[ungreased0675]

There are new data centers near me. My employment prospects haven’t changed. My utilities, particularly electricity have gotten more expensive though. Property taxes have gone up a little bit.

I’m not against data centers, I don’t mind one way or another. But they’ve definitely not improved the neighborhood and have almost no positive benefits for the community that I’m aware of.

[protocolture]

I really feel like DC operators should have a strike, shutdown 50% of their data halls for an hour, and they will suddenly be the most beloved industry on the planet.

Half the stuff going on in most data centres the terminally online crowd would consider to be human rights these days. But you cant calculate that element from Twitter.

"Whats the value of a router terminating multiple VXC's to me, jim everyman" well jimmy, what if you are about to place a call across that VXC.

[vasco]

You're all on the internet in your community and using software services so that's like saying you have no benefit from having a power station when you all use electricity. They have to be somewhere

[ungreased0675]

Sure, if we’re talking about “the internet” in general.

I’m talking about the data center near me, which powers a large social media service. I do not see any benefit to my neighborhood, and I suspect my power bill and property tax increases are subsidizing the data center, instead of the other way around.

[mbgerring]

You are absolutely smart enough to know the difference between a data center for internet-distributed software and a data center full of GPUs solely for AI, along with the attendant increase in power and cooling needs. Don’t play dumb, please.

[vasco]

I'm not playing dumb but you I'm not sure. Just think for 2 seconds why datacenters exist. It's not billionnaires scrolling tiktok and making all those AI pictures for Facebook. People want the thing the datacenters exist for. The same way they want disposable clothes made by slaves in far away countries. They just want the datacenters to be far away as well, not to stop them. It's the convenient hypocrisy of complaining about consumerism while swiping your credit card mindlessly, it's always someone else's problem.

[mbgerring]

I see you moving the goalposts! And that’s fine, because this is also wrong: the pace of AI datacenter construction far exceeds actual demand for AI datacenters or actual AI products. The current pace of construction is purely speculative.

[vasco]

Its if anything incrementally speculative, not purely, unless you think there's actually zero demand. And those datacenters are built to make money selling services, they aren't a vanity yacht.