371–380 of 383 posts
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> I think "reputation" is absolutely critical to functional societies, See the popular vote results of Nov 2024 US presidential election. Reputations were on full display.
> Reputations were on full display. The problem is that many people liked what they saw. Reputation was still important, but there were different beliefs about what reputations were desirable.
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> I think "reputation" is absolutely critical to functional societies, See the popular vote results of Nov 2024 US presidential election. Reputations were on full display.
Doesn’t that further defeat the argument for secrecy here?
But we see from the Nov 2024 elections (and others, but most glaringly that one), that that is, sadly, not true.
So the people rejecting Facebook because of Facebook's reputation tells you nothing about whether Facebook is bad, because the people could have just as easily been bad.
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I know why I, personally, consider eco-friendly power to be ideal; but why would the builder of a DC care?
So they can put it on a page like [1] and [2] Most large companies impose certain costs on society, and have to manage their reputation. Often it's cheaper to improve public opinion in a peripheral area than to address deep-seated problems. Putting a data centre close to a hydroelectric dam helps offset your product's impact on users' mental health, your disregard for competition law, etc. [1] https://datacenters.goo…
Those lists are the companies marking their own homework and congratulating themselves as PR, AKA "greenwashing". They can do that just fine by spinning a single metric of their choice where they do less-badly than their pick of mean, median, and mode of whoever else they want to compare themselves against, they don't actually need to be genuinely eco-friendly at anything.
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You make this sound like a conspiracy. This is normal practice in economic development, check off boxes until announcing to the public. The public rarely has much power in voicing their opinion but data centers are the current evil entity.
> data centers are the current evil entity. There's a reason for that: they compete for resources but contribute relatively little back to the local economy. In that sense they're quite different from previous large corporate investments in a local area.
If anything these should be examples on the failure of how these resources are being sold and good opportunity to build a better system.
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A few, most don't. If it's cheaper to use an open system then the closed system are only built for show, to soothe the public.
Charge them more for water and electricity until they're using the amount of water you think is right. The fundamental problem here is municipalities getting into cozy, sweetheart deals with corporations.
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However the conspiracy-theory nutters have done a really good job convincing people in the US that 15-minute cities, or as they're known in Europe, "cities", are some plot by George Soros to... actually I have no idea what sort of crazy is being invoked this time, but it seems to have worked, generating enough opposition to liveable cities to make it a real uphill battle to implement them.
A big part of the problem here is that this conspiracy theory plays right into what its followers want to believe anyway: their idea of an ideal city is one where you can easily get anywhere by car, and there are lots of highways, strips, other roads, and plenty of parking. It's what they're familiar with, and any suggestion that it could be improved by catering less strongly to individual vehicles and with a stronge…
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Clearly there needs to be room for both things to occur. You should absolutely begin with passing laws, but to think that the laws on the books can cover every situation is naive. When companies skirt the law and cause harm, there needs to be a remedy.
I don't agree. The benefits of a business environment governed by due process and the rule of law far outweigh the benefits of individual government actors having arbitrary discretion to fill the gaps. As we've seen clearly on the federal level this past year, once you create that discretion, the common way for corporate executives to "prove" that they're nice and generous and deserve favorable treatment is not good…
Also, we don't live in a world adjudicated by machines, there will always be discretion and the potential for special favors. No matter how much you tie the hands of regulators there will be some actor who will have the power to extort. Not to mention that regulation is not opposed to due process and the rule of law, but is the most important component of both.
Imagining a world without discretion is imagining a world where corporations can do as much irreparable harm as they want as long as there isn't a law against it.
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its mostly about environmental concerns, but data centres dont add nearly the amount of jobs that manufacturing had
So add 0 jobs because people don’t like chatgpt and it won’t create the same amount as 1960’s manufacturing; or add some jobs to rural WI? You only have to look at Hermiston/Umatilla OR to see how impactful data centers can be on rural communities. There’s a lot more than 40 new jobs there since Amazon started building data centers.
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Idk why it's hard to believe another company would try to outbid. Discovering good locations for data centers is genuinely a difficult problem. They're relatively scarce. Bidding wars seem completely plausible.
In which case doing this in the dark is clearly bad for the community -- if that location is what's scarce then they should be demanding a better deal.
Still, if the prospecting is the bottleneck there could be 3rd parties (or even the tech companies themselves) entering into agreements with towns which allow both a finders fee and open bidding for the lot.
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A big part of the problem here is that this conspiracy theory plays right into what its followers want to believe anyway: their idea of an ideal city is one where you can easily get anywhere by car, and there are lots of highways, strips, other roads, and plenty of parking. It's what they're familiar with, and any suggestion that it could be improved by catering less strongly to individual vehicles and with a stronge…
The point Strong Towns is making is that whatever you believe, you can’t live outside your means forever. The bill for all that infrastructure will come due, taxes will go up, people who still can will move away, and the town will start falling apart.
Whether the people who believe it are going to experience consequences in future isn't relevant to that.