Americans Have Grown Dramatically Anti-Data Center | Hacker News Reader

Americans Have Grown Dramatically Anti-Data Center

gizmodo.com

31 pointsWarOnPrivacy25 comments

It seems like there’s very little upside to allowing one in your state. They don’t bring in large amounts of new jobs once construction is done, they leech power and water like vampires increasing costs and depleting resources, they add noise and light pollution to nearby areas, they’re ugly. They only seem to benefit large tech companies.

The US has been dragging its feet in increasing power capacity and modernizing the grid. Data Centers (and one day EVs) are the kind of push we need to get the complacent monopolies to do the work.

The water concerns are absolutely overblown, the paper that everyone draws their numbers from had to be ammended because they had a 1000x water usage error.

When a poor town has an empty lot get converted to a data center, they are getting some jobs. 20 jobs of remote hands, plumbers, and security guards is better than zero. And there is increased tax revenue (this point I disagree with, because property tax is wrong and we need a land value tax).

Long term these changes are good.

They don't employ local maintenence/security. They contract with a large, reliable company from the nearest big city.

And those companies hire more people in the area. I don't care if the guy is driving 30 minutes to work. I know plenty of people whose careers are "security" . Why would I not want them to have more work?

No, they hire third-party staffing companies who only hire ‘independent contractors’ at low rates, with no benefits and punitive Ts&Cs.

> Data Centers (and one day EVs) are the kind of push we need to get the complacent monopolies to do the work.

Genuinely interested to know, has this actually happened on a larger scale? I.e. data centers triggering a systematic push to modernize the grid?

My impression (from headlines) was that companies either accept rising prices for grid power or generate their own power - using noisy, polluting and CO2 emitting gas turbines. In both situations the local communities are left holding the bag.

> they are getting some jobs. 20 jobs of remote hands, plumbers, and security guards is better than zero.

They'll also have made sure they won't ever get any more jobs from that "investment" over the next decades, whereas someone else could have built something with actual job growth instead.

I think those takes are a bit like saying the Fentanyl factory next door is great because it also needs a janitor and the exhaust contains CO2 so will make the plants grow faster.

I’m not against data centers, but they need to come with their own clean power supply, and export minimal pollution to its neighbors .

If you can’t provide that it’s not worth the downsides for the community.

Small power plants are less efficient and more polluting than larger ones. They are also harder to inspect and certify on a regular schedule. A single 1GW power facility in your county is much better than 10000 small power plants, one for each business.

True, centralized power generation using a grid that can carry that load would be the best solution. But in absence of that, the alternatives only seem to be between inefficient decentralized green and inefficient decentralized non-green solutions. In that case, I'd opt for the green ones. (Or of course: no datacenter at all)

Even for wind or solar ?

LOL. You’d need thousands of acres of solar panels to provide power for a single data center. Of course the exact area needed depends on what part of the world you’re in, but are you going to put up with 4 square miles of solar panels in your city? That’s a square two miles on a side, or 3.4km×3.4km. Or are you going to let them install hundreds of wind turbines in your neighborhood?

Yes. Don’t build the data center unless you can support that. What’s so strange about it?

I agree with this, and it really exposes how two faced and scandalous these companies are.

They all love green energy, but will they use that for their data centers in your backyard?

Rules for the and not for me !

I have several friends who used to lament the loss of manufacturing jobs as a ticket to the middle class, but now say they're going to protest a proposed data center, which feels a bit ironic. None really link it to AI's social impact like Gizmodo does here, the argument always starts with "I don't understand what they need a data center for" (often genuinely wanting me to explain it since I work with computers) and then goes into noise, water use, or loss of farmland. I'd probably not want to live near the noise pollution of a data center or any other kind of noisy industry either, so their views aren't incomprehensible or anything (though the farmland one makes zero sense to me), but it does seem like an instance of the revealed preference that many Americans are just deeply skeptical of anything more intensive than an Amazon warehouse going on in their area, even if they enjoy a fantasy version of the country where (usually other) people have a nice union job in a widget factory. It's good to remember when political extremists try to claim there's some easy fix that will make America an industrial powerhouse again; in reality, most of us don't want anything close to that.

I think locals (unlike economists apparently) are also thinking what is produced in particular in those facilities.

Yes, a chip fab might in fact be more of an environmental hazard, but at least the benefits of the products are clear.

I think this even used to be true with data centers before AI: It's sort of easy to see the need for one if you're hosting your own website in one or at least understand a bit more how the internet works.

The problem with AI is that both the product and its production now have a negative reputation.

Why should people tolerate the downsides of a factory if its only product is actively causing job losses, mental health problems and large-scale cognitive decline?

Datacenters don't create jobs and drain local resources.

It takes a couple dozen people to fully staff a datacenter. That's literally a rounding error in employment statistics.

Framing it as an argument against American manufacturing or jobs is complete nonsense.

> Datacenters don't create jobs and drain local resources.

Recap

    DATACENTERS DON'T CREATE JOBS

    DATACENTERS DRAIN LOCAL RESOURCES

    DATACENTERS DRIVE UP PRICES Of CRITICAL COMPONENTS 5-FOLD

    [there are countless more lines but you get the idea]

Datacenters are the greatest epic tragedy since car culture/trespassing culture mass-murdered childhood.

>Framing it as an argument against American manufacturing or jobs is complete nonsense.

It is a strong argument against those things in at least three ways: (1) if you want to mandate that high tech manufacturing come back to America (e.g. "just make iPhones here" which seems to be a common sentiment in my circles), it would be foolish to suppress an industry creating insatiable demand for high tech components and ensuring that it goes offshore at a time when other countries are also trying to build more local manufacturing. To say nothing of components and construction materials that are already manufactured here. (2) there are very few types of industry that would create less local environmental impact than a data center, no chance if you think data centers use too much water you'd be okay with the toxic chemicals that chip fabs work with. (3) since America is a high wage country with a lot of R&D strength, any factories we build are naturally going to be much more automated than they are in low wage countries. Being against entire industries because individual facilities don't create enough jobs would probably be quite limiting in the types of manufacturing you'd approve of as well.

How are data centers creating manufacturing jobs?

Media: "X is horrible!"

<6 months later>

Media: "Americans Don't Like X"

It's true that folks are unhappy when media does it's actual damn job and explains the things that bring harm.

However, a useless media is also a thing and it exists right along side of worthwhile media.

News Media: [Lockstep silence on Gov surveillance before 2013. Mostly silent on Gov/Corp surveillance after. Rarely reports on pols trading campaign cash for law/power]

<2026> Surveillance Is Everywhere and is being deployed against everyone possible.

Public: Increasingly exploited. Seemingly conditioned. Many are giddy after voting for a lying, grifting autocrat. Most don't give a thought to reelecting pols funded by career bribery.

    I prefer the news media
    that honors it's 1A protections
    by actually informing the public.

Yet they still love ordering from Amazon.

Amazon seemed to work just fine before this AI datacenter boom

Arguably Amazon is worse since they added AI

You don't need a datacenter in every town to run Amazon eShop.

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