pj_mukh

No NIMBY ever says “let’s just ban this!”, they always say “we need to study the issue more”. Almost always.

The science of hosting rack GPU servers in the middle of is unknown? Are you listening to yourself? Power and water usage is extremely well known. This isn’t a Nuclear Fusion site.

This is exactly what I mean though, if you can just keep claiming everything is an unknown you can successfully do nothing ever. The NIMBY mantra.

Spare me with the “temporary”, nobody will ever find the political will to actually approve data centers in Maine for the next quarter century, I can guarantee it.

If the whole voting population came together and said we’d like to pay ourselves $100,000 in straight cash today by borrowing it from future generations. Should they be able to do it in the name of direct democracy? Blocking all future growth due to aesthetic reasons is 10x worse, atleast the $100,000 could be meaningfully spent now.

Appointing a council of elders who will think through every imagined horror before approving a project (or a “framework”) is basically the textbook definition of NIMBY-ism.

Every NIMBY thinks they’re being optimally thoughtful (tm), except the answer is always the same, two years of environment studies, followed by a loud resounding “No”.

Why would they approve anything? They have no incentive to.

This is a recipe for creating dead retiree states. Just NIMBY everything, NIMBY the power sources[1] [2], then complain about a lack of power so NIMBY any type of new industrial <anything>.

Now do this for housing, new sources of water anything a person younger than 40 would need and you basically get a state full of retirees..and oh would you look at that! [3].

Now the question is, why wouldn't all states eventually do this with the way our population pyramid is looking? It's basically rabid conservation and tragedy of the commons writ large.

[1]: https://www.mainepublic.org/politics/2025-04-08/bill-removin...

[2]: https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/maine-voters-reject-q...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

Fascinating. First you NIMBY the power, then you cite the power shortages to NIMBY the data centers. Win. Win.

"Neither Maine nor New Hampshire voters are "bozos" for voting it down. "

I mean yes, that is how the Tragedy of the Commons works. Everyone individually makes the optimal decision for themselves but in effect you've basically hamstrung green sources of energy around the country by being very smart for your own state.

The question is, should you be allowed to this.

"We are for the jobs the comet provides" - Don't Look up.

I'm not trying to be facile here but let's be honest the environmental concerns are silly. I don't want to hear about electricity shortages from a state hellbent on NIMBY-ing itself out of power[1],[2].

I understand people are threatened by this technology, the tech CEOs' loud pronouncements can cause that and that these arguments are basically threat responses. I buy that. But to hear otherwise smart people say non-chemical industrial factories are a serious environmental threat but if they provided more jobs it would be fine while everyone nods along, feels like I'm living in an Adam McKay satire.

[1]: https://www.mainepublic.org/politics/2025-04-08/bill-removin...

[2]: https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/maine-voters-reject-q...

I don't know what's more crushing, not having a job, or knowing deep-down that there is a machine that can trivially do your job.

If I was made to lamp street lamps 5 years after incandescent street lights were invented, while not working on any way forward, I'd probably fall into a deep existential crisis.

How does a government express "anti-feminism". Surely you're not suggesting a reduction in voting power for women. So what else would make it seem "fair" to men in your mind?

FWIW, I'm not saying we are at full employment for all possible specializations and geography's, clearly some are out and others are in and we have some of the most immobile labor we've seen in a while [1]. The problem, as with many things, is housing. People simply can't (and aren't) moving to where the jobs are.

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2025/12/31/nx-s1-5660752/why-americans-d...

Just to cut through the headline here. The largest chunk of Oracle layoffs were in India [1]. In comparison, they've barely fired any American workers.

Contrary to popular opinion, IT workers aren't interchangeable and there exist a large swath of jobs that very few people qualify for (HN should know this) because of the specialization required.

America is at near full employment [2]. Replacing American workers with lower paid foreign workers is already illegal and frequently enforced[3].

This is such a deep distraction but a virulent virus of a narrative, surgically designed to needle our reptilian minds.

[1]: https://www.goodreturns.in/news/tech-layoffs-2025-oracle-cut...

[2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/269959/employment-in-the...

[3]: https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/whd/whd20180501-2, https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/whd/whd20180501-2

"returning to the moon in a more sustainable way"

Isn't this the point of this mission? If your point is "it shouldn't take this much money", then I agree. But also point to almost everything else.

"Just like oil prices and the global economy, fundamentally everything is getting better." (implied /s)

I remember having to pay a pretty penny to have a 3 minute conversation with my dad working half way across the world. Now I can video call my nephew for 45 minutes without blinking an eye. What happened?

Why will Intelligence be like Oil and not Broadband?

"typically own the houses and they obviously don’t want the prices to go down."

I've never understood this: If I replace a single home with 20 apartment homes, I've raised the value of the whole property at purchase time no? You're already dealing with home valuations that have faaar outstripped wages, the only way you go any higher is to build more homes on the same property.

Counterintuitively, the "I don't want to live next to apartments" line of thinking actually seems more potent in the regular NIMBY headspace? Like people will forego higher valuations to keep their suburb a suburb.

I moved away to Europe where there are none of those things and my child can walk himself over to a park 10x the size of an American backyard.

The chaos and noise (especially the car noise) are just an explicit choice American cities have made.

I really hope you get the irony of being a suburbanite complaining about there being too many cars in cities when most of those cars are suburbanites who’ve given up on improving the public transit in their cities.

This is the right answer. I have a child, work remotely and while I appreciate the flexibility, I kind of hate it for my career. The article is mostly vibe-y without any digging into why people with children need to commute from so far.

It's rent, the answer is almost always rent. Its my rent, its my child-care workers rent, it my kids school-teachers rent. It's always rent.

"This is a problem with a known solution that unfortunately still happens despite the best efforts to prevent it."

Great, let's just apply that logic to Waymo as well and call it a day (see how silly that sounds?). Waymo has engineers..so does the Department of transportation.

Yea but this feels like when a Waymo ran over a cat, and a Human driver ran over a toddler and both got the same level of coverage in the media (actually the cat got more follow-up coverage). And I'm supposed to believe both issues are equally important.

No. That's gaslighting, and totally misplaced political activation.

all accountability need not be punitive, we can certainly talk about systemic guardrails. What I find disbelief in, is someone saying the Chief of Police saying "We are not going to talk about that today?" is not the biggest scandal, but the AI is.

I'm sorry but this is a piss-poor excuse. When I Claude code broken features, I'm responsible 100%.

Why are cops not treated the same way? OP is right, AI is totally irrelevant in this story.

If the point is "cops can't be trusted". Why do they have GUNS?! AI is the least of your problems.

I feel like I'm going crazy with this narrative.

"A lot of that comes from parental involvement and having a critical mass of engaged students and parents, not the dollar amount spent on each student."

FYI, parent engagement is also heavily proportional to parent income/property prices.

Very hard to be engaged at school with double/triple working class jobs.

Bingo.

Personally haven’t met any parents who don’t know this already.

The problem is childcare not knowledge.

[flagged]

On a Sidenote: I’d a love a list of CLOSED journals and conferences to avoid like the plague.

“If people keep stabbing each other with knives then we shouldn’t make that trade just to be able to continue to cut vegetables at home”

Tale as old as time itself.

“But on balance it’s a negative!!”

By what measurement? That’s simply a measurement of your own personal information bubble.

“ technology that has some legitimate uses, it doesn't need a huge boost”

That’s what I’m disagreeing with. “Legitimate uses” isn’t something just hanging out in the ether to attach itself to useful technology it happens via a grinding sales process and big industry wide cultural changes.

People don’t like change.

I think AI and its knock-on effects in robotics will have massive productivity boosts in industries where productivity has been lagging for years. It will take decades and multiple boom-busts to happen to drag the population into change but it’ll happen.

I think this is exactly the right intuition. I think people hopelessly underestimate the human tendency to do nothing. We have this idea that if an innovation is good enough it should “sell itself”, and that’s almost never true because across all organizations, it’s almost always safer to do nothing, adopt nothing, keep doing what you’re doing.

No one gets fired for suggesting no change.

It takes a special level of hype where “doing nothing” is no longer the sensible choice.

Do I wish this hype was spread around to other technologies that are also awesome, of course. I’d love to help someone figure out a way to do that but as of now, we don’t know how to do that. Humans are very bad at holding two different ideas in their head.

Their investments in robotics over the long term will lead to massive unlocks in productivity that hasn’t moved in some industries for decades eg sim2real tech leading to construction robots being used to build housing with 1/3 of the human labor needed now in an industry with widespread labor shortage [1]

Will it match a certain valuation within a certain time period? I guess I don’t really care, I’m not an investor.

[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/operations/our-insight...

Except NVIDIA is turning the roundabout investments into real silicon, data centers and extraneous software investments (see: IsaacSim, autonomy stack etc). They may not have the returns all the investors are expecting but they are an extreme net good for the ecosystem.

I think the comparison to stock buybacks is ludicrous.