8 ms·
Missouri town fires half its city council over data center deal
- emiliazar 6mo ago[dead]
- ekkiren 6mo ago[flagged]
- philipwhiuk 6mo agoDatacentres aren't mills. Mills employed hundreds of people and mill owners invested in property to house the workforce in the local area. Data centres are mostly ran remotely, employing a handful of people to watch a fence line.
- fhdkweig 6mo agoAnd unless they also build their own power plant, everyone in town has to pay higher electricity prices to cover the new demand. That is the primary complaint I have been hearing. If anyone wants to add any other complaints to the list, I'd like to hear them. I might be forced to have this argument in my parent's hometown in the coming years.
- Mistletoe 6mo agoAnd sucking down all the electrical power in the region. > Yet another (text) suggests residents would forget about the data center controversy as soon as they find out the city is getting a new Olive Garden restaurant. This was so funny.
- oompydoompy74 6mo agoProps to these folks for protecting their community. Maybe they can build the data center in your backyard instead :).
- bluGill 6mo agoThey are. Well okay, it is about 5km away, but it is in the direction of my backyard. They are quiet neighbors overall, not much traffic compared to most other jobs. The only thing not to like is someone negotiated a tax 10 year break on us. More importantly, I'm not NIMBY if at all possible.
- phil21 6mo agoSounds good to me. As far as industrial neighbors go it doesn't get any better than a glorified warehouse. The scale of these facilities means keeping a few local contractors in the trades in business indefinitely - electricians, plumbers, etc. Not ideal in terms of number of jobs gained, but those jobs tend to be high quality. Power costs are a concern, but it doesn't matter if it's across the street from me or 100 miles away on the same PJM interconnect. In the end it likely would strengthen the local grid where I live. Water usage is just overblown social media rage bait for the most part in most locations at least. So long as it's not a stupid ridiculous design go for it. The only thing I'd rage against are tax credits. But I'd be strongly against those no matter the project going in. The only public money spent should be on adding traffic lights or improving road access if needed, and I'd want to see that being justified. This assumes an actual datacenter. Not one with a co-located power plant. These are different things. Many folks lived near datacenters and had utterly no clue or care until they were told to be mad about it. I'd point them out to visitors or when traveling to family and they'd never have known the difference otherwise. It's effectively living next to an office park.
- bachmeier 6mo agoI'd say having your house fall to a third of its value while your electricity bill triples is a perfectly rational argument for opposing a data center. If the data center is that valuable, pay the residents current market value for their property and give them a million dollars to uproot their life. Letting giant corporations impose massive costs on the folks that don't have the money to buy politicians is not an efficient outcome.
- bombcar 6mo agoI hesitate to say it, but at least the datacenter companies haven't realized that federal railroad laws mean that the feds can preempt state and local governments with regards to railroads and yards ... though it may be hard to argue that a datacenter is a necessary part of a railroad.
- foota 6mo agoSnowpiercer but with data centers? The breeze would help with cooling!
- barbazoo 6mo ago[dead]
- toast0 6mo agoA railroad has to track a lot of data; what's in each car (declared by customer), what train it's attached to, where is it on maintenance schedules; similar for the rail and signal infrastructure, etc; in today's modern environment, they need multiple datacenters for high availability. Something something route planning to reduce the number of coupling changes, etc, etc. Edit: also, a lot of long distance fiber runs on railroad right of way, so datacenters at rail yards may be well placed for connectivity.
- freehorse 6mo agoA railroad is the infrastructure for transporting commodities. In the modern digital economy, datacenters along with the whole internet infrastructure are the modern railroads, which need protection and deregulation for the sakes of safety, national security, economy etc etc. Maybe this argument works better if the others don't?
- mcmcmc 6mo agoMaybe instead of performing mental gymnastics to expand the executive’s power well beyond beyond what Congress has legislated, we should just pass new laws
- functionmouse 6mo agoDo what you must, they've already won.
- cucumber3732842 6mo agoI wish when they write these storied they'd put the town's per capita income in brackets the way they do with politician's party affiliation or company's ticker. The "Fairfax of St. Louis" voting out half their legislature over a project means something very different than the "Newark of St. Louis" doing the same.
- securicat 6mo agoAnd why is that?
- cucumber3732842 6mo agoBecause wealthy suburbs have said "not here, move your filthy industry somewhere else" since forever. When the places that aren't swimming in jobs, the local government isn't swimming in property tax revenues and frankly probably can't even enforce the rules they're federally compelled to have without destroying everything says "take that somewhere else" it means something entirely different.
- tomwheeler 6mo agoTake it from someone who lives in the St. Louis area, Festus is by no means a snooty suburb. It's a small town that has become a distant suburb of St. Louis due to sprawl spreading south into the adjacent county over the past 20 years. For comparison, an upscale suburb of similar size (Town and Country, Missouri) has a median household income of $202,974, as compared to $59,041 for Festus. The average person you meet in Town and Country is likely to be a doctor, attorney, or executive. In Festus, the average person likely works in a factory, farm, or lead mine.
- cucumber3732842 6mo agoThank you. That's exactly the kind of context I was looking for.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
- chromacity 6mo agoI'm honestly surprised why local governments are so eager to make datacenter deals in the first place. I'm pro-progress, but a datacenter brings approximately nothing to the local economy. It doesn't employ any noteworthy number of people, it doesn't generate any real tax revenue, and it increases electricity costs for the region. So if the voters don't want it, that feels like their prerogative. I don't know if it's the elected officials conflating data centers with the region becoming a bustling tech hub, rather than just a way for a Bay Area company to capitalize on cheap electricity... or if it's kickbacks.
- trollbridge 6mo agoA few steak dinners go a long way.
- BugsJustFindMe 6mo ago> and it increases electricity costs for the region This doesn't need to be true. It would be both possible and reasonable to mandate subsidy by the datacenter as part of any deal so that costs don't go up for anyone else.
- tombert 6mo agoYeah, that's what I've been thinking. If we charged twice as much money per kilowatt-hour for datacenter electricity compared to residential, it feels like the net revenue for electricity could be roughly the same to the power company, but then it wouldn't be nearly as annoying for the residents of the town having their prices spike way up. Or, you know, the AI companies could actually supply their own power like I keep hearing tech bros mention is coming soon.
- fhdkweig 6mo agoPossible and reasonable don't guarantee anything with big businesses. Around 2008, Atlanta had a major drought, and as the local government asked the citizens to conserve water, Coca Cola was bottling up the local water and sending it out on trucks. When the citizens complained, the government said it would cost too many jobs to stop the bottling.
- ramesh31 6mo agoThis is becoming a pretty clear wedge between red and blue. Why do you think Musk opened his diesel turbine driven data center in rural Mississippi? Big Tech is systematically targeting small municipalities across the US with promises of insane money to anyone willing to sell out their residents. Missouri being traditionally purple, it makes a lot of sense the flashpoint would be here.
- bigtex 6mo agoRed states are against the deals as well. Many people in Texas are fighting back but sometimes it’s too late because the deal was done in secret.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- wvenable 6mo agoIt's crazy that these are done in secret. From the article: "The operator of the data center hasn't been identified" -- that's shouldn't be allowed.
- stonogo 6mo agoIt's not possible to identify operators who do not wish to be identified. The land is purchased by an LLC, developed by another LLC, and then sold to a third LLC for buildout. Once it's up and running it could be rented to a fourth LLC who has contracted with the actual client, or the client could just buy the involved LLCs (usually via another LLC).
- ramesh31 6mo ago>Red states are against the deals as well. The people are, their politicians are not. Overwhelmingly this is a problem of backroom deals with state and local Republicans subverting the electorate's will.
- bdangubic 6mo agoThis is 100% not a political issue, red & blue are lining up against DCs. the DC capital of the world is Northern Virginia which is bluer than Bernie
- fusslo 6mo ago> Missouri campaign finance records show a political action committee — made up of labor unions that support data centers because of the jobs they create — spent almost $40,000 in the final weeks of the race on newspaper and digital ads and yard signs in support of the four council members booted from office. Serious question, what jobs do datacenters create? Are there jobs for local residents?
- nixass 6mo ago> Serious question, what jobs do datacenters create? Are there jobs for local residents? If locals are qualified then yes. The DC itself does not have many permanent staff (tech, facilities, security) but loads of work is contracted. I'd say that great majority of the work done in and around the DC campus is outsourced, and it creates work for plenty of people.
- bdangubic 6mo agoto build - yes. after it is built - no. so there is some temporary work but nothing permanent
- dilyevsky 6mo agoAt least when i was at google, more than a decades ago at this point, hardware ops guys were locally sourced
- rkomorn 6mo agoWhen I was at (then) Facebook, this was mostly the case, but we also ran data centers with a hundred thousands of servers off a dozen local techs. Facebook (and Google as well, IIRC) prided themselves on how few people they needed to run the datacenter. Maybe I'm jaded but "we created 50 jobs" just doesn't hit that hard.
- dilyevsky 6mo ago
- schainks 6mo agoPlugging this video about infrasound, which I only recently learned was a thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo These datacenters can be built in ways to limit this kind of noise pollution, but it appears local leaders do not think about things like this that can truly harm their constituents.
- stronglikedan 6mo ago> local leaders do not think about things like this that can truly harm their constituents Or they're paid to not think about it. I don't consider Occam's razor when politicians are involved
- BobaFloutist 6mo agoSurely you mean Hanlon's?
- josefritzishere 6mo agoGenerally this is good. Representatives should represent their populace and not monied interests. When they fail to do so they shoudl be removed. That's when democracy is operating correctly. But the article still contained the falsehood that data centers create jobs. This is just not accurate. Most data centers are acres of racks and HVAC with precious few humans to maintain them.
- uberduper 6mo agoI don't know anything about this particular site, but I presume it's one of the new mega gpu sites. I'm seeing many people in the comments with an early 2000's era concept of datacenters. The scale of these new sites is mind boggling. Take your idea of a typical datacenter building. Make it 4x bigger. Then put 4 of them together into a cluster. Then imagine 10 of those clusters at the site.
- Rekindle8090 6mo agoNone of that is new whatsoever. AWS has been doing that for 15 years at this point. The cloud didn't start existing just because of AI.
- uberduper 6mo agoAppreciate you making my point for me.
- sleepybrett 6mo agoThe coucilmembers probably got their bag already from whoever is building that datacenter, voting them out after the fact just means they don't have to clock in.
- sleepybrett 6mo agoIt will be interesting to see what we do with these enormous concrete boxes once we find a better way to do whatever we think all this 'ai' is going to do. 'Dead malls' that are being partially converted into pickleball courts and places for people to take their daily 'constitutional' indoors are going to seem quaint. That is if the bubble doesn't pop because of other factors first that is...
- quickthrowman 6mo ago> It will be interesting to see what we do with these enormous concrete boxes once we find a better way to do whatever we think all this 'ai' is going to do. These are just prefab tip-up walls with metal roofs, bar joists, columns spaced 30-40 feet OC, and a 6” concrete slab. It’s no different than an Amazon distribution center once all the electrical substations, switchgear, generators, and UPSes are gone.
- sleepybrett 6mo ago... sure, again once it's all pointless it's still a gigantic concrete box. Tons of old hastily built automotive factories just rotting around detroit.
- someguydave 6mo agoIt’s a bit crazy that the elderly are blocking data center buildouts while they also expect to collect a big chunk of everyone’s payroll. Pick your lane.
- sonofhans 6mo agoLike, what did “the elderly” ever do for us? Aside from literally creating the civilization around us, and the infrastructure necessary to support it? Seems perfectly reasonable to expect reward for that, rather than pollution and increased energy costs.
- someguydave 6mo agoNone of that justifies the level of government checks they receive
- dzhiurgis 6mo ago> increased energy costs Perhaps local gov that gets the gift of datacenter (aka hundreds of millions in taxes) should subsidize residents rooftop solar installations by a slight bit. Sounds like a fair deal to every party involved.