This is Andrew, Founder/CEO of Prophecy Gov (AI agents for city governments). We operate American Sentiment.
Our main focus is building AI tools that serve city staff. We also create data from public, online data sources; in this case city council videos.
Data center development has reached a fever pitch nationwide. We started American Sentiment to help AI leaders, researchers, and the public better understand and respond to local sentiment nationwide.
How does an AI data center make my life or my family's lives better?
I feel quite strongly that AI is making my life worse right now, so I'm interested to hear how you would convince me that a data center near me would be good for me even as I'm unemployed due to AI.
I can't convince you that AI is good for you just like I can't convince a recently divorced person that love exists or marriage is good or their spouse can be a fantastic person for someone else even if they were a horrible fit for them.
I am really sorry you're unemployed due to AI and the only thing I can really do for you is pray you find a good, stable source of income soon.
What you are saying is that your best arguments will fall flat compared to the pain it is causing, which kind of suggests to me that it is in fact causing more pain than good.
Here are 6 reasons off my head where "AI" helped me a lot and made my life better:
- File taxes and find issues that "accredited", "certified" entities missed. In one instance, my federal refund increased by nearly $5k. At $20/mo, just the refund is two decades worth of value.
- Appeal health, home and car insurance claims successfully
- Find out details of interesting plants without forking out tens of dollars for an app that claims to do the same but fails to do so most of the time
- Summarize never ending email threads with 20 disinterested parties who would rather not be on the email but have to respond to show they are "engaged"
- Write a convincing email to my mother in law why I cannot meet her this weekend and hold her hand through the tough times she's having with her ethnic neighbor who annoys her with their "ethnic" music and "smell of fish" BBQ
- Locate the user manual for my microwave and what that rapid 3 beeps every 1s for 2 minutes that starts at 10AM since the last 2 days mean
You might very well find these useless, trivial or even make your blood boil but my everyday life is vastly better due to "AI"
Are data centers being proposed that use a ton of water? If so, why? Liquid cooling on the chip should just be recycled, and there are many ways to dissipate heat without evaporating away a ton of potable water right?
Water issue was brought up the most, but that doesn't mean it's actually true. I think for most data center development projects, the claims of water use are incredibly exaggerated/false. For American Sentiment we're just aggregating what residents said, rather than judging whether it's accurate or not. If anything it goes to show that the AI labs have down an awful job communicating with the general public; there are real downsides/concerns, but this one should be a lay up for them to clear up, and yet they haven't.
Negative comments on data centers, or power plants, or day care, or apartment buildings, or coffee shops, or new fire hydrants are exactly what you'd expect from the (demented, sometimes literally) municipal public comment process, which sharply biased towards negative comments structurally --- people turn out because they're risk-averse and don't want to see change that could impact their own homes, and virtually nobody turns out for the abstract upside of new development --- and also demographically: public comment skews sharply older, wealthier, and towards homeowners.
The public comment process is an anti-democratic pox on our system (all the political systems that support it) and we should all be shifting to a mode where we more openly impeach it. Public comment is one of the first principal components of the American housing shortage.
What's the alternative? Without public comment, politicians will just do whatever they want without accountability or open opposition. With public comment, politicians will still just do whatever they want without accountability but at least there is a record of opposition.
I’m not sure there is a good alternative, but it is a problem. So many public infrastructure projects in the US are shot down or neutered because of short term issues outweighing long term upsides.
Not talking about data centers specifically here, there’s a few public transit projects near me that got killed/neutered because people didn’t want to live near a construction site, while it would have been beneficial long term.
Datacenters are not really public infrastructure though. They are private infrastructure and even though the outcome could well be similar there is no link between the two.
Where I live data centers are extremely unpopular with the general population simply because the process around the decision making for these is opaque, the benefits do not seem to be shared with those that suffer the consequences and we've been telling people for the last 40 years or so that they need to conserve energy because of global warming. In that climate (heh) pushing data centers is an uphill battle, and it probably should be.
Electricity is a utility, but is privately owned in the US. Everyone relies on data centers just as much as electricity in modern life. There are obviously exceptions for mega ones like Elon built in Memphis, but the vast majority are just normal infrastructure
That the process is sharply biased towards negativity is a cogent criticism.
Two alternatives:
- Trust our representative system and have our elected representatives make decisions (ha! Although perhaps people would pay attention to local elections more if they had more direct consequences…)
- Randomly select people to comment, like jury duty.
It’s not impossible to think of systems that take public opinion into account that are not the exact system we have now.
With public comment, politicians will still just do whatever they want without accountability
This is very obviously not true to me. Is there really nothing in your area that’s been cancelled or interminably held up by the public comment process?
I think tptacek means to emphasize the "public comment process" as opposed to "public comment" in general. Generic public comments/discussion are great (I think tptacek would agree because... they're commenting publicly).
It's the public comment _process_, where these Public Comments are given special status and power, that acts as a general drag on governments allowing anything. It's not _democratic_ because these Public Comments skew very unrepresentative. It's a sort of veto power granted mostly to people that don't have better things to do.
The clear alternative I see is to simply empower elected representatives/leaders to make these decisions.
No he is on record as telling elected officials to ignore people showing up to town meetings, writing letters etc… because he believes that negative comments are overrepresented.
Which may not may not be true, but you could say the same thing about votes on a referendum, or names on a petition. One side or the other is in most cases more likely to turn out. That is just how democracy works. You can’t divine the true will of the people, you can only act on their public participation.
Anything else is just a license to politicians to push through anything they please.
A company is trying to push through a very large wood burning power plant a few miles down the road that will impact air quality for half the state. If people convince politicians that dissenting voices are overrepresented, that’s one less tool we have to stop things like this.
>No he is on record as telling elected officials to ignore people showing up to town meetings, writing letters etc.
I don't think that's a charitable reading of what tptacek was saying. I read it as: ideally, democracy should give everyone an equal voice regardless of age, political views, or economic status; local political participation as it exists today skews heavily toward negative affect and toward older, wealthier homeowners, giving those groups a disproportionate voice in the process. We should move toward alternative processes that make it easier for everyone to participate, not just people who have the luxury of showing up to a town hall.
"Making it easier to participate" is precisely what's at issue here. I don't think that's incompatible with what you were replying to. Note, nobody in this thread said that the public shouldn't have input, just that the existing processes of getting public input are broken.
Telling people to ignore it when 100 people show up to your town meeting to say don’t do something because there’s secretly 500 people at home who want you to do that thing but aren’t doing anything to externally to indicate their wishes isn’t what I’m talking about.
I’m saying do things like hold town meetings multiple times at different times of day so people with different schedules can attend.
Not try to guess about people really believe. Give them easier opportunities to tell you what they believe.
You're still responding to points that nobody in this thread made. Can you show me a direct quote where someone said that we should ignore people showing up to town hall meetings, or that we should try to guess what people believe without getting their input?
I had a conversation with the OP a while back where he was posting about how people are much more likely to show up to speak against something at a town hall and how he was talking to elected officials about this bias.
I’m this very thread he is asserting that we should get rid of the public comment process which in many cases is just filling out an online form because it is biased towards naysayers.
The naysayers inherently feel more strongly, and so are more likely to make their feelings known regardless of the process. What other alternate is there than making a (maybe educated) guess.
If only there were some way of communicating remotely. Some sort of inter-network of devices and people could register their values and opinions so they'd have easier opportunities to tell people what they believe.
The person he is responding to has so frequently made comments with strong "the peasants are stupid and wrong" undertones I think the lack of charity is earned.
If your case is that we should strive for a social/economic state where everybody is equally capable of taking a couple hours to go stand in line and have their voice heard at a governmental public comment section, you have my vote.
But I don't think any of the folks here have the ability to "fix" the reasons that today, the people most able to do that skew heavily towards the old and the wealthy.
I don't understand how you feel so comfortable handwaving the idea of "fixing" the fact that broad chunks of the American population are radically less able to turn up for a couple hours to participate in public comment sessions. There's any number of underlying causes, ranging from having to work multiple jobs or bad hours to having families to take care of or lack of reliable transportation.
If we can switch to 'work from home' for a large fraction of the population at the drop of a hat I think with all of these technically savvy people there should be a way to improve on this. If that's not true then what is all this tech good for anyway?
I think that's the same reason why online reviews tend to skew negative: people that are against something or that have had a negative experience are more likely to speak out. That doesn't make their voice less important. But you should always compared this against the size of the population. If a restaurant gets 5 1 star reviews it could be a very bad restaurant. But if it turns out that those five reviews are all by the same person and that 1000's of people visited the place and none made a positive review then that gives a completely different perspective.
The stats in TFA are such that it makes you wonder what the total numbers are, for that there are different methods (for instance, surveys).
You don't even have to think hard about why turnout skews "no". You can see immediately why your neighbor might show up to comment against a new apartment building on their block. But what neighbor of yours has even considered showing up to comment in favor of one? Most of your neighbors are probably just fine with development, but almost none of them are nerds about it, which is what it takes to show up to support a commercial developer.
To me that seems like a mistake of whoever organizes these things.
A few years ago they were planning a massive overhaul of a roundabout nearby. Half the neighborhood showed up (weekday, after work), pretty much all of my neighbors were there. Some out of interest to see what was going to happen, others for input. I made the case that I thought that the sight-lines for bicycles were terrible with the way they had planned the new roundabout, traffic would be going faster than before (which was the goal of the change) so it really would relieve congestion but it would make it much less safe to cross the road there. There were two options, one would have been very costly (a bike tunnel under the road, also not without problems of its own), the other was more practical and required a change in the angle of the bike path and a change in the design of the center of the roundabout. They listened, took notes, redrew the whole thing, had a second round of feedback and that too was incorporated as much as possible within the budget. Then they went ahead and implemented the change. Everybody reasonably happy. Note that this was not even a municipal thing, technically that roundabout is just outside of the municipality but they had this hearing anyway (and on the other side of the road, so everybody going there had to cross it which really helped my argument, they had all just experienced how hard it is to see if there was a car coming).
This kind of process can work. They could have done it online as well (and during COVID that is how such meetings were held here). I'm sure this is not typical and that there are many examples of where objections were overruled by this was one case where I felt I was both heard and that something was done with the feedback. Nobody said 'no' to anything, not the locals, nor the province who govern that stretch of road.
Now, if you planned on putting a datacenter in between the village and the highway I'm not so sure that would get the same kind of constructive feedback. Because there wouldn't be any plus for the locals that they could perceive so likely they would be categorically against it. But that position would be fairly broadly shared unless some jobs would be created.
No, it can't work. Elections are decided on turnout. We schedule elections on specific days, with great ceremony, in part so we can maximize turnout. Public comment processes are the opposite. They structurally select for people with high-amplitude opinions, and for what should at this point be obvious reasons the high-amplitude opinions about development are almost uniformly negative. It's the exact same phenomenon that keeps guns deregulated in the United States: most people support regulation, but the people who don't really don't and turn out disproportionately.
If you set up a process that selects for people who can show up at random times on random days and that samples exclusively from people who pay unusual amounts of attention to policy and have high-amplitude opinions, you are going to get disproportionately older, wealthier, whiter, owner-class participants who are sharply skewed towards opposition.
You don't have to take my word for this; you can look this up in the literature, too. But I was just at a large public meeting about a rezoning we're doing; turnout around 150 people, and I was one of the youngest in the room.
You can't fix it. Avoiding broad representation is the point of public comment processes. It's the same reason local elections in single-party states tend to be held off-cycle: to keep turnout low.
This isn't a hot take or anything. It's well documented in the social science literature. It just happens that you can intuit why it works this way as well.
After 4-5 years of doing fairly intensive local politics I just don't have time for this helpless take anymore. I get where it's coming from and used to feel the same way, but it's wildly out of step with how local politics work. Local politicians are almost never full-time, they're elected by margins of hundreds or (maybe) thousands of constituents, they take personal phone calls from those people, and they read their emails. They're not generally staffed, and they don't work through a party apparatus. They are responsive to the voters who elect them.
None of this is true for your local congressional rep, and certainly not for your senator. But those people aren't voting on local development projects. Your alderman or trustee or councilmember is doing that. If you haven't learned what they're about and how they get elected, that's on you.
(None of this is to say that you're going to get your way with your local electeds! They may very well not care much about what you have to say --- because they're elected by a bloc of local constituents that they serve and that reliably turns out for them. That's democracy! The good news is: you can often organize and replace those electeds. I live in a relatively high-end inner-ring suburb of Chicago, and I ran a successful campaign for a friend there for $5000 all-in.)
Public comment is anti-democratic. It's an intrinsically low-turnout off-cycle process; it's specifically intended to amplify the influence of concentrated special interests. We have a democratic process already: it's called "elections".
While the segment of the population who are motivated and able to engage with the public comment process may often not be representative demographically, it's hideous (besides semantically inaccurate) to dismiss them as a special interest group.
It also doesn't make sense to include negativity and positivity as part of representation. Yes, people feel more strongly about bad things than good things, but that's everybody. It would be a mistake to try to excise that. It's already our job to account for it.
From your tone, this seems less like an opinion on democratic process and more like you just happen to have the opposite opinions of most people in the aforementioned segment, statistically, and you (perhaps understandably) are angered by them, and you see a viable argument for reducing their voices.
The disabled are a concentrated special interest group, and we’d always want to keep it that way. But who will nerd out for the disabled if not for those among them who seek disproportionate impact relative to their base numbers?
Some people have opinions that are perfectly human, but that you may certainly disagree strongly with. And yes, some people have straight up crazy opinions. And yes, some people have selfish opinions.
So... your answer is "fuck the people"? What are you even talking about? This is a necessary part of government. You are not the keeper of Correct Opinions. You're suggesting doing the thing that citizens historically get their weapons out to (rightfully) eject from civilization.
Public commenters aren't "the people"; they're the specific concentrated special interest that bothers to show up to a meeting on a school night to share their opinion. We have a mechanism to poll "the people" already: it's called "elections". The things you do besides the scheduled elections everyone knows and plans to show up at are all subversions of democracy. That's literally the point.
So, that sounds like a great opportunity to engage the younger, poorer and the homeless then. That will certainly give a lot more perspective, but I doubt the outcome would be very different when it comes to datacenters. With respect to the housing shortage I suspect it would give a completely different outcome.
Also: you can't really blame those who do show up for a democratic process for having the wrong ideas relative to those that don't show up.
Public comment is a feature of the democratic process, I don't see how it could ever be seen as anti-democratic.
What a dogshit take. The public comment process is anti-democratic? So the public having less input in the process and letting local officials do whatever they want is somehow more democratic?
I live adjacent to an industrial area. I showed up in support of a proposed recycling center. I lowkey hope it's loud and stinky because I want the vicinity to be an unappealing place to live because then the people I find unappealing will self select to live elsewhere but I didn't say that. Instead I mocked shortsighted environmentalists and out of touch ivory tower types who want everyone to recycle but also want to impose supply side restrictions on that. If not here than where?
Ah ninja smoke bomb out w/o proposing any alternative. Handy.
Not to mention hilariously conflating public comment on data centers (massively unpopular) with local weirdo NIMBYism on things like "coffee shops" and "fire hydrants". We all know every city has people that just love to speak at the city council meetings. Can't take it in good faith that you seriously think it's the same thing that's going on with opposition to data centers.
How do you know that the people speaking about with NIMBY views are "weirdos" and "people that just love to speak at the city council meetings", but the people speaking about data centers are different?
Is housing activism the reason you're taking this severe tack? That would mean you're suggesting to bulldoze that problem non-surgically. Because you accept the collateral damage for your cause?
I don't understand what you're trying to say, but housing/development is structurally disfavored in public comment processes. Again: this is not a hot take from me; it's also a social science finding.
> They should invest money into improving electric and community infrastructure
The problem with electric and community infrastructure is that very few electric infrastructure is owned by the community, but that's not the core issue because the other infrastructure that is indeed owned by community has people in the community split on what's useful and what not.
Imagine how difficult it is to decide where to go out to lunch in a group of people. Now up the stakes to getting people to agree on whose backyard and where holes and trenches and dug and electric poles and power stations are put up.
If there’s really trillions of dollars of market cap to be had, why not just build in the middle of nowhere northern Québec and Ontario and build your own damn dams and infrastructure?
You’ve got a ton of water. A ton of famously cheap hydro electricity potential. An entire service industry for remote mines (who will build your roads and power). And you’re not being an unwanted bastard.
My sense is that the answer is very simple: because they can just use someone else’s.
In the model it sounds like you're suggesting, instead of building a datacenter in the middle of the US along an existing internet backbone (a move which is already drawing tons of public criticism), they could build in rural Canada and also buy up easements to lay an entirely new set of high bandwidth pathways through rural Canada to connect those datacenters to the rest of the world?
I'd love for rural Canada (or what is left of it) to stay as pristine as it is today. Sticking a datacenter in there sounds a bit like putting on in the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone (though, Yellowstone might be the better of the two with respect to Geothermal energy).
By and large we aren’t hesitant to take a portion of the remaining 80% of undeveloped Canada and do useful things with it. I can’t speak for all Canadians but that’s just not been a point of contention.
The amount of surveyed untapped hydro potential is something like 110GW. Though to be fair I haven’t studied any of this too deeply since grad school (which I refuse to let my brain appraise how long ago that was.)
How broadly have you shopped this idea? Most Americans weren't anti-datacenter-in-my-state until this recent wave of tons of datacenters popping up in their state.
Mark’s a bit busy… but I actually chatted about this with the hockey parents at the rink this morning. They’re anti data center mainly because they just feel the companies (apparently they think it’s all Google and Facebook and have no clue Anthropic or OpenAI is a thing) will ruin the town and cause blackouts and ruin the water pressure (our water pressure is kinda weak). When I suggested “what about like an hour north of Sudbury?” they went from negative to I’d say indifferent. Except our goalie’s mom who was a hard no under any circumstances.
What I found interesting was that none of them had a single thing to say about the actual AI tech. Mind you n=6 or 7.
> They’re anti data center mainly because they just feel the companies (apparently they think it’s all Google and Facebook and have no clue Anthropic or OpenAI is a thing) will ruin the town and cause blackouts and ruin the water pressure (our water pressure is kinda weak).
Whether they know who Anthropic or OpenAI or are familiar with AI tech is immaterial, they are allowed a say on what happens in their immediate environment regardless of the application of the DC. The environmental impact of datacenters is substantial, especially near residential areas.
> When I suggested “what about like an hour north of Sudbury?”
Timmins? Or somewhere along the 144? That's not going to work: that area is pretty much inaccessible a good chunk of the year, besides you won't find the personnel to man your DCs there. And to hook it up you'll be digging fairly long trenches adding quite a bit to the cost of deployment.
Take a peek at Churchill Falls NL. They’re upgrading it to something like 14,000MW. You can see the hydro corridor on the satellite imagery. It goes for hundreds of KM to get to the customers.
I’m just not convinced that the frontier logistics are a real problem for an industry that’s supposed to be worth trillions.
I'd be all for it as reclamation of the territories that have already been damaged pretty much beyond recovery due to the oil industry. But the Canadian North is very precious. Besides, I wouldn't want to give my capricious neighbor yet another reason to 'protect' their investment.
That map shows zero on-land connections, as far as I can see. With the possible exception of Brazil, but that might be a cable down the Amazon from the looks of it.
But there's fiber connecting said dots the parent poster is talking about leveraging, right? Your map appears to only include submarine cables; see Australia, for example, where there's a huge on-land connector between Perth and Melbourne/Sydney (https://infraco.telstra.com.au/solutions/intercity-dark-fibr...) not represented.
What two dots are you thinking of where the connecting fiber would traverse northern Québec and Ontario? The furthest north there's a major presence seems to be Quebec City, but I don't see another rational endpoint and even that's measured in Gbps. Compare to the US where the entire middle of the country is covered in PoPs measured in terabits per second
> Compare to the US where the entire middle of the country is covered in PoPs measured in terabits per second
A problem if you're Netflix. Less so if you're Claude, where giant clusters of RAM and compute generate a few kilobytes of text leaving the datacenter at a time.
Your map maps the same point as mine. I also think you're massively underestimating the amount of ingress/egress traffic needed for one of these facilities.
Sorry, can we just get to the root here? Do you actually think there's a bunch of fiber capacity in the rural north of Ontario and Quebec?
You keep trying to slice and dice the maps to say that there is in fact stuff in Canada. I'm not disputing that Canadians have the internet. I'm debating that it would be possible to put datacenters in northern Ontario and Quebec without doing massive infrastructure projects to run new fiber a significant distance, likely to Quebec City or to the northern US.
If you think that's incorrect, and that there's actually existing fiber that would support this, I would be curious for you to say so directly. Otherwise, the maps seem clear: there's some connectivity in the coastal and southern areas you'd expect, but nothing inland and northern and nothing at the scale of the US midwest.
> If there’s really trillions of dollars of market cap to be had, why not just build in the middle of nowhere northern Québec and Ontario and build your own damn dams and infrastructure?
If nothing works out domestically, this might very well be where the industry ends up.
The current attempt is to have domestic (in the continental US) AI - because owning the infrastructure is way more valuable than renting it.
They are building them in the middle of nowhere. I've looked up sites for data center projects before and it'll literally be in some empty field far away from any homes, and people will still complain as if they're flattening a neighborhood. It's a little ridiculous.
That said, I agree they should put them in Canada and similar regions, it seems like a no brainer resources-wise for the reasons you mentioned. The reason they don't is probably that it's vastly more expensive to work on remote sites like that. Mines and dams do it by necessity, but it's a big undertaking to build stuff a full day's drive (or bush plane flight) from the nearest city.
They’re trying to build one in the middle of nowhere about 30 miles outside my city.
But they also want to build an on premise 1000MW natural gas power plant and a 500MW biomass plant that will take millions of acres of forest to sustain.
Which is dumb, but the obvious thing to do is campaign to block the massively polluting power plant part of it, not the building with computers in it. As the GP said, these companies have insane market caps, they can afford to build renewable power.
It feels like at some point our society forgot that the government is supposed to pass laws, and not just block things we don't like. Data centers are being built with polluting power sources, why is the instinct "stop all the data centers" and not simply, you know, require them to not use polluting power sources?
Also, while I'm glad you're focused on what matters, 90% of the outcry I've heard about DCs is about water. Or noise pollution, or them looking ugly... for buildings that, again, are mostly being built on razed industrial land or empty fields. According to the OP, "electrical grid" is the fifth most common concern, and air pollution is wayy down the list.
Data centers and power plants to power them are the new oil.
Also, just like oil is dirty, bad for the environment and kills people, so will the data centers. And the power plants to power them.
Our options are not to not have Data centers and their power plants but whether to have them built elsewhere (even outside the US) and pay rent or own them and get paid the rent.
Arguments about having more efficient or green Data centers and power plants miss the point. Engineering is a process of iterative improvement - you don't begin with the perfect product, you begin with one that crashes, burns and breaks some bones.
It's understandable though that no one one wants to be "it".
By my job their is a large vacant lot where they wanted to build a distribution center with over 125 truck bays. Absolutely gargantuan. Guaranteed trucks coming and going non-stop, lots more traffic, lots more noise, diesel engines idling all day. There is a school and a neighborhood immediately adjacent on one side, and commercial space and a minor highway on the other sides.
Apparently the developer was approached about the possibility of building a DC there, and it set off a five alarm fire of hysteria in the town. Of course, no one even blinked about the warehouse.
So now we are probably gonna get the hundreds of trucks 24/7 instead of the large quietly humming box (that would also probably increase tax revenue by 30%).
Bring back the $50k house. Thousands of them. Have the data center builders build communities around the data center. Sold to first time home buyers only, with a X year lock-in period. Effectively free energy comes along with it. Prop up community infrastructure so small businesses can proliferate.
Make the AI companies fully subsidize it instead of government.
It would change the sentiment in the country in an instant as affordability wrt owning a home would be in reach.
[OP] afandrew | 9 hours ago
Our main focus is building AI tools that serve city staff. We also create data from public, online data sources; in this case city council videos.
Data center development has reached a fever pitch nationwide. We started American Sentiment to help AI leaders, researchers, and the public better understand and respond to local sentiment nationwide.
The American Sentiment on Flock Safety is next!
Analysis: https://x.com/andrewfang/status/2117048211051532555
Findings include:
-73% of meetings had 0 people speaking in favor of data centers.
-Water use was the #1 issue. And only 1 in 5 comments mention AI!
-Elon Musk was mentioned more than Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Kevin O'Leary combined.
-Data center opposition is heavily bipartisan.
Barbing | 8 hours ago
Helpful charts, thank you!
lnkdinsuxs | 8 hours ago
bluefirebrand | 8 hours ago
How does an AI data center make my life or my family's lives better?
I feel quite strongly that AI is making my life worse right now, so I'm interested to hear how you would convince me that a data center near me would be good for me even as I'm unemployed due to AI.
lnkdinsuxs | 7 hours ago
I can't convince you that AI is good for you just like I can't convince a recently divorced person that love exists or marriage is good or their spouse can be a fantastic person for someone else even if they were a horrible fit for them.
I am really sorry you're unemployed due to AI and the only thing I can really do for you is pray you find a good, stable source of income soon.
bluefirebrand | 7 hours ago
lnkdinsuxs | 7 hours ago
- File taxes and find issues that "accredited", "certified" entities missed. In one instance, my federal refund increased by nearly $5k. At $20/mo, just the refund is two decades worth of value.
- Appeal health, home and car insurance claims successfully
- Find out details of interesting plants without forking out tens of dollars for an app that claims to do the same but fails to do so most of the time
- Summarize never ending email threads with 20 disinterested parties who would rather not be on the email but have to respond to show they are "engaged"
- Write a convincing email to my mother in law why I cannot meet her this weekend and hold her hand through the tough times she's having with her ethnic neighbor who annoys her with their "ethnic" music and "smell of fish" BBQ
- Locate the user manual for my microwave and what that rapid 3 beeps every 1s for 2 minutes that starts at 10AM since the last 2 days mean
You might very well find these useless, trivial or even make your blood boil but my everyday life is vastly better due to "AI"
bluefirebrand | 5 hours ago
None of that is worth boiling the oceans to me.
cowpig | 8 hours ago
Are data centers being proposed that use a ton of water? If so, why? Liquid cooling on the chip should just be recycled, and there are many ways to dissipate heat without evaporating away a ton of potable water right?
[OP] afandrew | 8 hours ago
tptacek | 9 hours ago
The public comment process is an anti-democratic pox on our system (all the political systems that support it) and we should all be shifting to a mode where we more openly impeach it. Public comment is one of the first principal components of the American housing shortage.
ryandrake | 8 hours ago
jrflo | 8 hours ago
happytoexplain | 8 hours ago
jrflo | 8 hours ago
jacquesm | 8 hours ago
Where I live data centers are extremely unpopular with the general population simply because the process around the decision making for these is opaque, the benefits do not seem to be shared with those that suffer the consequences and we've been telling people for the last 40 years or so that they need to conserve energy because of global warming. In that climate (heh) pushing data centers is an uphill battle, and it probably should be.
jrflo | 8 hours ago
jrmg | 8 hours ago
Two alternatives: - Trust our representative system and have our elected representatives make decisions (ha! Although perhaps people would pay attention to local elections more if they had more direct consequences…) - Randomly select people to comment, like jury duty.
It’s not impossible to think of systems that take public opinion into account that are not the exact system we have now.
With public comment, politicians will still just do whatever they want without accountability
This is very obviously not true to me. Is there really nothing in your area that’s been cancelled or interminably held up by the public comment process?
dantillberg | 8 hours ago
It's the public comment _process_, where these Public Comments are given special status and power, that acts as a general drag on governments allowing anything. It's not _democratic_ because these Public Comments skew very unrepresentative. It's a sort of veto power granted mostly to people that don't have better things to do.
The clear alternative I see is to simply empower elected representatives/leaders to make these decisions.
sarchertech | 8 hours ago
Which may not may not be true, but you could say the same thing about votes on a referendum, or names on a petition. One side or the other is in most cases more likely to turn out. That is just how democracy works. You can’t divine the true will of the people, you can only act on their public participation.
Anything else is just a license to politicians to push through anything they please.
A company is trying to push through a very large wood burning power plant a few miles down the road that will impact air quality for half the state. If people convince politicians that dissenting voices are overrepresented, that’s one less tool we have to stop things like this.
fasterik | 8 hours ago
I don't think that's a charitable reading of what tptacek was saying. I read it as: ideally, democracy should give everyone an equal voice regardless of age, political views, or economic status; local political participation as it exists today skews heavily toward negative affect and toward older, wealthier homeowners, giving those groups a disproportionate voice in the process. We should move toward alternative processes that make it easier for everyone to participate, not just people who have the luxury of showing up to a town hall.
sarchertech | 8 hours ago
>local political participation
Voting skews older as well. If you don’t participate you don’t get a voice. We can’t try to divine the public’s true intent.
We should be making it easier to participate, not giving politicians an excuse to ignore those people who do participate.
fasterik | 8 hours ago
sarchertech | 8 hours ago
I’m saying do things like hold town meetings multiple times at different times of day so people with different schedules can attend.
Not try to guess about people really believe. Give them easier opportunities to tell you what they believe.
fasterik | 7 hours ago
sarchertech | 7 hours ago
I’m this very thread he is asserting that we should get rid of the public comment process which in many cases is just filling out an online form because it is biased towards naysayers.
The naysayers inherently feel more strongly, and so are more likely to make their feelings known regardless of the process. What other alternate is there than making a (maybe educated) guess.
solyin | 7 hours ago
What would we call such a thing‽
sarchertech | 7 hours ago
cucumber3732842 | 7 hours ago
jacquesm | 8 hours ago
Then you need to fix that.
akerl_ | 8 hours ago
If your case is that we should strive for a social/economic state where everybody is equally capable of taking a couple hours to go stand in line and have their voice heard at a governmental public comment section, you have my vote.
But I don't think any of the folks here have the ability to "fix" the reasons that today, the people most able to do that skew heavily towards the old and the wealthy.
jacquesm | 8 hours ago
akerl_ | 8 hours ago
jacquesm | 7 hours ago
sarchertech | 7 hours ago
To the extent that it does require showing up, we should do things like hold multiple sessions at different times of day.
But none of those issues is what the OP is talking about.
“public comment process, which sharply biased towards negative comments structurally”
He’s saying public comments are inherently biased towards no even given equal opportunity to participate.
jacquesm | 7 hours ago
The stats in TFA are such that it makes you wonder what the total numbers are, for that there are different methods (for instance, surveys).
tptacek | 6 hours ago
jacquesm | 6 hours ago
A few years ago they were planning a massive overhaul of a roundabout nearby. Half the neighborhood showed up (weekday, after work), pretty much all of my neighbors were there. Some out of interest to see what was going to happen, others for input. I made the case that I thought that the sight-lines for bicycles were terrible with the way they had planned the new roundabout, traffic would be going faster than before (which was the goal of the change) so it really would relieve congestion but it would make it much less safe to cross the road there. There were two options, one would have been very costly (a bike tunnel under the road, also not without problems of its own), the other was more practical and required a change in the angle of the bike path and a change in the design of the center of the roundabout. They listened, took notes, redrew the whole thing, had a second round of feedback and that too was incorporated as much as possible within the budget. Then they went ahead and implemented the change. Everybody reasonably happy. Note that this was not even a municipal thing, technically that roundabout is just outside of the municipality but they had this hearing anyway (and on the other side of the road, so everybody going there had to cross it which really helped my argument, they had all just experienced how hard it is to see if there was a car coming).
This kind of process can work. They could have done it online as well (and during COVID that is how such meetings were held here). I'm sure this is not typical and that there are many examples of where objections were overruled by this was one case where I felt I was both heard and that something was done with the feedback. Nobody said 'no' to anything, not the locals, nor the province who govern that stretch of road.
Now, if you planned on putting a datacenter in between the village and the highway I'm not so sure that would get the same kind of constructive feedback. Because there wouldn't be any plus for the locals that they could perceive so likely they would be categorically against it. But that position would be fairly broadly shared unless some jobs would be created.
tptacek | 6 hours ago
If you set up a process that selects for people who can show up at random times on random days and that samples exclusively from people who pay unusual amounts of attention to policy and have high-amplitude opinions, you are going to get disproportionately older, wealthier, whiter, owner-class participants who are sharply skewed towards opposition.
You don't have to take my word for this; you can look this up in the literature, too. But I was just at a large public meeting about a rezoning we're doing; turnout around 150 people, and I was one of the youngest in the room.
jacquesm | 5 hours ago
tptacek | 5 hours ago
tptacek | 6 hours ago
This isn't a hot take or anything. It's well documented in the social science literature. It just happens that you can intuit why it works this way as well.
tptacek | 6 hours ago
None of this is true for your local congressional rep, and certainly not for your senator. But those people aren't voting on local development projects. Your alderman or trustee or councilmember is doing that. If you haven't learned what they're about and how they get elected, that's on you.
(None of this is to say that you're going to get your way with your local electeds! They may very well not care much about what you have to say --- because they're elected by a bloc of local constituents that they serve and that reliably turns out for them. That's democracy! The good news is: you can often organize and replace those electeds. I live in a relatively high-end inner-ring suburb of Chicago, and I ran a successful campaign for a friend there for $5000 all-in.)
Public comment is anti-democratic. It's an intrinsically low-turnout off-cycle process; it's specifically intended to amplify the influence of concentrated special interests. We have a democratic process already: it's called "elections".
Forgeties79 | 8 hours ago
tptacek | 6 hours ago
happytoexplain | 5 hours ago
It also doesn't make sense to include negativity and positivity as part of representation. Yes, people feel more strongly about bad things than good things, but that's everybody. It would be a mistake to try to excise that. It's already our job to account for it.
From your tone, this seems less like an opinion on democratic process and more like you just happen to have the opposite opinions of most people in the aforementioned segment, statistically, and you (perhaps understandably) are angered by them, and you see a viable argument for reducing their voices.
tptacek | 5 hours ago
threatofrain | an hour ago
lurk2 | 8 hours ago
This just sounds like your ideas are bad and you’re upset that no one supports them.
happytoexplain | 8 hours ago
Some people have opinions that are perfectly human, but that you may certainly disagree strongly with. And yes, some people have straight up crazy opinions. And yes, some people have selfish opinions.
So... your answer is "fuck the people"? What are you even talking about? This is a necessary part of government. You are not the keeper of Correct Opinions. You're suggesting doing the thing that citizens historically get their weapons out to (rightfully) eject from civilization.
tptacek | 6 hours ago
jacquesm | 8 hours ago
Also: you can't really blame those who do show up for a democratic process for having the wrong ideas relative to those that don't show up.
Public comment is a feature of the democratic process, I don't see how it could ever be seen as anti-democratic.
bobsomers | 8 hours ago
cucumber3732842 | 8 hours ago
newobj | 8 hours ago
Not to mention hilariously conflating public comment on data centers (massively unpopular) with local weirdo NIMBYism on things like "coffee shops" and "fire hydrants". We all know every city has people that just love to speak at the city council meetings. Can't take it in good faith that you seriously think it's the same thing that's going on with opposition to data centers.
akerl_ | 7 hours ago
mplewis | 8 hours ago
tptacek | 5 hours ago
happytoexplain | 5 hours ago
tptacek | 4 hours ago
vatsachak | 8 hours ago
They should invest money into improving electric and community infrastructure. There are so many win-wins to be had and they fumbled
lnkdinsuxs | 8 hours ago
The problem with electric and community infrastructure is that very few electric infrastructure is owned by the community, but that's not the core issue because the other infrastructure that is indeed owned by community has people in the community split on what's useful and what not.
Imagine how difficult it is to decide where to go out to lunch in a group of people. Now up the stakes to getting people to agree on whose backyard and where holes and trenches and dug and electric poles and power stations are put up.
Waterluvian | 8 hours ago
You’ve got a ton of water. A ton of famously cheap hydro electricity potential. An entire service industry for remote mines (who will build your roads and power). And you’re not being an unwanted bastard.
My sense is that the answer is very simple: because they can just use someone else’s.
akerl_ | 8 hours ago
tomrod | 8 hours ago
akerl_ | 8 hours ago
jacquesm | 8 hours ago
Waterluvian | 8 hours ago
The amount of surveyed untapped hydro potential is something like 110GW. Though to be fair I haven’t studied any of this too deeply since grad school (which I refuse to let my brain appraise how long ago that was.)
akerl_ | 8 hours ago
Waterluvian | 8 hours ago
What I found interesting was that none of them had a single thing to say about the actual AI tech. Mind you n=6 or 7.
jacquesm | 8 hours ago
Whether they know who Anthropic or OpenAI or are familiar with AI tech is immaterial, they are allowed a say on what happens in their immediate environment regardless of the application of the DC. The environmental impact of datacenters is substantial, especially near residential areas.
> When I suggested “what about like an hour north of Sudbury?”
Timmins? Or somewhere along the 144? That's not going to work: that area is pretty much inaccessible a good chunk of the year, besides you won't find the personnel to man your DCs there. And to hook it up you'll be digging fairly long trenches adding quite a bit to the cost of deployment.
Waterluvian | 7 hours ago
Take a peek at Churchill Falls NL. They’re upgrading it to something like 14,000MW. You can see the hydro corridor on the satellite imagery. It goes for hundreds of KM to get to the customers.
I’m just not convinced that the frontier logistics are a real problem for an industry that’s supposed to be worth trillions.
jacquesm | 7 hours ago
I was just wondering where you had planned this and Timmins is the biggest population center North of Sudbury that I'm aware of.
jacquesm | 8 hours ago
Waterluvian | 8 hours ago
narmiouh | 8 hours ago
akerl_ | 8 hours ago
Is it somehow not being represented here?
ceejayoz | 8 hours ago
akerl_ | 8 hours ago
ceejayoz | 8 hours ago
akerl_ | 8 hours ago
ceejayoz | 8 hours ago
> Compare to the US where the entire middle of the country is covered in PoPs measured in terabits per second
A problem if you're Netflix. Less so if you're Claude, where giant clusters of RAM and compute generate a few kilobytes of text leaving the datacenter at a time.
akerl_ | 7 hours ago
ceejayoz | 7 hours ago
But it's the lines between that matter, yeah?
Again, your map would say datacenters in the Australian outback would be insane, but there's huge dark fiber capacity passing through it.
> I also think you're massively underestimating the amount of ingress/egress traffic needed for one of these facilities.
Ingress/egress for AI compute is clearly different than some other use cases. One needs only to watch Claude's network activity for evidence of this.
(Like, it's the least problematic part of the in-space datacenter idea, versus cooling and maintenance.)
akerl_ | 7 hours ago
You keep trying to slice and dice the maps to say that there is in fact stuff in Canada. I'm not disputing that Canadians have the internet. I'm debating that it would be possible to put datacenters in northern Ontario and Quebec without doing massive infrastructure projects to run new fiber a significant distance, likely to Quebec City or to the northern US.
If you think that's incorrect, and that there's actually existing fiber that would support this, I would be curious for you to say so directly. Otherwise, the maps seem clear: there's some connectivity in the coastal and southern areas you'd expect, but nothing inland and northern and nothing at the scale of the US midwest.
ceejayoz | 7 hours ago
But that's... already on the map, and you described it as "a major presence" upthread?
> nothing at the scale of the US midwest
Again, I note the very different ingress/egress requirements of AI compute. The main bottleneck has been power, not bandwidth.
Waterluvian | 8 hours ago
redanddead | 8 hours ago
lnkdinsuxs | 8 hours ago
If nothing works out domestically, this might very well be where the industry ends up.
The current attempt is to have domestic (in the continental US) AI - because owning the infrastructure is way more valuable than renting it.
andsoitis | 8 hours ago
ipdashc | 8 hours ago
That said, I agree they should put them in Canada and similar regions, it seems like a no brainer resources-wise for the reasons you mentioned. The reason they don't is probably that it's vastly more expensive to work on remote sites like that. Mines and dams do it by necessity, but it's a big undertaking to build stuff a full day's drive (or bush plane flight) from the nearest city.
sarchertech | 7 hours ago
But they also want to build an on premise 1000MW natural gas power plant and a 500MW biomass plant that will take millions of acres of forest to sustain.
ipdashc | 4 hours ago
It feels like at some point our society forgot that the government is supposed to pass laws, and not just block things we don't like. Data centers are being built with polluting power sources, why is the instinct "stop all the data centers" and not simply, you know, require them to not use polluting power sources?
Also, while I'm glad you're focused on what matters, 90% of the outcry I've heard about DCs is about water. Or noise pollution, or them looking ugly... for buildings that, again, are mostly being built on razed industrial land or empty fields. According to the OP, "electrical grid" is the fifth most common concern, and air pollution is wayy down the list.
Anonyneko | 7 hours ago
lnkdinsuxs | 8 hours ago
Also, just like oil is dirty, bad for the environment and kills people, so will the data centers. And the power plants to power them.
Our options are not to not have Data centers and their power plants but whether to have them built elsewhere (even outside the US) and pay rent or own them and get paid the rent.
Arguments about having more efficient or green Data centers and power plants miss the point. Engineering is a process of iterative improvement - you don't begin with the perfect product, you begin with one that crashes, burns and breaks some bones.
It's understandable though that no one one wants to be "it".
BatchJob | 8 hours ago
That should be enough to stop it. But not in America.
WarmWash | 8 hours ago
Apparently the developer was approached about the possibility of building a DC there, and it set off a five alarm fire of hysteria in the town. Of course, no one even blinked about the warehouse.
So now we are probably gonna get the hundreds of trucks 24/7 instead of the large quietly humming box (that would also probably increase tax revenue by 30%).
add-sub-mul-div | 8 hours ago
nickstinemates | 8 hours ago
Make the AI companies fully subsidize it instead of government.
It would change the sentiment in the country in an instant as affordability wrt owning a home would be in reach.
akerl_ | 8 hours ago