Always thought letting populism define a "slow-down" was silly, its a moratorium and a permanent veto everyone is looking for. It's fine, the data centers will be built elsewhere in more politically impoverished states, New York and especially NYC will still reap the benefits and offload solving the gnarly energy problems to someone else. Federalism working?
Are you sure? Most of the objections I've seen center around environmental impact and effect on residential energy pricing in the surrounding area. Both of these seem to be to be objectively measurable.
> the data centers will be built elsewhere in more politically impoverished states
What does "politically impoverished" mean? I'd say more "politically permissive" states would make more sense here. Red states are not impoverished of politics, they just have different politics.
Sooo, how does that change in New York in a year? You've mostly re-inforced my point. And specifically the bill doesn't use any automatic re-enablement criteria, so data centers are basically dead in the state.
Realistically, this is a canard, AI scares people and environmental impact is a lever to use to stop it. Ask yourself this: if this was a new Ford plant (dirtier, also uses a lot of energy), would we be having this conversation?
I actually do mean politically impoverished. Banning Data centers is a horsehoe populism issue, the right wing loves it too. The data center builders will just have to find municipalities with less people and/or a less engaged political atmosphere aka politically impoverished. They mostly already have.
If environmental concerns were the real issue, we'd be talking about how to tweak those regulations. If power distribution was the real issue, we'd be talking about the economics of power companies, and tweaking the rules about billing for infrastructure upgrades.
It's strange how we're suddenly talking about things like illegal concrete dumping, as if concrete foundations were somehow specific to datacenters, and not 99% of buildings built in the past century.
Who's "we" in this statement? It can't be be the general public because historically, legally, and morally, the persons causing the problem are responsible for addressing it. When CFC refrigerants were damaging the ozone, "we" didn't talk about alternative chemistry for heat transfer, we adopted the Montreal Protocol and the industry had to figure out the solutions while being legally constrained from externalizing harm to the general public.
There's no novel problem here that any particular industry would need to find novel solutions for. Just some states ought to tweak their rules about the costs of distribution infrastructure upgrades.
If Ford announced that they were opening 10 new plants in every state, then yes, I imagine HackerNews would be having this exact conversation about it.
The other factor is that these tech backed build outs seem to revel in flaunting regulations. More established businesses tend to at least check the regulatory boxes when building new things. Meanwhile, I opened Reuters this morning to this article:
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/pollution-musks-unper...
This is not a measure of anything, except "news that is popular".
What you're looking for is fraction of datacenters that flaunt regulations, and I'm guessing you don't have those numbers and I'm betting they aren't that actually egregious compared to..anyone else building things. Again, I'm not saying this is bad politics, but let's not claim there is some actual issue here.
I mentioned politically impoverished communities, and that explains the Reuters headline more than anything specific about the people that build datacenters and how much they love polluting the air around Black communities.
P.S: Extremely funny for Mr.Solar Panel-Electric cars to now be installing Gas Turbines to run his data centers.
> I'm betting they aren't that actually egregious compared to..anyone else building things
And I'm betting the opposite. As little as I trust the current industrial leaders, I trust Altman, Dario, Zuckerberg, and Musk far less. Maybe in 5 - 10 years when the dust is more settled we'll have a better picture.
Regardless, data centers are drawing moratoriums and regulation because they're the ones building things. If 500 new massive auto plants were planned to be built out in the next 5 years, they would also draw similar ire. It's only specific to data centers because that's what's actually happening, and we live in a world that is capable of responding to the actual events that are unfolding.
For what it's worth, I do agree with you about the politically impoverished communities bearing the brunt of our negative externalities. I would like it if we had regulation that priced in those externalities so we couldn't just dump them on communities that are unable to combat them.
It won’t change at all, of course. I think maybe you don’t understand the reason for the moratorium. A year can be taken to assess what effects are likely to come about and how acceptable they are. Create some guidelines. Right now data centers are being built with no consideration for the effect on the surrounding area and, big surprise, people don’t like that.
> Banning Data centers is a horsehoe populism issue, the right wing loves it too.
Eh. The right wing is far more responsive to business wants than it is to populist demands. Right wing politicians do not like banning data centers even if right wing voters do.
Yea, and my bet is none of this is going to happen. There is simply no incentive to make it happen. Why would a government take all these steps? What's the incentive? Much easier to just keep things the way they are, or more likely, simply re-sense the political headwinds in a year.
"The right wing is far more responsive to business wants"
This is all pre-Trump thinking. Trump just randomly banned Fable, tonnes of MAGA politicos running on the "ban datacenter" ticket, all this is simply no longer true.
For example, allowing flock cameras is more "permissive" maybe, but for me, now I have more surveillance to worry about. I am, effectively, "permitted" to do less. So is it permissive really, or just permissive for the "right" party? The party which, lo-and-behold, happens to have more both literal capital than me and political capital?
Politically impoverished is kind of nice, because:
- Red states are "impoverished" politically in that there's very little competition of competing ideas. It's mostly just converged on who's the most christian and most white, and it's become a hivemind. Obviously not all. But I live in Texas. Have you seen political ads in Texas? It's almost 100% just virtue signaling "I'M the most christian!!1"
- Red state fiscal policy often leads to, like, actual poverty. Most red states are very poor, or at least their inhabitants are. There are exceptions, like Texas. But even in Texas: if you drive through Central, South, or West Texas, you will just encounter town after town after town that are borderline abandoned and obviously riddled with abject poverty.
Wall Street is gonna finance these projects and make their cut wherever the projects ultimately are. NY state is simply ensuring that no concrete batch plant in Oneonta accidentally gets rich along the way too,
It’s a serious concern that looks increasingly plausible. The bond market for financing buildouts is looking shaky and even Amazon struggled there in its last go at loaning money to fuel the buildout. That doesn’t bode well for others.
Good. People in red state have been voting to shit on the environment for longer than I have been alive, and they can have all the data centers.
Red states still have a significant population that don't vote Republican and they're more often than not the ones who bear the brunt of negatives like data center construction.
Like how the dnc is surprised when their overzealous and poorly thought out gun control measures are turned down by democratic voters. Of course they are, near 50% of rural areas are democrats and many own and use guns. They aren't going to just bandwagon along with poorly conceived legislation that restricts their actively used rights.
I typically don't vote for Republicans, and I typically do vote for environmental protection. However, my state is heavily gerrymandered by the Republican supermajority here.
So, I don't really have a choice.
Also, go fuck yourself for being so glib about an entire state's population and wishing them ill.
That answer is interesting. Its cause in most states, if a company formally requests a power hookup, the power company MUST comply. Thus entails in upgrading substations, transformers, supply lines, etc. And all those upgrades are borne by the citizens in that region.
That's why you bill goes up, cause datacenter upgrades dump on the public their externalities.
In some states like Indiana, the governor is already talking about changing that law requiring data centers to pay for upgrades.
The real problem is boomers have stopped allowing things to be built efficiently, so supply is limited, had been limited for decades, and demand still grows, so prices spike disproportionally with demand increases.
Additionally we subsidize wind and solar heavily, but the fixed costs of large plants don't drop, so we end up spending for our power twice and for natural gas plants to replace coal, because that's the only solution we will do to keep power during the winter in Northern states.
This utopia that everyone has about electric cars will never come to fruition without grid upgrades.
This country has systematically underinvested and underdeveloped the electric grid for 50 years and now we are paying the price. It is a government failing.
Please take a moment to review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make an efort to take the intended spirit of the site more to heart.
It is in the spirit of the site that I actually made an argument before doing so.
Had I not been so raw in my response to the poster, garnering flags and downvotes, I doubt that they would even have been addressed at all.
But this site can only work if we have guidelines and uphold them evenly, and it only makes it harder to help and defend you if you act with contempt towards us and the guidelines.
> Had I not been so raw in my response to the poster, garnering flags and downvotes, I doubt that they would even have been addressed at all.
This is false, and offensive. We work hard to make this a place where everyone can express their point of view and where people are not vilified for having different points of view. We would absolutely ban someone who demonstrated a pattern of initiating such attacks on you.
The right way to deal with such attacks is to flag them and to email us ([email protected]) to alert us to the attack, and we will always take action.
Come on .. this is not worthy of HN, we deserve better;
According to one Canadian, er sorry, a UE citizen, er sorry, an Irishman named Kevin O'Leary, who is seeing Chinese spys everywhere, we actually do need to move with breakneck speed, because otherwise the quality of American lives will be forever gone. Or at least infuse of naive VC money flowing into his pockets will be gone.
I experience no difference when I run my LLM either here in the US or in the EU or even in China.
So why should these be given any special treatment and tax benefits? They don't really create jobs locally (beyond the initial construction) and they won't bring in any sort of tax revenue beyond what you could get from property taxes. That makes them just a general nuisance. They are much like sewage or landfills, they serve a purpose and are needed but boy would I never want one near me (unless the company actually ends up paying for my community).
It certainly doesn't help that AI CEOs just can't help but to larp as Captain Planet supervillans when giving public talks to investors.
There are a lot of bankrupt companies and fallen nations that believed this. Complacency will hurt you, but only when you realize it too late.
We don’t actually have to be moving at breakneck speeds, the AI companies just want you to think we do. A pause to investigate seems warranted.