That's not really true on a practical level. For the most part, you can't just buy airline points at the one to two cent price that you effectively get them for in credit card transactions or the even lower price that the credit card companies themselves are likely paying.
What the hell are you talking about? You are absolutely not allowed to bet on whatever you'd like with another individual. Depending on what you're betting on (for example, the price of a stock or the throw of a card), it falls under varying different regimes. This is highly regulated and has been for most of the whole of human history.
Yes, there are de minimis exceptions. Your office NCAA pool, for example, is often legal, but it has nothing to do with what we're talking about and is also irrelevant to a business facilitating it via 18 U.S.C. § 1955.
In Spain in elderly caring homes there was a tradition to bet on Bingo matches for simbolic prices (barely one or two euros, enough for a coffee and that's it). It was legalized on paper recently, but technically everyone turned a blind eye.
It was, believe it still is, somewhat similar in Australia, where the game Two Up (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-up), which was a wartime favorite among soldiers, was implicitly or allowed on Anzac Day despite being gambling.
> Compared to the other industrial uses you'd get, data centers are almost certainly preferable.
Why? The ratio of jobs and taxes to local resources tied up has to be one of the worst possible trade-offs of any industrial use that you can envision. That is precisely why data centers are proving to be profoundly unpopular.
Compare and contrast to something like a Boeing assembly plant with thousands of high-paid skilled jobs, and knock-on effects with local service providers and OEM vendors.
> The ratio of jobs and taxes to local resources tied up has to be one of the worst possible trade-offs of any industrial use that you can envision
Why? There aren't much "local resources tied up" since it's land that isn't that valuable for the most part. DCs, once built, don't emit fumes or loud noises, or make traffic worse like other industrial land use might. They just sit there quietly and generate tax revenue for the locality.
Sure, there aren't many ongoing jobs at an operating DC. But I can't see why it's one of the worst possible industrial uses, from the point of view of the residents around one.
> data centers are proving to be profoundly unpopular
From what I can tell, this is just from a combination of AI being unpopular plus opportunistic fearmongering on the part of politicians.
The bigger thing here is just the idea that the alternatives are "Boeing assembly plant" or "data center". Like: if you have the option of getting the Boeing plant, get the Boeing plant! Racine County does not have that option. Meanwhile, the happy sounding businesses there --- like the duck farm --- are actually major polluters, and more problematic for the region than a data center.
The people opposing data centers oppose them everywhere, including in the middle of the desert in Utah, which really gives away the game.
> he bigger thing here is just the idea that the alternatives are "Boeing assembly plant" or "data center".
This is a false dichotomy, though. That region has enough land that you could do both. There just isn't much demand for manufacturing in the Upper Midwest right now.
What you're saying is just factually incorrect. Data centers absolutely are loud and they're disruptive.
They're not good for the environment. They consume large quantities of water, typically, and huge, absolutely staggering amounts of energy, which typically has the effect of raising rates for everybody else by driving up demand and causing capital infrastructure needs that are financed by everybody, not just the data center.
There is absolutely widespread dislike for data center construction in basically every region spanning almost every political axis in the United States right now.
There's polling on it. It's abysmal. The assumption that all these people are stupid sheep probably won't be a productive way to approach this public policy question.
> The assumption that all these people are stupid sheep probably won't be a productive way to approach this public policy question
I agree, and I do not assume that these people are stupid sheep. However, having said that:
> Data centers absolutely are loud
Compared to undeveloped land, sure. Compared to other uses of industrially-zoned land? Most likely not. I've been to a lot of datacenters. They're not very loud from the outside.
> They consume large quantities of water
I honestly do not understand why they don't just build closed-loop systems, or geothermal where they have a closed loop with the ground acting as the heat sink. Open-loop systems where they consume water just to evaporate sounds stupid to me. But I don't know how common that is.
Politicians showing off in front of the camera with a dirty jug of water, of course, is just grandstanding and has no real relation to datacenters other than they made construction happen.
> huge, absolutely staggering amounts of energy, which typically has the effect of raising rates for everybody else
This isn't just true of datacenters. They're building an aluminum plant near me that will consume on the order of 100+ MW, which is comparable to a fairly large DC. Any other large industrial plant would consume a lot of electricity, but nobody's blaming them for utility capital investment needs.
They do not in fact consume large quantities of water, and "they consume lots of water" is a pretty good shibboleth for "this isn't going to be a productive discussion". Golf courses in the US consume more than 8x the water of all data centers combined.
Obviously, that's my response to your polling claims as well: people getting polled thing data centers are consuming all the water.
You've got these people going on TV and doing interviews saying that this new technology will be capable of replacing huge amounts of jobs.
The people that say that most jobs will be eliminated by AI are making direct threats of violence against the families of millions of people. Telling someone that they will no longer have any way of feeding their children is telling them that you're going to kill their family.
I'm not saying this to convince you that that's true. You could make some counter-arguments to that, and I'm sure people will come along and do that. The point is to understand it that that's how it's perceived by the people hearing it.
And then to add insult to injury, they want to come do it in your town.
They want to pitch a giant "development" project. But remember nobody ever wants “development” except for the fact that it might bring jobs and economic growth, to them, not you living somewhere else.
Meanwhile, you've already told them that the reason we need so many more data centers all of a sudden is specifically so that we can eliminate whatever jobs are left that we didn't get a chance to eliminate over the last several decades when we exported most of the jobs we could to different countries.
By the way we're the same assholes who said "trust us" last time, and pitched the idea that it would lead to a prosperous future for everyone. Instead you made money off sending the jobs to china, capturing all excess value with software, and addicting our children to opioids.
And your next exciting offer for us is a giant windowless building that will take up open land, nature, and yes, water and electricity, and employ almost nobody.
People don't feel like they control a whole lot, but they do have some ability to complain about this thing happening where they live.
The actions of people opposing these data centers are completely rational. If I'm trying to make one point, that's it.
The actually interesting part of this back and forth on HN is that Silicon Valley (aka "tech") culture has grown so fundamentally rotten at its core that not only do people not have values that place humans first, they can't even recognize when other people do.
> But remember nobody ever wants “development” except for the fact that it might bring jobs and economic growth, to them, not you living somewhere else.
This is really the only point that matters. It's held true my whole life, and I expect it will be true until I die. Doesn't matter what you build. I was watching a couple transmission line projects over the past decade that are still in the "lawsuits and community rage" phase - proposed to bring wind farm watts to load centers - and now they will likely be killed since the anti-development folks can pretend they were always due to Datacenters.
Datacenters are just an easy scapegoat for the anti-development crowd. It's been amazing to watch how quickly it's gone, and how folks have such a strong opinion on stuff that otherwise would have been built half a mile from them and they'd never have known any better until they were told to care.
The rest of what you wrote is largely social media driven ragebait in comment form. Kernels of truth, but largely immaterial.
Datacenter land use is the least interesting thing you could possibly discuss. Knocking out some corn fields and building some warehouses off the road no one can see or hear, with almost no traffic to/from them after construction is pretty much the lowest possible bar for local community impact for quite literally any project. It change nothing for anyone, other than the farmers who sold the land and that a few local trades companies have a couple decades of stable highly paid employment.
Therefore, the only way to get communities up in arms about these things is basically lie about it.
It's going to be a real head scratcher to folks when electricity rates continue to march upwards even if they get all AI datacenter construction banned. The green tech crowd who had the datacenter bogeyman land in their lap is playing an exceedingly dangerous game here. What we are largely seeing is the bill coming due for generational lack of investment into the grid.
If your local community can't figure out how to get the money raining down from the skies like it is now to subsidize the build out of your local infrastructure for something as minor as municipal water treatment in Wisconsin You likely will never be building anything at all.
The people who want these data centers are telling us that the reason that they want them is to keep momentum on their plans to destroy our entire way of life.
They just say it. They go on TV and do interviews and say it out loud.
So then everyone who has any ability to stop it in any possible way tries to do that.
What exactly the fuck do you think they're going to do?
And more importantly, what causes you to feel that it's obvious that they are only coming to these opinions through ignorance?
Lumping together anti-data-center sentiment with anti-development sentiment in general is bullshit. Yes, there are certainly impossible to negotiate with NIMBYs who don't like apartment buildings because they cast shadows on a sidewalk corner or something. That has nothing to do with this.
The politics of data centers are completely different. If this was a real, actual job-creating industrial project, people would react differently.
> Lumping together anti-data-center sentiment with anti-development sentiment in general is bullshit. Yes, there are certainly impossible to negotiate with NIMBYs who don't like apartment buildings because they cast shadows on a sidewalk corner or something. That has nothing to do with this.
I mean, you just did it yourself. You made a great point by doing so.
It's generally the same people. Your rants pretty much prove it. Plus I've been in meetings where it's literally the same people. They will use any and all reasons to stop local development and then stick with the one that gets the most popular traction.
I'm not talking about folks against residential development. I'm talking being around projects and in local meetings about industrial development - primarily electric generation and transmission. The arguments are pretty much the same.
> The people who want these data centers are telling us that the reason that they want them is to keep momentum on their plans to destroy our entire way of life.
AI is now taking rural blue collar jobs? I find it very difficult to believe this is a real grass roots concern.
I find it very easy to believe white collar folks are using their relative positions of power to amp up concerns rural blue collar folks would actually care about. Often at the expense of said blue collar folks.
These facilities would often be a win for a local community with a little bit of foresight. It doesn't matter to your power bill if they are sited 5 miles down the county road from you, or 200 miles. Chances are they are using electricity from your regional interconnect and that's where your power bills come from.
> And more importantly, what causes you to feel that it's obvious that they are only coming to these opinions through ignorance?
Only? Of course not. Primarily? Obviously. For the simple fact that dozens of people in my orbit who never knew datacenters existed near them all of a sudden Care Very Much(tm) about the subject after watching a few very low information videos. These are folks who drove past local facilities most of their lives and never had a clue.
> If this was a real, actual job-creating industrial project, people would react differently.
Not in my experience. Pretty much every single industrial project is nearly impossible to build in the US. Heavy industry sounds fun until someone wants to build an aluminum smelter, copper mine, or wind farm down the way. There are tons of infrastructure projects that need to get done which will not because they are not point-source locations that employ lots of jobs for a single community.
My previous example are wind farms. Typically those are best sited a few hundred miles away from a major metropolitan/load center. Good luck getting anything of scale built these days now that we've more or less burned up every ounce of spare electric transmission capacity leftover from before we de-industrialized ourselves. Once you get out of re-using existing right-of-way you see nearly the same backlash as AI datacenters. The difference? The urban laptop classes don't take your side and the outrage tends to stay localized.
It's very interesting to me a certain class of folks have convinced people that the closest thing to "free money" for a local community is a bad thing. Construction phase might suck, but assuming it's simply a datacenter and not a power plant with a co-located datacenter off the to side, you really can't get any lighter-touch land use than this. It's probably less environmentally impactful (in a negative way) to the local community than the 100 acre corn field it replaces. And employs more people to boot.
I would 100% agree with you on any tax abatements/credits/etc. These facilities do not need them and would be quite happy to pay full-freight on taxes on top of contributing towards upgrading local infrastructure far beyond their expected impact on it. This is where I feel that local politicians have seriously shit the bed all over their communities.
The fact that opposition to one thing looks sort of vaguely like opposition to another thing isn't completely irrelevant information, but you're just missing the actual thing that's happening if you focus on it.
"Seven in 10 Americans oppose constructing data centers for artificial intelligence in their local area, including nearly half, 48%, who are strongly opposed. Barely a quarter favor these projects, with 7% strongly in favor."
This is another way of me countering your main point here.
It's not the same people you've seen in previous arguments.
It's those people plus almost all of the other people because overwhelming 70%+ majorities don't want these things.
So we know that. That's the given here, assuming you think there's at least some validity to Gallup and polling.
The question then becomes why? My rants are intended to illustrate why. They sound like "rants" because people are extremely fucking angry about how things are going, so accurately restating their opinions also sounds angry.
The culture has changed. People do not fucking trust tech companies and their leadership at all for extremely valid reasons. Talk about wind farms all you want. I can go ahead and talk about the Yankees. The conversation at hand is about data centers, and data centers are their own issue.
When people like you come along and say it's "free money" nobody fucking believes you because there is a rich and long history of that kind of bullshit already.
There's a point of view here that they oppose data centers out of ignorance. My countervailing point is that their distrust is almost certainly rational, considered, and correct.
Distrust is the only sane response to recent events.
My original post that started this discussion did not mention water:
> The ratio of jobs and taxes to local resources tied up has to be one of the worst possible trade-offs of any industrial use that you can envision. That is precisely why data centers are proving to be profoundly unpopular.
Nonetheless I can see that fixating on this instead of my obviously correct point which is that people absolutely hate data centers and the sociopathic tech billionaires behind them for rational reasons is a good dodge.
Hardly unexpected when I am posting on the promotional discussion board of a private equity firm responsible for launching many of these sociopaths into society.
My later comment about water usage is both unneeded for that point to stand and trivially proven true.
This is a story about Microsoft building data centers and people opposing it.
So yes, one of the two key players here is the heavily financed tech sector.
Starting to think these disingenuous replies are in fact the point here.
Since none of of these conversations on HN make much difference anyways, my only hope is that one person, somewhere, who is a part of the "tech community" that usually gathers here (and of which I am a longtime member) becomes newly aware that people fucking hate us now for excellent and extremely well-supported reasons and thinks a little about how that happened and how they might change it.
I simply disagree with you. I'm not a fan of populism, and, more importantly, I think that people have had very good reason to "fucking hate us" for decades --- we are in the business of automating away people's jobs, and have been since the 1960s.
It's fine that you think the discussion is unproductive; I agree, our premises are too far apart to get anywhere. But you'd get further with, well, everybody that doesn't already agree with you if you'd stop accusing anybody who doesn't agree with you of being "disingenuous".
Well at least you're honest then. I hope your team loses because the outcomes here suck and are destroying our culture.
And on a personal level, I hope you reconsider your life decisions a little and realize the importance of a culture where people can feed their families and lead healthy productive lives of dignity, regardless of who their parents are or how gifted they happen to be intellectually.
You can just say "fuck you". You don't have to do this kind of violence to the concept of civility. "Fuck you" is what this kind of populism inevitably devolves to anyways. Skip the middle steps!
If having your values questioned sounds like "fuck you" then that's on you.
What I actually said is perhaps you should think about the people who end up worse off under the system you advocate for.
Your call of course but this is definitely not violence.
Violence is what happens when attempting to work through civic institutions and discourse has failed so many times that people no longer try this approach.
I agree with the article, but I feel like this is something that anyone who uses AI aggressively for a while picks up on pretty quickly.
The thing that I find Claude incredibly good at when I'm designing architecture is working more like a research assistant on briefing decisions. It has the ability to read the entire code base and draw some conclusions. It can pull from lots of best practices and the millions of blog posts about this or that pretty effortlessly, which would take me a lot more time.
And then if asked, it can do a really good job of laying out the landscape around decisions and walking through the trade-offs. Like the author of this post, I found that if you let it, it will certainly be happy to just come up with some architecture and run with it, often in ways that will paint you quite rapidly into a corner.
But if you ask it to present you with all the trade-offs and let you make the judgment calls, it's great for that too.
That's certainly how I use it. And I think, just like anything else, working with AI is a skill, and similar to working with libraries, SaaS providers, service providers, frameworks, or anything else that's a "helper." You learn how something that could work but will fail silently is a problem, or you learn how depending on a fly-by-night SaaS company for a key framework is different than depending on a well-populated open source project, etc.
In the same way, you learn that relying on Claude's judgment is a bad idea, while relying on Claude's ability to summarize, brief, and research can be incredibly efficient.
This is broadly accurate, but it can be a little easier to point the finger at the actual culprits, which is Wall Street.
The problem is the financialization of everything, and the insistence on ensuring high rates of return above all other goals. Which is highly related to the dynamics that you mentioned here, so we're agreeing.
But other countries don't do this because the government stops them. In this country, the financial sector is more powerful and can override democracy through a couple of obvious means that we've all seen.
The result is effectively the plundering of a previously strong economy for the benefit of a couple of people.
Ask yourself why General Motors is taking the many billions of dollars in cash that they generate from their business operations and literally sending it directly to Wall Street bankers through the form of stock buybacks rather than investing in the next generation of electric cars. It's an obvious mistake, and eventually the bill will come, but maybe not in the lifetimes of the people who profit from it. Certainly not before they have a chance to buy another summer home.
China doesn't do this. They keep savings rates high and returns low, which means the money goes into building factories and infrastructure and lots of other things that ultimately make the country much, much wealthier.
> Ask yourself why General Motors is taking the many billions of dollars in cash that they generate from their business operations and literally sending it directly to Wall Street bankers through the form of stock buybacks rather than investing in the next generation of electric cars.
Hmm, putting aside others issues (e.g. stock-manipulation to make quarterly numbers) stock-buybacks might be viewed similar to repaying a loan and reclaiming the stock that was put up as collateral...
Although I suppose if the loan is zero-interest, why would one want to do that? Even if somehow all spending options are terrible today (but might improve tomorrow) one could just sit on the cash.
All spending options are not terrible today. That's the point. Without reinvestment, the companies will fall behind and die.
The decisions by major companies to prioritize stock buybacks over capital investment in the next generation of products and innovation is the absolute core of why the financialization of everything threatens to destroy us as an industrial economy and, by extension, our prosperity and way of life.
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