Hacker News Reader

Comment by cogman10 | Hacker News Reader

> no one I know gives a shit about the energy consumption or water usage.

They do when the knowledge of the resource consumption is paired with "Which will directly lead to your electric/gas bill going up."

People are also paying attention to the fact that the politicians aren't paying attention to the people. Nobody is even trying to sell the benefits of a datacenter in people's backyard. Instead, politicians are bending over backwards to eliminate any possible benefit by giving these datacenters permanent tax breaks.

When you have politicians clearly bought by businessmen who don't care about the communities that elected them. It's a bit of a no brainer that they'd be voted out.

View on HN

I think it's less about what data centers are and more about what they represent.

* The lack of care of governments of the people's will: they're opposed nearly everywhere but city governments get them done anyway, oftentimes while ignoring more important local problems

* The intrusion of the wealthy/big tech into people's lives. Large tech companies tend to be like insurance companies: they just appear out of the ether of daily life, and make your life worse.

* The ongoing selling out of America to the wealthy: the rich can do, buy, or build whatever they want. Regular people have to just deal with it.

I'm just saying a lot of these I expect we're going to start seeing more direct opposition to from local activists. And a lot of these areas have high rates of gun ownership.

> I think it's less about what data centers are and more about what they represent.

I don't really agree with that. Like I agree with you that these things represent a lot of things people hate. But what they are also matters.

Amazon warehouses represent pretty much all the same things here, but people don't get mad at them because what they are is storage for products and jobs for the local community. They are things that get people their orders faster. While there are protests to Amazon warehouses, it's not to the level of data centers.

I'd argue that it's uniquely what these things are on top of what they represent. They are giant sucks of power/gas which raises local prices and spews out pollution. And their benefit to a local community is basically nothing. ChatGPT isn't appreciably better because of a gargantuan noisy pollution spewing data center next door. And that's assuming the residents use or appreciate ChatGPT.

In smaller towns, many people absolutely do have an issue with distribution centers that will probably increase local traffic.

I think it's a fool's errand to believe populaces resist data centers, or take up issues in general, for any of the rational reasons you listed. It's propaganda using m legacy/social media to fuel movements. The only question is who the propaganda is from. The boogeyman guess would be China but i honestly have no clue. Either way, when you engage most of those against data centers, their positions are generally baseless (not that the anti data center movement is without merit - its just most of the movement is not in it due to rationality or logic)

What positions did you hear and conclude were baseless?

Anything having to do with water

Utah is looking at 3 gigawatts to start and 9GW when operating, the state uses 4 GW, and they are choosing to tell residents that their service will be shut off to support the datacenter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com