That's not quite correct. There's a lot of NIMBY pressure in cities, where land is scarce and there's lots of people to attend planning meetings to block building.

However, if you want to build a datacenter, you don't need to build it in downtown Manhattan. You can build it anywhere, and some places make it easy to build data centers.

By definition local restrictions apply locally. If you want more housing in Manhattan then Manhattan nimbyism really matters. But if you want to build a data center somewhere you have a lot of options. There's no nationwide vote on allowing datacenter construction.

I wish, so so deeply in my bones, that after the 2008 financial crisis we just let everything fail. Fail fail fail, pain, turmoil. But after the pain would have been a much better, fairer system, where large banks and other "systemically important companies" like insurers would actually have to watch what they are doing, and prove they are careful stewards of money.

As an aside, basically all hedge funds in America park their funds in the Cayman Islands. Nobody is going to bail out the Cayman Islands (other than hedge funds). So I would hope that if a series of large hedge funds fail, holding myriad funds of high net worth individuals, they just fail

I have a hard time seeing the truth of your statement. If I think about where Google's largest data centers are located in America, they are all on former industrial sites that had access to large amounts of power and water, like the old Gatorade factory in Oklahoma. While you can argue I guess that this choice, like everything else, was the product of all choices made by society prior, I am not seeing a direct connection between financial and legal incentives and the siting of those data centers.

Nonetheless, we did not vote directly for or against any particular data-center. They don't go up for a vote that way. It would take forever and nothing would get built if you gave voters a possible veto on literally every single thing.

Socialism is the way for the majority to constrict the individual. You may want that but I do not