This is bad news for everyone (well, except the high priests of the LLMs / nascent Cthulhoid godlings), but it certainly makes the communities who've successfully opposed data centers seem ever more justified in retrospect.
> except the high priests of the LLMs / nascent Cthulhoid godlings
Let's not be this flippant about where the real pressure for this is coming from. Presidents and their appointees come and go. The people pushing the regulators[1] are not subject to US election cycles. It's important to know who they are when we aim our finely honed fingers, even if we find that these folks were formerly virtuous and mighty green energy advocates, because if your solution is merely different figureheads, all that will really change is the scale of the bribes.
>Presidents and their appointees come and go. The people pushing the regulators[1] are not subject to US election cycles.
While true, it’s also true that presidents and their appointees can vary wildly in their susceptibility to those “people pushing”. Both sides might be bad, but one’s very obviously worse.
> except the high priests of the LLMs / nascent Cthulhu-oid godlings...
I did not say that, but is so obvious, like looking through a plate glass window. There is no pressure, its just a natural transition to the end of bipedal life.
It also sustains the bubble for a bit longer. I'm genuinely curious/anxious to see when and how the bubble bursts. It could end up being something seemingly trivial or random and completely illogical that finally topples the jenga tower.
They're good analogies. It's possible to keep a Jenga tower going forever, just extremely difficult once it reaches the point of being all middle pieces.
It's certainly not possible to keep a Jenga Tower growing forever. For each floor you add you need to leave at least one piece in a lower floor. Eventually you run out of pieces. It's possible to "complete" a Jenga Tower, but at that point it has to stop growing.
The dot com boom was a bubble. Doesn't mean that the underlying web technology that powered it was bad or worthless. But the valuations definitely were. AI, in its current form, will be around for a long time, maybe even as ubiquitous as the internet is today, a few decades from now. But the situation right now can definitely be classified as a bubble.
The economics work out just fine. Their actual target business model is replace every knowledge worker. Their thought process is "look at all these people making 150k+, we can do their jobs for 10% of that, think how much money that would be if we had all of it"
Sure, the next step is complete regression to feudalism, but they aren't thinking that far ahead, they just want to take every job in existence that isn't physically turning a proverbial wrench.
the moment AI is capable enough to replace every knowledge worker and all knowledge workers are fired and/or dead the AI companies will just hike up the price for access to their bots until every company is paying at least as much if not more than what they were on human workers.
It doesn't work out for the owners of the capital. Their wealth is entirely based on their claims on future production that is consumed by people with money.
Then it's on to centralization of the "human" components of the workforce into company towns, robot armies and competition for natural resources that will be processed from raw.
It’s wild to me that anyone can have that thought and yet not think about what happens to everyone whose job you took. Especially in a country with citizens known for owning guns.
Especially after seeing what the “learn to code” movement has brought people into, I can’t imagine those people will just roll over and peacefully enter homeless encampments..
> Especially in a country with citizens known for owning guns.
This has always been a story Americans tell themselves to sleep better at night that has zero relation to reality.
The US is a country that has seen many injustices perpetrated by the government. From concentration camps for people of a certain descent to legal racial discrimination (and slavery before that) to wanton violence by security forces against innocent people (pick your favourite police/ICE/etc murder here).
When have armed Americans ever risen up against a government injustice? Best I can think of is the Oklahoma city bombing and I'm pretty sure that's not what you're all refering to.
Your list is embarrassing. Since 1973 (I'm not going further back because the recent examples are too bad to bother), there have been:
* 2 land disputes between federal land management and individuals that thought they deserve more rights over federal land. Hardly fighting against an injustice here, were they
* The BLM protests/unrest started by the murder of George Floyd. I don't recall Americans taking up arms against murderous cops, or anyone, really. The closest to arms taking I can remember is an underage guy going to a protest to "protect" against rioters, getting attacked and killing people in response. Hardly anyone fighting against government instilled injustice with their right to bear arms, is it?
* January 6, where a bunch of mentally challenged individuals tried to overturn the election results at the request of the loser of that election. There was no injustice done against the people in question, and they didn't use their arms against it, they just stormed a barely defended building. One of the shittiest coup attempts of all time, and if anything, for furthering injustice and government overreach than anything else.
Your fixation on "injustice" makes your point unfalsifiable. Any rebellion could be construed as righteous or treasonous. The point is that people really do take up arms against the govt all the time, and that fact has historically had major effects on the conduct of police and politicians
Hunger and desperation are really powerful motivators. And violence and rioting are basically socially transmitted diseases.
You don't need everyone to wake up someday and think "Hey, I think those Jacobins in France had a good point" to have a revolution. You only need a few detonators.
If the societal conditions are ready, nobody can really stop the masses once they are ignited.
Like a bunch of guys with guns couldn't defeat the well drilled and maintained British regulars that are backed by massive warships.
Or a bunch of dudes with guns in the jungles of Vietnam couldn't beat a modern military with fighters and bombers and tanks.
Or a bunch of dudes in the mountain wilderness with guns couldn't beat a modern military with satellites, smart missiles, night vision and drones
Or a bunch of dudes in the deserts of yemen couldn't defend against a modern military with aircraft carriers, realtime control of almost all communications, autonomous drones and missiles and 5th gen fighters
History and current events seem to be disagreeing with you.
They said it every decade since invention. My father who worked in IT since the 60s told me to become an electrician when I was kid as computers will replace all jobs soon. I did become an electrician, welder and have two doctorates; math and cs (which was part of the math dep then). But this time does feel actually different; cheap LLMs are good enough to do advanced work, better than most colleagues I worked with over the decades. Sure you need humans still, just not many. Robots are crap still mostly but we are just starting out… I will not have to worry in my lifetime, but if I had kids or grandkids, I would be worried. But I guess all generations, like my father, have that anyway; we will see.
Even your back of napkin optimistic math doesn't work.
The median white collar job in the US (picking it on purpose because it's a country with high wages, your math would be even worse in a France or Italy) is in the $60-70k. Yes you have to add benefits and etc, but we're still pretty far off 150k.
How much tokens does $80k buy you and do you think it's capable of replacing a human's output? For some, definitely. For plenty, I doubt it. Currently token costs are subsidised by the bubble frontier labs and already we're seeing tightening of budgets because it's costing more than expected
I think you never worked with ‘plenty’; most people I worked with in the past 40 years in IT I am suprised when they actually can walk in on their own. I would say most can be replaced by deepseek flash now, let alone Astra or Fable. I never know in what heaven HN people work, but my company is doing some fixing for a multinational with 20k ‘devs’, most outsourced and they are quite literally morons, far behind even bad LLMs. Their trick is basically to schedule as many calls with as many people as possible to look busy and make their timesheets somewhat plausible. And these are mostly devs. When you see the questions to jira tasks you worry about if they don’t forget to eat or go to the toilet randomly. Oh yeah, most are classified as seniors. An we visit many companies like this. So I am definitely confused how people on HN seem to think most humans can do something worthwhile.
But they haven't replaced every knowledge worker. The unemployment rate remains unaffected by all the AI progress. At some point the bill comes due, and if most of those jobs are still around, then what?
If the need is driven by a bubble economy, when the bubble pops the demand disappears too. This can even lead to a separate bubble popping (see: the dotcom and telecom bubbles).
Yes, datacentres can be reused for other purposes but dark fibre didn't save the telecom bubble and the utility of train tracks didn't save the railway bubble.
well, according to finance bros, shovelling cash into a furnace to power a boiler to steam some eggs is considered a wild success. Economics is for normies.
>(well, except the high priests of the LLMs / nascent Cthulhoid godlings
This is potentially good news for everyone who wants to do anything less dirty than a datacenter (logistics, cold chain, light manufacturing/assembly, etc) because they'll probably be able to get the precedent extended to them in the next decade or so. The people and communities that make money off that sort of stuff will probably do well. Most of that sort of industry is in poorer sections of states where the municipalities are constantly being hamstrung by their own state because the municipalities want to permit it but state rules make that hard. So there is potential for some good to come out of it.
I mean, yes? Are you aware of the history of the industrial revolution?
There are plenty of major industrial powers with very clean industries who used to have very dirty industries in previous decades or centuries. I can't think of any nation at all that developed while maintaining a firm commitment to clean industry trough the process of industrialization (though, there are a few places that never industrialized and developed a service economy directly, especially tax havens and financial hubs).
These exemptions are not granted based on logic or precedent. "Less dirty" has nothing to do with it. They're entirely based on open bribery. This will be granted to any industry that bribes the administration enough. What's the good news again?
oh! "This will benefit the 2%, while the 1% burns the earth to the ground"
This is like Republicans claiming that they're doing everything for small businesses, when the reality is they're doing things for contract workers who more often are just being forced into contracts that wouldn't exist without the lax regulatory reality and are abused thereof.
"This will benefit the little guy (assuming they survive their cancer diagnosis)"
I just heard this last night: buried in the "support for small business" was the repeal (or effectively neuteringO of the Corporate Transparency Act's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.
That program had a simple ask of every corporation doing business in America: who really owns it? No more hiding of ill gotten gains and laundering through US real estate, etc (hint: anybody come to mind who might do a lot of that)?.
It was a stupid regulation to begin with. Any investigative agency already could trivially get this data through already existing means.
All it did was make your 3 member condo association have to pay a lawyer $500/yr in compliance fees for utterly no benefit to anyone other than the compliance folks collecting their rent. Or take on personal criminal liability to file it yourself. Better not forget one random year or it’s a felony!
Just like most of the rest of the AML/KYC creep after 9/11 it did absolutely nothing to go after anybody they say it did - it just made things harder on normal everyday people.
All that stuff is more dirty to the local community than your average datacenter.
The vast majority of these these no one knows even exist until told. They are basically warehouses without loading docks not much traffic goes into or out of.
Sure some horrible projects exist and are repeated over and over on social media, but they are the exception.
Most folks working across the street from one of these facilities had no idea until they were told to care.
Why is skipping public review bad news for everyone?
Public review is a blight on the democratic process. Instead of having a set of democratically established laws and regulations that apply fairly to everyone, a small handful of noisy people with too much time on their hands can stop anyone they don't like from doing something that is perfectly legal.
It's an incredibly dumb process and bypassing it is good, actually.
It also has nothing at all to do with whether the environmental regulations themselves are being followed.
Public review in practice is a mechanism for concentrated local interest groups that don't have enough democratic legitimacy to win at the ballot box to instead win via a series of Tuesday night meetings normal people don't go to. There's literature on this: public comment overwhelmingly trends negative. People show up to prevent change. They rarely show up to support it, even if they do support it; normal people feel, reasonably, that their civic responsibility is to vote in actual elections for the policy they support, not to spend their life in City Hall jawboning.
I feel like this is a complicated issue, because there are two competing values here.
On one hand, fair representation is important, and the idea that every person has an equal say in how governmental decisions are made. One person one vote.
On the other hand, not everyone has the same ‘skin in the game’ for different decisions. For example, if we are deciding if a noisy building should be allowed to be built, someone who lives 5 miles away is not going to be affected by the noise, so they aren’t going to care about that. If someone comes to a community and says “we will give everyone in the community $50 if you let us build this loud building here”, then all the people out of the noise range are going to think that is a great deal. They get $50, and they don’t hear the noise anyway. Why WOULDNT they want to approve that?
So is it fair for the community to decide to make one (or a few) people miserable for years so they get $50?
So things like public review that let a “concentrated local interest group” have more power makes some sense if the thing they are reviewing also has a concentrated local impact.
Of course, there has to be some balance, otherwise we will live in a NIMBY world and nothing will be built.
People naturally have varying levels of skin in the game on various issues. They should not have varying levels of voting power. But that's essentially what public comment process does.
And your natural inclination is to assume that turnout at public comment maps to those people most impacted by an issue. But that's not at all the case! Turnout maps to those most activated by an issue, which is a function of how much free time they have (public comment is generally wealthier and older) and how fearful they are of change (public comment biases sharply towards "no").
I'm fond of asking people locally here how many of them have even considering turning out at public comment opportunities to support new apartment development. I've never met someone who has, even though people here are broadly supportive of housing. But go to a Plan or HPC meeting: there's a line of commenters out the door opposing the apartments.
This is a fascinating train of thought. I get the logic, but where does it stop?
If the idea is that any situation where people are influencing the government/making decisions without absolutely everyone in the electorate being involved, is anti-democratic, at what point are people in the government allowed to make decisions without consulting everyone?
We have representatives for a reason, and part of that reason involves making decisions without having a vote (even when that decision is made by someone several rungs down the chain from the person actually elected).
I'm highly sympathetic to the idea that the actual effect of these types of "public comment" situations and hopefully anyone involved in one keeps in mind the inherent biases of who shows up, but I don't see how you can flat out deny the idea of asking people, you know, the voters, to come give opinions on decisions being made that are inbetween the actual elections.
We arrange to have everybody vote on a designated day. We publicize that day. We make a very big deal out of getting people to vote. We don't do it too often. People show up and make decisions. They should then be able to leave and assume those decisions will be put into action. But in local politics they often can't, because interest groups that lost the election will camp every meeting afterwards with canvassed public commenters jawboning officials to make different decisions.
> People show up and make decisions. They should then be able to leave and assume those decisions will be put into action.
But this isn't the case. In every representative democracy around the world, including ours, the bedrock principle is that elected politicians "vote their conscience", i.e. they are not bound by what they said they'll do if elected. So in practice you can't assume that what you voted for will be put into action. If anything, the track record on that is pretty poor.
This again sounds like national politics and not local. They really are totally different. In local politics the electeds are your neighbors. They serve part time. All of them have full-time jobs (except sometimes the mayor). You don't communicate with them by making time with their staff --- none of the have staff. Instead you generally just text them or meet them for coffee. I've never met Tara Stamps, my county commissioner, but I could be face-to-face with her inside a couple days if I wanted. And that's Cook County, one of the largest densest counties in the country.
> I've never met Tara Stamps, my county commissioner, but I could be face-to-face with her inside a couple days if I wanted. And that's Cook County, one of the largest densest counties in the country.
This was literally my point about "public comment".
We vote for representatives. They then make decisions based on all sorts of things like ancient holy texts and whoever they spoke to most recently.
How is this formal meeting to give opinions antidemocratic but you setting up a personal meeting to influence someone is just fine?
That all makes sense - I'm not involved enough in local politics so I can't comment knowledgebly.
But that doesn't mean the people trying to prevent change have (only) invalid reasons.
Voting is critical, but it still lags behind. Kicking someone out of office a year after they sign off on the new data center doesn't stop the data center from getting built.
Yes. I'm specifically not saying that working the refs with canvassed public comment invalidates an underlying substantive grievance. Public comment can be used "for good" or for evil. All I'm saying is that people using it "for good" are helping clear a path for all the evil usage, which I'd claim right now dwarfs the good.
I happen to disagree with most data center opposition, but I'm not saying data center opposition is per se bad because it's delivered through public comment.
> normal people feel, reasonably, that their civic responsibility is to vote in actual elections for the policy they support, not to spend their life in City Hall jawboning.
That's not how the vast majority of this works, and the average best case scenario on this you get to vote a politician out after they already fucked people over.
This sounds like porting assumptions about national and statewide politics into local politics, which is a totally different animal. I hear this a lot from people, and if you're referring to local electeds as "politicians fucking people over", you're probably not thinking locally. If you disagree, can we reconcile our premises? What local politics are you doing that's indicating otherwise to you?
In many environments it ends up acting like a generic "don't build things" mandate. Such a mandate's wins are by accident more often than by target, and it does more harm than good.
I think you have to actually do local politics (I'm assuming you do) to really get just how fucked public comment is as a process, and I think this is an important and useful thing to talk about that just won't be possible to talk about in a data center thread, because of the political valence data centers have taken on.
I live near a small town of about 10,000 people that's about 30 minutes away from a "hot commodity" city. The crown jewel of this small town is the main street, which retains a bit of kitschy Americana that has remained charming for decades and even draws tourists, for whatever reason.
A local business owner bought up one of the blocks in the center of the street and announced plans to demolish it in order to build a 5-over-1 complex several stories higher than any of the other buildings.
Without the public comment process, he'd have been able to do this practically overnight, completely ruining the street. The public fought back long and hard for many months and eventually won by convincing the town council to vote against the rezoning that would permit this construction.
I can't say I'm opposed to the public comment process.
(Note that this was not a case of never-change NIMBYism; tons of other similar buildings are going up all over the town completely unopposed. It was the ugly, generic design and the sheer size put so blatantly in the middle of everyone's favorite part of town.)
I don't know, this sure sounds like NIMBYism to me. Public comment was used to organize against multifamily housing units. That's approximately the whole story; I think you pretty much just have to add "organizing against new renewable and grid upgrades" to complete it.
We can agree to disagree, so long as we can at least recognize NIMBYism when we see it. "Public comment works great because it enabled us to organize to keep a multifamily development out of our vicinity" is like the archetypical NIMBY project.
"5-over-1 or over-1s, also known as a one-plus-five or a podium building,[1] is a type of multi-family residential building commonly found in urban areas of North America", so either you're wrong about them wanting to build a 5 over 1 or wrong about them being multi-family.
The fact you're using this as an example of public review being a good thing shows how fucked up the process is.
You're cheering for the prevention of building new housing in the most valuable, most useful part of the town. I bet it would have kept all the same retail and restaurants in the bottom too, so there would have been zero downside for anyone who actually uses the street.
Instead a bunch of people with no stake except an aesthetic preference blocked it. How on earth is that a good thing?
If you don't own the land and can't demonstrate a direct, severe impact to you and yours from the actions of someone else, you shouldn't have a say.
"More traffic" is not sufficient. I can actually sort of believe shade from an apartment building could count, but the impression I get is that is rarely a good-faith argument (and in any case it should only severely affect a few people in any new development, so you could easily justify just compensating them in some way rather than outright blocking a development.
> several stories higher than any of the other buildings
If the highest other building was 2 stories then it would have been 4 taller. More likely 3? Not several.
I appreciate your complaint about generic design but damn putting apartments downtown sounds amazing actually, not ruining. Would you have been happy if they had a better design and it was 3 over 1?
"5 over 1" refers to the section of the building code, wooden (part 5) over concrete (part 1) or something like that. Coincidentally it's also the number of floors allowed, but a 3 over 1 would be built of something else.
Interesting claim. Wikipedia is unsure but uses the floor count meaning in the article.
> The name derives from the maximum permissible five floors of combustible construction (Type III or Type V) over a fire-resistive Type I podium of one floor for "5-over-1" or two floors for "5-over-2", as defined in the United States–based International Building Code (IBC) Section 510.2.[1][4] Some sources instead attribute the name to the wood framing of the upper construction; the IBC uses "Type V" to refer to non-fireproof structures, including those framed with dimensional lumber.[5][6]
In most US jurisdictions if you pick reasonable ceiling heights plus a little margin for un-level ground making the building effectively taller on one side 6-floors is also about the maximum number of floors you can build before you get kicked in the dick by all the highrise regulatory compliance so that probably has a bit to do with it.
As I understand it, NIMBYism is "don't ever build anything anywhere in the neighborhood/town", not "don't build in this one spot we all really like". As I said, there are tons of other buildings going up over town.
Exactly. The "my" in "my backyard" can apply to everyone therefore nothing gets built. The alternative is everything gets built. There has to be a middle ground, which is what zoning laws are meant to accomplish. We have buildings and multi-family housing going up in our town too, but we also have historically-protected buildings on the main street that require some more work if you want to do stuff with them. This is a good balance.
Zoning laws accomplished what they were intended to do, which was to enforce economic and racial segregation by preventing new affordable housing from being built near areas of opportunity. I don't think anybody working on housing affordability thinks this is a good balance, and the trend is sharply towards rolling these rules back. Apropos this particular thread I think it's notable that the most popular way of accomplishing that is to remove home rule authority for municipalities on zoning minimums and re-vesting that power exclusively in the state, which can't be mugged by local special interest groups spawn camping public comment opportunities.
Well, and also preventing things like slaughterhouses being built in residential areas, as they were often in the 19th century. I rather suspect that the real power behind wanting to repeal zoning laws aren't altruistic people wanting to provide people with affordable housing but people who just want to make as much money as possible, regardless of the effects on people in the neighborhood.
>If you have your own private back yard you're not allowed to refer to condominiums as "luxury".
I live on .1ac in a post-industrial shithole that remains a post-industrial shithole largely because the politics of snooty people mostly a hundred miles away.
The last thing I, or anyone else here, needs is "those people" in our midst telling us how to live. Our lifestyles are fundamentally incompatible.
In the campaign I'm a part of to end exclusionary zoning ("Yes Oak Park"), housing reform opponents claimed to residents that we were advocating for the construction of rock quarries next to people's houses. It's like there's a playbook of bad arguments NIMBYs are drawing from. Thanks for sharing this! It was a useful cite in a local politics discussion.
That's literally what NIMBYs exploiting public comment say: whatever else is happening, at least they're striking back against the psychopathic Private Equity firms who are building all this evil housing.
Blocking datacenter builds is the right thing to do right now. Whether the general public has the right vocabulary to explain why is not so important when the people in charge are actively evil and tasked with the exact opposite of their claimed job title.
We don't agree, but either way, the only thing I'm here to say is that public comment distorts democratic process and entrenches concentrated local interest groups. You're happy about it (in the abstract, apparently) because it's achieving an outcome you support, but mostly what it supports is preventing housing and renewable energy from being built.
Data centers aren't housing and don't always make use of renewable energy. Seems kind of crazy to me that people shouldnt' have a say in what gets built near them. There are certainly things I wouldn't want to live near to, data centers being one of them.
I'm really not sure how I can be clearer about the fact that I don't agree with the prevailing sentiment on these threads about data centers† but that my reason for commenting here is that public comment processes are a nightmare for democratic policymaking.
† (I think they're fine and moreover I think they're a huge missed opportunity for blue states to get more sustainable and regulated power delivered and data centers running under those regulations, rather that what's going to happen, which is data centers all being located in red states that aren't going to regulate them at all).
Texas is a weird case because they're the fastest growing state in the country and they run their own independent power grid --- badly (see: the winter outage a couple years back). And even then: data centers are going to get built in Texas. Gov. Abbott is doing a performative audit thing, but they're ultimately going to clear projects.
> but that my reason for commenting here is that public comment processes are a nightmare for democratic policymaking.
The public comment process has stopped a lot, a LOT, of shitty things from happening at the federal and state government level. I've seen it happen time and time again, because I've been part of it time and time again. Over decades.
So I see this, and to be honest? I'm going to move on! Because this clashes with a lot of extremely personal experiences to me that have shaped public policy and legislation in positive ways. Sometimes people will get it wrong and it can be corrupted by Big Money like anything else, but it's one of the few levers the public has until they start moving to the different boxes of Democracy.
No, I did not! I've written at length about how I engaged with my local municipality on Flock cameras. The search bar will avail. None of it involved public comment.
> Seems kind of crazy to me that people shouldnt' have a say in what gets built near them.
People get really irrational about things built near them and their say causes problems finding anywhere to build reasonable things.
> There are certainly things I wouldn't want to live near to, data centers being one of them.
Give it a residential noise limit and I'm happy to live near a data center. (I am worried about power prices but that's a matter of total number rather than specific location, and utilities charging them enough to cover expansion.)
Given the scale of the buildout, I think it would be sensible to mandate that, for every data center built, the companies doing that must also subsidize a new green power plant somewhere (not necessarily the same region, but where it makes the most sense), proportionally to consumption. Basically each kWh of power has to be compensated. No gas or any other fossil fuels even if there's pre-existing supply.
Separately there's a problem with the lack of enforcement, most notoriously Musk's infamous gas-powered data center that apparently violates a bunch of regulations including noise. Musk does this because he believes that he can get away with it in a sense that the eventual fines, if any, will be dwarfed by the profit extracted. The penalties need to be hefty enough that this computation doesn't work out.
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
"The public having access to information on what corporations plan to do in their communities and having the ability to vote to against what corporations want is a blight on the democratic process" is a crazy stance to take.
What you call "a small handful of noisy people with too much time on their hands" I call "We the People" and it should fall to them to decide what happens in their own communities. It's legal for me to put a hot tub in my living room. My family doesn't have to let me put it there. It's legal to pave over city park in my community and turn them into parking lots, but the people in my city should have a say in that.
> Public review is a blight on the democratic process. Instead of having a set of democratically established laws and regulations that apply fairly to everyone, a small handful of noisy people with too much time on their hands can stop anyone they don't like from doing something that is perfectly legal.
We're talking about data centers, which are deeply unpopular with just about everyone. It's laughable to suggest that skipping public review is a good thing here, because it's only going to result in data centers being sneakily approved contrary to the overwhelming desire of constituents. We can ruminate all day on whether public comments or public review is useful in the grand scheme, but the realpolitik of the situation is that – barring possession of a time machine to go back and elect different representation – it's one of the few levers that constituents have to prevent data centers from moving into their area.
> which are deeply unpopular with just about everyone.
Speak for yourself. Plenty of people support them. The technological progress and economic benefits they bring are good for our country. But are you always an opponent of democracy, or only when you pretend everyone is on your side on an issue?
70% opposition and people who strongly support (7%) continues to decrease. I guess that’s plenty in absolute numbers. But even the Iran war has more supporters than that.
Often not everyone is impacted equally by a policy. So it is reasonable to allow, for example, the people living near a potential data center greater say into what happens.
See, I think it's better if every vote is counted equally, and people with concentrated or high-amplitude opinions about specific issues don't get extra votes. Different strokes, I guess.
Well, if the democratic proces was actually democratic instead of infused with money it could work. As it is now, you buy of some politicians and get your way. If the law is in the way you buy of some other politicians.
democracy is imperfect, I like to view public hearings as helping nudge democracy back toward functionality. Heck humanities very stewardship of our only home in the universe is currently a very dumb process but do we have to delete the stewardship and care, can't we try to improve things, have hearings so we can better pursue solutions to problems?
It's like giving people excessive discretion. Then if you're someone they don't like (eg. a black person if you're racist), then you deal out a maximalist punishment. If they're someone you do like, you let them off and tell them not to do it again.
Policy like this is just corruption. It allows some people to exercise more rights than others, at the expense of the commons.
