7 ms·
Rural Americans are trying to hold back the tide of AI
- csto12 8mo ago“I assumed Republicans would be for this: business, deregulation” When are we going to stop talking about Republicans like they are still neocons? Republicans haven’t been the pro big-business party in 10 years (did we forget about the tariffs, trade wars, etc that have happened in the last year alone?)
- palmotea 8mo ago> When are we going to stop talking about Republicans like they are still neocons? Republicans haven’t been the pro big-business party in 10 years (did we forget about the tariffs, trade wars, etc that have happened in the last year alone?) Because they're still schizophrenic about that. It's not an either/or thing. Trump likes tariffs, and a protectionist strain has appeared in the Republican party, but the pro big-business/small government stuff is there, just not so monolithically dominant.
- Der_Einzige 8mo agoWhich party do the mega rich vote for? It's primarily not democrats, and especially not the anti-isreal/progressive 40-45% of the democratic party. Rich people love trumps protectionism and MAGA. Neocons and paternal autocrats, but I repeat myself.
- riddlemethat 8mo agohttps://theweek.com/politics/us-election-who-the-billionaires-are-backing https://theweek.com/politics/us-election-who-the-billionaire...
- Der_Einzige 8mo ago"the majority of mega-donors back the Republicans and Donald Trump" - direct quote from your article.
- post_break 8mo agoNIMBY over rules stuff like that. It's like pemdas, NIMBY is #1.
- Spooky23 8mo agoThe problem with Republicans is that the core public platform is pure identity nonsense. The people voting for them are voting for that stuff and usually don’t understand their own interests. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the country. GOP policy blew up farming in the 80s, but doubling down on stupid culture war shit in the 90s flipped the farmers. The democratic parties concluded the juice of a contested small voter base wasnt worth the squeeze. The same rug pull is in play here. Lots of Catholics are on the MAGA train because of their supposed deep convictions. The anti-immigrant Cuban and Mexicans will be the first to hit the “find out” phase.
- Der_Einzige 8mo agoAfter I saw over 50% of latino men and close to that of latino women voting for Trump suddenly the idea of English becoming the national language is very attractive to me. You want assimilation with our neo-con hellhole? Earn it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-only_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-only_movement
- analognoise 8mo agoTrump is now -30 with Latinos. This is generational damage for anyone (R), and we’re only a year in. They’re losing elections in Trump +17 districts. Never interrupt your enemy when they’re making a mistake.
- Der_Einzige 8mo agoI'm willing to bet at least 1000 USD that a sufficiently trumpian republican in 2028 will be able to get near or even more latino votes than trump did. They LOVE the cruelty. The people who hate immigrants most are other immigrants. Brazil didn't end slavery until 1888 and it continued de-facto far longer than it did in the USA. Spain/Portugal were far more cruel/racist than the English and especially french were. Their history is one of extreme, virulent racism. Even today, they make huge distinctions between the "European" white mexicans who are "untainted" by indigenous blood. Latinos also are extremely anti-LGBT, and used to be catholic but are having their own evangelization sweeping through their communities (I am personally witnessing it right now). That evangelization is primary in reaction to the precieved liberalism of the current and previous pope.
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- js8 8mo agoThere is a difference between neoconservatives and neoliberals. You probably meant the latter, but Republican party was never neoliberal only, it also is, as you write, neoconservative. It's not really surprising as conservativism and liberalism are both main pillars of capitalism, because the idea of property is based both on authority (like authority, you get the property ostensibly based on your past performance and you keep it indefinitely) and liberty (you can do what you want with it).
- drbig 8mo agohttps://archive.ph/xeAWu https://archive.ph/xeAWu
- srworkdayhat 8mo agoIt’s not just rural Americans that are against data centers. It’s most working class Americans who understand that data centers increase their everyday expenses significantly, but provide very little daily benefit.
- Wololooo 8mo agoOr even daily hindrance if you happen to live next to the datacenter...
- sparrish 8mo agoHindrance to what? I'm trying to understand your comment.
- rpcope1 8mo agoThey're unbelievably loud
- nickphx 8mo agoinsanely loud. even more so when they are running massive natural gas burning turbines to generate power ...
- tzs 8mo agoSome have been built where there wasn't enough power currently available from the grid but would later be available, and were allowed to operate using temporary power sources until then which can cause serious pollution issues for nearby communities. A notorious example was/is xAI's Memphis data center. They started out using a loophole that let them power it with dozens of gas turbines without permits that didn't have to meet air pollution standards. (I don't remember for sure, but I think they were using them under a rule that is meant for emergencies like natural disasters). The surrounding communities, mostly poor and minority with not much political clout, already had air that was significantly worse than wealthier and whiter parts of the area, and the data center pushed that to levels health officials considered to be alarming, like a 79% rise in peak NO2 nearby. This was actually bad enough that even the Trump administration had to act and the EPA now had a rule making it harder for data centers to exploit that loophole. But they are still using gas turbines, 15 instead of dozens, and they now are permitted and have more pollution controls, but independent data suggests it remains a major source of the smog in the surrounding neighborhoods. They are expected to be fully on the grid later this year.
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- ok123456 8mo agoData centers won't feed people. These datacenters will likely be hastily abandoned once the AI-flavored expansion pops and will be a blight on the land that would have otherwise been growing beans and corn. At best, they will be a poorly guarded structure that local high school students will break into and do what high school students do.
- vel0city 8mo agoCorn, that stuff our cars eat? Nearly half of all corn fields in the US go to feed our cars.
- blackfawn 8mo agoThe corn that was used in ethanol production, now called distillers grains, is then used as livestock feed for cattle, cows, pigs, poultry, fish, etc.
- bryanlarsen 8mo agoCorrect, we're only wasting ~1/4 of our corn production land on ethanol production rather than ~40% that a naive estimate would come up with. 25% of a massive number is still a massive number.
- vel0city 8mo agoI got my "nearly half" from the USDA which has stated: > Because of provisions in the Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act of 1996 that permits farmers to make their own crop planting decisions based on the most profitable crop for a given year, corn acreage in the United States has increased from a Government-mandated low of 60.2 million planted acres in 1983 to close to or exceeding 90 million since 2018. Much of this growth in area and production is a result of expanding ethanol production, which now accounts for nearly 45 percent of total corn use. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn-and-other-feed-grains/feed-grains-sector-at-a-glance https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn-and-other-feed-gr... It does look like its dropped a bit since that time though.
- jmclnx 8mo ago>“I assumed Republicans would be for this: business, deregulation,” AI Data Centers are different than other plants. They provide very little in employment in the region. The few high-paying jobs that may exist can be located in other countries. All that is needed is building maintenance, and that can be contracted out, so no permanent work for the area. All the Data Center does is use resources, electricity/water, without giving anything back to the community except discounted property tax. The residences, they only see higher utility costs for themselves. So no wonder people are fighting back.
- xve 8mo agoMarket forces are already putting a lot of pressure on AI. The market doesn't work for everything but the invisible hand is coming for AI already.
- jihadjihad 8mo agoIf you're not around rural America a lot, it can be hard to believe how deeply, at an existential level, ideas like those conveyed by a Gadsden flag are held. Rural Americans really, really do not like being told what to do, by anyone, regardless of whether the person in power's mascot is an elephant or an ass. It is not surprising in the least that suits from Washington and execs from Silicon Valley descending upon the land like vultures aren't exactly given a warm welcome from regular folk. Even if electricity prices stayed the same there would be damage done that goes beyond NIMBYism that would need to be fixed.
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- Ancapistani 8mo ago> If you're not around rural America a lot, it can be hard to believe how deeply, at an existential level, ideas like those conveyed by a Gadsden flag are held. This neatly encapsulates a big part of what I’ve been trying to say on HN for years: those outside “rural America”/“red states” simply do not understand those inside - and to only a slightly lesser degree, vice-versa. When we say “Don’t Tread on Me”, it’s largely not a political slogan; it’s a shorthand that represents an entire worldview. When others see that as on par with “Yes we can”, “I can’t breathe”, or “Defund the police”, they’re making a mistake. What’s seen as politics on the coasts is seen as a direct attack on our culture and way of life in the middle of the country. As always, I want to be clear and say that I’m neither complaining nor offended here. My fear is that the factions in the US will cross each others’ red lines without even understanding what they’re doing. Historically, that’s been the left doing something the right finds untenable without realizing the consequences. These days the opposite is looking more and more likely.
- jihadjihad 8mo ago> What’s seen as politics on the coasts is seen as a direct attack on our culture and way of life in the middle of the country. And the framing of "middle of the country" matters, too. There are many rural parts of New York and California, too, some of which are as deep a shade of red as parts of the South.
- JuniperMesos 8mo agoThis article seems like more of at attempt on the part of the Wall Street Journal and the prestige media memeplex it represents to characterize AI as harmful and unpopular - particularly unpopular among rural Trump voters - than it is reporting on organic rural opposition to data centers being built. It's heavy on quotes from think tank people, community organizers who clearly talk about rural Republicans as an outgroup, polticians making relatively bland statements, etc., who are talking about AI being bad in a general sense or talking in a meta way about rural opposition to datacenters being a phenomenon that exists. It doesn't have much reporting on local people specifically objecting to data centers near them, or any indication of how many people actually object to this. My own thinking is that the prestige media memeplex really hates AI and has a big problem with silicon valley tech companies, and this colors all their reporting about AI datacenters. See for instance https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake, and https://www.wired.com/story/karen-hao-empire-of-ai-water-use-statistics/ https://www.wired.com/story/karen-hao-empire-of-ai-water-use..., particularly the parts about prestige media journalist Karen Hao getting the amount of water datacenters use wrong by multiple orders of magnitude in order to make AI datacenters seem like a problem. Plenty of people who clearly hate the concept of AI also throw around "datacenter water use" as a general attack against AI, completely thoughtlessly. I strongly suspect that the prestige media journalists Anvee Bhutani and Amrith Ramkumar who wrote this article are doing something similar. Are there really significant numbers of people in rural areas who object to a thousand-acre data center project? That's not that big in a rural farmland context. The one thing that strikes me as something rural people might organically care about is if the presence of a data center near them appreciably raises their power bills or makes the local electric grid less reliable. Data centers really do use a lot of electricity, and that's the specific issue the Republican Missouri senator was quoted as addressing. Still, if power bills are actually going up in a way that meaningfully affects people, it shouldn't be hard to find quotes from people who have seen their power bills go up. Increased local energy cost should be the focus of this entire article if that is in fact a problem, and I'm suspicious of the fact that it isn't.