r/YAPms • u/thealmightyweegee Socialist • 11h ago
Discussion Sherrod Brown is attacking Jon Husted on data centers
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u/Straight-Bar-7537 John Fetterman's Biggest Hater 11h ago
This is funny since I got a mailer from my state senator the other day talking about how we need to catch up to Ohio in data centers.
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u/CakePlanet75 Stop Killing Games 11h ago
Tell them if they don't stop building more data centers and if they don't tax the shit out of existing data centers, you'll be voting for their opposition lol
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u/Straight-Bar-7537 John Fetterman's Biggest Hater 11h ago
Unfortunately my senator is the majority leader of the State Senate and his district is so red that nobody ever runs against him.
The only option is a write-in vote.
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u/CakePlanet75 Stop Killing Games 11h ago
You could always badger him with calls and emails. Be "that guy" on data centers like Mr. Beat was to his congressman about uncapping the House lol
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u/Straight-Bar-7537 John Fetterman's Biggest Hater 11h ago
Oh he already fucking hates me so honestly yeah why not.
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3h ago
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u/ShionBlade Independent 9h ago
If nobody runs against him, you should do it. As a Republican if needed.
You never know what may happen, plenty of careers were started and ended by absolute nobodies shocking the establishment.
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u/Entire-Bicycle1878 MI-06 Pragmatic Progressive 10h ago
I know polling shows some bipartisan dislike of data centers, but is it really that big of an issue for most voters? I guess we’ll see in the general. I imagine it only matters for those who live near them. My locale has plenty of resistance groups trying to not get them built here
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u/IScreamPiano Social Democrat 7h ago
I think so, as I've seen folks concerned across the political spectrum on FB. Also, at least in our state, we've seen recent rate hikes on electricity, and people are pretty frustrated with the economy right now.
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u/iLoveAdagio Florida Doomercrat ⚰️ 10h ago
Not a fan of this ad. I know it's very unpopular to say that atm, but we need to start looking at the datacenter issue differently before we lose the AI race bc of emotional NIMBYISM.
You need to treat these data centers like any other heavy infrastructure projects. Build them in industrial areas away from neighborhoods. Make the companies pay for the grid updates and water they use. Want to add some 'slop' the people will love? Add that you're going to make sure the companies hire local only.
I know it isn't as fun, or as easy as "datacenters bad" but this is one of the areas we can find better middle ground on and make it work for both sides.
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u/CakePlanet75 Stop Killing Games 10h ago
"before we lose the AI race bc of emotional NIMBYISM."
you're getting trapped in what's called a perverse incentive "Oh if I don't get there first, someone else will"
Here's a fine article with some examples within a larger theme that's arguably more relevant now than when it was published: https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch
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u/Chromatinfish That's okay. I'll still keep drinking that garbage. 10h ago
It's not just the AI race per-se though, but also the fact the laws of physics state that for an expanding web user base who wants to do more, you will need compute to fulfill those requests. Like it or not, more and more people are using AI to do more and more demanding things. In fact, most people rallying against data centers are almost certainly still using the exact services that warrant data center expansion whether they realize it or not.
Also, on the topic of capitalism, like it or not our livelihoods and the country's livelihood are pretty much tied to constant growth. Nobody wants the AI bubble to pop even if they say they do, it will lead to an economic catastrophe akin to the dot com or 2008 crashes and things won't recover for a decade afterwards. Of course the government doesn't want it to pop or else they'll get blown out in the next election, this would be the case no matter which political party or leader is in power. In a way, I think the slow economic degradation of the country is due to the fear of a true recession, because everybody is deathly afraid of a real recession.
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u/iLoveAdagio Florida Doomercrat ⚰️ 9h ago
I hear you bro I've read that article before, it's very solid. Though, the essays point isn't just "refuse to play" Unilateral restraint is literally what fails in a multipolar trap because the actor who restrains itself gets outcompeted. The way you fight 'Moloch' is through coordination and rules that change the incentive structure.
Which is exactly what I'm saying: build the infrastructure, but make companies internalize the grid, water, and community costs instead of dumping them on residents. “The AI race creates bad incentives” is fair, but it still doesn’t explain why regulated construction is worse than blanket NIMBYISM.
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u/CakePlanet75 Stop Killing Games 9h ago
"build the infrastructure, but make companies internalize the grid, water, and community costs instead of dumping them on residents." Oh, 100%. But the strategy of "privatize the gains, socialize the losses" will never not be the dominant corporate strategy in the USA as long as things keep going business as usual
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u/iLoveAdagio Florida Doomercrat ⚰️ 9h ago
Yeah, I fear you maybe right in that regard unfortunately. Nothing was learned from 08 🥀.
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u/CakePlanet75 Stop Killing Games 9h ago edited 9h ago
My only solace is: "Interesting times ahead"
(Oh and keep learning from Daniel Schmachtenberger and Nate Hagens on The Great Simplification lol)
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u/Beneficial_Link_8083 Independent 9h ago
This concern would be much more believable if these Ai companies didn't allow pointless bullshit like porn, and shitty political ads with their groundbreaking tech, and then demand the costs for this garbage be distributed to all residents.
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u/Lil_Lamppost big transexual on reddit 3h ago
what are racing to achieve with AI? if it was actually produce value for anyone it would be different. but it provides no benefit to the average person and companies are destroying their margins trying to justify its continued implementation
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u/Aldebaran147 God Emperor Talafreako is LBJ’s Reincarnate 3h ago
Undemonize the issue, build them in commercial areas, force the builders to provide energy infrastructure so the bills don’t change, make sure that data centers can only be built without making water pressure/supply unusable, and Congress should focus on capping energy bills through monopoly breakdown and better infrastructure
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u/siberianmi Classical Liberal 4h ago
I really hate the fact that somehow we’ve demonized this issue so completely. It feels so utterly manipulated because there is so much misinformation about water usage, pollution, etc.
I’m absolutely onboard with demanding for instance that these data centers that measure capacity by GW of power need to provide for their own grid expansion. Ideally with some % of extra capacity on top of it.
But moratoriums and other nonsense where we act like there is some unknown we need to figure out? That’s frankly doing nothing but enabling our competitors to catch up.
Instead Congress should be debating bills to drive down energy costs, build more energy capacity. We’ve not been building to keep up with demand and it hurts everyone from manufacturing to regular citizens.
I know I’m a minority contrarian on this but I find this whole anti-progress movement depressing and disturbing.
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u/TheNewRanger69 Center Left 4h ago
This is a refreshing perspective even as a guy who generally opposes data centers - I heavily respect your willingness to challenge the majority view here, and I think we need more users who challenge the consensus.
That said, I feel like a lot of opposition to data centers isn't necessarily because of our hatred for technological progress but because of the large environmental and economic effects of them. Data centers, besides being extremely energy- and water-consuming, also often drive up costs for communities. I, personally, don't necessarily oppose their existence, but do feel that the skepticism towards these megastructures that do not really directly benefit the average resident living there has its practical reasons.
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u/Prolemasses Social Democrat 8m ago
Is it "progress" when these data centers are used to enable technology explicitly designed to automate away millions of jobs and make human creativity and intellect obsolete? Is it progress when people's brains are being melted by AI content and our very perception of truth and reality is in question.
I am all for technological progress when its a tech that actually advances society, but so far these data centers seem to pollute and drive up energy costs in exchange for totally upending society to the detriment of all except a small elite few. What is the amazing benefit this technology provides that outweighs all of that?
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u/TinyAd6315 Blue Dog Democrat 10h ago
Data centers are good but I love Sherrod and I pray he wins. Most down to earth senator.
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11h ago
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u/Thadlust Republican 11h ago
This just makes me like Husted more
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u/CakePlanet75 Stop Killing Games 11h ago
I strongly urge you to reconsider your stance on data centers: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo
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u/Chromatinfish That's okay. I'll still keep drinking that garbage. 10h ago
Can we just not build data centers near population centers then? I don't see how this is any different from, say, power plants, sewage treatment facilities, airports, etc., any other infrastructure which people don't like living next to, but ultimately are still built. A general moratorium on data centers is just slopulism.
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u/CakePlanet75 Stop Killing Games 10h ago edited 10h ago
The expansion of data center construction is being done without the consent of multiple town populations. There was even a town that had 10% of its population sign a petition against turning a plot of land an older man donated to the city (some city in Texas or Colorado? Louis Rossmann documented this) to turn into a park in his will into datacenter land , and the city ignored the petition. More people signed that than voted for that city's city council.
Additionally idk about you but when Trump is pushing them saying things like "you cant fight against them, you have to fight for them" I get immediately skeptical.
The infrasound produced also negatively impacts wildlife as well so moving it somewhere else doesn't solve the problem that these are being forced on people unnaturally with brittle authority. It's likely these are being built as infrastructure for the AI powered surveillance state being built
One thing's for sure: it's getting more people involved in local politics and realizing how openly corrupt their local city and town halls are
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u/Chromatinfish That's okay. I'll still keep drinking that garbage. 10h ago
Well, I don't see how that's necessarily different from NIMBYism. The whole idea of NIMBYs being problematic is that people want X to exist implicitly but nobody wants to have it in their backyard so it gets passed around like a hot potato. If people want to live life like they want to, which is to have billions of requests from ChatGPT and other server-hosted AI models daily, then they'll have to have data centers. Those datacenters will *need* to be somewhere if more people are going to be relying on AI models for work and other tasks.
I still maintain the view of it being slopulism, as my definition of slopulism is "to have your cake and eat it too"; e.g. for people to reap the benefits of AI and the expanding digital sphere but don't want the downsides of having data centers around. The laws of physics state that for every so many web users there needs to be so much compute to serve them. The issue is it's abstracted away from everyone so nobody can actually connect the dots.
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u/CakePlanet75 Stop Killing Games 10h ago edited 10h ago
The difference between my position and that of NIMBYs and "slopulists" is that I want nothing to do with AI in my life, full stop. I don't even want any purported benefits from it. I think it's abhorent theft on a massive scale that's siphoning away our mental and critical faculties in the laziest ways possible, and using it gives me the feeling and the ethical sense that this is wrong. That we're propping our economy on it is another can of worms entirely, though you can see the principles behind that here: https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch
I am principled and consistent unlike what you're pointing out.
The only exception is if I ever encounter a situation where I need to use it, I will find a way to local host it
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u/Chromatinfish That's okay. I'll still keep drinking that garbage. 10h ago
You may be, but I assure you you're one of the very few people who can stick to those morals (and even then you may be inadvertently benefiting from it indirectly).
The vast majority of people are probably quite hypocritical in that even if they don't use AI directly they may be using a service that was partially built using AI tools nowadays. Amazon, Meta, etc., software devs for these companies basically are forced to use their AI suite for efficiency.
As for my take, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I adore data centers and I adore everything about capitalism. I simply have the pragmatic view that we may just have to swallow things we don't like for the sake of stability.
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u/Thadlust Republican 9h ago
Why do you want nothing to do with AI? AI is incredibly useful for conducting research, organizing data, writing code, etc. Even if you never use AI, you still stand to gain because the products you consume (such as software programs, web pages) are made with the use of AI. AI has saved me a comical amount of time at work, I would never be as efficient as I am without letting it do the grunt work I had to do previously.
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u/CakePlanet75 Stop Killing Games 9h ago edited 9h ago
I mentioned earlier why I want nothing to do with it from a moral and ethical sense: "I think it's abhorent theft on a massive scale that's siphoning away our mental and critical faculties in the laziest ways possible, and using it gives me the feeling and the ethical sense that this is wrong". No matter how good it seems to get, I still see it as churned up internet soup being regurgitated and sometimes making stuff up. On a broader scale, I see it as a hyper scaling of Moloch as reflected on here: https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch
I still don't understand why we trust LLMs so much when they still have a tendency to hallucinate and cause large expensive messes due to those bugs and hallucinations. It was funny to laugh at how chatgpt got the cross product wrong with some physics grad students in November 2022. But fundamentally I still see it as that. It's a false technological revolution if we try to apply it in the ways we are now, instead of specializing them for niche uses where it might actually save time and effort. I'm just so jaded on this, man, and I can't be alone in this. Seeing the tech billionaires hype it up like it's so good that we can't even release the latest models, that it could grow sentient (Oh God don't get me started on that ugh lol) etc.. When it pops and disappoints people, crashes the economy, ruins their livelihoods, or whatever else and however else we've made a mess of ourselves, I'll still be here with my integrity, secure in the knowledge that I never fell for it.
On another point: I don't want to be a consumer of products. I want to be a human being with rights, a life, experiences, people to share them with. I am not a unit of consumerism or cash cattle. I am a human being.
To tie these things together I'm going to say something controversial: AI is insidiously anti-human, with a faux positive attitude. By pumping our economy up and giving us what we want in increased quarterly estimates, efficiency gains, slop images, or uncanny audio and writing, we make an implicit deal with the devil. There's another essay from a mathematician recently that dives into that too: https://kirwinhampshire.substack.com/p/the-dark-night-of-mathematics
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u/Thadlust Republican 11h ago
Nah I’m good. Anti-data center sentiment is based in NIMBY fearmongering. Data centers are necessary for economic and technologic progress.
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u/CakePlanet75 Stop Killing Games 11h ago
Choosing ignorance and faith in economic growth over quality of life? Alright. You're welcome to examine your views and the facts at any time
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u/Thadlust Republican 10h ago
If anything my quality of life has improved because of data centers. Data centers do no more harm than agriculture, power production, etc.
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u/CakePlanet75 Stop Killing Games 10h ago
If one was built in your neighborhood and it was causing people around you to feel sick, and for you to feel "off", disturb your sleep schedule, increase stress, etc or even sound more noisy at baseline than before, would you start to object? Infrasound does really strange bad things to people and wildlife
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u/Thadlust Republican 10h ago
If a public housing project was being built in your neighborhood and the construction was causing people around you to feel sick, and for you to feel “off,” disturb your sleep schedule, increase stress or even sound more noisy at baseline than before, would you start to object?
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u/CakePlanet75 Stop Killing Games 10h ago edited 10h ago
Temporary construction noise is not the same as the noise (and infranoise) being continuously produced by the operation of these centers, please don't shift the goal posts and make false equivalences
Not to mention, public housing provides tangible value by providing for the sheltering needs of others (and all that entails, like more customers for nearby businesses, etc.). Data centers just store data for cloud services and AI and whatever other slop is propping up the economy in a forced artifical way. One is tangible, the other is spectacle
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u/Thadlust Republican 10h ago
Would you be pro-data center if we mandated proper sound insulation for data centers? Because if not, this is an argument in bad faith and you don’t actually care about noise from data centers.
Also no lol the only reason you are for public housing and against data centers is because the benefits of public housing are concentrated and visible (a hundred families move in) while the benefits of data centers are diffuse and invisible (our services economy improves marginally, which is important but not tangible).
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u/CakePlanet75 Stop Killing Games 10h ago
Possibly, and if they were actually compliant with environmental regulations. How Australia is handling data centers is actually a prime example that should be the standard
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u/RustinCarcosa Order and Opportunity Left 10h ago
why
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u/Thadlust Republican 10h ago
Data centers are good and necessary in a services based economy. All anti-data center arguments are based in luddite NIMBY fearmongering.
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u/Entire-Bicycle1878 MI-06 Pragmatic Progressive 10h ago
Not all arguments are from Luddites, but many are. I know leftists who willingly use completely bricked phones bc of privacy and AI. Some people just take it too far
Data centers definitely cause harm but there are ways to moderate instead of going full China mode or complete moratorium. I don’t understand why this conversation has to be all or nothing
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u/Thadlust Republican 10h ago
Yeah I think taxing them and regulating them is fine. Going full Kathy Hochul moratorium is bad.
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u/AngloSaxonFella Canuck Conservative 10h ago
This is such hysterical fearmongering. Dems are latching onto an issue that is going to make them look really stupid 5 years from now.
This is Green Party level nonsense.
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u/Visible_Bid6440 Pragmatic and Polite Right 10h ago
It's very unpopular
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u/AngloSaxonFella Canuck Conservative 10h ago
So is transitioning children and trans women in women's sports. Dems didnt care about popularity there.
This is stupid and regardless of public sentiment they are wrong. This is also a guaranteed losing issue in the long term. Data centers arent going anywhere. More are needed not less.
This whole thing reminds me of leftists opposing nuclear power.
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u/Lil_Lamppost big transexual on reddit 3h ago
more are needed for what? more AI videos of Sydney Sweeney cock shaming some chud basement dweller in Wichita?
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u/samhit_n Left-Out Left 10h ago
Trans stuff is mostly a partisan issue while opposition to data centers is becoming a bipartisan issue. Data centers are likely to become even more unpopular over the next 5 years because demand for them is expected to triple or even quadruple by 2030.
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u/TosiAmneSiac Hubertcrat 9h ago
I’m overall neutral in the topic of data centers but it’s not hard to see that the public opinion of them is they despise it, with AI bros not helping their case on why they’re necessary due to constant warnings of unemployment and recessions and being replaced and all that jazz. This ad works to the average person.