What's so great about cornfields? I can imagine hating it if they were deforesting the Amazon or something.

The argument they make is, "it is food and we eat it". Nevermind most of the corn grown is not eaten by people.

Yeah, but our food eats it too.

Mostly our cars drink it

45% and rising.

I have bad news about what they are deforesting the Amazon for (hint: cornfields)

Chocolate and coffee I believe

By area it's almost entirely corn and soy (mostly for animal feed)

In the US, there's currently about 300x more land used by cornfields than by data centers.

Does that seems unreasonable? We already grow more than enough food in this country and surely we're not getting 300x more value from the corn.

You do get less efficiency from the gas you put in your car though.

I wonder what causes more harm? High fructose corn syrup or data centres?

It's almost like people want things built that they directly benefit from.

A warehouse provides hundreds of lower education jobs. Well at least until they go completely robot.

Not everyone is a software developer.

Aren't most people directly benefiting from AI?

No? I can think of so many things in life that were better just a couple years ago.

And you think they wouldn't directly benefit from solar power?

What if the cornfield owners got paid market rates for the power generated when that land is given over to solar? This should be (and ChatGPT agrees) much more profitable given that it is vastly more energy efficient.

Directly? No. Indirectly? Of course they do. Everyone does.

Realistically the solution to NIMBYism is to pay the neighbours, but that's not really practical.

NIMBYism isn't rational, it's a manifestation of fear of change, even if they past state of affairs was worse than the future one. I live in a city where the anti-datacentre campaign isn't about some pleasant locale, but a disused toxic industrial land in a steel-mill complex over half a km away from any actual homes.

The corn field is a known quantity.

> Realistically the solution to NIMBYism is to pay the neighbours, but that's not really practical.

If we pay each farmer to generate solar (and maybe also stop paying them to grow corn beyond what's actually economically viable), why would they care what the next farm over is doing? I thought we were talking about places where people live too far apart for "backyards".

They can make all objections or decisions they want on their own private property. It seems people have too much levers to pull to control what others can do with their property.

A lot of people have dumb opinions grounded in ill-thought-out ideas like "natural cornfields are morally superior to human-built infrastructure buildings" or "solar power is a Democratic party conspiracy". In general it should be easier for property owners with skin in the game to make good land use decisions to make them without having to need small-d-democratic opposition from locals with bad incentices and values.

On Nextdoor, I have met several people who believed solar and wind polluted more than coal plants.

I see that from time to time on HN. It’s hard to believe they’ve never encountered mercury or arsenic in their news.

Anyone with kids probably should be aware of Mercury - it's an important guideline during pregnancy, all the mercury in fish. I don't have kids, so I am not sure if the doctors explain how all the mercury got into the fish...