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Why We've Filed a Referendum

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Re: Why We've Filed a Referendum

#41

Post by dgllghr »

explodes wrote: post #9
dgllghr wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who lives in Northern Virginia, it makes me furious to receive my electricity bill and see that even though I used less electricity than the same month last year, I am paying significantly more. And this happens every year. Do you think Virginia is adding solar, battery, and wind proportional to that additional power draw? Nope! It's natural gas and coal power imported from PA and WV. It would be one thing…

This echoes some of my biggest gripes about data centers: We should be mandating green power, to a great extent, be built to support these facilities. We (US states) should not be competing, in a race to the bottom, to be the state to give the biggest tax breaks and pass the cost to the citizens. We should not be ignoring the citizens who will have their health and livelihoods affected. AI data centers, for better or…

So true. A legislator in Virginia finally pitched ending the tax credit that brought all the data centers to VA in the first place, and I hope it passes (I know it won’t). But seeing the upcoming rate increases already on the books and the number of data centers they are planning to build is pushing me to consider solar again. The payback time is getting shorter and shorter :)

Re: Why We've Filed a Referendum

#42

Post by evil_buzzard »

I think everyone here is missing the point that while data centers may have may of the same negative effects on the community, THEY DON'T PROVIDE ANYTHING IN RETURN.

Just because you've sold your soul to Anthropic and can't feed yourself with consulting ChatGPT doesn't mean that these people are stupid or crazy for not wanting a data center in their backyard. It's also a pretty big deficiency in moral fiber to object to people working against something that is good for yourself and terrible for everyone else. The best equivalent I can think of would be CEOs complaining about how terrible it is that unions are allowed to exist.

Re: Why We've Filed a Referendum

#43

Post by yostrovs »

razakel wrote: post #37
recursivecaveat wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's as simple as people generally believe that electricity is good for the world, and AI is bad for it. In the former case you're kindof taking-one-for-the-team. Even places that have nasty nasty stuff like tailings ponds generally have a kind of civic pride that coal mining or whatever was a necessity and the sacrifice of their local environment made a lot of other people's comfy lives possible. Data-center…

For some strange reason people aren't all that keen on building something that'll increase their utility bills, pollute everything, and threatens to take their job.

Here in Michigan, people are all for auto factories, but the polluting, energy intensive, and job taking data centers are a big no no. They use electricity, they look ugly, and they use water. Can't have that.

Re: Why We've Filed a Referendum

#44

Post by llbbdd »

freedomben wrote: post #38
llbbdd wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Utah is such a special, creepy little standout enclave among the states. I've worked with a few Mormon coworkers who are genuinely wonderful people whom I adore, but they are, as a group, militant in a way that's hard to describe.

You should at least try to describe it more specifically if you're casting shade on a huge population. Otherwise you just look like a bigot assigning traits to tens of millions of people based on a few people with the same religion that you know. I grew up Mormon and I've also lived and worked among mostly non Mormon populations, and I would say most Mormons are actually not militant. Turns out Mormons are just peopl…

I could have been clearer, but the group I'm describing is only the Mormons I've known, and I don't mean militant in a bad way - professional, polished, hardworking. I'm sure there are lazy Mormons as there are lazy people in any large population, I just haven't met one.

Re: Why We've Filed a Referendum

#45

Post by Tanoc »

simianwords wrote: post #34
Tanoc wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Datacenters are financially a net negative for whichever municipality they end up in. They're operated mostly remotely with little staff and they have no tangible production, meaning any wealth they generate ends up vast distances away. Meanwhile the municipality ends up with increased costs because of the inefficiencies of bruteforcing computation, and because of the subsidies and tax breaks that the companies not o…

Why did you not include the tax they bring in? I think this is a serious omission and points at motivated reasoning. Can you do one where you account for the tax dollars and compare it to similar industries?

Because in reality they don't actually bring in any revenue for the first few years thanks to all the subsidies and tax breaks they demand upfront before construction. At best it would be state and federal taxes used for operations that any operating business brings like federal payroll, but there wouldn't be any property taxes for at least five to ten years and the federal corporate income tax would likely be from the state the company is based in rather than the state the datacenter is based in. The municipality, be that the county or city the datacenter's in, gets screwed.

Meanwhile just to run a trucking depot you'd have the heavy vehicle tax, international fuel agreement tax, registration tax, sales taxes for the trucks and trailers, property taxes, and whatever incidental taxes required by the state you're operating in. The property tax, IFAT, and local payroll taxes meanwhile all go to the municipality and don't skip straight up to the state or national level. This is with no expectation of any of this being waived or delayed because the trucking industry doesn't have the surface visible financial performance of the industries municipalities are more lenient towards.

Re: Why We've Filed a Referendum

#46

Post by razakel »

yostrovs wrote: post #43
razakel wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some strange reason people aren't all that keen on building something that'll increase their utility bills, pollute everything, and threatens to take their job.

Here in Michigan, people are all for auto factories, but the polluting, energy intensive, and job taking data centers are a big no no. They use electricity, they look ugly, and they use water. Can't have that.

The auto factories propose to actually create jobs, though.

Re: Why We've Filed a Referendum

#47

Post by gruez »

danaris wrote: post #33
gruez wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ad homniems aside, is the accusation even accurate? So far as I can tell he doesn't obviously have "a massive financial incentive to do so", like he's a VC investor in anthropic or whatever. He does seem to be bullish on AI in general, but I'm not sure why that'd be a disqualification for someone on the pro-ai camp any more than someone who's interested in retaining their property values or whatever would be a disqua…

That's not an ad hominem, though? Ad hominem would be if shimman had said something like "don't post rebuttals from people who are stupid meanyheads". Identifying a characteristic of the posters that affects their incentives is a perfectly legitimate reason to discredit their posts, or at least call their impartiality into question.

From wikipedia:

>Ad hominem (Latin for 'to the person'), short for argumentum ad hominem ('an argument to the person'), refers to when a speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than the substance of the argument itself.

>motive

Emphasis mine.

Re: Why We've Filed a Referendum

#48

Post by bigbadfeline »

yostrovs wrote: post #43
razakel wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some strange reason people aren't all that keen on building something that'll increase their utility bills, pollute everything, and threatens to take their job.

Here in Michigan, people are all for auto factories, but the polluting, energy intensive, and job taking data centers are a big no no. They use electricity, they look ugly, and they use water. Can't have that.

> Here in Michigan, people are all for auto factories, but... data centers are a big no no. They use electricity, they look ugly, and they use water. Can't have that.

Because they know economics better than their politicians and academia.

Data centers saddle the public with their power and water capital expenses, for new generation and transmission which are used solely for the benefit of data centers. And get this, in many cases the data bros get sweet tax-free deals for many years.

All of a sudden, the entire economics establishment loves communism for the rich, where the rich get exclusive use of public utilities built and paid for by the public.

The media, academia and politicians silence is deafening, which is why people have to raise their voices if they want to be heard.

Re: Why We've Filed a Referendum

#49

Post by tzs »

timmg wrote: post #2

Obviously, it's fine to be wary of any development in your area. But it seems like there is a certain amount of irrational(?) fear of datacenters. And I really don't understand it. I saw a poll recently that people would rather live near a nuclear power plan than a datacenter. That's... their choice, of course, but doesn't seem logical to me. I have heard several "concern stories" about them on NPR recently. Maybe th…

It makes more sense when you look at how much waste heat it will generate and how it will get its energy [1].

[1] https://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2026/05/07/utahs-dat...

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