[aschla]

That's a zoning issue the local residents should take up with their town/city.

[runtime_terror]

But isn't the parent post implying objections to datacenters is just "populist brainrot"?

[hunterpayne]

The stated reasons are "populist brainrot". They aren't scientific or based on reality at all. What has happened is the AI folks have made themselves very very disliked. Saying you are going to take everyone's jobs will do that. So whatever they try to do, people will oppose it. It doesn't matter if the reasons are based in reality or not.

[runtime_terror]

Sure, lots of people parrot the water wasting and it's often not true, but it came out of truth.

There are communities that are on water restrictions where datacenters have no such restrictions (and pay less).

It's also true after some datacenters opened the local aquifers were polluted.

Then there are legit concerns about noise, air quality from LNG generators, etc

Plenty of very legitimate reasons to dislike them, and each community likely has a different set of concerns.

[aschla]

The average person's inattention to nuance could be labeled as "populist brainrot" in this case, and the cases of poor zoning could be used as examples of the issues with datacenters that the average person does not evaluate with the proper attention to nuance.

[runtime_terror]

Sure, the water use is often a simplified argument against these data centers, but there are plenty of legitimate reasons but they are in fact more nuances and context dependent based on the specific location.