[phil21]

> But remember nobody ever wants “development” except for the fact that it might bring jobs and economic growth, to them, not you living somewhere else.

This is really the only point that matters. It's held true my whole life, and I expect it will be true until I die. Doesn't matter what you build. I was watching a couple transmission line projects over the past decade that are still in the "lawsuits and community rage" phase - proposed to bring wind farm watts to load centers - and now they will likely be killed since the anti-development folks can pretend they were always due to Datacenters.

Datacenters are just an easy scapegoat for the anti-development crowd. It's been amazing to watch how quickly it's gone, and how folks have such a strong opinion on stuff that otherwise would have been built half a mile from them and they'd never have known any better until they were told to care.

The rest of what you wrote is largely social media driven ragebait in comment form. Kernels of truth, but largely immaterial.

Datacenter land use is the least interesting thing you could possibly discuss. Knocking out some corn fields and building some warehouses off the road no one can see or hear, with almost no traffic to/from them after construction is pretty much the lowest possible bar for local community impact for quite literally any project. It change nothing for anyone, other than the farmers who sold the land and that a few local trades companies have a couple decades of stable highly paid employment.

Therefore, the only way to get communities up in arms about these things is basically lie about it.

It's going to be a real head scratcher to folks when electricity rates continue to march upwards even if they get all AI datacenter construction banned. The green tech crowd who had the datacenter bogeyman land in their lap is playing an exceedingly dangerous game here. What we are largely seeing is the bill coming due for generational lack of investment into the grid.

If your local community can't figure out how to get the money raining down from the skies like it is now to subsidize the build out of your local infrastructure for something as minor as municipal water treatment in Wisconsin You likely will never be building anything at all.

[CPLX]

Who's lying about it?

https://www.axios.com/2025/05/28/ai-jobs-white-collar-unempl...

The people who want these data centers are telling us that the reason that they want them is to keep momentum on their plans to destroy our entire way of life.

They just say it. They go on TV and do interviews and say it out loud.

So then everyone who has any ability to stop it in any possible way tries to do that.

What exactly the fuck do you think they're going to do?

And more importantly, what causes you to feel that it's obvious that they are only coming to these opinions through ignorance?

Lumping together anti-data-center sentiment with anti-development sentiment in general is bullshit. Yes, there are certainly impossible to negotiate with NIMBYs who don't like apartment buildings because they cast shadows on a sidewalk corner or something. That has nothing to do with this.

The politics of data centers are completely different. If this was a real, actual job-creating industrial project, people would react differently.

[phil21]

> Lumping together anti-data-center sentiment with anti-development sentiment in general is bullshit. Yes, there are certainly impossible to negotiate with NIMBYs who don't like apartment buildings because they cast shadows on a sidewalk corner or something. That has nothing to do with this.

I mean, you just did it yourself. You made a great point by doing so.

It's generally the same people. Your rants pretty much prove it. Plus I've been in meetings where it's literally the same people. They will use any and all reasons to stop local development and then stick with the one that gets the most popular traction.

I'm not talking about folks against residential development. I'm talking being around projects and in local meetings about industrial development - primarily electric generation and transmission. The arguments are pretty much the same.

> The people who want these data centers are telling us that the reason that they want them is to keep momentum on their plans to destroy our entire way of life.

AI is now taking rural blue collar jobs? I find it very difficult to believe this is a real grass roots concern.

I find it very easy to believe white collar folks are using their relative positions of power to amp up concerns rural blue collar folks would actually care about. Often at the expense of said blue collar folks.

These facilities would often be a win for a local community with a little bit of foresight. It doesn't matter to your power bill if they are sited 5 miles down the county road from you, or 200 miles. Chances are they are using electricity from your regional interconnect and that's where your power bills come from.

> And more importantly, what causes you to feel that it's obvious that they are only coming to these opinions through ignorance?

Only? Of course not. Primarily? Obviously. For the simple fact that dozens of people in my orbit who never knew datacenters existed near them all of a sudden Care Very Much(tm) about the subject after watching a few very low information videos. These are folks who drove past local facilities most of their lives and never had a clue.

> If this was a real, actual job-creating industrial project, people would react differently.

Not in my experience. Pretty much every single industrial project is nearly impossible to build in the US. Heavy industry sounds fun until someone wants to build an aluminum smelter, copper mine, or wind farm down the way. There are tons of infrastructure projects that need to get done which will not because they are not point-source locations that employ lots of jobs for a single community.

My previous example are wind farms. Typically those are best sited a few hundred miles away from a major metropolitan/load center. Good luck getting anything of scale built these days now that we've more or less burned up every ounce of spare electric transmission capacity leftover from before we de-industrialized ourselves. Once you get out of re-using existing right-of-way you see nearly the same backlash as AI datacenters. The difference? The urban laptop classes don't take your side and the outrage tends to stay localized.

It's very interesting to me a certain class of folks have convinced people that the closest thing to "free money" for a local community is a bad thing. Construction phase might suck, but assuming it's simply a datacenter and not a power plant with a co-located datacenter off the to side, you really can't get any lighter-touch land use than this. It's probably less environmentally impactful (in a negative way) to the local community than the 100 acre corn field it replaces. And employs more people to boot.

I would 100% agree with you on any tax abatements/credits/etc. These facilities do not need them and would be quite happy to pay full-freight on taxes on top of contributing towards upgrading local infrastructure far beyond their expected impact on it. This is where I feel that local politicians have seriously shit the bed all over their communities.

[CPLX]

The fact that opposition to one thing looks sort of vaguely like opposition to another thing isn't completely irrelevant information, but you're just missing the actual thing that's happening if you focus on it.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/709772/americans-oppose-data-ce...

"Seven in 10 Americans oppose constructing data centers for artificial intelligence in their local area, including nearly half, 48%, who are strongly opposed. Barely a quarter favor these projects, with 7% strongly in favor."

This is another way of me countering your main point here.

It's not the same people you've seen in previous arguments.

It's those people plus almost all of the other people because overwhelming 70%+ majorities don't want these things.

So we know that. That's the given here, assuming you think there's at least some validity to Gallup and polling.

The question then becomes why? My rants are intended to illustrate why. They sound like "rants" because people are extremely fucking angry about how things are going, so accurately restating their opinions also sounds angry.

The culture has changed. People do not fucking trust tech companies and their leadership at all for extremely valid reasons. Talk about wind farms all you want. I can go ahead and talk about the Yankees. The conversation at hand is about data centers, and data centers are their own issue.

When people like you come along and say it's "free money" nobody fucking believes you because there is a rich and long history of that kind of bullshit already.

There's a point of view here that they oppose data centers out of ignorance. My countervailing point is that their distrust is almost certainly rational, considered, and correct.

Distrust is the only sane response to recent events.