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Comment by verdverm | Hacker News Reader

The politics of anti-* is tiring. Where are the people and politicians with optimism and a vision? The issues with data centers are manageable. It's quite hard to bring X back to America if Americans oppose the buildings we need (factories, power gen, data centers). I wonder how much of this is the powerful and adversarial poisoning the discourse so America continues to stumble and fall from hegemony?

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If you want people to support anything, show them how it benefits them. Do it as directly as possible - new jobs in their town, lower energy bills from a new plant, etc. People will generally follow the money.

What won't work is something like "it'll be better for the economy in the entire country, so put up with some disruption for a while." No one likes higher electricity bills while a power plant is being constructed, a new building going up too close to their homes that doesn't create jobs they can apply for, etc. It's a losing message to promise the payoff only years later or indirectly.

Especially when the payoff is "AI will create exciting new jobs" and no one can come up with any jobs that are not just "AI Accountant" where the AI Accountant is just an existing Accountant replacing one of his colleagues.

For sure, a couple of those arguments I've heard recently

1. The taxes can offset the federal cuts so local taxes do not need to be raised. Requires the local gov't officials signing onto the deal in this way, which seems more likely given the massive pushback nation wide.

2. The data centers should be forced to build the energy generation they require. Excess (during off peak) can be fed back into the local grid and lower prices. It's quite likely the energy deficit will be the primary limiting factor to build out. We can also force the data center to pay premium prices, this is within the capability of regulations.

> The issues with data centers are manageable.

are they? whats been done to solve the infrasound pollution?

governments haven't even managed to get datacenters to follow clean air regulation

Yes, a few issues / approaches, largely around politics and regulation. The discourse mainly focuses around the bad cases and extrapolates to all data centers (incorrectly). I run our company workloads in a data center that is 95% renewables (mainly wind).

1. About 25% of data centers use close water cycle systems [1]. This could be part of the approval process. It costs more, but these companies are flush with cash.

2. Where they go matters for water table impact and energy generation mix, both geographically and per zoning laws. There are good and bad places to put data centers.

3. Energy shouldn't be a problem, but we have under/mis-invested. A world with limitless energy is possible, what happened to that vision for massive renewables to realize that?

4. A responsive government is required, which seems to be what is happening (as evidenced by the significant pushback). We should be more reasonable (the middle path), but that seems not within the politics of our times.

[1] https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275...

You might remember the current president cutting renewable subsidies and adding regulation to slow down building them?

Yup, mainly focused on wind mills because he's still butt hurt about losing in Scotland. Solar is still growing at a good clip. The economics has reversed and many renewables are now cheaper.

We've heard a lot of optimism about Facebook, Google, etc. and now see all those companies having too much power over us and sucking worse eeach year. So we've evolved our thinking. Sorry it's tiring.

I'm fully on board with the Big Tech / Big Ai / oligarchs having far too much power. I am involved with my local indivisible towards creating a better future. We are currently focused on getting voter turnout so we can get people elected to slow the damage the current admin is doing. It's hard to have any nuanced discussions right now.

Interestingly, the group is mixed on the Ai topic. Some are anti, some are very excited. We have had amazing discussions without it becoming heated, IRL, because people communicate differently in the flesh.

> Where are the people and politicians with optimism and a vision?

Seems like an assumption on your part that being pro-data center reflects "vision" and "optimism."

> The politics of anti-* is tiring. Where are the people and politicians with optimism and a vision?

China.

The US has always had reactionaries, especially around topics construed as existential threats

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