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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 8, 2025

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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 x 24h x 365 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.