unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,101|7492|PNW

i agree. i don't even want a walmart or amazon for some similar reasons.

shitty jobs and few in number even. huge point of deception. "we'll make you the next silicon valley!" devil at your doorstep!

a giant warehouse full of computers doesn't actually require dense employment. the constant dodging and obfuscation of utility needs and environmental impact, and other deceptions, lying, 'sneaking' their way in through back channels, are not great confidence builders. just the thing to magic next to a place where people are already struggling with utility prices. the skepticism is understandable even with "drain-a-lake-per" language in social media. still not a great tradeoff!

"we gotta do this if we want to stay world leader (/spongebov) in ai! and we MUST, because of the investments!" or "we'll invigorate the community!" which is it? ha! sacrifices must be made, and your little city will be the one to make them!

Last edited by unnamednewbie13 (2026-04-16 13:49:12)

SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+678|4439
They are taking an old rental storage site and turning it into a data center. If low income housing was built there would be anger. If luxury rentals were built there would be anger. Etc.

These are all shitty jobs.
Okay, how about a small factory? Nope, same issues with noise, pollution, water, electricity.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+678|4439
The water use misinformation should annoy you. You know these things used closed loop cooling systems.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,101|7492|PNW

i'm pretty sure there would be anger if a filthy smelter was erected over there to add to the environment joys like lead and arsenic, too. maga might say "bringin' jerbs back to 'murica" but bleh.
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+678|4439
Okay so no factory. No data center.

What can we put there to produce jobs? Good jobs of course.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,101|7492|PNW

SuperJail Warden wrote:

The water use misinformation
yes i've already pointed that out, and yes, the selection between cooling efficiency and energy efficiency doesn't get the attention it should. closed loop systems reduce (bigly) use but that doesn't mean that water consumption is no longer an issue from place to place. the term itself is misleading. you don't set one of these and forget about it until the water is black and gross like fire sprinkler systems.

generally more complicated than "it's a water guzzler" vs "no water demand," anno domini 2026. then there's the question of where and how they flush it when they do. what's in it? is it treated before being released into the environment?

What can we put there to produce jobs? Good jobs of course.
pay people enough to live and strengthen the social safety net so people don't need to work three jobs and work into their 80s. stop housing from being used to generate wall street bucks. address the companies holding onto properties and not even developing them just to control prices! instead of the billionaire space race, put that money back into nasa. spend here, instead of sequestering. there's lots of ideas to go around. countries with less resources can manage a far saner way of life.

seriously this is like "what will the waitresses do if we removed tipping from american culture."

"if you don't let us have this shady factory and dump poison into your air, soil and waterways, there will be no jobs," is deeply flawed imo.

Last edited by unnamednewbie13 (2026-04-16 14:29:26)

uziq
Member
+561|4172

SuperJail Warden wrote:

Okay so no factory. No data center.

What can we put there to produce jobs? Good jobs of course.
what jobs does a data center provide for a local economy? serious question. are the local people of mahwah, NJ going to become network engineers, data scientists, and AI philosophers by virtue of there being a gigantic warehouse planted on the edge of town? these places run basically wholly without people. a temporary boon for contractors and construction workers, i guess? as opposed to building something socially useful with real long-term dividends?

would you be excited if someone turned an old storage unit into a crypto farm or bitcoin mine or whatever the fuck they're called? because extracting as much electricity as it takes to power 20,000 homes so that a few semi-anonymous institutional traders can continue to amass fortunes just enriches the local economy so much, right?

and yeah, amazon warehouses don't supply quality jobs that pump blood into a community. they employ workers on zero-hours contracts in punishing conditions. great if you want a large new population of drugged-out drongos i suppose.

dream big!!!!

Last edited by uziq (2026-04-16 14:39:33)

unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,101|7492|PNW

i imagine a number of americans largely indifferent ("oh you're exaggerating") to stuff going up elsewhere in the country would be quite angry about a datacenter, oil pipeline, coal power, or a stinky factory being placed in their town's backyard! but you said we needed the jobs! haha
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+678|4439

uziq wrote:

A rental storage site produces a lot less property taxes than a data center. Property taxes pay for municipal workers, schools, etc. Property taxes on commercial property can prevent tax hikes on residential property.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,101|7492|PNW

higher assessments mean higher property taxes and housing costs and utility rates. close enough proximity to a datacenter can even hurt your property value! getting that new sidewalk on a 5 year timeframe instead of 20 (besides the promise possibly not even being the reality) suddenly seems less appealing.
uziq
Member
+561|4172
as if all these giant companies aren't being given a fuckload of tax breaks and inducements to even relocate to that fuckin' hellhole near bruce springsteen's armpit in the first place.
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+678|4439

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

higher assessments mean higher property taxes and housing costs and utility rates. close enough proximity to a datacenter can even hurt your property value! getting that new sidewalk on a 5 year timeframe instead of 20 (besides the promise possibly not even being the reality) suddenly seems less appealing.
Having a sidewalk in 5 years instead of 20 prevents someone from breaking their leg on a bad sidewalk during year 11. These are genuine quality of life concerns.

Newbie is like: data centers can cause property values to go down. Terrible. They can make property values go up. Terrible.

Pick a lane.

You never answered what a small city can do with a former storage unit lot since factories, Amazon warehouse, and data centers are all off the table. High paying LGBT coffee shops?
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/HflL2zIZkxs/maxresdefault.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,101|7492|PNW

that's assuming the datacenter even puts that kind of money (let alone tax money lol) back into the community, mac. you're on their sales pitch.

NOT TO MENTION that america as a nation could afford all this without leaning on the dubious largesse of these fucking companies. but no, we need all the billions and trillions of dollars to prop the comically wealthy and the wholesale murder of schoolchildren in the middle east.

Newbie is like: data centers can cause property values to go down. Terrible. They can make property values go up. Terrible.

Pick a lane.
if your property isn't overlooking the windowless concrete walls of the monolithic structure, and assuming infrastructural additions, your property value (tax!) may go up well in excess of actual qol improvements. if your house is next to one like that photo of the amazon shantytown, your property value goes down. higher utility demand, higher utility price, blah blah blah. it's always going to cost. i can think of a number of neighborhoods where one of these things being erected will spawn a lot of $500k+ for sale signs and future overpriced rentals.

do we REALLY NEED a shady megacorporation taking over a town to 'build community' lmao

You never answered what a small city can do with a former storage unit lot since factories, Amazon warehouse, and data centers are all off the table. High paying LGBT coffee shops?
what are you talking about

why should we not have high paying lgbt coffee shops anyway? starbucks is soulless.

there's a lot of things you could do with vacant lots and properties, which are sometimes intentionally left vacant or undeveloped! it doesn't have to be a fucking datacenter.

Last edited by unnamednewbie13 (2026-04-16 15:56:11)

unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,101|7492|PNW

you're just mad because you use chatgpt to manage your sidegirls
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+678|4439
https://images3.memedroid.com/images/UPLOADED187/641aaaab7566b.jpeg
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,845|6826|eXtreme to the maX
OK, so according to google the water circulating in industrial cooling system should be replaced about every six months.
This would apply to any commercial building - assuming it uses water which would be common in large installations I think.
The water usage would not be huge, the waste water would have corrosion products, may have anti-corrosion additives and anti-freeze.

Whether the outdoor chiller evaporates water to improve efficiency and reduce cost is a different question, the water usage would be a lot higher, power usage would be a bit lower.

I think the answer is not to build these stupid ginormous 'datacentres' at all.

The question is what is the real agenda:

To make money

To make all the money

To control all the money on earth

To control all the information on earth

to control all the money, all the information and all the people

I mean, there's a steady trend of separating the people from their money, control of their money, and control of their information.

Next we will see a pretext to stop selling personal hard drives "But they are so toxic and polluting to make, why do you even want one when you have onedrive? Its so much easier! What do you have to hide? Here, I can dispose of them for you"
Fuck Israel
uziq
Member
+561|4172
in 200 years time when europe is -7 degrees cooler and the atlantic seaboard of the states is permanently whipped by arctic winds due to the AMOC shutting down, people will read that, at the epoch's climacteric, western societies decided to *check notes* double-down on building gigantic data centres, indulge in a 21st century tulip mania over make-believe crypto currencies that require terawatts of power to mine, and commence upon programmes of nationalist, war-beating reindustrialisation. 'drill baby drill!'

it will seem absolutely outrageous that one of the main generations living through the climate crisis decided their main civilisational priority was diverting all possible resources and allocating all capital expenditure towards refining chatbots, at the behest of a few misanthropic nerds in silicon valley with messiah/anti-christ (pick one) complexes. but hey, you get videos of cats playing violins. think of the twitter memes! the embassy of iran just roasted trump in their latest AI clip!!!

Last edited by uziq (2026-04-17 07:14:17)

unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,101|7492|PNW

fantastic visual. crypto coal rolling on a supervillainous scale.

youtube is infested with ai videos and ai ads and ai voices and people click along like it's perfectly normal. i don't know how people consume these distortions without feeling like they have a massive headcold. so weird. also so wild to me that even governments are trading pwns on social media like wendy's dropping sick burns or something. not great stuff. better than a bomb dropping on your school i suppose.
uziq
Member
+561|4172
i literally don't doubt the utility of LLMs for business and automating away a whole bunch of white-collar work.

i'm also well familiar with the benefits of AI in science and technology; this stuff has been percolating for 25+ years under the much less glamorous (and less well funded) guise of deep/machine learning. using AI to detect cancers or synthesize new drugs: great.

but it will seem really funny that we really went ALL IN at a moment of near-existential crisis on ... a bunch of goobers like sam altman shilling some fucking messianic 'artificial general intelligence' bunkum. it is not AGI, nor will it ever be. it's a shortcut for research and a pocket unpaid intern for excel and powerpoint drudgery. the fact that we urgently need to be spending all the resources we can on, say, a Green Energy pivot, but instead decided the most important thing was letting a cabal of tech companies race towards ... uuuh, some spurious military-industrial, surveillance-state-adjacent monopoly, is really fucking grimly funny. nobody should give this much of a shit about AI and data centres outside of high-tech traders and finance bros, the consultancy class who have been vaporised in one stroke, and the coders who are slowly automating themselves out of existence like dutiful oakum pickers.
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,845|6826|eXtreme to the maX

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

fantastic visual. crypto coal rolling on a supervillainous scale.
Could AI make me an animation of that?
Fuck Israel

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