I’ve seen a lot of verifiably false claims being thrown around data centers.

I was married to a doctor, helped them study for board exams, etc and was surrounded by other doctors within our social circle. What most people don’t realize, and most doctors themselves refuse to acknowledge, is how limited by specialization their knowledge can be and how the education of most doctors stops after med school and residency. Nutrition, for example, is barely covered at all.

Yes, there are continuing education requirements and countless journals but most doctors do the bare minimum and don’t keep up. I’d even argue that most physician knowledge tends to be updated more often through drug and instrumentation reps promoting their products by taking them out to dinner and entering them into referral programs, etc.

Communities can have more effective politicians, but that means voting out individuals who make bad decisions or decisions that are counter the will good of the community they serve.

Amazon and other companies already have job training programs because they cannot find enough skilled labor to build and operate their data centers. The number of jobs commonly cited are comically lower than what is common to operate a modern hyperscaler. In my experience, hyperscalers often have at least 100-200 people on site to operate the data center and I've seen more than 1000 people on a site when the data center is under construction.

The real issue, as always, are the local governments and utilities that sellout out the citizens and fail to create and enforce building codes. The governments should be using the demand for data centers to partner with the companies and have them pay to modernize and fix the power grid. They should be using them to help subsidize green energy initiatives among other things and fund other projects to benefit the community.

The inconvenient truth is that the problem with data centers lies with the people in the communities who continue to elect politicians who, time and time again, make decisions counter to the best interests of their community. Data centers just happen to be the latest scapegoat to distract people from corrupt politicians and an community that is not civically engaged enough to hold their politicians accountable.

https://www.nber.org/digest/apr13/do-women-avoid-salary-nego...

As a man who has worked in a predominantly female workplace, my experience has taught me that harassment is less about gender and more about power. Those in power will always feel entitled to behave poorly, regardless of gender.

https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/19941105/1939991/oh...

The real customer are the third party sellers and those using Amazon platforms.

I don't think it's a matter of setting goals based on what you can do alone, life is lonely enough as it it. I think it's more a matter of accepting that life is a sequence of unpredictable events, and you have to just embrace the absurdity of it all.

I do it because it can be creative and fun. It adds color to an otherwise gray and boring surface and provides a practical way of identifying my laptop from everyone else’s.

When I was in school, we used to cover out textbooks with brown paper bags and then drawn on them. How is this any different?

You seem to have you entire identity tied to the notion of what you think a software developer is and that everyone should conform to that idea. I’d rather have people be creative, embrace fun, and add color and self expression to the world. We could all use more color in our lives.

Sure there are a number of Democratic Socialists and other progressives winning elections and driving changes but everything I’ve seen policy-wise has been directly targeted areas where unchecked capitalism has clearly failed their constituents. Even in those cases, there’s no dramatic shift towards government ownership.