These are not different from normal nimbyism. Me demanding that before any housing can be built near me it should benefit ME, all is potential negatives like traffic are mitigated, it must be built extra expensively, etc. Is just bog standard nimbyism and why housing is not getting built.
Any real estate regulation can be labeled as NIMBYism. You're invoking it here as a thought-terminating cliché.
Building without considering consequences at all, or building the way that capital demands, is how you end up with urban communities getting obliterated by highways[1], or rural communities getting decimated by industrial plants[2], or indigenous communities getting destroyed by military testing[3], or indigenous people AND fragile ecosystems getting erased by military testing[4].
What i always wondered - why wasn't building completely new cities from scratch where nothing stands now, and far from other residential areas, considered as a solution to NIMBY problem?
Not really. The regulation where everyone has to meet the same long term, unbiased standard on noise, emissions whatever, while it can also be excessive, is different from the regulation where to make use of your private property you have to follow the whims of whoever has the power. Why would data centers need to be built using union labor when there's no such requirement for anything else? In the old days you needed to placate the whims of a king to be granted the right to use your own property, now you need to placate a union boss or some design review bureaucrat.
And of course most of the examples you give are irrelevant - they don't even involve private property or specifically involve the government taking private property.
Eminent domain used to seize private land is more similar to prohibiting construction on private land, than allowing it.
Perhaps it's just you, because the votes say otherwise. Housing NIMBYism is people who already have homes preventing new ones from being built, for their own benefit (Price increases on existing stock). That's not what's happening with data centers.
NIMBYism covers far more than just building homes, and covers more than just homeowners. Instead, it covers when residents oppose things like schools, public transit, electricity generation, infrastructure, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIMBY
The person I initially responded to was specifically talking about housing NIMBYism, not NIMBYs in general. I pointed out how homeowners are typically the ones opposing new housing, which is not the case with data centers.
You responded with “NIMBYism covers far more than just building homes” which is true but not what was being responded to.
Yes, I want the datacenter just not in my backyard. Of all buildings, a datacenter is the most amenable to being put somewhere else. Maybe we can have it nearby if the corp is bringing something to the table. What's the problem?
And yeah I use cloud services. They aren't charities, I pay for those.
Or put another way, NIMBY is used as a slur but not every NIMBY position is unreasonable.
We need landfills but I don’t want to live next to a landfill. Maybe we could come to a compromise where you build the thing in a way that doesn’t negatively impact me.
By the same logic, you obviously won't mind if there are open-cut-mines; a sewage plant; a tannery; a telecommunications rocket launch facility and a container shipping terminal next to your backyard.
I won't mind a shipping terminal. The rest have some pollution issues so probably should be some distance from residences. Data centers have no pollution issues and I won't mind living next door to one either. I never had problems with seeing industry, I like seeing industry, its a great sign of progress and technology.
Data centres causes noise pollution which has health impacts. Similarly, a shipping terminal, will generate particulate pollution (until they move to EV and/or trains), noise pollution and perhaps light pollution (if it's a 24/7 port).
But as you've (rightfully) indicated, not all pollution is offensive to all. You might even be able to benefit from that, I imagine housing near industrial areas might be cheaper. And we do need mines; sewage system; leather; satellites...and even data centres.
By no means am I suggesting that polluting industries should be completely banned. I believe there's a middle ground between carte blanche and a complete ban. The backlash against data centres isn't just because they are data centres. It's because they are often located in residential areas and are taking advantage of previous investments by the residents in power/water infrastructure. If they located data centres in industrial (or commercial) zones and invested to upgrade the power/water infrastructure, there'd be significantly less backlash.
Lastly, my reply was primarily directly at parineum's comment which contemptuously rejected people's legitimate concerns as if they lost all rights to democratically lobby for sensible regulation simply because something has a legitimate use in society.
Yes, personally its not just about money for me, a shipping port is scenic to me and if I could, I won't mind at all living near one.
Its because the current movement is insane and absurd made from completely imaginary flat earth level reasons, many of these protestors won't be happy with any dc at all even if they made it 10000 miles from their house. I am okay with reasonable dialog and compromise. I feel these people aren't. This is a uniquely strange phenomenon, I am not wholly ruling out the opinion of some who think this might be amplified ad sabotage by foreign powers, but then again one should never underestimate the native stupidity of americans. They elected trump twice after all.
I live near a sewage plant. One or two days a year when I am cycling past the fence on my commute, I might get a whiff of something. People really overestimate the problem.
Collossus 2's pollution from on site power generation is well documented. There's also noise; depending on the design you could have a 24/7 hum plus infrasound. These things can be unbelievable nuisances if they are built without caring, near residences.
Even if they do use AI and are happy with it, and I'd be willing to bet that isn't always the case, the services they use today clearly don't depend on data centers that haven't even been built yet. Maybe some are happy with the current shitty AI that's a fun toy to play with, but don't want new data centers built and used to train an improved AI that will make them unemployable.
Not at all. I gave houses as an example, but I hypothetically also don't want bus or rail stops anywhere near me. Or shops. Or bars. I guess it's not nimbyism since I don't own a bus stop or a shop.
Yes, I'm a NIMBY. Someone want to build more houses, maybe that's good, but the roads need to be scaled up to match. Want to build a datacenter, ok but what's in it for me? The people long-term invested in a town are the ones who should be making decisions on how to develop it, not someone coming in from the outside to make a buck.
Well, at least on case of taxi drivers "the flimsy excuse" phrasing applies more to existing regulation than not following it.
Not sure about the nurses, but my grandmothers were able to afford live-in caretakers in old age, without any government help or having much money, because these are completely unregulated (outside the US; or the regulation is not enforced)... We found good ones thru word of mouth, exactly the approach apps can scale
This has about as much bearing on AI anything as a statement from some other cult about immortal soul and life beginning at conception has on biology of fetal development.
I just disconnected the antenna on my Chevy bolt and terminated it. Much more reliable :)
Although for me the concern is insurance getting data... My rate is so low based on whatever they have now, that I definitely don't see it going any lower :) perhaps I'd give them data if it was high.
Why would anyone go to jail? I know eating beef is bad for the environment and I eat beef. I wouldn't even mind if there was an externality tax I had to pay, but I don't see why anyone should be obligated to take into account every possible indirect harm their action might cause that is not regulated. Did Chevron break any specific existing rules?
Somebody could decide retroactively that you circling a parking lot to find a better spot knowing you release CO2 was unjustified and you need to be punished. These lawsuits are exactly that - arbitrary petsonalistic extortion.
This sounds too gimmicky and motivational. You need to be good at something that pays. I am not sure you need to be a cheetah specifically. Then you need to spend less than you make. I feel like this style of article is actually not conducive to that. Spending less is usually not flashy.
Basically you would do what FIRE people do, except you won't quit if your goal is wealth. In fact fire forums occasionally get a post like "hey I'm 61 I have 10m do you think I can retire?"
vibe coding for personal projects is a power tool. If I'm creating a 4x game for fun, id like to write core logic myself, but figuring out why drop-down lists stopped opening after a unity upgrade or why the animation is glitching sometimes is something ai can do.
For work projects, if fun was the goal you wouldn't be paid to do it :)
"Potential" threat? This applies symmetrically. Hundreds of millions of people are "potential" victims of crime, and privacy advocates can only provide a few dozen anecdotes, most of them less impactful than someone stealing your sandwich.
Somehow matters of degree only apply to safety (and my liberty to film whatever I want in public), but they don't apply to privacy, that's absolute.
One thing to remember is that for most people, safety at some level of disorder becomes an overriding concern, with hardly any regard for liberty, fairness, prosperity or anything. This is how people elect Bukele, Duterte, or even to an extent Putin. Heck Seattle once voted for a Republican prosecutor, even though disorder in Seattle is nowhere near overwhelming.
The USA is right now in an equilibrium where crime is relatively low. Only a few years ago, we saw that it can... fluctuate. I grew up in Russia in the 90ies so let's put it like that, I would already be open to all kinds of ways to fight crime, if I were in a different one. Most people won't go quite as far as me, but after a couple years in a different equilibrium, even some of the ardent privacy fighters will start coming around, especially if it affects them personally. At El Salvador level of disorder, apparently "put everyone with a tattoo in cages" starts to sound like a great plan to most people.
Now consider how Flock affects this equilibrium. What is the realistic, actual risk to non-criminals from the government? UK has mass surveillance, I mean it's not ideal, but how much of a dystopia is it? And the UK, as far as I understand, doesn't have nearly as many existing legal protections, nor does it have the culture of flipping the government a bird (consider e.g. covid lockdown compliance and enforcement).
On the other hand, to me it appears that surveillance is a relatively cheap and effective way to prevent crime. Aside from being good, that also reduces demand for other solutions that have been tried around the world, and the kinds of candidates who would run on crime/disorder agenda.
Do you have statistics for both? To me, it looks like the reduction of crime is backed by some tentative numbers, whereas even organizations explicitly dedicated to finding violations of privacy report a a small collection of anecdotes.
Not to mention that as far as I am concerned, even someone e.g. breaking into a house - not speaking of violent crime - is far more damaging and traumatizing than some random cop looking up his exes license plate and doing nothing with it. Even if the numbers of instances were comparable.
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