Right. That’s something I’ve found that those of us in the modern ruling class tend to have in common.

Perhaps we should be. It’s the most common outcome of this degree of inequality and disenfranchisement.

Or maybe we’ll get lucky and this will be history’s one exception to the rule.

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.

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.

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.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/709772/americans-oppose-data-ce...

"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.

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.

What in the fuck are you talking about? This is a public policy problem and has been literally for 3,000 years.

It's one of the oldest and most pervasive public policy problems that has spanned nearly every culture that's existed since there was culture.

https://www.axios.com/2025/05/28/ai-jobs-white-collar-unempl...

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

I suddenly have new concerns about what my future might be like.

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.

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.

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.

And in general Google lost any immediate benefit of the doubt status many years ago. Many such stories.

American media may be less likely to share that narrative with you. But the actual people figured this out a while ago and they're mad.