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Comment by dclowd9901 | Hacker News Reader

For people who don't support this kind of ban, I'd ask: What's the alternative? _Requiring_ that states house data centers?

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In what universe is requiring them the only alternative to banning them? The actual alternative is obvious: not banning them.

The consequence of saying they cannot choice to not have them. Is saying your requiring them to have them whether or not the people their want them. Its also a temporary moratorium. Maybe the industry should have been more responsible and not pasted so many externalities on to the public sector if they didnt want to face regulations.

I think the highest parent comment basically hasn't engaged in any of the cost benefit analysis just strawman the subject to banning all industry. They are not doing that and allow other manufacturing to exist maybe the data center business should learn from those industries how to conduct themselves

> The consequence of saying they cannot choice to not have them. Is saying your requiring them to have them whether or not the people their want them.

Sorry, but this is nonsense. They are currently not banned in Maine, yet they do not have them. There is obviously no requirement to have them.

Being against a ban is equivalent to requiring that something be allowed. It might or might not end up happening, but either way it is permitted.

"Requiring something be allowed" != "requiring them to have them"

So if companies are actively trying to build them in the state. And your claim is the state has to allow them to be built? Isn't this just a delay requirement to force them to have data center? Sure they aren't build today but if the government cannot stop them at the permit, or at any point after its a requirement to have them. If you want to deny a state that right to decide via democratic processes you are effectively requiring them to build in their state.

How else could states that deny those data centers if they cannot pass legislation to prevent them or require XYZ parameters before they are allowed to be built? Your argument is nonsensical in my opinion especially in context. I get that if you do a string compare they are different sentences but the semantic effects of the two statements are equavalanet in the framing that comapnies are actively trying to permit and build them.

If you can't ban them, what else would you call it?

Taxing them to account for the externalities they bring.

This right here is the right take.

Might have the effect of making it uneconomic, though, and then they wouldn't get built.

Usually that's a good approach but it doesn't work as well for industries that are in boom-bust cycles or have externalities which persist longer than the lifetime of the company that caused it -- because you either end up in a situation where you have to tax it all up-front, or end up in a situation where companies disappear and leave you to clean up their mess.

This is notoriously problematic with oil and gas wells. When it's profitable, they're maintained and you get tax revenue. When they're not profitable, the company might just disappear and you're left with an abandoned uncapped well spewing pollution, generating zero tax revenue.

I see no need for a false dichotomy of "require" vs "ban". There aren't laws requiring a state to have lumber mills, or outright banning them. There are many alternatives with a wide spectrum of attributes:

- Limiting the rates of builds allowed (e.g. total area per year, density per area per year).

- Requiring that the companies involved offset their resource usage in any number of ways (could expand this to three paragraphs on its own).

- Placing restrictions on proximity to $THINGS, whether that's residential areas, parks, you name it.

These are just the first three examples that come to mind, and I am confident that people smarter than me could come up with more.

In free societies, bans should be the last weapon of choice. By default, any activity should be allowed, many of the allowed activies should be regulated and/or taxed, but outright bans should be very well justified.

Otherwise you will end up with a chaotic-authoritarian system banning whatever the current Zeitgeist feels icky about, which in the era of social networks means twenty different things each year.

It's a free state. Like the Swiss banned minarets in Geneva the Mainers should be allowed to vote to ban datacenters. AI bros can always opt to build their stuff elsewhere, like Texas or Abu Dhabi.

That’s not what a free society is.

That’s like saying “Mainers should be allowed to ban speech they don’t like, and private sex acts they find offensive”. Your view of what constitutes freedom is nonsensical.

Your examples are both unconstitutional (see Lawrence v. Texas for the second), so no, there are limits. Also the majority of sane individuals would not bother to vote on that kind of stuff to meet a qualified majority, not in a democracy and not without a massive brainwashing campaign (which should be banned btw). Also, as others have pointed out, this is not a ban but a moratorium. AI bros just have to wait until the hype cools down to build data centers in Maine, or build them elsewhere.

I was talking about a free society. You changed that into a free state.

State X may be free in the sense that there is no military occupation or outright dictatorship, but that does not mean that its society values freedom highly. There are degrees to "lived freedom", and being too ban-happy is on the (for me) bad side of the spectrum.

Imagine a very religious society, something like a Puritan state, or a Wahhabist colony, where the faith itself imposes significant restrictions on everyday life of an individual and all laws are derived from religion. Would you call it a free society? What about the few non-believers who live among them, what level of freedom do they enjoy (except the freedom to move away, if they have the means to do so)?

This is not a simple boolean variable.

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