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Comment by beej71 | Hacker News Reader

"Let us build this data center in your back yard and in return you'll get..."

Conspiracies aside, this sentence still needs to be satisfactorily completed for people to buy in. Because right now people know the best case is they'll get nothing.

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This is a silly standard and the reason why people make fun of NIMBYism. By this logic we shouldn't build anything at all unless it immediately benefits the people living next to it. (And I don't like how much power DCs are using either, but that should be the argument, not "it doesn't benefit me personally so don't build it".)

Correct, we shouldn't.

Alright, fair enough. I guess no factories, no power lines or pipelines, no thru highways or train tracks, no office parks, no farms other than subsistence, no radio towers or aeronautical beacons, no bus depots or railyards, no quarries, oil rigs, or mines. Heaven forbid someone is forced to live nearby something that's useful for someone other than themselves.

They can exist, they just have to create value, and not the capitalist sort exclusively measured in dollars.

Sure. ChatGPT alone has a billion users. I don't particularly like AI, but it's clearly useful, and a lot of people are using it. (And even this assumes that every data center is an AI one.)

Then it can afford to compensate affected people.

Yeah, they do, they pay for the land. That's how buying land works and it's separate from the permitting process to actually build on it. I'm not really seeing where we're going with this

That doesn't compensate affected people. It only compensates the previous landowner. In fact it usually more than compensates them, as they receive substantial profit, creating a speculative bubble market that's bad for everyone else.

if they pay for the land and pay taxes why exactly shouldn't they be able to build what they want on that land? besides that what do you mean by "compensate" affected people? does a sewage treatment plant need to compensate nearby homes?

Call me crazy but I think the purpose of an economic system is to encourage what's good for society.

If people like that have their way private property would effectively cease existing.

And on higher level. "You are spending astonishing amount of maybe our collective money for ..."

Looking at those numbers. Looking at what it does now. And then simply comparing it to anything else and very reasonable some start to question what even is going on...

Regardless of what the tech can or cannot do, the business model is clearly a scam by people who get high on thinking they're smarter than everyone else. You don't promise your investors "the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars" by accident. You do it because you're a fraud who thinks you're much cleverer than you actually are.

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