in the industry and are clueless about tech. Same reason they invest in OpenAI, that hasn't made any money. Investors, both commercial and individual, often have more money than sense.
Do you think investors as a large group make enormous amounts of money on average?
I didn't say they make it. They have it, like an older person who grew their portfolio over time. They are an example of someone who invests in AI without knowing anything about what it is.