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Please take a moment to review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make an efort to take the intended spirit of the site more to heart.
It is in the spirit of the site that I actually made an argument before doing so.
Had I not been so raw in my response to the poster, garnering flags and downvotes, I doubt that they would even have been addressed at all.
But this site can only work if we have guidelines and uphold them evenly, and it only makes it harder to help and defend you if you act with contempt towards us and the guidelines.
> Had I not been so raw in my response to the poster, garnering flags and downvotes, I doubt that they would even have been addressed at all.
This is false, and offensive. We work hard to make this a place where everyone can express their point of view and where people are not vilified for having different points of view. We would absolutely ban someone who demonstrated a pattern of initiating such attacks on you.
The right way to deal with such attacks is to flag them and to email us (hn@ycombinator.com) to alert us to the attack, and we will always take action.
That answer is interesting. Its cause in most states, if a company formally requests a power hookup, the power company MUST comply. Thus entails in upgrading substations, transformers, supply lines, etc. And all those upgrades are borne by the citizens in that region.
That's why you bill goes up, cause datacenter upgrades dump on the public their externalities.
In some states like Indiana, the governor is already talking about changing that law requiring data centers to pay for upgrades.
The real problem is boomers have stopped allowing things to be built efficiently, so supply is limited, had been limited for decades, and demand still grows, so prices spike disproportionally with demand increases.
Additionally we subsidize wind and solar heavily, but the fixed costs of large plants don't drop, so we end up spending for our power twice and for natural gas plants to replace coal, because that's the only solution we will do to keep power during the winter in Northern states.
This utopia that everyone has about electric cars will never come to fruition without grid upgrades.
This country has systematically underinvested and underdeveloped the electric grid for 50 years and now we are paying the price. It is a government failing.