[oooyay]

There are two simultaneous problems that I've come to understand with datacenters and the people that live in their proximity:

1. Somehow the public is always left holding the bag for increased transmission costs despite the cause of the increase being a single (or short list) of outliers.

2. The residential public, as is tradition, is always asked to scale down for industrial demand.

How can we imagine expanding a system that results in both of these outcomes? That, to me, seems to be the thing to fix first.

[jmyeet]

Transferring wealth from the young and poor to the old and wealthy is the entire purpose of our government.

This is now the endpoint we are bouldering towards: the bottom 90% increasingly have nothing left to steal or exploit. And just like an algal bloom that eventually runs out of oxygen and dies, this is where this system and our society unravels.

[cucumber3732842]

> the old and wealthy

The government will throw them under the bus in a heartbeat to keep power.

[jerlam]

The government would, except that they tend to vote in much greater numbers than other groups, so keeping them happy is important to stay in power.

[scoofy]

The success of the YIMBY movement is basically like watching this power shift happen in real time.

[therobots927]

*Transferring wealth from the poor to the rich

[scoofy]

No... we are specifically transferring it from the young. This is happening across the west. Once birth control was created, we kicked off a ticking time bomb of a crisis by not actually changing our social safety nets, with fewer young people paying to support an much larger number of older folks.

At the same time, our entire housing shortage is designed to enrich the homeowners by protecting the value of their property at the expense of the young who live with a zero-sum shortage, when previous generations could typically buy a home at, or near, the cost of construction.

We need to be honest that while yes, we are transferring wealth from the poor to the rich, we are also transferring wealth from the young to the old.

[jjav]

> fewer young people paying to support an much larger number of older folks

The largest generation by population in the US is Millenials, second largest in Gen Z.

https://www.populationpyramids.org/generations/united-states

[scoofy]

It's very obviously not the total number of people that matters. It's the difference in the number of people being funded and doing the funding. The math is fairly straightforward:

# of Boomers - Greatest Gen > Millennials - Boomers

This means that Millennials will have a greater burden than Boomers did. Which means Millennials will live with fewer resources.

[jjav]

I don't follow this comment at all, sorry.

Presumably you're comparing people of working age contributing to social security vs. people in retirement receiving social security. That age can vary but let's pick 65 as a typical retirement age.

Here's another data source:

https://theworlddata.com/us-population-by-age/

There are 205.7 million working age adults vs. 61.2 million of age 65 and older.

From where do you get the "fewer young people paying to support an much larger number of older folks"?

[cute_boi]

And because poor people don’t have much money, the government decided it could borrow heavily from future generations and give it to rich ppl, making them even poorer.

[Noaidi]

The idea that capitalism off loads the cost of externalities onto the unwitting public is nothing new. This is just the most recent and obvious version. Air anbd water pollution are the old ones. They make the pollution and the public pays for it with superfund sites or increased health care costs.

The solution is having the consumer pay for the externalities when they use the product. But this would make AI so much more expensive. When you use AI you are exploiting other people. Just keep that in mind.

[catlikesshrimp]

The last two sentences are drawing downvotes to an otherwise sensible comment.

[Noaidi]

I agree. But is it a false statement?

[mindslight]

It's the tired pattern of absolving the direct bad actors (the corpos themselves), as well as corrupt regulators who give them a pass, in favor of diffusing the responsibility onto individuals. If we're talking about collective action to solve the problem, it should be more of the form of demanding regulation that directly stops the bad actors, rather than this nonsensical fallacy from the same vein as "voting with our wallets".

[jshen]

I think it's people that do that, not capitalism. This happens in every system that has existed in human history.

[tadfisher]

Absolutely not. The default economic system is anarchy, also known as sharing and mutual aid. You see this even in the reddest of US states, where disaster victims help each other, and a huge pastime is sharing food via potlucks. But all evidence points to anarchical/egalitarian cultures as the baseline mechanism of human organization from prehistory.

Externalities don't exist in anarchic systems, because there is no hierarchical separation between producer and consumer. You can't push off costs to some members of the community when they have equal power to retaliate in kind, and there is no incentive to do so.

[fc417fc802]

> Externalities don't exist in anarchic systems

Sure they do. I do a thing, it benefits me but causes a problem for my neighbor in the process, I say "oh well fuck him", that's a textbook externality.

> they have equal power to retaliate in kind

A convenient fiction often engaged in by proponents of anarchy. In practice if you compare pairs of people at random you will find almost none that can reasonably be described as equal. Equality is something imposed by the law in an attempt to improve our lives on average.

Anarchy lasts exactly as long as it takes people to start banding together and no longer.

[hdgvhicv]

Ok so you’d win a community upstream on a river and you build a dam and hive off the water

Downstream 500 miles away another community loses their water source

Those externalities still exist

[jshen]

The far left tends to treat humans as essentially good and plastic — corrupted by unjust systems, but redeemable once those systems are dismantled. Remove capitalism, hierarchy, scarcity, and people will naturally cooperate. The far right tends toward a Hobbesian view — humans are greedy and lazy by default. Without the discipline, consequences, and hierarchy, civilization unravels. Hence “if you tax people more they’ll stop working.”

Both are cartoon versions of something real, and both fail in predictable ways. The more honest picture comes from behavioral economics and evolutionary psychology: humans are neither blank slates nor rational maximizers. We’re a messy bundle of cooperative instincts and tribal ones, capable of extraordinary generosity within in-groups and breathtaking cruelty toward out-groups. Our “goodness” has always been conditional and contextual.

What really undermines the anarchist vision specifically isn’t that people are evil — it’s that they’re biased and self-deceiving in systematic ways. There’s a well-replicated finding that when you ask members of a team to estimate their individual contribution to a group outcome, the percentages sum to well over 100%. Everyone genuinely believes they pulled more than their weight. This isn’t malice — it’s a predictable artifact of how memory and attention work. We have more access to our own effort than to others’, so we weight it more heavily.

The practical consequence of this is underappreciated: it means that even in a community of genuinely well-meaning people with no bad actors, you’ll still get persistent grievance and conflict, because everyone will sincerely believe they’re being shortchanged. This isn’t a solvable problem with better norms or more transparency — it’s baked into human cognition.

[catlikesshrimp]

Haiti is in Anarchy. All sharing and mutual aid is shadowed by resource and power struggle. It is even worse than communism and fascism.

[Noaidi]

> Haiti is in Anarchy

This is what people say when they have no idea what people mean by the POLITICAL system of Anarchism (Libertarian Socialism).

Anarchism, the political system, is not "chaos". That is propaganda that started during the 1930's. If you want to learn about it, real the Anarchist FAQ.

(I have a degrees in American History and Economics if that matters).

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-ed...

[CamperBob2]

Yeah, and communism has never been given a fair shake, either. For that matter, neither has laissez-faire capitalism.

At some point, you need to accept that your favorite "-ism" has an impedance mismatch with human nature.

[CamperBob2]

Externalities don't exist in anarchic systems

Neither do computers.

[PieTime]

This is the same issue for water in California as well. Growing water thirsty crops in a desert to use an allocation while average people are asked to conserve.

[cute_boi]

How will this be fixed when the public doesn’t have any power to make changes, and politicians are bribed—i.e., lobbied—by all these companies building data centers?

[TitaRusell]

The reality is that these data centers make money for billionaire douchebags.

And unlike the billionaire douchebags of yesteryear they don't invest in the local economy. NOTHING IS TRICKLING DOWN In fact our modern billionaire douchebags love talking about how much they hate humanity.

[butvacuum]

nothing ever trickled down. philanthropy is not trickle down, and the gates foundation has to be one of the most critical I know of.

[paradox460]

Carnegie at least built libraries

[onlypassingthru]

Well, MacKenzie Scott seems to be doing her best but she's the exception.