3 ms·
Two things can be true: the construction can be technically legal and at clear odds with community opinion. I mean, yes. Amazon can likely do this. But is th
by ajross 2mo ago
Two things can be true: the construction can be technically legal and at clear odds with community opinion.
I mean, yes. Amazon can likely do this. But is this strategy really in keeping with its long term interests? I mean, look at the comments in the rest of this very topic. Do you want a communist insurrection? This is literally how you get communist insurrections. People are fucking pissed, and the bourge^M^M^M^M funding-focused growth-minded startup set here are throwing gasoline on the fire.
- arcbyte 2mo ago[flagged]
- Avicebron 2mo ago"Nobody intelligent opposes dovecote construction"* *French nobility circa 1789
- InsideOutSanta 2mo ago5G towers have no negative externalities except looking kinda dorky. In fact, they're nice; they improve your reception. The same cannot be said for data centers. (Instead of just downvoting this, I'd appreciate it if you could point out exactly what I said is wrong. Thanks.)
- junofan 2mo agoI think we should refrain extending “negative externality” to mean “things people don’t like that might affect them.” Non-pecuniary externalities, in the Pigouvian sense, are really something you analyze to achieve efficiency. In this case, following a 5-year permitting process and plopping the industrial activity on industrial land is basically a form of bargaining and is probably acceptable from a social efficiency standpoint. Amazon’s hardly mining cobalt next to a daycare here.
- InsideOutSanta 2mo ago> I think we should refrain extending “negative externality” to mean “things people don’t like that might affect them.” But that's pretty much the definition of the term. It's a negative impact on a third party. If I'm living next to a data center, and it's noisy, or my electricity costs more, those are negative externalities. There are real reasons not to want data centers next door, unlike 5G towers.
- Apocryphon 2mo agoIn the South Valley, the pre-data center nemesis were distribution hubs, lambasted for the traffic they caused. Ironically also a key component of Amazon’s physical infrastructure.
- mindslight 2mo agoI'd say you're trying to define some ambiguous criteria to keep harms illegible to the analysis and thus deny that they exist. Noise pollution is very much pollution, certainly causes real problems, and falls right into the externality paradigm wherein a party unilaterally causes harm while making others suffer it. That the effects of noise pollution are hard to formally describe (and extra hard to quantify in monetary terms) does not mean we can just throw up our hands and pretend they don't exist. In fact, I'd say this is exactly why we stake out lofty non-economic ideals like human rights etc - markets have friction (ie are not efficient), and this combined with your reasoning means we could justify anything that produces negative outcomes for humans by simply writing it off as non-economically-legible. But the entire human-value justification for letting markets do their thing rests on the positive benefits they bring to us humans, so that is absurd. And so we always need to look at the larger picture and judge the real-world effects on humans.
- giaour 2mo ago5G towers are typically much smaller and less conspicuous than the towers they are replacing. One of 5G's hallmarks is its "small cell" architecture.
- nucleogenesis 2mo agoYour premise is a straw man so maybe keep your opinion on the intelligence of others to yourself. Plenty of journalists are eating well reporting on the negative externalities actively felt by residents who live near data centers. It is not hard to find if you look.
- Miner49er 2mo ago6 years ago when the work to build the data center started, nobody cared about data centers. Should 6 years of planning be thrown away because data centers have recently become fashionable to hate?
- voakbasda 2mo agoOne hundred years ago when humans started pumping oil out of the ground and burning it, nobody cared about it. Should a century of infrastructure investment be thrown away because cooking the planet has recently become fashionable to hate? Yes. It should. Will it? No.
- Matl 2mo agoSo noise and pollution that makes it impossible to live in or sell your house is now simply 'fashionable' to hate?
- ajross 2mo agoThis is going to sound like I'm flipping sides in this thread: but yeah, absolutely. Otherwise people in Gilroy would have hated datacenters when the planning started and Amazon would have built in Fresno or wherever. Really both sides are insane in this battle. People are angry about social change, injustice, perceived loss of status and are taking out those frustrations on totems like "Buildings Owned by Big Tech". Which is wrong. But it's equally wrong to ignore those concerns and try to align with their political enemies, which only makes this worse. (We saw exactly this thing happen with the vaccine madness just half a decade ago!) To wit: we're all going to hell in a handbasket and this community is 100% as much at fault as the big data opposition front.
- ACCount37 2mo agoYep. The "noise and pollution" of a datacenter are bordering on nonexistent. The same goes for water use concerns and more. The environmental concerns are extremely overblown - but NIMBYs really don't need much to get going.
- 2mo ago