mukbangpervert

I agree that datacenters showed up because a ton of fibre was already there.

I was talking about reasons that the general public of Loudon County has had a positive view toward datacenters -- not why datacenters chose the county (that's a different list entirely).

Notably, that the datacenters showed up in a way that offered almost no material downsides to the locals... and that this differs markedly from what many towns face today.

A few things you might want to consider:

1) your example pays very substantial tax. (property taxes, plus, recently, tax on electricity use)

2) your example primarily used undesirable land.

3) your example grew slowly, allowing the power company to add capacity without a big challenge matching demand.

4) your example is in a heavily connected part of the grid, so it didn't need all of that added power generation to be local.

All of these factors led to datacenters being viewed favorably by Loudon County for most of this century.... but many (and sometimes all) of those factors aren't there for other projects. For example, there are a lot of projects where the datacenter is not paying any property tax or sales/use tax at all.

Heck, even in Loudon County, they're changing regulations to pump the brakes because the hyperscale datacenters are growing electric demand a bit too quickly for them to manage without adding a little friction.

Your anecdote about "it was good in this one county, from 1995 through 2025" cannot be reasonably extended to believe that all of these projects have similar tradeoffs.

(And I'm not even getting into the reality that "this datacenter will let me use AOL" will, of course, be viewed differently than "this datacenter will help my employer remove my job.")

It's inaccurate to claim that the opposition is "completely irrational".

One _extremely_ rational and common reason that people oppose these projects is that they can bid-up the energy cost in their regions, meaning that one of the residents biggest monthly bills gets bigger.

A second one goes around pollution and noise, particularly when the AI DataCenter is using "portable" gas turbines or similar.

Solutions are hard, but possible... so long as the decision makers are able to recognize that much of the opposition is quite rational, and that the deals struck need to accommodate the legitimate and rational concerns, while avoiding getting hung up by true nonsense.

They described their car as having "auto-installed" the update.

An update which advertised, amongst other features, that it "rectifies errors and prevents security gaps" and stated "This update is recommended for everyone."

Borderline insane to refer to the user as "complicit" in that case.

BEVs are great for non-enthusiasts whose goal is to be transported, but in their current incarnation they are _abysmal_ for people whose goal is _to drive_.

And people who brag about the performance specs of a car whose main selling point is that it requires no skill or attention to drive are missing the point entirely.

True, I just left a hipster coffee shop in LA, and the liberals were whispering about their love of SaaS services, and their desire to socialize the costs of compute infrastructure.

Your post is largely false, and quite confused.

Grid upgrade costs are frequently socialized onto existing customers, especially for larger upgrades. Your central premise that interconnect charges cover everything is false.

When they gave water to big ag, we got to buy food.

With this, we pay extra to lose our jobs.

Or how about this framing (using your own numbers): for every dollar a datacenter is charged for electricity, regular hard-working Americans get charged $2.

Your proposed sentence contains less information.

The initial headline also conveys both that there is current spend with Broadcom, and that the future spend is higher than current levels.

if you watch European car enthusiast review videos, they nearly all start by showing what's required to disable all of the nannies.

To be precise: Biden created an abusable system that requires waivers for Chinese software that is now being administered by the GOP.

Volvo got a waiver from the Trump admin no problem. Polestar could not get their waiver from the Trump admin.

I expect Polestar will eventually get their waiver, once Elon has less clout. Until then, Elon has tariffs keeping china-made EVs uncompetitive, and this program that deals with Chinese companies that setup shop in America.

The video discusses this directly.

I should've said competitive Chinese EVs to be precise.

(Though I thought that anybody as smart as you think you are would've inferred that without issue)

Correction: it is because a major Republican donor wants Chinese cars banned, because they beat the living shit out of his offerings on quality and value.

It is silly to credulously pretend that the excuse about Chinese software has even a whiff of legitimacy.

What facts do you have that make you certain that the underlying issue is "food addiction" rather than, say, a difference in body chemistry that changes perceived hunger levels?

Stellantis is wild. They went from having a large portfolio of brands, each of which had many popular vehicles in America to having the Chrysler minivan, the Dodge charger, the Jeep Wrangler/Gladiator, and the Ram pickup.

There's the added cost that the best people are the least likely to return after a layoff.

There is power available in the country. It is not available in arbitrary quantity, to arbitrarily selected buildings, on arbitrarily short timelines.

That said, I agree we need more power generation in this country. Massive rollouts (like in China) would bolster industry while being beneficial to nearly every citizen except those dependent on legacy energy technologies.

Sadly, the party in power opposes the most scalable approaches to this because greatly expanded power generation would hurt margins for a few special interests.

xAI colossus was built without sufficient grid power, so uses "mobile" gas turbines to generate power.

It's absurd, and serves as evidence that we need a confiscatory wealth tax, if we want to maintain a society.

Meanwhile, at an actual enterprise, we have lots of Slack channels where membership is controlled by an LDAP group... so this would be a non-issue.

"Is it really much different to how much artists got from radio?" is a weird way of stating that artists should be paid more.

If you actually want to defend artists... I suggest _not_ drawing equivalence between the old (bad) deal, and the new (much worse) deal.

A million album sales generates $2-3m for the artist under a typical label deal.

150,000,000 streams typically generates $560k _before_ the label cut.

Your posts make clear that you're a wildly immoral person -- not just because you repeatedly lie and distort to defend your position -- but the crux of your argument is "artists had a mediocre deal, so it is fine that the new deal is dramatically worse".

There's no way to respond to that.

The overall economics are wildly different.

Radio didn't pay much, but it was promotion for the album.

Spotify doesn't pay much, and it _replaces_ the album.

Paul Graham was at his best when he gave clear, experience-driven, action-oriented advice. But even then, his advice was flawed... advising people to do things like to discriminate against women and parents.

As he got a little older, he cut back on that pro-discrimination advice... that typical thing where he was able to recognize the problems with his bigotry only after he would have been on the other side of it.

As he has become ludicrously wealthy he has, unfortunately, lost all track of reality. He no longer engages with the practical or the real... instead he deliberately misreads a quote so that he can wrote a pathetic and defensive response to it that engages in bad faith. And because he is ludicrously wealthy, he is surrounded by a mix of yes-men, and other hyper-wealthy sociopaths. So none of them give him critical feedback.

Paul Graham has become useless to society. He is, fundamentally, just a mindless pile of cash.

cease telling other people what to do and not do!

People like you are so sociopathic and unaware that it's simply comedy.

people who make more money than you.

One of the things I realized, as I made more money... was how much _easier_ every aspect of earning gets, as you are already earning more, and as you need it less.

We live in a system that almost _automatically_ overallocates wealth to people who do little for society. It's pathetic.

People are just lining up to announce that they're fucking idiots.

We've gone from highly skilled people being able to forge some specific photos and documents using substantial time/energy/resources, to any asshole being able to generate realistic full-motion video in minutes.

I get that there is a certain type of moron who thinks that the collapse in cost of misinformation has no harm... but all you've done is announce to the world that you are a moron.