What I’m trying to get at is that while we talk about establishing a new datacenter or Costco or a rail line or a freeway, it often makes the living conditions worse for a group of people than what they live in. Understandably, this is the reason why people do not support them, even if, there was a little more money to be made. I for example would rather pay my full property taxes, than have the air quality, traffic, noise etc. get worse in my neighborhood in exchange for a discount on my taxes. And I’m not in an affluent neighborhood.
Sure. Financial reasons are on the surface, but finances are limited by my ability to make my brain work both normally-enough and regularly-enough to satisfy typical employment obligations. Maybe some of this could be alleviated with the availability of better healthcare and healthcare management. And while I'm very proficient at some very complex things, I'm a demonstrated failure at many things that others find easy or basic. Maybe a life coach would be useful (but I can't afford that, either, even if I encabulate the expense as an investment with certainty of positive return).
I make too much money to get meaningful assistance with any of that and nowhere near enough money to move to a quieter neighborhood.
I don't get to choose where to live with any meaningful capacity. The best I can do is seize opportunities when they avail themselves.
The most-recent opportunity brought me to a nice-enough home with lots of indoor space for projects and my own noisemaking, with a decent-sized garage (which is useless for parking in, but whatever). It's in a very loud neighborhood in a small town, but it's what I've been able to sustain in recent years. It's cheaper than an apartment with neighbors left, right, up, and down.
There's a bodega nearby and I can walk there in a couple of minutes. I like the place well-enough, but everything they have (other than addictive things like smokes, beer, and soda) is alarmingly expensive. There's also Kroger that is a good bit further out than I'd prefer to walk with groceries, but it exists. Everything else of meaningful report is in another city.
> given an option, would you move to a different place that don’t have the same problems as the current one?
Yeah, I sure would. Some previous person decided that this house needed lots of windows added, and they're decent-enough windows but they leak noise even when closed and latched. I'm listening to trucks roll by with the Jake break blubbing loudly right now as I write this, interspersed with the sounds of would-be race cars with gutted [whether intentionally or unintentionally] exhaust systems and occasional periods of relative silence.
Except for the hammering. That starts early in the morning and extends until 10:00PM or sometimes later. As I understand it, there's some kind of conveyor that gets stuffed up at the mill and hammering on it (sometimes, ceaselessly) seems like the primary method of keeping it going. Except when they use pneumatic vibrators, instead: Those klaxon-sounding devices come and go in their use periodically. I think they wear them out quickly, and I also think that I've heard them degrade and wear-out in real time.
My tolerance for noise is obviously very well-honed, but be nice if it weren't quite so fucking loud outside. The edge of a Costco parking lot wins on quietness in this way, by a wide margin.
> What I’m trying to get at is that while we talk about establishing a new datacenter or Costco or a rail line or a freeway, it often makes the living conditions worse for a group of people than what they live in.
According to my homework, this house was built well after the mill was introduced, and just after the US highway became a deliberate 4-lane concrete-paved monster that ran through the town.
Previous to all of that, and the land being divided up to build many somewhat-big houses on very small lots, it was farmland -- or at least, farmland-adjacent.
Things changed. They didn't necessarily change in the normal order, but they changed.
That particular Costco, too: That area was a center of commerce. It was gridded with residential subdivisions and cul-de-sacs and a proper school, but it was also commercial. There was a mall in that neighborhood. And that mall didn't stand forever, but the folks who really remember a time before it was present are mostly dead by now.
I regularly drive through an area of my own hometown with largely-isolated residential neighborhoods that were constructed because the recently-constructed mall [which is gone now] was nearby along with jobs at a plant a few blocks away [also gone] that made vacuum components before transitioning to semiconductors. My own grandfather played a part in developing much of that housing, largely to the exception of the parts that were instead developed by my own old friend's competing grandfather.
> Understandably, this is the reason why people do not support them, even if, there was a little more money to be made.
I can understand how people would feel that way, but I'm still all-in on living right next to a Costco. Seriously.
A datacenter of the type under discussion: Not so much. If it could manage to be quiet then it'd be kinda-sorta-fine, except they're also enormous and loud (cooling, gas turbines, etc).
I can't walk into a datacenter as I walk and buy a hotdog on my little jaunt to Home Depot to get some lag screws before hitting the Asian market to refill on cheap bamboo chopsticks, canned fish, and red bananas. The proximity of the datacenter presents only an obstacle to me on my path.
It's not a big deal in a car at 35MPH, but it's tiresome as a pedestrian to spend time walking past immense, boring things. The mind wants to engage with something, and there's nothing positive around to engage with while focused circumnavigating a datacenter.
> I for example would rather pay my full property taxes, than have the air quality, traffic, noise etc. get worse in my neighborhood in exchange for a discount on my taxes. And I’m not in an affluent neighborhood.
That's a reasonable take on datacenters, but: I think you should reconsider this Costco thing that we've been discussing. :)