Thread

1. aliasxneo · 1791145670 · focus · HN ↗

   I lived in a smaller rural town near a Google datacenter. During my career there I had routinely come across some outlandish accusations made about our water/power usage from the locals. But for obvious reasons I could never dispute them. I remember we hired a local who'd grown up in the town and he was "really surprised" when he started to see what we were doing to remain efficient.

   The current data center craze just feels like the same thing but on a bigger scale.

   1. thayne · 1791153423 · focus · HN ↗

      My biggest problem with the data centers getting built around me are that they are building new natural gas power plants to power them, that will be greenhouse gases and decrease local air quality. I would be a lot more ok with it if they were using wind or solar. And maybe built it somewhere that didn't have a water shortage.

      1. RajT88 · 1791160413 · focus · HN ↗

         By me they are converting cornfields to data center campuses. People hate it and are against it.

         They are also building solar farms independent of the data centers. People hate it and are against it.

         They just built a Costco which turned some cornfields into a giant warehouse. No signs, no protests, no complaints at the city council meetings.

         1. lostlogin · 1791162650 · focus · HN ↗

            I wonder what causes more harm? High fructose corn syrup or data centres?
         2. hackernud3s · 1791165533 · focus · HN ↗

            What's so great about cornfields? I can imagine hating it if they were deforesting the Amazon or something.

            1. RajT88 · 1791168177 · focus · HN ↗

               The argument they make is, "it is food and we eat it". Nevermind most of the corn grown is not eaten by people.

               1. WesolyKubeczek · 1791187566 · focus · HN ↗

                  Yeah, but our food eats it too.

                  1. swiftcoder · 1791190559 · focus · HN ↗

                     Mostly our cars drink it
         3. Pxtl · 1791167726 · focus · HN ↗

            It's almost like people want things built that they directly benefit from.

            1. expedition32 · 1791169607 · focus · HN ↗

               A warehouse provides hundreds of lower education jobs. Well at least until they go completely robot.

               Not everyone is a software developer.

            2. Eueudhsbsj32 · 1791170896 · focus · HN ↗

               Aren't most people directly benefiting from AI?

               1. Gigachad · 1791173192 · focus · HN ↗

                  No? I can think of so many things in life that were better just a couple years ago.
            3. zahlman · 1791184805 · focus · HN ↗

               And you think they wouldn't directly benefit from solar power?

               What if the cornfield owners got paid market rates for the power generated when that land is given over to solar? This should be (and ChatGPT agrees) much more profitable given that it is vastly more energy efficient.

         4. Eueudhsbsj32 · 1791170724 · focus · HN ↗

            In the US, there's currently about 300x more land used by cornfields than by data centers.

            Does that seems unreasonable? We already grow more than enough food in this country and surely we're not getting 300x more value from the corn.

         5. JuniperMesos · 1791182705 · focus · HN ↗

            A lot of people have dumb opinions grounded in ill-thought-out ideas like "natural cornfields are morally superior to human-built infrastructure buildings" or "solar power is a Democratic party conspiracy". In general it should be easier for property owners with skin in the game to make good land use decisions to make them without having to need small-d-democratic opposition from locals with bad incentices and values.

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.