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Comment by Dylan16807 | Hacker News Reader

Well I guess the question is whether those protestors were representative of the community as a whole. 3 million dollars in tax revenue per year is a pretty good upside.

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Anecdata to be sure, but I can tell you that no one I've talked to was pro data center. I'm sure those people must exist somewhere but somehow I've never run into them in real life.

For datacenters being built at all I want them to invest enough in power production to avoid contributing to price spikes. And for them being near me I want strict noise controls.

But if both of those are met, I'll be pro-datacenter if it can offset checks the size of Hermantown $800 per household per year in taxes.

That's just selection bias. The majority of people I know are pro data center. In fact, I'd struggle to find anyone who isn't.

I write blog posts like this

https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-06-24/The_Amenity_...

and my friends wear T-shirts like this

https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/File:Photo_-_Ben%27s_T-shirt...

Here, this article from the current front page may help you find some of those people who aren't pro data center: https://www.semafor.com/article/11/04/2026/us-voters-roundly...

Oh, I don't need that. I've always been fully aware they exist. I'm just pointing out that they're not in my circle. My friends are quite literally highly selected.

That’s because people hate them!

https://news.gallup.com/poll/709772/americans-oppose-data-ce...

70% of Americans are against having them locally. By group, “Strongly oppose” is about 50%, “strongly approve” is only 7%.

Doesn't really seem like the city was interested in finding an answer to that question.

They refused to reschedule to a larger venue (and more hours?) but since they can count how many people showed up and watched and emailed my guess is that wouldn't have given them a much more accurate picture. In some ways I feel like they should have done it anyway, in other ways I don't know if it would have made any difference. It's certainly a lot less illuminating than a community vote...

When the article says "most" people spoke against the proposal, that's an unfortunate gap in the reporting. Was it 60% or was it 95% or where in between?

You'd have to take a public poll. The public comment period could be overwhelmingly negative even with the community in broad support because the "pro data-center" posture only requires silence.

Only $3 million? They’re dealing with one of the richest companies on earth and said company is currently trying hard to find where to shove these things.

I frankly have to think $3m is low.

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