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Comment by antonymoose | Hacker News Reader

In my area (South Carolina) - the opposition seems hyper fixated on “water use” with little or no conversation around electrical usage or even equitable utility rates. AI itself largely absent from the discourse.

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Data centers use miniscular amount of water. Data center water use is a fake issue.

I've long suspected that monied interests are seeding social media with weak arguments about water as a distraction, and people mindlessly re-share that as part of their identity. Then the other half can come along and "correct" them while the main issue of power is forgotten. Social media gets engagement, and capital gets its data centers.

It's the same tired distraction pattern we've seen for a long time now in politics, and they keep rolling it out because it works.

What makes their actions mindless, exactly? Is the implication that what they've read is easily falsifiable by the average person? One of the fundamentals to society-scale problem solving is not to dismiss the masses as morons, as much as we often enjoy doing that. You must accept who society is composed of, or else you, by definition, can't fix their problems.

Social media fosters that kind of behavior. Plus, people usually don't look into issues before deciding which "side" to be on, and more importantly don't examine if the sides are a manufactured false dichotomy, as they often are.

I suspect rather foreign actors seed some of the anti data center narrative in order to try and reduce American capability to compete in the space, just like the Soviets did with nuclear in the 60-80s.

If they wanted to do that, they'd pick stronger arguments for starters. But either way, social media updoots and shares aren't going to change anything with capital's plans, so it'd be weird for a foreign power to think that it would.

They don't need strong arguments they need emotionally resonent ones, "AI is using all your water" is a more primal, plus doesn't matter they just flood with a thousand different arguments.

And updoots might not but plenty of people now are protesting and pushing against allowing data centers to be built near them so it is working.

Like everything else, it's only a matter of time before capital gets its way. Democracy is illusory in case you haven't noticed.

updoots == upvotes

(slang from reddit)

This is a great data-backed resource to refute made-up claims about data centers:

https://www.andymasley.com/visuals/ai-prompt-footprint/

Nobody's gonna change their mind about AI wastefulness from an obviously AI-generated infographic. The author should have realized this with about 5 seconds of thought.

The medium is the message.

Many communities are water limited. Many communities limit housing construction permits to available sewer hookups. Many communities are carrying expensive bonds that citizens are paying off to fund water expansion projects.

I do not want one penny of infrastructure that I have paid for in order to grow/better my community going to subsidize infrastructure for datacenters.

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