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Comment by yojo | Hacker News Reader

State government leadership did change in unexpected ways, and they do get to pass laws. See: Texas

Yes. I actually hadn't read the article before commenting because initially the link was to the Reddit thread. The data center buildout slowing, with Texas (among others) blocking otherwise expected to be built data centers is probably a significant justification for re-evaluating the business.

The "planned" capacity in Texas represented over 40% of the total power generation of the entire USA, how did the market think that was going to get built even without moratoriums?

Maybe they planned literally THOUSANDS of "walkaways" or "wheelhouses" with horses or cattle going round and round in circles powering generators, every 4 hours new, fresh horses go online and the previous go to pasture to eat more grass.

Grass / weeds to data center power conversion achieved !

$2–3 trillion dollars would honestly be about the right price to do that.

Curious to see your working out for that statement, if you have it handy.

Thinking is a disadvantage when you're playing Hot Potato

> how did the market think

Wait, what? When does the market think at all?

If your business is this faulty that you have to rely on subverting democratic norms maybe you don't deserve to run a business in said society.

> If your business is this faulty that you have to rely on subverting democratic norms

I'm not seeing the relationship between building datacenters and subverting democratic norms. Could you explain?

the people building datacenters don't want to go through the normal process. they want special exceptions to do whatever they like and put the externalities on other people.

My take is that they get subsidized energy prices and the average person is going to pick up the tab. That doesn’t seem very fair.

It's worked out quite well for social media, so why not AI?

Did social media REQUIRE to subvert democratic norms or is it just that social media was so good/powerful that it ended up inadvertently hurting democratic norms and that social fabric?

I didn't think your Facebooks and Twitters required shady data center deals and circumvention to actually establish a viable business model.

>I didn't think your Facebooks and Twitters required shady data center

there were years of debate on whether or not a lot of the things early social media groups did constituted violations of, and not limited to : FTC Act Sect 5, the electronics communications privacy act, the CFAA, the video privacy protection act, and us state privacy laws from coast to coast.

they just did what they wanted, lawyered up, got big enough to lobby, and became legal ..

point is, these groups aren't stranger to 'shady deals'.

Fair point.

Neither. Governments and other politically aligned entities realized social media was useful and it was intentionally used to hurt democratic norms and the social fabric. It was neither an accident nor an intentional part of their business model (with Facebook being a possible exception.)

It's heresy to say here but related content algorithms aren't inherently evil.

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