“I assumed Republicans would be for this: business, deregulation”
When are we going to stop talking about Republicans like they are still neocons? Republicans haven’t been the pro big-business party in 10 years (did we forget about the tariffs, trade wars, etc that have happened in the last year alone?)
The problem with Republicans is that the core public platform is pure identity nonsense. The people voting for them are voting for that stuff and usually don’t understand their own interests.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the country. GOP policy blew up farming in the 80s, but doubling down on stupid culture war shit in the 90s flipped the farmers. The democratic parties concluded the juice of a contested small voter base wasnt worth the squeeze.
The same rug pull is in play here. Lots of Catholics are on the MAGA train because of their supposed deep convictions. The anti-immigrant Cuban and Mexicans will be the first to hit the “find out” phase.
After I saw over 50% of latino men and close to that of latino women voting for Trump suddenly the idea of English becoming the national language is very attractive to me. You want assimilation with our neo-con hellhole? Earn it.
I'm willing to bet at least 1000 USD that a sufficiently trumpian republican in 2028 will be able to get near or even more latino votes than trump did.
They LOVE the cruelty. The people who hate immigrants most are other immigrants. Brazil didn't end slavery until 1888 and it continued de-facto far longer than it did in the USA. Spain/Portugal were far more cruel/racist than the English and especially french were. Their history is one of extreme, virulent racism.
Even today, they make huge distinctions between the "European" white mexicans who are "untainted" by indigenous blood.
Latinos also are extremely anti-LGBT, and used to be catholic but are having their own evangelization sweeping through their communities (I am personally witnessing it right now). That evangelization is primary in reaction to the precieved liberalism of the current and previous pope.
> When are we going to stop talking about Republicans like they are still neocons? Republicans haven’t been the pro big-business party in 10 years (did we forget about the tariffs, trade wars, etc that have happened in the last year alone?)
Because they're still schizophrenic about that. It's not an either/or thing. Trump likes tariffs, and a protectionist strain has appeared in the Republican party, but the pro big-business/small government stuff is there, just not so monolithically dominant.
There is a difference between neoconservatives and neoliberals. You probably meant the latter, but Republican party was never neoliberal only, it also is, as you write, neoconservative.
It's not really surprising as conservativism and liberalism are both main pillars of capitalism, because the idea of property is based both on authority (like authority, you get the property ostensibly based on your past performance and you keep it indefinitely) and liberty (you can do what you want with it).
It’s not just rural Americans that are against data centers. It’s most working class Americans who understand that data centers increase their everyday expenses significantly, but provide very little daily benefit.
Yeah I'm kind of surprised that people here are calling the opposition to datacenters reflexive NIMBYism. They draw tons of power which causes everybody's utility bills to go up because of the need to add additional electrical capacity, they create very few jobs besides during the initial construction phase, and once the AI boom ends they'll become huge abandoned structures that the very small local police force will then be responsible for guarding. It's a huge net negative for any community they're built in.
Some have been built where there wasn't enough power currently available from the grid but would later be available, and were allowed to operate using temporary power sources until then which can cause serious pollution issues for nearby communities.
A notorious example was/is xAI's Memphis data center. They started out using a loophole that let them power it with dozens of gas turbines without permits that didn't have to meet air pollution standards. (I don't remember for sure, but I think they were using them under a rule that is meant for emergencies like natural disasters).
The surrounding communities, mostly poor and minority with not much political clout, already had air that was significantly worse than wealthier and whiter parts of the area, and the data center pushed that to levels health officials considered to be alarming, like a 79% rise in peak NO2 nearby.
This was actually bad enough that even the Trump administration had to act and the EPA now had a rule making it harder for data centers to exploit that loophole.
But they are still using gas turbines, 15 instead of dozens, and they now are permitted and have more pollution controls, but independent data suggests it remains a major source of the smog in the surrounding neighborhoods. They are expected to be fully on the grid later this year.
Very little daily benefit? I think they have to agree that the magic of applications like Waze or Google Docs or OpenAI don't magically happen without some data center somewhere. It's like people complaining about the smell of hog farms but insisting on eating pork.
Maybe it's better to just say that they're shouldering more of the burden?
>> It’s not just rural Americans that are against data centers. It’s most working class Americans who understand that data centers increase their everyday expenses significantly, but provide very little daily benefit.
> Very little daily benefit? I think they have to agree that the magic of applications like Waze or Google Docs or OpenAI don't magically happen without some data center somewhere. It's like people complaining about the smell of hog farms but insisting on eating pork.
Are you being deliberately obtuse? Pay attention to the context.
It seems like since the AI boom, people have been building more datacenters, that are bigger, and using more power. I mean FFS, memory prices are through the roof and NVIDIA is pulling back from the consumer market. This isn't about building data-centers for "Waze or Google Docs," or any of those applications people actually benefit from.
These datacenters will likely be hastily abandoned once the AI-flavored expansion pops and will be a blight on the land that would have otherwise been growing beans and corn.
At best, they will be a poorly guarded structure that local high school students will break into and do what high school students do.
If you're not around rural America a lot, it can be hard to believe how deeply, at an existential level, ideas like those conveyed by a Gadsden flag are held. Rural Americans really, really do not like being told what to do, by anyone, regardless of whether the person in power's mascot is an elephant or an ass.
It is not surprising in the least that suits from Washington and execs from Silicon Valley descending upon the land like vultures aren't exactly given a warm welcome from regular folk. Even if electricity prices stayed the same there would be damage done that goes beyond NIMBYism that would need to be fixed.
> If you're not around rural America a lot, it can be hard to believe how deeply, at an existential level, ideas like those conveyed by a Gadsden flag are held.
This neatly encapsulates a big part of what I’ve been trying to say on HN for years: those outside “rural America”/“red states” simply do not understand those inside - and to only a slightly lesser degree, vice-versa.
When we say “Don’t Tread on Me”, it’s largely not a political slogan; it’s a shorthand that represents an entire worldview. When others see that as on par with “Yes we can”, “I can’t breathe”, or “Defund the police”, they’re making a mistake.
What’s seen as politics on the coasts is seen as a direct attack on our culture and way of life in the middle of the country.
As always, I want to be clear and say that I’m neither complaining nor offended here. My fear is that the factions in the US will cross each others’ red lines without even understanding what they’re doing. Historically, that’s been the left doing something the right finds untenable without realizing the consequences. These days the opposite is looking more and more likely.
> What’s seen as politics on the coasts is seen as a direct attack on our culture and way of life in the middle of the country.
And the framing of "middle of the country" matters, too. There are many rural parts of New York and California, too, some of which are as deep a shade of red as parts of the South.
>“I assumed Republicans would be for this: business, deregulation,”
AI Data Centers are different than other plants. They provide very little in employment in the region. The few high-paying jobs that may exist can be located in other countries. All that is needed is building maintenance, and that can be contracted out, so no permanent work for the area.
All the Data Center does is use resources, electricity/water, without giving anything back to the community except discounted property tax. The residences, they only see higher utility costs for themselves.
This article seems like more of at attempt on the part of the Wall Street Journal and the prestige media memeplex it represents to characterize AI as harmful and unpopular - particularly unpopular among rural Trump voters - than it is reporting on organic rural opposition to data centers being built. It's heavy on quotes from think tank people, community organizers who clearly talk about rural Republicans as an outgroup, polticians making relatively bland statements, etc., who are talking about AI being bad in a general sense or talking in a meta way about rural opposition to datacenters being a phenomenon that exists. It doesn't have much reporting on local people specifically objecting to data centers near them, or any indication of how many people actually object to this.
My own thinking is that the prestige media memeplex really hates AI and has a big problem with silicon valley tech companies, and this colors all their reporting about AI datacenters. See for instance https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake, and https://www.wired.com/story/karen-hao-empire-of-ai-water-use..., particularly the parts about prestige media journalist Karen Hao getting the amount of water datacenters use wrong by multiple orders of magnitude in order to make AI datacenters seem like a problem. Plenty of people who clearly hate the concept of AI also throw around "datacenter water use" as a general attack against AI, completely thoughtlessly.
I strongly suspect that the prestige media journalists Anvee Bhutani and Amrith Ramkumar who wrote this article are doing something similar. Are there really significant numbers of people in rural areas who object to a thousand-acre data center project? That's not that big in a rural farmland context.
The one thing that strikes me as something rural people might organically care about is if the presence of a data center near them appreciably raises their power bills or makes the local electric grid less reliable. Data centers really do use a lot of electricity, and that's the specific issue the Republican Missouri senator was quoted as addressing. Still, if power bills are actually going up in a way that meaningfully affects people, it shouldn't be hard to find quotes from people who have seen their power bills go up. Increased local energy cost should be the focus of this entire article if that is in fact a problem, and I'm suspicious of the fact that it isn't.
“I assumed Republicans would be for this: business, deregulation”
When are we going to stop talking about Republicans like they are still neocons? Republicans haven’t been the pro big-business party in 10 years (did we forget about the tariffs, trade wars, etc that have happened in the last year alone?)
The problem with Republicans is that the core public platform is pure identity nonsense. The people voting for them are voting for that stuff and usually don’t understand their own interests.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the country. GOP policy blew up farming in the 80s, but doubling down on stupid culture war shit in the 90s flipped the farmers. The democratic parties concluded the juice of a contested small voter base wasnt worth the squeeze.
The same rug pull is in play here. Lots of Catholics are on the MAGA train because of their supposed deep convictions. The anti-immigrant Cuban and Mexicans will be the first to hit the “find out” phase.
After I saw over 50% of latino men and close to that of latino women voting for Trump suddenly the idea of English becoming the national language is very attractive to me. You want assimilation with our neo-con hellhole? Earn it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-only_movement
Trump is now -30 with Latinos.
This is generational damage for anyone (R), and we’re only a year in. They’re losing elections in Trump +17 districts.
Never interrupt your enemy when they’re making a mistake.
I'm willing to bet at least 1000 USD that a sufficiently trumpian republican in 2028 will be able to get near or even more latino votes than trump did.
They LOVE the cruelty. The people who hate immigrants most are other immigrants. Brazil didn't end slavery until 1888 and it continued de-facto far longer than it did in the USA. Spain/Portugal were far more cruel/racist than the English and especially french were. Their history is one of extreme, virulent racism.
Even today, they make huge distinctions between the "European" white mexicans who are "untainted" by indigenous blood.
Latinos also are extremely anti-LGBT, and used to be catholic but are having their own evangelization sweeping through their communities (I am personally witnessing it right now). That evangelization is primary in reaction to the precieved liberalism of the current and previous pope.
> When are we going to stop talking about Republicans like they are still neocons? Republicans haven’t been the pro big-business party in 10 years (did we forget about the tariffs, trade wars, etc that have happened in the last year alone?)
Because they're still schizophrenic about that. It's not an either/or thing. Trump likes tariffs, and a protectionist strain has appeared in the Republican party, but the pro big-business/small government stuff is there, just not so monolithically dominant.
NIMBY over rules stuff like that. It's like pemdas, NIMBY is #1.
Which party do the mega rich vote for? It's primarily not democrats, and especially not the anti-isreal/progressive 40-45% of the democratic party.
Rich people love trumps protectionism and MAGA. Neocons and paternal autocrats, but I repeat myself.
https://theweek.com/politics/us-election-who-the-billionaire...
"the majority of mega-donors back the Republicans and Donald Trump" - direct quote from your article.
There is a difference between neoconservatives and neoliberals. You probably meant the latter, but Republican party was never neoliberal only, it also is, as you write, neoconservative.
It's not really surprising as conservativism and liberalism are both main pillars of capitalism, because the idea of property is based both on authority (like authority, you get the property ostensibly based on your past performance and you keep it indefinitely) and liberty (you can do what you want with it).
It’s not just rural Americans that are against data centers. It’s most working class Americans who understand that data centers increase their everyday expenses significantly, but provide very little daily benefit.
Yeah I'm kind of surprised that people here are calling the opposition to datacenters reflexive NIMBYism. They draw tons of power which causes everybody's utility bills to go up because of the need to add additional electrical capacity, they create very few jobs besides during the initial construction phase, and once the AI boom ends they'll become huge abandoned structures that the very small local police force will then be responsible for guarding. It's a huge net negative for any community they're built in.
Or even daily hindrance if you happen to live next to the datacenter...
Hindrance to what? I'm trying to understand your comment.
Some have been built where there wasn't enough power currently available from the grid but would later be available, and were allowed to operate using temporary power sources until then which can cause serious pollution issues for nearby communities.
A notorious example was/is xAI's Memphis data center. They started out using a loophole that let them power it with dozens of gas turbines without permits that didn't have to meet air pollution standards. (I don't remember for sure, but I think they were using them under a rule that is meant for emergencies like natural disasters).
The surrounding communities, mostly poor and minority with not much political clout, already had air that was significantly worse than wealthier and whiter parts of the area, and the data center pushed that to levels health officials considered to be alarming, like a 79% rise in peak NO2 nearby.
This was actually bad enough that even the Trump administration had to act and the EPA now had a rule making it harder for data centers to exploit that loophole.
But they are still using gas turbines, 15 instead of dozens, and they now are permitted and have more pollution controls, but independent data suggests it remains a major source of the smog in the surrounding neighborhoods. They are expected to be fully on the grid later this year.
They're unbelievably loud
insanely loud. even more so when they are running massive natural gas burning turbines to generate power ...
[dead]
Very little daily benefit? I think they have to agree that the magic of applications like Waze or Google Docs or OpenAI don't magically happen without some data center somewhere. It's like people complaining about the smell of hog farms but insisting on eating pork.
Maybe it's better to just say that they're shouldering more of the burden?
>> It’s not just rural Americans that are against data centers. It’s most working class Americans who understand that data centers increase their everyday expenses significantly, but provide very little daily benefit.
> Very little daily benefit? I think they have to agree that the magic of applications like Waze or Google Docs or OpenAI don't magically happen without some data center somewhere. It's like people complaining about the smell of hog farms but insisting on eating pork.
Are you being deliberately obtuse? Pay attention to the context.
It seems like since the AI boom, people have been building more datacenters, that are bigger, and using more power. I mean FFS, memory prices are through the roof and NVIDIA is pulling back from the consumer market. This isn't about building data-centers for "Waze or Google Docs," or any of those applications people actually benefit from.
Data centers won't feed people.
These datacenters will likely be hastily abandoned once the AI-flavored expansion pops and will be a blight on the land that would have otherwise been growing beans and corn.
At best, they will be a poorly guarded structure that local high school students will break into and do what high school students do.
Corn, that stuff our cars eat?
Nearly half of all corn fields in the US go to feed our cars.
Yes that's a problem too. We'd be better off with solar panels on that land.
The corn that was used in ethanol production, now called distillers grains, is then used as livestock feed for cattle, cows, pigs, poultry, fish, etc.
https://archive.ph/xeAWu
If you're not around rural America a lot, it can be hard to believe how deeply, at an existential level, ideas like those conveyed by a Gadsden flag are held. Rural Americans really, really do not like being told what to do, by anyone, regardless of whether the person in power's mascot is an elephant or an ass.
It is not surprising in the least that suits from Washington and execs from Silicon Valley descending upon the land like vultures aren't exactly given a warm welcome from regular folk. Even if electricity prices stayed the same there would be damage done that goes beyond NIMBYism that would need to be fixed.
> If you're not around rural America a lot, it can be hard to believe how deeply, at an existential level, ideas like those conveyed by a Gadsden flag are held.
This neatly encapsulates a big part of what I’ve been trying to say on HN for years: those outside “rural America”/“red states” simply do not understand those inside - and to only a slightly lesser degree, vice-versa.
When we say “Don’t Tread on Me”, it’s largely not a political slogan; it’s a shorthand that represents an entire worldview. When others see that as on par with “Yes we can”, “I can’t breathe”, or “Defund the police”, they’re making a mistake.
What’s seen as politics on the coasts is seen as a direct attack on our culture and way of life in the middle of the country.
As always, I want to be clear and say that I’m neither complaining nor offended here. My fear is that the factions in the US will cross each others’ red lines without even understanding what they’re doing. Historically, that’s been the left doing something the right finds untenable without realizing the consequences. These days the opposite is looking more and more likely.
> What’s seen as politics on the coasts is seen as a direct attack on our culture and way of life in the middle of the country.
And the framing of "middle of the country" matters, too. There are many rural parts of New York and California, too, some of which are as deep a shade of red as parts of the South.
Market forces are already putting a lot of pressure on AI. The market doesn't work for everything but the invisible hand is coming for AI already.
>“I assumed Republicans would be for this: business, deregulation,”
AI Data Centers are different than other plants. They provide very little in employment in the region. The few high-paying jobs that may exist can be located in other countries. All that is needed is building maintenance, and that can be contracted out, so no permanent work for the area.
All the Data Center does is use resources, electricity/water, without giving anything back to the community except discounted property tax. The residences, they only see higher utility costs for themselves.
So no wonder people are fighting back.
This article seems like more of at attempt on the part of the Wall Street Journal and the prestige media memeplex it represents to characterize AI as harmful and unpopular - particularly unpopular among rural Trump voters - than it is reporting on organic rural opposition to data centers being built. It's heavy on quotes from think tank people, community organizers who clearly talk about rural Republicans as an outgroup, polticians making relatively bland statements, etc., who are talking about AI being bad in a general sense or talking in a meta way about rural opposition to datacenters being a phenomenon that exists. It doesn't have much reporting on local people specifically objecting to data centers near them, or any indication of how many people actually object to this.
My own thinking is that the prestige media memeplex really hates AI and has a big problem with silicon valley tech companies, and this colors all their reporting about AI datacenters. See for instance https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake, and https://www.wired.com/story/karen-hao-empire-of-ai-water-use..., particularly the parts about prestige media journalist Karen Hao getting the amount of water datacenters use wrong by multiple orders of magnitude in order to make AI datacenters seem like a problem. Plenty of people who clearly hate the concept of AI also throw around "datacenter water use" as a general attack against AI, completely thoughtlessly.
I strongly suspect that the prestige media journalists Anvee Bhutani and Amrith Ramkumar who wrote this article are doing something similar. Are there really significant numbers of people in rural areas who object to a thousand-acre data center project? That's not that big in a rural farmland context.
The one thing that strikes me as something rural people might organically care about is if the presence of a data center near them appreciably raises their power bills or makes the local electric grid less reliable. Data centers really do use a lot of electricity, and that's the specific issue the Republican Missouri senator was quoted as addressing. Still, if power bills are actually going up in a way that meaningfully affects people, it shouldn't be hard to find quotes from people who have seen their power bills go up. Increased local energy cost should be the focus of this entire article if that is in fact a problem, and I'm suspicious of the fact that it isn't.