This is bad news for everyone (well, except the high priests of the LLMs / nascent Cthulhoid godlings), but it certainly makes the communities who've successfully opposed data centers seem ever more justified in retrospect.
Let's not be this flippant about where the real pressure for this is coming from. Presidents and their appointees come and go. The people pushing the regulators[1] are not subject to US election cycles. It's important to know who they are when we aim our finely honed fingers, even if we find that these folks were formerly virtuous and mighty green energy advocates, because if your solution is merely different figureheads, all that will really change is the scale of the bribes.
I did not say that, but is so obvious, like looking through a plate glass window. There is no pressure, its just a natural transition to the end of bipedal life.
While true, it’s also true that presidents and their appointees can vary wildly in their susceptibility to those “people pushing”. Both sides might be bad, but one’s very obviously worse.
> the jenga tower
I am not so sure about these narratives anymore.
Sure, the next step is complete regression to feudalism, but they aren't thinking that far ahead, they just want to take every job in existence that isn't physically turning a proverbial wrench.
Especially after seeing what the “learn to code” movement has brought people into, I can’t imagine those people will just roll over and peacefully enter homeless encampments..
They're largely the ones voting for this.
This has always been a story Americans tell themselves to sleep better at night that has zero relation to reality.
The US is a country that has seen many injustices perpetrated by the government. From concentration camps for people of a certain descent to legal racial discrimination (and slavery before that) to wanton violence by security forces against innocent people (pick your favourite police/ICE/etc murder here).
When have armed Americans ever risen up against a government injustice? Best I can think of is the Oklahoma city bombing and I'm pretty sure that's not what you're all refering to.
You don't need everyone to wake up someday and think "Hey, I think those Jacobins in France had a good point" to have a revolution. You only need a few detonators.
If the societal conditions are ready, nobody can really stop the masses once they are ignited.
* 2 land disputes between federal land management and individuals that thought they deserve more rights over federal land. Hardly fighting against an injustice here, were they
* The BLM protests/unrest started by the murder of George Floyd. I don't recall Americans taking up arms against murderous cops, or anyone, really. The closest to arms taking I can remember is an underage guy going to a protest to "protect" against rioters, getting attacked and killing people in response. Hardly anyone fighting against government instilled injustice with their right to bear arms, is it?
* January 6, where a bunch of mentally challenged individuals tried to overturn the election results at the request of the loser of that election. There was no injustice done against the people in question, and they didn't use their arms against it, they just stormed a barely defended building. One of the shittiest coup attempts of all time, and if anything, for furthering injustice and government overreach than anything else.
So no.
My point is that nobody stands up with arms against injustice in the US.
> The point is that people really do take up arms against the govt all the time
6 times in 50 years, half of which didn't involve any arms? "All the time" might be a stretch.
> that fact has historically had major effects on the conduct of police and politicians
Yes, police have stopped murdering innocent people. Right?
Or a bunch of dudes in the deserts of yemen couldn't defend against a modern military with aircraft carriers, realtime control of almost all communications, autonomous drones and missiles and 5th gen fighters
History and current events seem to be disagreeing with you.
Suppression of populace is vastly different than "trying to beat terrorism" or end resistance in a jungle.
Go take a look at actutal comparable environments, like china, or north korea for how well that goes for the dissenters
The median white collar job in the US (picking it on purpose because it's a country with high wages, your math would be even worse in a France or Italy) is in the $60-70k. Yes you have to add benefits and etc, but we're still pretty far off 150k.
How much tokens does $80k buy you and do you think it's capable of replacing a human's output? For some, definitely. For plenty, I doubt it. Currently token costs are subsidised by the bubble frontier labs and already we're seeing tightening of budgets because it's costing more than expected
They are though! They are literally building castles for themselves already.
Yes, datacentres can be reused for other purposes but dark fibre didn't save the telecom bubble and the utility of train tracks didn't save the railway bubble.
This is potentially good news for everyone who wants to do anything less dirty than a datacenter (logistics, cold chain, light manufacturing/assembly, etc) because they'll probably be able to get the precedent extended to them in the next decade or so. The people and communities that make money off that sort of stuff will probably do well. Most of that sort of industry is in poorer sections of states where the municipalities are constantly being hamstrung by their own state because the municipalities want to permit it but state rules make that hard. So there is potential for some good to come out of it.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/pfas-forever-chem...
"Great" news indeed.
This is like Republicans claiming that they're doing everything for small businesses, when the reality is they're doing things for contract workers who more often are just being forced into contracts that wouldn't exist without the lax regulatory reality and are abused thereof.
"This will benefit the little guy (assuming they survive their cancer diagnosis)"
https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2026/09/10/treasury-launder-mon...
That program had a simple ask of every corporation doing business in America: who really owns it? No more hiding of ill gotten gains and laundering through US real estate, etc (hint: anybody come to mind who might do a lot of that)?.
They killed it. To "protect small businesses".
The Trump Regime is pure corruption.
Financial Crimes Enforcement Network
Sales Tax handling is more of a burden on the business than this reporting was.
All it did was make your 3 member condo association have to pay a lawyer $500/yr in compliance fees for utterly no benefit to anyone other than the compliance folks collecting their rent. Or take on personal criminal liability to file it yourself. Better not forget one random year or it’s a felony!
Just like most of the rest of the AML/KYC creep after 9/11 it did absolutely nothing to go after anybody they say it did - it just made things harder on normal everyday people.
What do you have in mind?
Subpoenas and search-warrants exist but are not trivial.
Oh yes, the well-known path to riches by being a toxic dumping ground.
There are plenty of major industrial powers with very clean industries who used to have very dirty industries in previous decades or centuries. I can't think of any nation at all that developed while maintaining a firm commitment to clean industry trough the process of industrialization (though, there are a few places that never industrialized and developed a service economy directly, especially tax havens and financial hubs).
The vast majority of these these no one knows even exist until told. They are basically warehouses without loading docks not much traffic goes into or out of.
Sure some horrible projects exist and are repeated over and over on social media, but they are the exception.
Most folks working across the street from one of these facilities had no idea until they were told to care.
Trump is running a spoils system. You don't obtain favor through reasoned argument. You obtain favor by making him like you personally.
I think you'll need to wait for the Orange Toddler to pass away before you can get anywhere with reinstating environmental checks and balances.
Even then you'll need to contend with large corporations with buckets of money... and the Republican party...
Public review is a blight on the democratic process. Instead of having a set of democratically established laws and regulations that apply fairly to everyone, a small handful of noisy people with too much time on their hands can stop anyone they don't like from doing something that is perfectly legal.
It's an incredibly dumb process and bypassing it is good, actually.
It also has nothing at all to do with whether the environmental regulations themselves are being followed.
We're talking about data centers, which are deeply unpopular with just about everyone. It's laughable to suggest that skipping public review is a good thing here, because it's only going to result in data centers being sneakily approved contrary to the overwhelming desire of constituents. We can ruminate all day on whether public comments or public review is useful in the grand scheme, but the realpolitik of the situation is that – barring possession of a time machine to go back and elect different representation – it's one of the few levers that constituents have to prevent data centers from moving into their area.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-does-everyone-hate-data-cen...
Speak for yourself. Plenty of people support them. The technological progress and economic benefits they bring are good for our country. But are you always an opponent of democracy, or only when you pretend everyone is on your side on an issue?
70% opposition and people who strongly support (7%) continues to decrease. I guess that’s plenty in absolute numbers. But even the Iran war has more supporters than that.
Your definition of "plenty" does not match up with the accepted definition.
> But are you always an opponent of democracy, or only when you pretend everyone is on your side on an issue?
Have you stopped beating your wife?
A local business owner bought up one of the blocks in the center of the street and announced plans to demolish it in order to build a 5-over-1 complex several stories higher than any of the other buildings.
Without the public comment process, he'd have been able to do this practically overnight, completely ruining the street. The public fought back long and hard for many months and eventually won by convincing the town council to vote against the rezoning that would permit this construction.
I can't say I'm opposed to the public comment process.
(Note that this was not a case of never-change NIMBYism; tons of other similar buildings are going up all over the town completely unopposed. It was the ugly, generic design and the sheer size put so blatantly in the middle of everyone's favorite part of town.)
An odious commercial use is the next best thing to no change whatsoever.
I live on .1ac in a post-industrial shithole that remains a post-industrial shithole largely because the politics of snooty people mostly a hundred miles away.
The last thing I, or anyone else here, needs is "those people" in our midst telling us how to live. Our lifestyles are fundamentally incompatible.
You're cheering for the prevention of building new housing in the most valuable, most useful part of the town. I bet it would have kept all the same retail and restaurants in the bottom too, so there would have been zero downside for anyone who actually uses the street.
Instead a bunch of people with no stake except an aesthetic preference blocked it. How on earth is that a good thing?
"More traffic" is not sufficient. I can actually sort of believe shade from an apartment building could count, but the impression I get is that is rarely a good-faith argument (and in any case it should only severely affect a few people in any new development, so you could easily justify just compensating them in some way rather than outright blocking a development.
If the highest other building was 2 stories then it would have been 4 taller. More likely 3? Not several.
I appreciate your complaint about generic design but damn putting apartments downtown sounds amazing actually, not ruining. Would you have been happy if they had a better design and it was 3 over 1?
> The name derives from the maximum permissible five floors of combustible construction (Type III or Type V) over a fire-resistive Type I podium of one floor for "5-over-1" or two floors for "5-over-2", as defined in the United States–based International Building Code (IBC) Section 510.2.[1][4] Some sources instead attribute the name to the wood framing of the upper construction; the IBC uses "Type V" to refer to non-fireproof structures, including those framed with dimensional lumber.[5][6]
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
† (I think they're fine and moreover I think they're a huge missed opportunity for blue states to get more sustainable and regulated power delivered and data centers running under those regulations, rather that what's going to happen, which is data centers all being located in red states that aren't going to regulate them at all).
The data center backlash is bipartisan though? Even Texas froze all data center buildouts recently [1].
[1]: https://www.texastribune.org/2026/08/03/texas-data-center-pr...
The public comment process has stopped a lot, a LOT, of shitty things from happening at the federal and state government level. I've seen it happen time and time again, because I've been part of it time and time again. Over decades.
So I see this, and to be honest? I'm going to move on! Because this clashes with a lot of extremely personal experiences to me that have shaped public policy and legislation in positive ways. Sometimes people will get it wrong and it can be corrupted by Big Money like anything else, but it's one of the few levers the public has until they start moving to the different boxes of Democracy.
People get really irrational about things built near them and their say causes problems finding anywhere to build reasonable things.
> There are certainly things I wouldn't want to live near to, data centers being one of them.
Give it a residential noise limit and I'm happy to live near a data center. (I am worried about power prices but that's a matter of total number rather than specific location, and utilities charging them enough to cover expansion.)
Separately there's a problem with the lack of enforcement, most notoriously Musk's infamous gas-powered data center that apparently violates a bunch of regulations including noise. Musk does this because he believes that he can get away with it in a sense that the eventual fines, if any, will be dwarfed by the profit extracted. The penalties need to be hefty enough that this computation doesn't work out.
That's not how the vast majority of this works, and the average best case scenario on this you get to vote a politician out after they already fucked people over.
On one hand, fair representation is important, and the idea that every person has an equal say in how governmental decisions are made. One person one vote.
On the other hand, not everyone has the same ‘skin in the game’ for different decisions. For example, if we are deciding if a noisy building should be allowed to be built, someone who lives 5 miles away is not going to be affected by the noise, so they aren’t going to care about that. If someone comes to a community and says “we will give everyone in the community $50 if you let us build this loud building here”, then all the people out of the noise range are going to think that is a great deal. They get $50, and they don’t hear the noise anyway. Why WOULDNT they want to approve that?
So is it fair for the community to decide to make one (or a few) people miserable for years so they get $50?
So things like public review that let a “concentrated local interest group” have more power makes some sense if the thing they are reviewing also has a concentrated local impact.
Of course, there has to be some balance, otherwise we will live in a NIMBY world and nothing will be built.
And your natural inclination is to assume that turnout at public comment maps to those people most impacted by an issue. But that's not at all the case! Turnout maps to those most activated by an issue, which is a function of how much free time they have (public comment is generally wealthier and older) and how fearful they are of change (public comment biases sharply towards "no").
I'm fond of asking people locally here how many of them have even considering turning out at public comment opportunities to support new apartment development. I've never met someone who has, even though people here are broadly supportive of housing. But go to a Plan or HPC meeting: there's a line of commenters out the door opposing the apartments.
Public comment is antidemocratic.
This is a fascinating train of thought. I get the logic, but where does it stop?
If the idea is that any situation where people are influencing the government/making decisions without absolutely everyone in the electorate being involved, is anti-democratic, at what point are people in the government allowed to make decisions without consulting everyone?
We have representatives for a reason, and part of that reason involves making decisions without having a vote (even when that decision is made by someone several rungs down the chain from the person actually elected).
I'm highly sympathetic to the idea that the actual effect of these types of "public comment" situations and hopefully anyone involved in one keeps in mind the inherent biases of who shows up, but I don't see how you can flat out deny the idea of asking people, you know, the voters, to come give opinions on decisions being made that are inbetween the actual elections.
But this isn't the case. In every representative democracy around the world, including ours, the bedrock principle is that elected politicians "vote their conscience", i.e. they are not bound by what they said they'll do if elected. So in practice you can't assume that what you voted for will be put into action. If anything, the track record on that is pretty poor.
This was literally my point about "public comment".
We vote for representatives. They then make decisions based on all sorts of things like ancient holy texts and whoever they spoke to most recently.
How is this formal meeting to give opinions antidemocratic but you setting up a personal meeting to influence someone is just fine?
But that doesn't mean the people trying to prevent change have (only) invalid reasons.
Voting is critical, but it still lags behind. Kicking someone out of office a year after they sign off on the new data center doesn't stop the data center from getting built.
I happen to disagree with most data center opposition, but I'm not saying data center opposition is per se bad because it's delivered through public comment.
What you call "a small handful of noisy people with too much time on their hands" I call "We the People" and it should fall to them to decide what happens in their own communities. It's legal for me to put a hot tub in my living room. My family doesn't have to let me put it there. It's legal to pave over city park in my community and turn them into parking lots, but the people in my city should have a say in that.
That doesn't give anyone veto power, the worst people can do is say mean comments and make the listeners feel bad before they do the thing anyway.
Moving to cut off comments is simply breathtaking arrogance, which is on brand for this regime.
It's like giving people excessive discretion. Then if you're someone they don't like (eg. a black person if you're racist), then you deal out a maximalist punishment. If they're someone you do like, you let them off and tell them not to do it again.
Policy like this is just corruption. It allows some people to exercise more rights than others, at the expense of the commons.
Anyone who knows the story of the US auto industry in the 1970’s and 1980’s knows how excessive government protection for an industry works out.