You can learn a lot from such experiences. What to look for/what not to look for, etc. Sometimes the wrong location will have the right house and you can dial in precisely the things that matter to you so you waste less time on future showings.

Of course if you're highly experienced and on your 4th house purchase the value for your time may not be there. But I've found it quite useful over the years - especially when looking at different property types than I'm experienced with.

This is entirely believable to me based on the stories and trends they talk about.

My current place would sell for say $1.4M or so.

The lot itself is worth around $600-700k if it was empty.

A similarly sized home would cost well over $1m to construct to similar quality levels - normalizing a bit for modern construction techniques and all that.

So about $2.4m to build new, or $1.4m to buy a fairly similar 25 year old home next door. New construction here costs more than the older structures on the land in most cases. This ignores permitting and financing costs which throws a light wrench into those calculations, likely making it a bit more expensive on the build side.

That is using numbers I would pay a custom builder for, but even if you add in 20-30% profit for the builder the math isn't super great for the new build end of things.

Why? Nerds have been hosting services for their friends and family for decades now. It was one of the primary benefits of knowing an IT nerd. They probably had a few servers co-located at work or with their friend who worked for the local ISP. These days with cloud I suppose it's changed, but I didn't think this skillset had eroded that much.

Hosting services on the public internet isn't very scary. If your Plex server gets zero day'ed, you just reinstall it and start over. Chances are that will never happen.

I host the media server, you come help me fix my plumbing when I need it sort of thing.

> That's a lot of effort for very questionable return, considering the requirements for your hard drive space, bandwidth, the time it takes to curate your library including "acquisition" and pruning etc.

This part, sure. But it's like anything else you do for family and friends. When I ran an e-mail server for everyone it was a giant pain that eventually became not worth it once the free providers got better and more accessible.

Plus the whole "curating" thing is the fun part, usually! Most of that stuff is usually about 98% automated either way so the "job" is largely fixing automation when it chokes.

It’s basically the OG networking effect. You put equipment there because everyone else had equipment there.

The rest just grew with it. It had nothing to do with power infrastructure. If anything, datacenters created the power infrastructure in the area.

Agreed on the tax abatement stuff. Those should be outright illegal regardless of industry.

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.

I'm pretty sure they actually come ashore in Virginia Beach and New Jersey, both a solid 4 hour drive away.

I don't follow. What I said is in alignment with the idea that activism is out of vogue. The comment I replied to implied that electing Trump was an act of activism (or "doing something about it").

Anyway, we already had Hitler. Sadly too often, these guys pop up at the right time and wreak havoc but I would say they're outliers (and in general the world is globalizing and trending away from them).

The exact opposite is typically true, so this is surprising to me!

If you don’t know where I live how can you know if my claim is true or not?

I would be very surprised to hear of a location in the US that is experiencing grid instability due to recent increases in industrial scale electric usage.

I 100% refute your claim that grid instability is the primary reason folks in the US are installing solar. You will be still seen as a crazy prepper type if you call a company and tell them you don’t care about the financials penciling out, and only want it for potential blackouts. Assuming you are not in California of course - which I assume not since none of those instability problems have to do with industry so it’s not relevant to this discussion.

Generally speaking - if you want to live in a place with a stable grid, you will seek out a spot that has heavy industry in the region. These energy consumers stabilize the grid for residential folks. Especially datacenters since those tend to come with emergency backup and are the first to fall off the grid on a voluntary basis during peak usage events.

I’m sure somewhere in the US exists where this is true since basically everything is true at a micro scale. I just do not see it as a wide scale issue.

If you want to find locations of grid instability focus on growth, both residential and industrial, that is radically out of scale compared to larger geographic averages. Otherwise, it seems like you are measuring using the wrong trends.

What’s crazy is that the grid instability was there before the explosion of data centers and the primary revenue generator of the much larger geographic region is energy transport/production.

It’s a non-issue. It’s like complaining about a vacant but well maintained warehouse next door.

If you mean living next door to a power plant? Absolutely. But that is a different topic.

It’s not a non-issue right now.

Electricity should function as a common carrier like any other utility. If you want to pay for the watts you get the watts regardless of who you happen to be.

I generally agree that I would not like to live across the street from a datacenter. Having worked inside of dozens of them, I could not care less if I lived half a mile from one. Most people who live within such a distance currently do not have a clue. At that point I would not even worry about the noise from the backup generators.

It’s just not representative of the bigger picture when there are a dozen horrible projects against say 1000 total.

The hyperbole is what gets my mom terrified of moving to a city that might allow a datacenter to be built 8 miles away from the place she was looking at.