Comment by phil21

4 days ago

> It makes me want to fucking cry, what's happening to my country.

Same. We used to be a country that could get things done. Stuff like power generation and transmission lines were built out well ahead of expected demand, with resiliency baked in. Negative impacts were there, but understood as part of the whole living in society thing. Reasonable minds came together and made the best choices possible at scale and mitigated negative externalities to individuals as much as possible. We understood spending a decade on impact studies and lawsuits helped no one.

We decided to protect the absurd, so we shall get the absurd as workarounds. Folks (collectively speaking) didn't want transmission lines running through their farmland or whatnot, so now we get absurd workarounds like standing up gas turbines in datacenter parking lots.

It's going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better, since this has become the only way to get anything done.