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Comment by rcxdude | Hacker News Reader

The issue is not the intent of the rules, but the actual effect, which is 1) increasing the time and cost involved in building anything, and 2) abuse of those rules by bad-faith actors who wish to block or delay a development that would on average benefit the local community.

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I just voted in favor of California proposition 45, which weakens a huge amount of California environmental review law, specifically in order to prevent it from being weaponized by NIMBYs to block or delay housing developments. Unfortunately it looks like the measure is losing, because housing NIMBYs have a great deal of political power in California. Anyway, I would support similar legislation aimed at allowing data centers to be built for exactly the same reasons.

> that would on average benefit the local community.

The AI boosters appear to have badly failed in convincing local communities of this.

Perhaps they should have started off with an informative AI positive PR campaign rather than ... whatever it was that put local communities off the notion.

The heads of the big AI labs do seem to be pretty catastrophically bad at PR, I do agree. But this is hacker news, I thought we were meant to care about and look at the facts and not get swayed by the PR?

But what are the facts here? What is the benefit to the local community?

The facts will depend on each individual datacenter proposal. I'm not saying they all should be built or that none should be built, but that each one should be based on understanding of what each proposal entails that is grounded in reality as opposed to emotive broad-strokes generalisations that are either false in general or not necessarily true for every example, and ideally the tools available in the decision making process empower the former and not the latter.

What is the benefit of a data center to the local community? This is the real problem. Best case, it’s eh, whatever. It doesn’t provide jobs, but if planned and built properly it is largely inoffensive (provided that it does not cause electricity rates to rise; this is pretty locally specific as different electricity markets work different ways). Worst case, you have Elon Musk putting old jet engines next to your house, or that Bitcoin miner in Texas where neighbours report 90db noise.

At the very least, laws need to prevent the second case.

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