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I'm not anti-data-center as a general idea. But somehow every data center plan in my town is absolutely moronic.
My particular town has one main commercial corridor. On this corridor you have stores, movie theaters, banks, offices. People moving back and forth across it throughout the day. Now there used to be a major company headquartered there, they since moved to new offices down the road. Developers want to convert the old offices into data centers, a few million square feet.
My first thought upon looking at the plan was, you'd never do this in Sim City. You have one of your most prime pieces of commercial real estate in the region, and you want to turn it into a box that no one uses and nobody goes to. You want to give away that access, that site with easy walkability and simple drivability to literally everything in town, and turn it into a box that hums. You're going to take this prime real estate away from people.
It's just a stupid development choice. And I get that the market doesn't owe me Sim City type optimal decision making, but it's a weird thing. I'm not anti-data-center, but there's obvious good places and obvious bad places to put them, and so many of the choices made seem to be obvious bad places.
It does seem to me that the most parsimonious explanation is that the developers involved in this are mostly treating it as a gold rush rather than coming in with well-thought-out plans. OK, maybe it's cheaper to convert an old company headquarters into a data center, but it's also certainly understandable that people don't like it. Not helped by the AI companies' intentionally terrible PR strategies.
And you'll get similar results, as well.
One of the claims I've seen for the benefit of data centers is, well, jobs. As someone who has friends looking to get into Data Center construction, given from what I've seen, the timeline for construction seems to be around 2 to 3 years for each new data center.
In the local area, for those 2 to 3 years, the numbers will probably be rather rosey - you'll get a glut of new people spending a fair amount of cash from things from groceries to restraunts to RV parks to hotels - business is booming! Numbers go up!
Until they leave.
Whoops. So now businesses that were operating under the assumption of a cash flow that no longer exists - and as someone who's watched more businesses fuckup due to accounting budgeting and making really stupid decisions than I care to admit to, oh boy is this the likely outcome - if they can't react to the economic shock, more than likely they'll go under.
So now you've got a data center likely set in the most moronic of location and a bunch of businesses now no longer able to make ends meat because the circumstance under which they were flourishing no longer exist.
And you've still got the fucking data center.
Do I have numbers to back this up? Studies? No. All I'm going off of is a little bit more economic knowledge than the average person and watching businesses do really stupid things during covid. (Businesses got flush with cash during Covid due to government grants to stay open. So they planned around that sudden cash flow. Guess what happened when it dried up?)
Putting all that aside, even people who are pro-data center have no issue pointing out that the entire PR look is bad. And, in my personal pet peeve, I'd seen more than a few people try to compare anti-data center people to anti-nuclear power, nevermind how moronic such an arguement is.
One of these days, I'd love to see a social study to find out what causes people's brains to flip and do the meme.
What's moronic about it? It sounds very easy to me. Nuclear could have been the next generation of energy but was constrained by regulations protecting the places where they would be built. "Data centers" could be the next generation of tech but are threatened by a movement that wants regulations to protect the places where they would be built. And in both cases it scans really simply as all mixed with more than a little bit of Luddism.
Nuclear you can point to solid returns that would benefit the common consumer directly - less reliance on hydrocarbons, energy independence, cheaper energy.
Data Centers you point to with the returns that basically boil down to 'Big Businesses need it, LLMs are magic bro, trust me, we've got to beat China!'
So color me a skeptic. On Data Centers, not Nuclear. For fuck sake people, just use the magic rock and be done with it.
> is it a strawman or an argument
> "it's a good argument sir"
> look inside
> it's a strawman
We wouldn't be having this conversation right now without data centers.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
You(and others) are making comparisons that Data Centers are just as important(if not more, from what I've seen people say) than Nuclear Power. And when I go digging around, that's the answers I typically find.
Brother, you accuse me of building a strawmen when all I'm doing is rooting around in your hayfield, looking for a point. Hell, you haven't even offered up a rebuttal. If you've got something in your pocket, I'm all ears.
I asked you a question about something you said, and you proceeded to defend a different statement. You then claimed that data centers do not have “solid returns that would benefit the common consumer directly,” and that nobody can come up with any. Now that I point out that this is an obvious strawman, you become hostile accuse me of bad faith.
This is ridiculous.
This is besides the fact that it appears you appear to misunderstand simile. At least, when people say “opposition to data centers is like opposition to nuclear,” it is not relevant for you to assert that nuclear is more important than data centers.
I’m happy to continue this conversation, but I’m confused as to whether: 1) You want to defend the notion that AI is useless 2) You want to defend the separate notion that AI is less important than nuclear 3) You want me to introduce some other opinion so you can argue against that instead of having to defend your own contradictions
Sigh.
If it was so easy to point out how LLM benefits the common man, then you'd have an easy response in your back pocket. You didn't, and instead responded with ridicule, the equivalent of 'lolno'.
I'm not accusing you of bad faith. If anything, the only hostility in this argument I'm seeing comes from you. I'm asking you to back up your argument with something. I've seen instances of LLMs being utilized to impressive degree, and I know of atleast one person that I find interesting to follow who says similar, so while I'm skeptical I'm atleast willing to hear him out.
My basic argument boils down to this: I don't think you can extrapolate the above and expect similar return out of the common man, or ways it benefits them.
Still, I do want to step back and clarify something. When I see the argument in the wilds - I'm not talking about the motte, I'm talking elsewhere about people comparing Data Centers to Nuclear Power, I read their implied statement as to say that, yes, they equate Data Centers in importance to Nuclear Power. And when asked 'why', they never give a solild answer - they either reflect, or attack. Or, as you called them, my strawmen arguments. It's why I brought it up. I find the comparison rather silly, or an actual use of a slippery slope fallacy.
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