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Comment by dlcarrier | Hacker News Reader

I do like living and working in buildings, using computers, refrigeration systems and transit infrastructure, getting medical care, and eating cooked food, so I think building things is by far a net positive.

Also, banking, scientific research, offsite backups, and the internet have been very useful, so data centers are pretty great.

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May they build a data center next to your home.

It's always nice to be close to things we cherish dearly.

There is a data center in my town.

I drove by it and don't get the fuss. It's a box in an industrial park. It makes a little bit of noise but not nearly as much as the paper factory next to it. People just like to whine.

A paper factory, on the other hand, smells like barf and has huge vats of chemicals that will dissolve you. It probably uses also more power than a data center, at a much worse power factor.

There's stuff in my town that I don't mind being there, but they are "over there" enough not to bother me.

I used to work two lots down from one. I wouldn't notice at all if it was next to my house. The only way to distinguish it from any other business in the office park was the slightly higher security. There was also a charter school next to it, and it was much more disruptive than the data center.

That's dismissive to my point. Society built itself up. Corporations that suck on society's tit and give nothing back, demand profits, and continue to skim off the top are not Mother Teresa.

I've had great experiences with most every large corporation I've chosen to deal with, from suppliers like Toyota with their cars and Perrigo with their pharmaceuticals to distributors like Costco and WinCo Foods, and marketplaces like Craigslist and eBay. The countless smaller S corps I deal with have been even better. I've also benefited greatly from nonprofit corporations like the Wikimedia Foundation, American Automobile Association, and Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

There are plenty of corporations that I haven't had a great time with, so I just don't do business with them. Amazon's marketplace search doesn't support boolean operators and their sort by price feature doesn't work, so I buy from eBay instead. Wal Mart doesn't have as good of products or as helpful of employees as WinCo, so I buy from the latter.

The only corporations that I've had bad experiences with but continue to patronize are: Comcast, Wells Fargo, and PG&E. Just because they treat me horribly doesn't mean I blame any of their wrongdoing on the other corporations I do business with. Their use of tax breaks is far from the worst problem. They all have contracts with various government organizations which force me to do business with them, when I would leave immediately if I had a choice.

Granted, I've had much better experiences with those three than with Department of Motor Vehicles and the Franchise Tax Board, so I'm probably better off with those agreements in place than if the government organizations themselves were providing internet access, servicing my mortgage, and suppling natural gas. Then again, what is a government except the most powerful corporation?

I don't like doing business with corporations that have police and an army backing them, but otherwise the rest of the corporations I deal with have been great.

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