[esikich]

Did you vote for the new McDonalds that got built? The new strip mall? The new apartment complex? The new water treatment plant that makes noise and stinks? The new metal shop? The new gas station? Let's start voting on everything and see how that goes. But we obviously don't because that's fucking stupid.

[dwb]

I don’t think dismissing direct democracy as “fucking stupid” is the kind of constructive commentary this site is after. It’s a complex issue and I wouldn’t advocate for it claiming it would fix everything, but in the representative democracy that we (supposedly) have, and the representatives that we tend to get, often cowed or corrupted by huge corporate interests, is it surprising that people want to take some influence back into their own hands? I’m not ever going to be against that kind of democracy.

[ghaff]

And, in fact, the town where I live in the northeast does have a lot of issues voted on in town meetings by the residents who attend. Not every little detail certainly. But zoning changes, budgets, etc. yes. (Not that our infrastructure would presumably support one but I'd expect a datacenter proposal would be voted down.)

[dwb]

Glad to hear it!

[tzs]

The McD, strip mall, metal shop, and gas station will all be going into places that were long ago zoned for that kind of business, had all the necessary infrastructure to support such business installed long ago, and won't bring any new significant quality of life issues to people who live or work nearby. They also generally aren't asking for special tax breaks.

The water treatment plant often will be voted on, because it will often be financed by a bond issue or levy that requires voter approval.

The apartment complex is the only one that doesn't fall into either of those types of projects, and this is one that gets exceptions because it is to solve a problem the local area is having by directly addressing that problem. They need more nearby housing, so they make exceptions for housing projects.

Not many towns have found their AI needs are hard to meet because of the latency over the internet to their AI provider's datacenter, and so need to get a local datacenter built.