Maine Governor Vetoes Data Center Moratorium Bill 96
Maine Gov. Janet Mills vetoed a bill that would have imposed the nation's first statewide moratorium on new data centers, saying she supported the idea in principle but would not block a major redevelopment project tied to jobs and local investment. Instead, she said she will create a council to study data centers' effects while also signing a separate measure to deny them certain state tax incentives. Politico reports: "After prior redevelopment efforts failed, the Town of Jay worked for two years on a $550 million data center redevelopment project to finally bring jobs and investment back to the mill site," Mills wrote, adding that she would issue an executive order establishing a council to examine the impact of data centers in Maine.
The legislation would have made Maine the first state to block the construction of new data centers, as both political parties grapple with how voters view them ahead of the midterm elections. In a statement accompanying the letter, the governor said she had signed a separate bill that would prohibit data center projects from receiving Maine's business development tax incentive programs
The legislation would have made Maine the first state to block the construction of new data centers, as both political parties grapple with how voters view them ahead of the midterm elections. In a statement accompanying the letter, the governor said she had signed a separate bill that would prohibit data center projects from receiving Maine's business development tax incentive programs
It is not binary, for or against. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: It is not binary, for or against. (Score:5, Informative)
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No, mainly they're making a lot of assumptions about what a "data center" means in the absence of any actual facts or specific details. That is a bit of a problem.
The majority of data centers are using glycol for cooling. They simply do not use a significant amount of water. Even their sprinkler systems are generally dry-pipe. About the only water they use is tfull of docium he usual kitchenette and bathroom facilities. Even the few facilities that actually do water cooling aren't being wasteful about i
Re: It is not binary, for or against. (Score:2)
They're not "driving up" electricity rates because they're paying the same rate as anyone else. If your utility has to raise rates because demand goes up, your city has already failed at managing resources effectively.
This is mental gymnastics. If an effect of having a data center is that the electricity bill goes up, then the data center drove the price of electricity up. Increasing the local demand for electricity with no local benefit and with extra burden (developing local electricity production) or cost is not a good thing or a smart thing. Electricity production is generally a necessary evil btw, see global warming. Treating extra electricity consumption as just a need to increase the production capacity is missing
Re: It is not binary, for or against. (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't have to work there to know... probably one or two security people, and like one or two tech people per shift
All the techs do is monitor for drive failures and hot-swap a new one in, make sure the cooling system is working fine, and get a paycheck.
Sure it creates construction jobs until the building is finished, then it's back to the unemployment office for those bricklayers.
The big question is: do we need these precious data centers? How is your precious "Clod" improving life? Taking over an entire department with one computer? Yeah, everybody's gonna love that :-)
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I am not contradicting you here, but to get the full jobs picture, one does have to include the jobs required to supply electricity. I have no idea how many, but if there is enough electricity use to change the price of electricity, there must be some jobs added for that (of course, these jobs might be in another state - or in Maine's case possibly in Canada).
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The job benefit is construction, so short-lived, the long term benefits is to the local tax base.
A successful data center pays a lot more in taxes than an abandoned off-line paper mill...
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Remember, they want to get their power from "renewables", and store the "excess" (because they convinced people that there would be excess) for use at night, so a couple guys to go out and clean the panels and check the status indicator on a tablet.
If they built a power plant to power the useless thing, that'll create some jobs until they put AI in charge of running it (and, if they don't build one, the operators at the nearest one just have to increase their output 10% or something.
Remember... they want as
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"You don't have to work there to know... probably"
Probably.
In other words, you don't know either.
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Actually, it was: "You don't have to work there to know... probably one or two security people, and like one or two tech people per shift"
I don't see why they'd have 50 security guards and 100 techs per shift just standing around doomscrolling Facebook, waiting for one of the racks to blink a light because of a failure. Ten years ago, it might've been that way, but that many people would cost too much these days.
They might bring in a bunch of temps when it comes time to swap out all the harddrives or NPUs
Re: It is not binary, for or against. (Score:2)
Probably...
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Assuming that DCs run the same way today that the one you worked at ran ten years ago isn't a valid argument, and doesn't negate my statement.
Unless you worked at an Anthropic DC last year or last month or yesterday, ten years ago.
If you didn't work at one at all, then you can't really make any definitive statements either way, hence the popular word "probably"... they _could_ "probably" have more people working there than I guessed, but if neither of us worked at one, we _could_ be wrong on either account
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*a DC ten years ago isn't gonna be the same.
(got distracted by a phone call, forgot where I was with typing, and just continued the thought)
Re: It is not binary, for or against. (Score:2)
You do know that I really didn't claim to have worked at a data center recently. But I have done some work at data centers in the past, and everything I hear about them today tells me they have changed. Surprisingly little. The thing that surprises me the most is that everyone seems to understand how they work, some because they worked at 1. I did have the rare opportunity to work in several of them for different reasons and at different times. They operate differently but the equation is pretty much the sa
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You were talking like you did.
Working at one in the past, doesn't mean it functions and is staffed the same.
I wouldn't think the "clients" would come to the DC, whoever is in charge of it (I assume something multi-use like AWS) sends an email to the guy in charge, and he adds the credentials to the system.
I really doubt OpenAI is gonna sell their DC to Anthropic.
'Changes' are just hardware upgrades, and when it comes time to replace all the drives when they're close to EOL or swap NPUs, temps!
They do take u
Re: It is not binary, for or against. (Score:2)
The 'buy the old mill building' is an old strategy, throughout New England. Many different industries have done this. And many got tax incentives. Nothing new here, and the resentment towards the new interloper isn't new either. Discount power isn't new either. One wrinkle in this is the separation of generation v distribution. Distribution costs to residences are often higher per kilowatt, while baseload demand for industry throws a wrench into demand management. In Maine there is Hydro Quebec to look to f
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OpenAI or whoever couldn't give a flying f*** what "the people" say or how affected they are... slip the Governor enough 'under the table' and they'll approve it.
It might have capacity for that amount, but how much gets deducted from people's supply (or reallocated)?
Solar ain't an option at night, storing it ain't (the thing uses more than the storage capacity), wind only provides so much.
It's not an industry (like a foundry)... it's a building that houses a few hundred racks of server-class rack-mount comp
Re: It is not binary, for or against. (Score:2)
"but how much gets deducted from people's supply"
If you're not going to be serious, good bye. That's not how it works, and you should know better.
Re: It is not binary, for or against. (Score:5, Informative)
I've worked in many across North America and outside it for a decade or more and he is for the most part correct. Call Centers are good business, Data Centers are utility hogs that run dark.
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I've worked in many across North America and outside it for a decade or more and he is for the most part correct. Call Centers are good business, Data Centers are utility hogs that run dark.
And generate tax revenue - that is the appeal. Not income taxes on worker salaries, but on the income generated by the data center itself - corporate income taxes and property taxes.
Re: It is not binary, for or against. (Score:5, Insightful)
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And, even if they paid local taxes to the community... how much does that help? Repave three blocks of streets?
Do the citizens paying higher power bills get a refund? Do the prices for stuff at the store go down because of this huge surplus?
Re: It is not binary, for or against. (Score:4, Interesting)
There are jobs created, but they'll likely be remote jobs. Maybe not in USA in general. DCs work of 90s is mostly automated now.
This is just bullshit real estate that happens to have a DC on it. It will in general be bad for everyone except the land owner.
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There are jobs created, but they'll likely be remote jobs. Maybe not in USA in general. DCs work of 90s is mostly automated now.
This is just bullshit real estate that happens to have a DC on it. It will in general be bad for everyone except the land owner.
For a closely related example, we have the Marcellus Shale natural gas production in Pennsylvania.
Sold on the may thousands of jerbs that were going to be created, towns in the vicinity opened hotels, restaurants, and were downright giddy with the economic windfall that would propel Northern PA into riches.
Banks even bought into it. A friend of my wife's husband had one of the gas field jobs, and the bank lent them to the max.
I begged them to reconsider because of what was obvious to me. Those jer
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A friend of my wife's husband had one of the gas field jobs
Wait, a friend of your wife's husband...who are you then? Are you not your wife's husband? So wouldn't that friend just be your friend?
The rest of your post, yeah I'm onboard but surely that must of been some kind of typo.
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I think they mean "my wife's friend's husband". Or they're in a thrupple.
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I think they mean "my wife's friend's husband". Or they're in a thrupple.
Yeah, but it was not good phrasing on my part. Kinda a funny phrase though.
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A friend of my wife's husband had one of the gas field jobs
Wait, a friend of your wife's husband...who are you then? Are you not your wife's husband? So wouldn't that friend just be your friend?
The rest of your post, yeah I'm onboard but surely that must of been some kind of typo.
Oh, hell, that was an awkward phrase on my part! My wife has a good friend. The friend's husband had a gas field job. 8^)
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Please qualify how this is "bad" for people who have no connection to the facility at all.
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When the datacenter is kind of embedded in a larger business, or it's a business that has poor resiliency, then there's a reasonable amount of jobs.
Those are a dying breed, and the vast majority of things being discussed are isolated facilities with skeleton crews. You have a few months of construction type jobs, but the persistent job picture is pretty light compared to the impact on the local area.
Re: It is not binary, for or against. (Score:4, Insightful)
If we don't want corporations to suck up fresh water, the answer isn't a ban on datacenters, the answer is to stop subsidizing their water use.
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Except in this environment they'll just raise a few extra billion dollars and buy all the water anyway and price out anyone that is not a VC funded AI company
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As long as the people are getting paid for their water, I don't see a problem with this.
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You left out environmental concerns, including costs to flora and fauna, not just people. How is are those data centers to be powered? If it mean pumping lots of CO2 into the atmosphere, then that cost must be brought in. Insurance companies have actuaries that can put a price on your grandma, we have scientists to can predict the effects. Put them together and come out with a cost. Then charge taxpayers that cost and see how welcome are the data centers.
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There are water, electricity, and infrastructure considerations. If it makes sense, do it, if not, do not do it. I don't think the article lays out the facts enough for us normals to decide.
Where exactly in the country does it make sense to do it?
The governor vetoed it because "jobs and investment". But it smells more like corruption. Watch and see how those denials for certain state tax incentives, quietly disappear in a back room briefcase somewhere.
If it doesn't make sense, watch and see how it will make enough sense for those profiting off it. No one else's' opinion really matters.
A moratorium is stupid (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: A moratorium is stupid (Score:4, Interesting)
Will that rule apply to commercial (non-datacenter) and residential projects? Must home development builders build their own sanitation and electricity generation facilities, or is it just data centers?
Re: A moratorium is stupid (Score:5, Informative)
It already does. Residential building projects require a power/water/sewage infrstructure plan that ensures there is enough utility for the number of projected buildings/residents. Heck in my state they do a green space study and often make developers install a wash area for runoff.
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Local utilities expand to serve expanding residential developments, the home builder doesn't need to build their own power plant or water treatment plant...
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That's actually why housing prices (Score:2, Interesting)
Back when the baby boomers were coming up the government made sure that was all taken care of and paid for it all with taxpayer dollars.
If you're a developer now and you want to build you generally have to take care of that yourself because we stopped spending money on infrastructure and that was all part of infrastructure spending.
So developers stopped building anything affordable and focused on pricey luxury homes that they may not be able to sell but they don't care because
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"paid for it all with taxpayer dollars"
The tax increment from new residents doesn't accrue until after they move in. However, the infrastructure capacity increment is needed immediately.
So the municipality needs a) planning information so they know how much incremental infrastructure will be needed, and b) financing that is based on payments in the future.
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Well, yes? Would it make any sense to build a housing plan knowing the substation is already at capacity?
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The point I was making was that when a builder goes into an area to build say 200 homes, the builder doesn't have to install an infrastructure to supply electricity or water/sewage, the utility adds the capacity and the municipal water department increases capacity. When someone wants to build a data center the OP said they need to supply their own electricity or water if sufficient supply doesn't already exist.
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The point I was making was that when a builder goes into an area to build say 200 homes, the builder doesn't have to install an infrastructure to supply electricity or water/sewage, the utility adds the capacity and the municipal water department increases capacity.
Absolutely not.
When developers put in a new housing development, they absolutely DO have to negotiate with the community to get electricity supply extended, water lines laid, and sewerage. It is completely wrong to think that they just build the houses, and somehow the electric company, waterworks, and wastewater just pops up and builds service to them. Until they have these arrangements made, they don't get the permit to build.
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It is completely wrong to think that they just build the houses, and somehow the electric company, waterworks, and wastewater just pops up and builds service to them
That is how it works in the rest of the world.
Until they have these arrangements made, they don't get the permit to build.
In the rest of the world that is reversed. You get your building permit, based on your property and construction plans: the utilities are obliged to provide the infrastructure. Because that is their damn job, and the law.
No i
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Well, yes? Would it make any sense to build a housing plan knowing the substation is already at capacity?
That is part of what happened in my locale. They installed solar panel fields at the end substations to service growing developments. More cost effective by far, since the alternative was running new high tension lines, declare some eminent domain, and take many years to fight the court battles and install all of that infrastructure.
This method, they buy a few fields, install the panels and connect them to the grid at the substation. It also helps the substation to last longer. End of line substations are
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But, the data center can just use existing infrastructure instead of spending all the time and money in finding an untapped water reservoir and installing a whole treatment plant for the well water and a whole new sewer system (instead of adding on to existing sewer lines like they do when building a new house on a new city block).
It's cheaper to use existing than build new, always.
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Such a silly thread. You don't sell many homes without 'infrastructure'. And no data center is built without 'infrastructure'.
You've forgotten it's just about how it's paid for.
Sad that it came to a veto (Score:1)
Re:Sad that it came to a veto (Score:5, Insightful)
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"Data Centers don't seem to bring jobs."
Seems is not a great word in an argument one wishes to make.
Re:Sad that it came to a veto (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Sad that it came to a veto (Score:5, Insightful)
Lay it out to me how data centers bring jobs. They build a huge building, They buy chips. I give you that. After that, they suck up water and electricity, and maybe employ 130 people. These are not the classic "Manufacturing Jobs" from the 1950's, when I guess America was "Great", as the MAGAs think.
This is the real problem. Data center use electricity and water, create minimal jobs for the area and resources used, and generate a small amount of taxes. The property taxes for commercial (especially in California) are minimal, there are no sales taxes, and income-related taxes are also low due to the relatively low number of workers.
You'd think that the extreme electricity and water usage would incur a correspondingly extreme cost, but in a mind-baffling way, the extreme resource usage costs far less per unit than households pay. Instead, households bear the brunt of the required electricity and water resource infrastructure and procurement.
The way to even out the pros and cons is to mandate a economic return to the area. Impose a tax based on the output of the data center. Call it either a sales tax or a value added tax. Of course, this would scare off the data centers, which is just fine because there is no lost economic value to the residents of that area.
Re:Sad that it came to a veto (Score:5, Informative)
130 people? More like 13 people. All the workers do is change out hardware when it fails.
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Half correct, but very simplistic.
After all, you also need guards, in 3 shifts.
Perhaps a resting area, and a cafeteria.
Cleaning stuff, and so on.
It adds up quickly.
I guess something between 50 - 60 might be more logical.
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I'm not really a pro-jobs guy (IMHO 100% unemployment is a fantastic goal), but I'll take a shot at this one.
Widget manufacturer wants to be able to take online orders, so they host an e-commerce site at a data center. Now they can take orders. They hire people to help make more widgets faster, in order to keep up with customer demand.
A data center is well-connected, so a VPS there makes for a good, fast seedbox. People can use it to torrent all their TV and movi
Re: Sad that it came to a veto (Score:2, Informative)
If you had ever been in one you'd know.
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I think you have your concern backward and need to read TFA. She vetoed the moratorium that would have prevented the project outright. Instead she said the project needs further review before a decision is reached.
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Instead she said the project needs further review before a decision is reached.
That's just a way of opening the door for the developers to bribe the select people who get to decide instead of the citizens.
Guess how long it will take... (Score:2, Troll)
Instead, she said she will create a council to study data centers' effects while also signing a separate measure to deny them certain state tax incentives.
I predict this 'council' will be researching this until after the Fall election, then quickly reach a conclusion...
Also, Gov, you don't need to deny tax benefits, just don't offer them!
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Perhaps she doesn't need to "offer" them. Perhaps there is an automatic process that offers tax incentives for any new industrial construction over $100 million?
Assigning political motivations based on a poorly written summary? Your cynicism is showing.
I'm embarrassed for my party (Score:5, Insightful)
So the only path forward is to either give up on having consistent water and electricity or ban data centers.
A better educated population with higher critical thinking skills could find a middle ground.
A better educated population with higher critical thinking skills wouldn't have half the population thinking the Earth was 6,000 years old and wouldn't be withholding school lunch from children because they think it builds character or some shit...
We need to do the bans because America refuses to do nuance. Fix that and you can have middle grounds but you're going to have to give up a whole bunch of other sacred cows but you refuse to point critical thinking at.
Re:I'm embarrassed for my party (Score:4, Insightful)
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Or just schools, period.
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Really? We don't have schools in the US? Or are you arguing that they are underfunded? Having worked in public school education, I think the money is there, but it is spent poorly, wasted on things that don't help students as much as it helps teachers and their healthcare/pension benefits. Question: Have you ever seen a teachers union go on strike for longer school days, longer school years, higher academic standards, or additional money for after school activities? Me neither - but then again, they are cal
You're wrong for a lot of reasons (Score:2)
So I'm just going to point out that you want to keep kids starving but you don't want to admit it in public. So you hide behind the excuse that it's those evil administrators in their blue hair or something.
You are withholding food from children and if you happen to be Christian you will burn in hell for that.
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"Having worked in public school education"
Lol. Means shit all for caring about better education.
"as it helps teachers and their healthcare/pension benefits"
Yes, you dipshit, it must be crazy of me to think that paying teachers well leads to better teachers.
Why would teachers want longer school days? School day lengths are fine. Longer school years? Is school a job? The length of the school year is for kids. There's a reason why schools have breaks, its for students. Additional money for after school activit
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Seems like if we can spend a billion dollars a day on bombs, we can buy kids breakfast and lunch at school. Off topic, sorry.
Are you really unaware of the federal school lunch program that feeds countless millions of low-income students a hot breakfast and lunch daily, along with take-home meals in some locals? Did you not see cars lined up outside public schools collecting their free meals during COVID? Are you unaware of SNAP, WIC, and other programs to help lower income family afford healthy food?
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The low-income lunch is a reheated cheeseburger, some half-ass fries (when I was in high school and was getting the LIL), and a milk carton.
I'm sure the breakfast is a couple identically-shaped pancakes, and a couple sausages or floppy bacon, and a milk carton (never got dropped off at school that early).
Was there a reason the parents (who drove the kids to the school) couldn't have just made something at home for the kids (during the Big Bad Covid)?
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You do know our current government wants to end those programs right?
It's not about the money (Score:2)
Part of it is they want their parents to suffer too. And part of it is they like to tell themselves those kids being hungry all day build character.
The real reason is that their own personal lives are terrible and they desperately need somebody to be worse off so that they can compare themselves to that person. They don't judge the quality of their lives objectively they judge their lives relatively.
I saw this with people who woul
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Nuance isn't going to get rid of the DCs, or force them to employ more people, or not replace a whole department full of workers with just one computer, or to use half the water they needed originally.
It's an all-or-nothing discussion... either the DC gets built and uses all the power it can get (even to the displeasure of the population... because "Clod"!) and empties all the water towers in town every time they change the water out... or, they don't build it and it takes you a few more seconds to get a re
Don't build this. Don't build that. (Score:1, Flamebait)
I am currently on vacation in Maryland. A place only slightly less blue than my home in Massachusetts.
You know what I see here that I never see there? Road networks built out to handle actual traffic. Public transportation built out to handle commuter volumes. Parking lots at train stations. Housing developments being built to handle a growing population. Land set aside to handle municipal services (schools, sanitation, libraries, etc) for future growth.
I once ventured out into deep purple North Carolina wh
Now we know who owns her (Score:2)
Corporate shill gonna shill (Score:2)
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... of reading the comments of the anti- data center people. You know, the comments stored in data centers.
Well, I'm not "anti data center, but I think they are going to be a dinosaur- at least what is proposed today. Kind of like vacuum tube computers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Power consumption under the present paradigm is going to be a real bitch. Recommissioning old 1960's technology shuttered nuc plants specifically to run data centers should tell us that maybe we need to have the data center AI mature a bit before we give them a whole nation's worth of power.
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The only way a discussion board comment will ever end up in an AI data center is after it's ripped from the Internet for training data. They're nothing like a traditional general-purpose data center, you're making an apples-and-hand grenades comparison between two things that are kinda round, handheld-sized and will hurt if they bonk you on the head. If every AI data center burned to the ground tomorrow, only AI services would be lost, and every discussion board could drop these PITA Cloudflare checks neede
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"Yay! AI is gonna make our life so much better!"
two weeks later
"One computer running "Gemini" 'laid off' my entire department... I've got two weeks of unemployment left, no insurance, and nobody is hiring a computer programmer with a degree and $400,000 of loan debt to get that degree."
Well, if we knew about the problems/damage that AI would create, we might've realized that it's going to affect every inch of our every day lives, and not in a good way.
I'm just waiting for them to give AI full control of th
Maine has initialtive and referendum (Score:2)
If the veto isn't overridden by the legislature, then the citizens could start a petition for a referendum if they can raise the enough money to gather the signatures.
Imagine using AI to solve this problem (Score:2)
Imagine we used AI to figure out how to make it take up less space, use less energy, and not be so damn loud.
But that's a problem for another day just build the warehouses and let the cards fall where they may. AI will make us redundant anyway.
NIMBY (Score:2)
I'm waiting to see if my theory is correct. Last year there was a local referendum for allowing a data center in a rural area of Chesapeake, VA. Some of my friends who live nearby voted against it because they like living around farmland and trees. I do too, but I don't believe that will be the case long. I suspect that this country corner is going to be developed no matter what, and not putting a data center there will instead allow zoning to put something even more obnoxious there.
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What's more obnoxious than an AI data center? A bomb test range?
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The main roads to this area are already insufficient, so traffic is a problem. The data center was only going to have a staff of 30. It could be an Amazon warehouse or meat processing plant or something where hundreds of additional vehicles swarm the roads. I don't have a clear idea yet of what the alternate bad development will be.
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The alternate developments will be buying up all the fields to bring you all the solar power you need (with a few wind turbines tossed in for good measure) because it's what you want! Nobody needs those fields for growing anything or that forest of trees where animals live... we can just plow it all and make it green power!
Translation (Score:2)