Comment by miki123211
8 hours ago
There's more to NIMBY than "thrashing your land."
The US seems to have a "tragedy of the commons" problem when it comes to NIMBYism. Everybody wants X to exist, but X causes some negative externalities for the people living close to it, so nobody wants X build specifically in their back yard, they want it but built somewhere else. Because the US seems to delegate these decisions to a much more local / granular level than Europe does, nobody has the courage to vote "yes", so X never gets build.
Who should decide whether E.G. an airport or a datacenter gets build? Should it just be the people living next to it? Should it be everybody in the relative vicinity who would use its services? Should it be everybody in the country (indirectly through the elected representatives)? I think those are the right questions to ask here.
I think what you are talking about is called "tragedy of the anticommons" [1].
Who gets to decide if an airport or data center gets built is a complicated question. But there are other options to keeping one party in the dark via NDAs. On one extreme we have eminent domain, on the other there's just buying out the local community transparently.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_anticommons
"Tragedy of the commons" is suffering from people overusing it.
The idea that data centers have to be built near homes (or anywhere people live or work) is absurd. The US is huge and vast amounts of open spaces.
The people who work in the datacenters don't want a long commute.
Also, in a remote area, the third parties the owners require for continual maintenance will be fewer, take longer to respond, likely cost more, and may be less qualified than those you can find in a more populated area.
Very few people work in datacenters
Pay them more then
so datacenters should be allowed to come into communities, consume their resources and barely hire the local populace?
What? A 5 minute drive is miles, and that's plenty far enough. They are currently being built within 100 meters of homes. It's absolutely insane.
EDIT: https://youtu.be/t-8TDOFqkQA?si=Qa9ot70MylFp6qkE
Just watch that and not get hoppin' mad.
Arguably, an 800 person town is likely quite far from most.
An airport that services large passenger jets will absolutely tank property values if you happen to fall within the flight path. Yet I don't believe that owners typically receive any compensation when that happens. I assume other externalities are handled similarly (ie not handled at all). Then it shouldn't be surprising that people don't want to be the one to take the fall for everyone else's benefit.
> Everybody wants X to exist
Hardly "everybody" wants AI to exist.