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Anti-datacenter people are barely sentient. It's the fiery hot center of the populist brain rot of America. There aren't any arguments on the level of decoupled and rational justifications, it's all either complete misinformation that the CCP wish was a psyop because it would prove them far more capable than they are or friend enemy distinction with barely even a fig leaf of being about the actual building on the actual ground. I apologize for any doubt I had for Elon Musk's orbital data centers, the cold vacuum of space is clearly more hospitable than anywhere the american voter can influence.
The specific arguments may be bad (water use being an obvious example), but that does not mean good arguments don't exist. Besides, the basic notion of "this will be costly in some way to my local community, while all the benefits will be reaped by billionaires with no connection to me and who I can't trust" seems pretty valid.
The solution to someone building infrastructure in your town for exporting, in this case bits, is that you get property taxes and some amount of job revenue. No different than if someone in your town sets up a factory selling widgets. Like these rustbelt towns that were hollowed out by sending jobs over seas sold a rounding error of their own car products to locals. All these same arguments could be made against building anything ever, they're fundamentally degrowth arguments.
Clearly people saw more benefit in opening local factories than they do in opening local datacenters. The amount of jobs created is probably the main thing for this specific comparison. A datacenter is really not bringing jobs to that many people, and the goal of the datacenter is actually to replace human jobs with AI. Something that could actually harm you in the long run.
Is this because of a rational calculation or because communist twitter artists have been throwing up a nonstop alarm since the second stable diffusion was able to generate furry smut art for pennies undermining their only marketable skill? Ok, maybe a bit of a specific case but it's clear that the position has been in from certain quarters that AI is to be opposed and these narratives have expanded from those quarters. If anything the out of the way town that has a datacenter being built is the last group of people who will have their labor automated. It's us white collars in urban areas that are in the first few waves.
Yes, data centers don't particularly bring long term employment(although notably not zero), the main case is property tax revenue. But it really can be a lot of revenue, and the capex is so massive that you can for a rounding error demand they employ a comparable number of security staff or whatever to a factory workforce if you really want to. Not that it wouldn't be more efficient to just demand more tax revenue. Of course they'll bid around and the towns will bid competitively, it's a market like anything else. My objection isn't that the towns shouldn't be playing hardball and looking out for themselves, it's that rather than letting them do this we've turned it into some kind of insane moral panic.
I'd even be behind outlawing the whole NDA practice, seems shady and isn't exclusive to data centers. The Datacenters bring a lot of potential wealth to the table and the towns have some leverage, this should be allowed to play out in an open market to a positive sum outcome. But it's really obvious that the people pushing back most aggressively don't give a single shit about these towns. They hate AI and that is the motivation.
The communist twitter artists have good reason to be scared. Art jobs are already being impacted by AI. Living off art commissions might actually be straight up impossible in the near future if it isn't already. Standing firmly against a clear threat to your livelihood is reasonable. Generally, AI is hyped because of the promise that it will automate away most of our labor. If the opposition is fueled by fear that this is correct, then that actually explains the denial of AI capabilities quite well. Once you admit an LLM can do your job cheaper and with comparable results, then you are going to be replaced. Of course people oppose this with every tool in their arsenal. This results in bad faith arguments, but the basic standpoint still makes sense.
Regarding your point about property taxes, I agree there should be a point at which the company pays enough to offset local damages while also sharing some of the wealth it earns with the community in question. If there was some guarantee this would happen, I also imagine much of the anti-datacenter sentiment would die down wnough to allow for easy construction. The fact that it hasn't, shows that the builders of datacenters are not yet bidding high enough.
Yes, it's reasonable, in that I can articulate reasons for it. But the reasons are ludditism and anti-progress, this isn't hypoerbole, this is what the luddites preached and practiced. We ought want labor to be automated, this is how all progress has happened. We should also demand that some of these gains be redistributed to those replaced at first and the population in general in time. But once we can replace toil we ought to. Work is not an ends, it's a means to an ends. Demands to spend a third or more of your life doing labor to survive when a machine could do it instead is insanity. Work will not set us free.
The demand of the anti-datacenter group is not "bid higher" it is go away and die. The propose moratoriums, not taxes or standards. If all the demand was was that AI companies be taxed at some reasonable rate then I'd have absolutely no problem with the demands.
This is notably contrary to your initial statement calling them idiots and claimed there were no rational justification. From the perspective of self-preservation, then there clearly is a rational argument against AI. It will take your job and leave you with nothing.
"Fuck off" is a natural response when you don't believe the other side is going to offer anything reasonable. If they instead would enter into negotiations with a meaningful offer, the tune would probably change. If you are trying to get someone to do something for you (in this case let you set up datacenters) it is common sense that you should have a clear answer when they ask what is in it for them.
I called them barely sentient, not non-sentient. There is a vague and difficult to clean up cloud of noise behind the eyes that still marks them as among the living. The noise is basically ludditism in a pure form that they're too embarrassed to or historically illiterate to own.
We're not even talking about the perspective own talking to the perspective data center, we're talking about some third party declaring that the town should be disallowed by gunpoint from even negotiating.
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