"The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated"
That's a direct quote.
The fact that it wasn't first on the list doesn't mean it's not on the list.
(no response needed; I know that you're a partisan actor to the degree that direct discussion with you offers no value to myself or to society. You're too dishonest, too sociopathic, and too disinterested in truth.)
If that was his intent he shouldn't have handed over any pin. This looks like he was hiding evidence of wrongdoing and he will probably be charged with it. I am guessing his only hope will be that they denied his request for a lawyer.
His rights were already being violated. He was falsely arrested and denied his rights to an attorney.
They can prosecute him (and probably will) but he's got a pretty strong civil rights claim against the federal government for a false arrest and illegal search and seizure.
You can't arrest someone without a warrant or a reasonable suspicion of a crime. These thugs had neither when they arrested him, just that he's "a terrorist". That's why they were trying to get him to confess or commit a crime. That's why they didn't want a lawyer to get involved.
It's inaccurate to claim that the opposition is "completely irrational".
One _extremely_ rational and common reason that people oppose these projects is that they can bid-up the energy cost in their regions, meaning that one of the residents biggest monthly bills gets bigger.
A second one goes around pollution and noise, particularly when the AI DataCenter is using "portable" gas turbines or similar.
Solutions are hard, but possible... so long as the decision makers are able to recognize that much of the opposition is quite rational, and that the deals struck need to accommodate the legitimate and rational concerns, while avoiding getting hung up by true nonsense.
The portable gas turbine is a somewhat separate issue, in that it's highly illegal but if you have more money than god you can just pay off the fines and the judges.
It's relatively easy to avoid being that egregious about it if you're a little bit patient on construction permits and power contracts.
NIMBY opposition to datacenter construction is orthogonal to that, except insofar as in both cases the construction will gravitate toward places that won't or can't object to the construction.
In theory, rising energy prices would encourage more investment in capacity increases, that would then real a new equilibrium and so on. In theory of course, energy markets are so distorted now who knows. Having AI data centers bring their own power or power investments is probably going to be necessary.
Residential electricity rates don't get "bid up" like that. Increases typically must be approved by the government and have to be justified by expenses rather than market prices. Ashburn VA, which has more data centers than anywhere else, actually pays below US average rates.
Growing up near Ashburn makes every anti data center argument feel like crazy land. From my perspective when I lived there, they were somewhat ugly large boxes that paid county tax and raised land value. I never noticed any kind of noise from them, though they were largely on industrially zoned land right by the airport. Also gave us single digit ping. Electricity rates are below the national average.
Now that I'm an adult I have several friends employed in the industry, mostly in cooling system automation.
1) your example pays very substantial tax. (property taxes, plus, recently, tax on electricity use)
2) your example primarily used undesirable land.
3) your example grew slowly, allowing the power company to add capacity without a big challenge matching demand.
4) your example is in a heavily connected part of the grid, so it didn't need all of that added power generation to be local.
All of these factors led to datacenters being viewed favorably by Loudon County for most of this century.... but many (and sometimes all) of those factors aren't there for other projects. For example, there are a lot of projects where the datacenter is not paying any property tax or sales/use tax at all.
Heck, even in Loudon County, they're changing regulations to pump the brakes because the hyperscale datacenters are growing electric demand a bit too quickly for them to manage without adding a little friction.
Your anecdote about "it was good in this one county, from 1995 through 2025" cannot be reasonably extended to believe that all of these projects have similar tradeoffs.
(And I'm not even getting into the reality that "this datacenter will let me use AOL" will, of course, be viewed differently than "this datacenter will help my employer remove my job.")
I agree that datacenters showed up because a ton of fibre was already there.
I was talking about reasons that the general public of Loudon County has had a positive view toward datacenters -- not why datacenters chose the county (that's a different list entirely).
Notably, that the datacenters showed up in a way that offered almost no material downsides to the locals... and that this differs markedly from what many towns face today.
It's actually because of DARPANET/ARPANET and other early computer research that was military or intelligence funded. It led to a concentration of networking in the region that led to MAE-East and it's all spiraled from there. The transatlantic cables were an aftereffect of everything else.
I'm pretty sure they actually come ashore in Virginia Beach and New Jersey, both a solid 4 hour drive away.
This might be true in the US (which is obviously what the article is about) but it isn’t everywhere. Data centre impact is a concern here in New Zealand and we have a poor track record of handling the impact of large users of electricity. Case in point - the aluminium smelter that has manipulated the entire country power prices (and various other things) via threats.
Which market do you mean when talking about "market prices"?
I'm pretty sure the utility where I am has been able to get rate increases approved partly based on rising prices they have to pay to buy power on the wholesale market when they do not have enough capacity of their own to cover all their customers.
They described their car as having "auto-installed" the update.
An update which advertised, amongst other features, that it "rectifies errors and prevents security gaps" and stated "This update is recommended for everyone."
Borderline insane to refer to the user as "complicit" in that case.
BEVs are great for non-enthusiasts whose goal is to be transported, but in their current incarnation they are _abysmal_ for people whose goal is _to drive_.
And people who brag about the performance specs of a car whose main selling point is that it requires no skill or attention to drive are missing the point entirely.
100%. And to be clear I have no problem with BEVs or boring cars (there is some overlap). I own an extremely boring car, a CR-V hybrid, and it's a fantastic family hauler.
Thinking about it now, I suppose I didn't feel any need for my family hauler to have a hot 0-60 time. It will apparently do mid eighties on the skidpad, which really underlines how useless that metric is for describing real world cornering performance---it's unapologetically a boat.
Grid upgrade costs are frequently socialized onto existing customers, especially for larger upgrades. Your central premise that interconnect charges cover everything is false.
Or how about this framing (using your own numbers): for every dollar a datacenter is charged for electricity, regular hard-working Americans get charged $2.
The hill to die on might be the one behind your house that has a nice view of the illegal methane generators that these data centers are using, because they sure as hell aren't running on solar.
Well, I think some of those hardworking Americans would be happy to pay some of those $2 because otherwise all the SaaS services and other services, platforms, and tools running in datacenters wouldn’t be accessible to them.
Or did I read this wrong and somewhere it said only datacenters running inference or training for LLMs?
The thing people are pissed about is giving better rates to datacenters.
Compare this to most of Europe (and Texas if I understood correctly) where the detacenters buy their electricity from the same market as everyone else (in Europe the spot market or futures) meaning they effectively pay the same price as everyone else.
It’s when they do some back room deal with the local public utility to get 50% off and offload the real costs to the public when people get angry.
Is there an example of this happening? Isn't the problem that datacenters are drawing electricity at the market rate and driving the cost up, rather than paying a surcharge for the difference?
I don't think the mechanism is that different, and even if it was Europe, etc would have the same issue - data centers would still bid up the price for existing capacity, and the future capacity added to accommodate the dcs would be added at a higher marginal rate too because scarcity of new supply + base load nature of dc loads. So the problem will get worse before it gets better
Concrete examples? Quick google only shows small discounts for DCs relative to other wholesale industrial consumers, which could be partially explained away by the flat load, lack of stability concerns, no need for power factor correction hardware, etc. I think 'bidding up the market' is the dominant mechanism, here in Australia (spot market + futures) consumer prices are projected to increase 26%.
In Quebec, new data center will have to pay almost twice the price of what citizen are paying. it's 14 cents/kwh vs about 8 cents/kwh. Crypto center are set to pay 18 cents/kwh. That's the advantage of having a public utility.
True, I just left a hipster coffee shop in LA, and the liberals were whispering about their love of SaaS services, and their desire to socialize the costs of compute infrastructure.
That's a direct quote.
The fact that it wasn't first on the list doesn't mean it's not on the list.
(no response needed; I know that you're a partisan actor to the degree that direct discussion with you offers no value to myself or to society. You're too dishonest, too sociopathic, and too disinterested in truth.)
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