It really ought to be possible to structure the utility contracts such that a new data center lowers every one else’s rates instead of raising them. And it really ought to be possible to design a tax system such that the data center actually pays its way on an ongoing basis.

(For obvious reasons we're not going to get data centers, because like every dense metro area we're the most expensive conceivable place to put them --- I'm ambivalent about the data center argument, they're going to go somewhere, might as well put them where they're welcome.)

I've found "family farms" that will sell you raw milk and some freshly-butchered mutton. There is a local news story, ongoing here, about a gentleman and his family that just wants to give out free bottles of water to passers-by but his HOA is being a big old meanie-head. It turns out that this family is running a full-on business from their garage, and the water bottles are a marketing strategy to drum up customers.

Is it any surprise, that in a nation built by wealthy landowners who derived profit from their home estates, that "home ownership seen as an investment" is not so much a money pit but a lot of free space to open up your office and your workspace and start extracting some value out of it, zoning regulations, commercial insurance, and business licensing be damned?

Imperceptible compared to two incredibly loud things that most people wouldn't want built within a few hundred feet of their home. Some of the defenses of these datacenters in this thread are so poorly framed that it makes me wonder who actually wrote them.

Now that I think about it were do all these tech bros live...

A technologically impressive innovation that is ultimately doomed by being too loud and so expensive that it mostly benefits the rich before the costs just become too high for even that to be practical? That's the positive analogy?

Those data centers require a ton of extra power infrastructure and the costs of those get front-loaded on the consumers already in the area, driving up their rates. The data centers get tax breaks because they can afford to buy the politicians, who get to claim progress and a bunch of other things that the poor won't see in their lifetimes, nor will their descendants. The progress and its outcomes might benefit society as a whole, in some small way, but the cost to society in terms of economic and environmental destruction will never be borne by the wealthy and will never equalize out because income disparity never lessens.

We're already starting to see some of the effect in lost jobs because business owners see AI as a replacement for technical labor. The people who are losing their jobs aren't being retrained and are becoming the equivalent of modern day coal-miners.

Meanwhile, their energy costs are rising to subsidize a data center that will be used to run an AI that will replace them and the owners will get richer.

But hey, at least the data center isn't in their backyard.