[swatcoder]

People have a dozen reasons to refuse data centers being built in their communities and zero reasons to encourage it. They're little more than post-industrial mines that take limited resources (power, land, water, quiet) from a community, sell them for profit as compute, and siphon those profits away onto the books of far-flung megacorps with no community reward.

Meanwhile, golf courses are a traditional green space where people in a community gather for both work and leisure. They're not ideal themselves, but they at least provide some benefit against which their negatives can be weighed.

If all you hear from critics of data center building is water use complaints, that's strictly because you've chosen not to listen to people.

[anuramat]

> data centers being built in their communities

> golf courses are a traditional green space where people in a community

I have a feeling those two sets of communities are disjoint

[ekelsen]

How is this different from farming?

It takes the limited resources of land and water from a community and sells the result for profit as food or fuel. The vast majority of profit is made downstream and outside the community.

Golf courses being a traditional green place where people gather seems a bit far fetched to me when most of them are elite private clubs.

[trollbridge]

Most golf courses around me are open and anyone can go play for a cheap greens fee. The clubhouse has normal low end restaurant prices for a hot dog or a burger.

[ekelsen]

If the clubhouse is your idea of the valuable public good we can provide without 18 holes of grass.

[trollbridge]

As far as "valuable", the golf course is private property that the owners presumably bought and can do with as they see fit. If you want to develop it into something else, make an offer to them?

The golf courses are a business like any other (although we do have some publicly-owned golf courses around here too). The cost to play 9 holes on a weekday is $10 at one of them. I'm not really sure what you're asking for here.

[ekelsen]

Data centers have negative externalities which is why people don't think anyone should just be able to buy land and turn it into one.

Once of those negative externalities is water usage. The parent was commenting on the also high water usage of golf courses.

Perhaps that's the connection you've missed.

[trollbridge]

That's highly dependent on the area it's in. Where I live, golf courses use no more water than anyone else and aren't irrigated.

The proper answer would be to simply charge appropriate prices for large scale uses of water from the water utility, or else this is a discussion about riparian rights and law and possible changes needed to that.

[yosame]

People are more lenient on farming because humans need agriculture to survive. Obviously not all agriculture is necessary for survival, but it's something that in some way provides real tangible benefits for everyone.

On the other hand, if AI data centres all disappeared today, humanity would continue on completely fine.

[ekelsen]

The test of "if it disappeared today, we'd all be fine", would eliminate most of the economy.

[mrdomino-]

In farming, the result is food that can be eaten.

[groundzeros2015]

they are one provider among many. Everybody needs food. But nobody needs that particular farm's food.

[ekelsen]

Golf courses don't do that either...

[shermantanktop]

I associate golf with WASP-y business types who hobnob with their boss in an electric cart to get ahead, and can't stop talking about their hobby of chasing a little white ball.

Is that fair? Probably not. But I don't think golf is a particularly inclusive sport, unless you live in a golf course gated community... in which case everyone is included.

[marcosdumay]

When mines pay a sizeable share of their profits as local taxes, and obey environmental regulations, people suddenly start to like them.

[swatcoder]

Can you point to some examples of where that's happening?

These data centers are specifically being scouted for communities whose governance is too weak to negotiate for some "sizeable share of their profits" and too ill-prepared to have suitable environmental regulations on the books already. The Ivy League sharks planning these buildout initiatives are sharp people who are looking out for the interests of their employers and know how to pick locations where they have the best opportunity to exploit locals unprepared for their kind of esoteric deal-making, political lobbying, and lawfare. They'd be failing at their job if they did what you're suggesting, and that's why we don't really see that happen.

For any benefit to national or global society AI data centers might provide to someone, the buildout looks a lot like the dirty and exploitative stories of rail expansion in the 19th century. That rail infrastructure proved a good thing for the US, but that doesn't mean the process of making it happen was honest or good for the people immediately affected.

[trollbridge]

This may sound crazy, but I’m glad the data centre being built near me (the new us-east-3) is being built by Amazon who pays lip service to local government and the community, as opposed to cartoon villain levels of saving a few pennies by forcing noise pollution on everyone else and everything else undesirable the other builders are doing.

Never thought I’d say that.

[marcosdumay]

> Can you point to some examples of where that's happening?

You mean the AI datacenters doing it? No, they are not doing it.

They seem to be doing the opposite. They being loud is really hard to accept, decorrelating the fans cooling them would probably pay for itself in less than an year. It's like it's some Capitan Planet villain building those things.

[swatcoder]

Got it. I misunderstood you. Agreed.

[WarmWash]

States give the tax incentives, local municipalities are cheap to buy out, that's why all these towns quickly pass approval. $30 million annually is pennies for a datacenter and a windfall for a town.

[Aurornis]

> People have a dozen reasons to refuse data centers being built in their communities and zero reasons to encourage it.

This is, ironically, the NIMBYism that so many people hate.

People generally don't want anything built in their surroundings unless it directly benefits them and has no downsides, however low the impact.