Comment by GolfPopper
10 hours ago
This is bad news for everyone (well, except the high priests of the LLMs / nascent Cthulhoid godlings), but it certainly makes the communities who've successfully opposed data centers seem ever more justified in retrospect.
Poor old America.
I think you'll need to wait for the Orange Toddler to pass away before you can get anywhere with reinstating environmental checks and balances.
Even then you'll need to contend with large corporations with buckets of money... and the Republican party...
Pejoratives aside, it’s also bad news for AI companies.
Anyone who knows the story of the US auto industry in the 1970’s and 1980’s knows how excessive government protection for an industry works out.
I don't know that story. Can you summarize?
They became lazy and uncompetitive, and were eventually overrun by Japanese imports. It's probably reasonable to say they never really recovered.
Why is skipping public review bad news for everyone?
Public review is a blight on the democratic process. Instead of having a set of democratically established laws and regulations that apply fairly to everyone, a small handful of noisy people with too much time on their hands can stop anyone they don't like from doing something that is perfectly legal.
It's an incredibly dumb process and bypassing it is good, actually.
It also has nothing at all to do with whether the environmental regulations themselves are being followed.
Seems to me public review is a failsafe - an acknowledgement that laws and regs can't always keep up with real life harms.
Public review in practice is a mechanism for concentrated local interest groups that don't have enough democratic legitimacy to win at the ballot box to instead win via a series of Tuesday night meetings normal people don't go to. There's literature on this: public comment overwhelmingly trends negative. People show up to prevent change. They rarely show up to support it, even if they do support it; normal people feel, reasonably, that their civic responsibility is to vote in actual elections for the policy they support, not to spend their life in City Hall jawboning.
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You can't give all citizens effective veto power and then expect it will only be used for good in cases where the law is behind.
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I think you have to actually do local politics (I'm assuming you do) to really get just how fucked public comment is as a process, and I think this is an important and useful thing to talk about that just won't be possible to talk about in a data center thread, because of the political valence data centers have taken on.
I live near a small town of about 10,000 people that's about 30 minutes away from a "hot commodity" city. The crown jewel of this small town is the main street, which retains a bit of kitschy Americana that has remained charming for decades and even draws tourists, for whatever reason.
A local business owner bought up one of the blocks in the center of the street and announced plans to demolish it in order to build a 5-over-1 complex several stories higher than any of the other buildings.
Without the public comment process, he'd have been able to do this practically overnight, completely ruining the street. The public fought back long and hard for many months and eventually won by convincing the town council to vote against the rezoning that would permit this construction.
I can't say I'm opposed to the public comment process.
(Note that this was not a case of never-change NIMBYism; tons of other similar buildings are going up all over the town completely unopposed. It was the ugly, generic design and the sheer size put so blatantly in the middle of everyone's favorite part of town.)
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At least in this instance it's a counterbalance against the psychopathic tech CEOs
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Wait, we're talking about public comment.
That doesn't give anyone veto power, the worst people can do is say mean comments and make the listeners feel bad before they do the thing anyway.
Moving to cut off comments is simply breathtaking arrogance, which is on brand for this regime.
> Public review is a blight on the democratic process. Instead of having a set of democratically established laws and regulations that apply fairly to everyone, a small handful of noisy people with too much time on their hands can stop anyone they don't like from doing something that is perfectly legal.
We're talking about data centers, which are deeply unpopular with just about everyone. It's laughable to suggest that skipping public review is a good thing here, because it's only going to result in data centers being sneakily approved contrary to the overwhelming desire of constituents. We can ruminate all day on whether public comments or public review is useful in the grand scheme, but the realpolitik of the situation is that – barring possession of a time machine to go back and elect different representation – it's one of the few levers that constituents have to prevent data centers from moving into their area.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-does-everyone-hate-data-cen...
> which are deeply unpopular with just about everyone.
Speak for yourself. Plenty of people support them. The technological progress and economic benefits they bring are good for our country. But are you always an opponent of democracy, or only when you pretend everyone is on your side on an issue?
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"The public having access to information on what corporations plan to do in their communities and having the ability to vote to against what corporations want is a blight on the democratic process" is a crazy stance to take.
What you call "a small handful of noisy people with too much time on their hands" I call "We the People" and it should fall to them to decide what happens in their own communities. It's legal for me to put a hot tub in my living room. My family doesn't have to let me put it there. It's legal to pave over city park in my community and turn them into parking lots, but the people in my city should have a say in that.
Thank you for this take.
It's like giving people excessive discretion. Then if you're someone they don't like (eg. a black person if you're racist), then you deal out a maximalist punishment. If they're someone you do like, you let them off and tell them not to do it again.
Policy like this is just corruption. It allows some people to exercise more rights than others, at the expense of the commons.
Often not everyone is impacted equally by a policy. So it is reasonable to allow, for example, the people living near a potential data center greater say into what happens.
See, I think it's better if every vote is counted equally, and people with concentrated or high-amplitude opinions about specific issues don't get extra votes. Different strokes, I guess.
> except the high priests of the LLMs / nascent Cthulhoid godlings
Let's not be this flippant about where the real pressure for this is coming from. Presidents and their appointees come and go. The people pushing the regulators[1] are not subject to US election cycles. It's important to know who they are when we aim our finely honed fingers, even if we find that these folks were formerly virtuous and mighty green energy advocates, because if your solution is merely different figureheads, all that will really change is the scale of the bribes.
[1] https://www.datacentercoalition.org/members
>Presidents and their appointees come and go. The people pushing the regulators[1] are not subject to US election cycles.
While true, it’s also true that presidents and their appointees can vary wildly in their susceptibility to those “people pushing”. Both sides might be bad, but one’s very obviously worse.
> except the high priests of the LLMs / nascent Cthulhu-oid godlings...
I did not say that, but is so obvious, like looking through a plate glass window. There is no pressure, its just a natural transition to the end of bipedal life.
It isn't flippant, it's just not exclusively focused on your target of choice.
It also sustains the bubble for a bit longer. I'm genuinely curious/anxious to see when and how the bubble bursts. It could end up being something seemingly trivial or random and completely illogical that finally topples the jenga tower.
> the bubble
> the jenga tower
I am not so sure about these narratives anymore.
Both bubble and Jenga tower are examples of unstable systems that can persist for an unexpectedly long time.
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I don't think it's a bubble
The dot com boom was a bubble. Doesn't mean that the underlying web technology that powered it was bad or worthless. But the valuations definitely were. AI, in its current form, will be around for a long time, maybe even as ubiquitous as the internet is today, a few decades from now. But the situation right now can definitely be classified as a bubble.
It’s a bubble. “AI” could be quite successful at this point, and the economics still don’t work out.
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>(well, except the high priests of the LLMs / nascent Cthulhoid godlings
This is potentially good news for everyone who wants to do anything less dirty than a datacenter (logistics, cold chain, light manufacturing/assembly, etc) because they'll probably be able to get the precedent extended to them in the next decade or so. The people and communities that make money off that sort of stuff will probably do well. Most of that sort of industry is in poorer sections of states where the municipalities are constantly being hamstrung by their own state because the municipalities want to permit it but state rules make that hard. So there is potential for some good to come out of it.
> Most of that sort of industry is in poorer sections of states where the municipalities are constantly being hamstrung by their own state
Oh yes, the well-known path to riches by being a toxic dumping ground.
To be fair he didn't say who was getting rich, presumably the people making the deals, not the chumps left with the cleanup and the bill.
These exemptions are not granted based on logic or precedent. "Less dirty" has nothing to do with it. They're entirely based on open bribery. This will be granted to any industry that bribes the administration enough. What's the good news again?
All that stuff is more dirty to the local community than your average datacenter.
The vast majority of these these no one knows even exist until told. They are basically warehouses without loading docks not much traffic goes into or out of.
Sure some horrible projects exist and are repeated over and over on social media, but they are the exception.
Most folks working across the street from one of these facilities had no idea until they were told to care.
I mean, like this?
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/pfas-forever-chem...
"Great" news indeed.
oh! "This will benefit the 2%, while the 1% burns the earth to the ground"
This is like Republicans claiming that they're doing everything for small businesses, when the reality is they're doing things for contract workers who more often are just being forced into contracts that wouldn't exist without the lax regulatory reality and are abused thereof.
"This will benefit the little guy (assuming they survive their cancer diagnosis)"
I just heard this last night: buried in the "support for small business" was the repeal (or effectively neuteringO of the Corporate Transparency Act's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.
https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2026/09/10/treasury-launder-mon...
That program had a simple ask of every corporation doing business in America: who really owns it? No more hiding of ill gotten gains and laundering through US real estate, etc (hint: anybody come to mind who might do a lot of that)?.
They killed it. To "protect small businesses".
The Trump Regime is pure corruption.
Financial Crimes Enforcement Network
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This seems like yet another piece in a build up to a civil war. And those in governance know it.