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Comment by neucoas | Hacker News Reader

> now residents want to complain about it years later because data centers are this year's culture war hot topic

I hope one day Amazon or any AI company installs a data center next to your home. Then you will finally understand

The data center in question is being installed next to a Walmart supercenter and highway 101. It’s being built on land zoned for industrial use. It’s not next to anybody’s home.

This is false and easily provable by simply looking at the location on the map [1]. It's very clear that it's being built near housing and schooling. Especially a big deal as there's been more recent cases of exceedingly loud data centers carrying noise quite a distance.

[1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/D5PDUa62B5weCcqZ7

It looks to me like it’s several hundreds of meters away from housing, with a 6-lane divided and controlled-access highway between the housing and the site.

The only houses I see are across a busy highway (101). The location is in an industrial park with nothing behind it. You’re not wrong, for large values of “near”, but not making a great case.

It's close enough when you consider that the noise from a poorly built data center (ie: most of the ones being stood up rapidly in the current AI craze) can carry noise upwards of a mile plus depending on a bunch of different factors. So a lot of homes in that area would potentially be within the blast radius of data center noise, especially at night.

You’re right that it does appear to be near a school (I don’t think anything that contradicts anything else I said). I think the health effects of siting a school right on a major highway are much more serious than being near a data center.

If noise is the concern then regulate noise. Don’t restrict data centers.

If someone’s house has a dog that barks continuously, you aren’t going to say building houses here are restricted. Instead you restrict barking dogs, which is what cities do.

And companies frequently ignore city-wide noise ordinance thanks to corruption and kickbacks.

And how is that more or less likely then companies ignoring city zoning laws, or making cities grant zoning exceptions through kickbacks and corruption?

Much more likely! Zoning exceptions can be opposed and construction is very visible, as with this trend we're starting to see. Whereas once a structure is built the owner will stymie attempts at investigation by denying access, and generally has more resources than a municipality to waste endless time in court. If they're politically connected at the state/national level, they can even nullify existing pollution laws or override local ordinances.

So you saw a video of the unholy shrieking of a gas turbine and concluded that all data centers are like that?

Before an edit, you had made an analogy to whether it makes sense to judge individuals' behavior the same way that datacenters are getting stereotyped. If there was no recourse through the legal system, then maybe?

The problem here is that the "justice" system is all too happy to come down on individuals, while giving corpos a pass. If you or I buy a loud car stereo, we can get fined for making too much noise. Cities can even pass new noise ordinances or new methods of measurement that are post facto of our purchase, and we still have to conform to them! But when a corpo does something similar, the kid gloves go on, their ongoing behavior (eg noise pollution) gets "grandfathered", and there is nothing that anybody can do. Restore the rule of law - meaning equal protection under it rather than one-sided laws written by corpos - to restore the public's trust that new data centers (and construction/business in general!) will be accountable.

But barring that, I'd say it's only smart to prevent this industry from getting a foothold in your community. Most are going to be great neighbors, but the few that aren't you can't do anything about. So why risk it?

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