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Comment by betterunix2 | Hacker News Reader

OK, let's take that example. It is true -- landlords are responsible for raising rents, and they do so in response to demand for housing. In some places, landlords are not allowed to arbitrarily raise rents -- for example, by limiting rent increases to follow the CPI. In theory you could regulate utility rates to insulate communities from the impact of DCs and other industrial operations.

Like I said, it is a nitpick and there are bigger problems here.

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> you could regulate utility rates to insulate communities from the impact of DCs and other industrial operations.

Yes, that's what the politicians in question are proposing.

This reminds me of the short-form video (Daily Show?) I saw recently of a man in a red hat insisting that the government should facilitate union workers increasingly gaining ownership of the companies and corporations they work for.

You know, like workers seizing the means of production.

But then in the next breath condemning the concept of socialism. But probably because JD Vance himself has redefined socialism to mean forcing girls to play with boys in sports.

Right, but the point is not that it is possible, it is that there are other, more important issues here. Let's say we regulate the utilities so that residential customers will not be impacted by industrial users (or by DC operators specifically). The result would be higher utility bills for those industrial users, which would encourage the use of things like turbine generators -- which I would say is a negative outcome we should avoid.

It needs to be carefully thought out (Congress does not have the best record on this -- see e.g. the ban on onion futures). As I suggested elsewhere, a better idea would be to require DCs to pay the local community in proportion to the electricity consumed by the DC, and an even larger payment to the local community if the DC does not get its power from the grid (to discourage less efficient/more polluting power generation). Yes, rates would be higher, but people would be compensated with cash and it would be a big incentive for industrial users to be more energy efficient and a small nudge for residential users.

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