site banner
PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12394 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 8, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Lots to comment on here (to start with, comparing American suburb life to anything China has to offer is a featherweight match between two very mediocre lifestyles, in a global comparison), but the thing that particularly stuck out to me is

America can build (gives the example of AI data centers)

In what sense are AI datacenters a mark of state capacity/building ability? They just take some off-the-shelf hardware (fabricated elsewhere) and stick lots of it in a room with some ventilation and power supply. China had unemployed miners do the same thing in soot-choked shacks in the desert for Bitcoin mining, and I here they do that with cellphone farms for scamming in the Cambodian jungle. In fact the scam farms are more impressive, since they usually come with some slave labourer camp/brothel/casino compound for tens of thousands of people attached and are actually just created ex nihilo in the middle of nowhere.

Those scamming datacenters are there bc Chinese cracked down inside China.

Data centers are far, far more complicated than setting up a desktop and WiFi in your home network times a million. To give a taste of the problems:

  1. Power. They're incredibly power hungry. You can't just hook them up to the local grid; the local grid might not even have the capacity to support them. You've got to expand existing plants or build entirely new ones. And then how do you handle power surges? A naive approach is going to cost you tens of millions of dollars when a spike comes through and kills a thousand GPUs. Of course, you've also got to figure out how to distribute the power internally and plan for inevitable component failure at multiple layers. How do you distribute thousands of amps (safely and without melting the insulation)? And what about when the grid fails? You've got to have backup power sources ready for a day or two of unavailability. Not doing these things will make your data center uneconomic, as all that expensive capex is sitting around unused.

  2. Heat. All this power has to go somewhere. Air conditioning and fans don't work at this scale, so you've got to use liquid cooling. But where do you get this liquid and where do you send it? And how do you pump it through hundreds of miles of plumbing? How do you minimize the rate of pipes getting clogged, and how do you handle it when pipes do get clogged? And remember: if this plumbing fails, your GPUs are going to rapidly start failing as well, to say nothing of the risk of a highly corrosive liquid being sprayed all over billions of dollars of investments.

  3. Weight. A rack, by itself, weighs over five tons. Now add all of the equipment and liquid needed to handle 1) and 2). You've got to have a massive foundation that can support that. This isn't just a big Amazon warehouse.

  4. Security. You've got a lot of investment here, all in one place, and quite delicate. How do you prevent a hostile actor from taking a truck or drone and destroying your investment? To say nothing of state-level actors, who absolutely are trying to break in.

  5. Networking. You've got thousands of very chatty, data dependent GPUs coordinating in a highly choreographed dance to transmit trillions of parameters to each other. And the slowest link determines, by itself, the overall speed. When you've got thousands of nodes, that is pretty slow. Your mega ultra gaming WiFi 7 ASUS gaming router is going to have some trouble here. And that's just internally: you're receiving and transmitting massive amounts of data to the outside world. How do you prepare for a backhoe running through, or a shark chewing through, one of your fiber optic cables? Every hundred miles or so, you also need to amplify the signal, which comes with its own power, security, etc requirements. And what about truly bulk data: if you're transmitting 100Pb of data, is it better to saturate your measly 1 Pbps capacity (displacing your other network needs) for a painful amount of time, or to use trucks with hard drives to ship it cross country? And, if you have a bunch of these trucks, how do you efficiently unload them, without causing needless congestion or buffering in the physical world?

There's maybe half a dozen organizations in the world that can handle all these concerns. All of them are American.

Nobody is comparing datacenters to home networks. I don't think your points are particularly correct regarding the extraordinariness of datacenter construction, either, even though you (or your LLM? I'm getting a certain vibe) evidently put a lot of effort into them.

1/2: Bounded above by the requirements of power plants, which lots of countries build. Electric arc furnace complexes are also measured in the same hundreds of megawatts as datacenters. Also, my examples about bitcoin farms are pretty relevant here.

3: Moving heavy things on the order of "five tons" is really not impressive for modern civilisations.

4: Same for securing centralised facilities. How often do first-world countries experience break-ins in their bank vaults or even prisons?

5: This is of course a nontrivial engineering problem, but off-the-shelf solutions exist. Also, China is filtering all their incoming and outgoing traffic for content basically in real time, which is surely a harder problem.

Your conclusion is also wrong. I searched for maybe about 2 minutes to find that Meta's Prineville data center is (was at some point?) considered the biggest in the US, and it's cited as using 15000 GWh in a year. Elsewhere, Alibaba's Zhangbei data center is cited as pulling 150MW, which 24h365 gives 1314GWh which is only one OOM off. Other big US data centers seem to also be moving in the 100-200MW range.

or your LLM? I'm getting a certain vibe

Your LLM detector is busted, I'm afraid.

Power

It's actually worse than that: you will fuck up the grid if you just naiively run jobs that cause your hundred thousand node cluster to all spike their draw in unison.

We have to smooth our consumption because otherwise it messes with generating equipment.

Okay you've aligned all your ducks in a row at massive expense which even that half dozen companies are more 'capable of getting financed' than outright affording and then it's being used for something that isn't even profitable at current scale.

That's a orthogonal concern as to whether it's a big infrastructure project. Maybe they're going to be giant boondoggles; maybe not. The same applies to most of China's infrastructure projects; it still represents a high level of state/social capacity.

And the biggest builder of these projects (Google) usually funds them out of cash on hand. To the extent it issues bonds for them, it's for financial engineering/tax reasons. And investors for whatever reason are desperate to buy "green bonds," and are willing to take spectacularly low rates for the chance to buy them.

And more to the point... I don't think the real contention was that America CAN'T build. But between all the bureaucracy, environmentalism regs, NIMBYs, and cost disease, it just costs WAY more than it probably 'should' and thus things only get built if someone is enthusiastically willing to fund the process. Once they do, things happen very fast.

With Datacenters, we have motivated buyers utterly flush with cash so the cost obstacle is surmounted, at which point all the other steps can be done.

As I'm fond of pointing out, Florida built a high-speed rail system before California even broke ground on theirs because there were many many fewer unnecessary obstacles to doing it. Simple as.

I don't think the real contention was that America CAN'T build.

There are three issues here - a skill level issue where the hard costs of a big project are a lot higher than they would be in a country that didn't suck, a political culture issue where either NIMBYs kill the project or soft costs explode fighting them off, and a bloat issue where projects get overspecified because it isn't anyone's job to control costs.

As regards large-scale civil engineering, the US has all three problems, such that the overall cost of new roads is 3-5x the cheapest European countries * and the cost of new rail infrastructure is 5-10x (10-20x in NYC).

With data centres, I suspect the skill level issue is mitigated because Google and suchlike can hire first-rate people to do unglamorous work in a way neither the government nor the big construction contractors can. The NIMBY issue can be managed by building in red states, or by Big Tech buying the Government of California en bloc. I suspect Google eats the bloat, and Elon personally trims bloated projects at 3am with his hands while shitposting with his feet, or some other similar feat of workaholism.

* Per Alon Levy, these are Spain, Sweden, Turkey and the less corrupt parts of Italy. France is slightly better than average, Germany slightly worse, and the UK shockingly bad when compared to anywhere except North America.

between all the bureaucracy, environmentalism regs, NIMBYs, and cost disease, it just costs WAY more than it probably 'should'

I think an important aspect is that those things largely don't apply to data centers in the same way they do to any public infrastructure or factories. A data center is essentially just a large building with power and network connectivity and cooling. There is no real noise or chemicals involved so safety regulations don't apply and of course it isn't a public building so the local politicians or interest groups don't get a say. It also doesn't have to be located in city center so there's no "social" aspect and in general the location is not critical so NIMBYism is much less important.

And yet you get people screaming about water and electricity usage (being fair, the latter is a concern).

They have successfully shut them down before:

https://www.kold.com/2025/12/02/county-city-leaders-amazon-pulls-out-embattled-project-blue/

https://wsbt.com/news/local/st-joseph-county-council-denies-rezoning-of-land-for-data-center-votes-7-2-marathon-meeting-hours-long-public-opinion-13-billion-dollar-project-amazon-new-carlisle-approval-process-plan-commission-st-joseph-county-indiana

https://www.fauquiernow.com/news/warrenton-town-council-passes-resolutions-to-address-legal-disputes-in-amazon-data-center-cases-halt/article_6f98e20c-d36c-11ef-885a-9bc61bdcc17c.html

I agree with your overall point, datacenters are less objectionable than average... so imagine what building anything more objectionable would take!

Let me just say for the record, I am SO glad that NASA exists simply because by building out their facilities at Cape Canaveral back when Florida was barely populated, we've got a large rocket launch complex that didn't have to be built in barely accessible mountains or something. Can you imagine the fuss residents would put up if someone suggested building 40 launchpads near a populated area?

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats