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I'm not sure that's true, there's a pretty common phenomenon where upon learning what should be good news people instead respond with hostility and anger. Like telling people that data centers aren't really that heavy on water consumption or that food prices are actually cheaper than ever or that home ownership rates is actually around historic levels, or that children starving in the US isn't an issue anymore or that welfare fraud is actually a relatively negligible issue compared to the overall budget or whatever else.
Now some of the anger could be from a "I think you're lying and I'm mad that you are lying to me and denying a serious issue", but I think some of it is reflective that the particulars don't matter to begin with, it's the vibes that matter. You don't actually need immigrants to be 64% of murders (yes this was a real claim spreading on X) to have the vibe of "outsiders bad". You don't actually need to believe that ten thousand blacks are killed by police each year to have the vibe of "fuck the police". And you're harshing the vibe for pointing out the actual statistics and facts, so fuck you.
Well, yes, this is definitely a real effect. Actually, I was confused when I first read this comment; I thought you were replying to my other post. The question is how common the effect is, and what it would take to overcome. I started with rent control for a reason: there's a decently large contingent of leftists who have given up on the idea. Not the populists, but I don't think I've seen a serious defense of rent control from the wonk/YIMBY/urbanism side for... a decade? Well, I'm sure it exists, but my impression is that it's a lot less popular in those circles than it used to be.
... But outside of those circles? Yeah, there's a frighteningly large proportion of people who are incapable of or totally unwilling to understand frequency and base rates, or just the concept of a tradeoff. I've got no idea how to close that gap.
(I genuinely don't understand how the AI water meme even got started. How could someone simultaneously be so disconnected from reality as to believe it's a real problem and well-informed enough to know about evaporative cooling in datacenters in the first place? I understand how it spread; it's one of those claims that's just too good to check if you already hate AI for the normal Luddite/antislop reasons. But where did it come from?)
Well the YIMBY/urbanism side understands, by definition, that the issue is supply based and thus rent control isn't really an effective solution off that.
I will go to bat and say I don't think rent control is as bad as people think and it's at least partly selection bias. Rent control doesn't have much political energy when homes are being built and rent is going down. Rent control comes about when rents are going up rapidly, which means already terrible conditions. It compounds a bad problem to make an even worse problem, but the issue is still fundamentally lack of supply and bureaucracy. And new rentals will still get built even in predicted negative rent environments, so if builders can tolerate an expected -1%yoy in rent, they should be willing to tolerate +3%yoy rent.
That they're willing to build even when rents are expected to be lower long term is the biggest sign that builders want to build, and they're just being prevented. And all the places with rent control are well, the places that don't want to address the real issue so it's a great little sign of "don't come here to rent control city, we think government should control your property and we will never ever allow you to build anything new"
Take a real issue (data centers need to consume water)
Unaware of your bad faith or not you misinterpret it out of context making a mountain of an ant hill because you're against the very concept to begin with
Other people hear it and start repeating it because holy shit that mountain is scary, and for something I'm already against anyway?
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