[yellowapple]

Here in Reno the city council imposed a similar moratorium, buckling under a deluge of NIMBY pressure, citing talking points that are obvious bullshit to anyone who's actually set foot in any of the dozen or so existing local datacenters. All that it accomplishes is a guarantee that future projects and their tax revenue will move to the next county over — and then we'll be wondering why we're still stuck with crumbling infrastructure woefully undersized for our population and an economy dominated by a dying tourism industry.

If I was more tin-foil-hat inclined, I'd hypothesize that this wave of anti-datacenter activism is an astroturfing campaign pushed by the CCP to make sure the US deliberately refuses to compete with China in the technology sector. Or it's an astroturfing campaign by incumbent tech companies to block competition via regulatory capture and grandfathering. Or it's an astroturfing campaign by the agricultural sector (and/or companies like Nestlé) to deflect attention from their multiple-orders-of-magnitude greater water consumption. The reality's probably a lot less exciting, though: just a bunch of people who mean well and are rightfully opposed to Big Tech capitalism, but have been misled (probably by some or all of the above) into throwing out the babies with their bathwater.

[bendergarcia]

Your condescending tone about what people want is crazy. You don’t even acknowledge that this will have a real material impact negative impact on people who are not tech workers. Everyone’s electricity bill will go up. And the argument is always that the benefits will come down stream. But it ignores the real fact that: it will affect people immediately, once electricity bills go up. And all of that for the sake of compute for a technology most people don’t like anyways? Your comment about them being misled implies that they haven’t done their own research to understand the impacts these things have on their communities.

[yellowapple]

> You don’t even acknowledge that this will have a real material impact negative impact on people who are not tech workers.

Of course I don't acknowledge that, for the same reason I don't acknowledge the “real material negative impact” of wind and solar farms or desalination plants: because there's exceedingly little of it in reality.

> Everyone’s electricity bill will go up.

That's trivial to fix by the electric utility charging datacenters at a higher rate. That's exactly what NV Energy is seeking regulatory approval to do here, and what Seattle's electric utility should be doing (if they ain't already).

>technology most people don’t like anyways?

Most people don't like streaming video and social media? These datacenters ain't exclusively for AI.

>Your comment about them being misled implies that they haven’t done their own research to understand the impacts these things have on their communities.

Correct, and I'll even exply it: the overwhelmingly vast majority of them have indeed demonstrably done zero of their own research on the actual impacts these things will have on their communities and mine. They're entirely parroting talking points fed to them via social media, and those talking points invariably boil down to things that are either not actually applicable to local datacenters or are just outright lunacy on the same level as 5G towers controlling minds via COVID vaccines.

[quantified]

Could be some astroturfing, but compared with fears of drag queen storytellers and wind farms, there is a lot of sentiment ready to be mobilized here. Externalities of data centers on this scale, and the outright lying on what's going on by their builders, are already visible. If there was astroturfing available we'd see the Koch brothers et al ramp up in favor of this, get Tea Party rabble-rousers to insist on data centers. Let's see how China deals with the impact on their land and water too.

I'm glad you're not tinfoil-hat inclined!

[yellowapple]

It seems maybe I should be prepping the tinfoil after all, if OpenAI is to be believed (given their material interests, their claims should of course be taken with a datacenter-sized grain of salt): https://openai.com/index/prc-linked-influence-operations-ai-...