There are two simultaneous problems that I've come to understand with datacenters and the people that live in their proximity:

1. Somehow the public is always left holding the bag for increased transmission costs despite the cause of the increase being a single (or short list) of outliers.

2. The residential public, as is tradition, is always asked to scale down for industrial demand.

How can we imagine expanding a system that results in both of these outcomes? That, to me, seems to be the thing to fix first.

This is the same issue for water in California as well. Growing water thirsty crops in a desert to use an allocation while average people are asked to conserve.

Transferring wealth from the young and poor to the old and wealthy is the entire purpose of our government.

This is now the endpoint we are bouldering towards: the bottom 90% increasingly have nothing left to steal or exploit. And just like an algal bloom that eventually runs out of oxygen and dies, this is where this system and our society unravels.

The reality is that these data centers make money for billionaire douchebags.

And unlike the billionaire douchebags of yesteryear they don't invest in the local economy. NOTHING IS TRICKLING DOWN In fact our modern billionaire douchebags love talking about how much they hate humanity.

The idea that capitalism off loads the cost of externalities onto the unwitting public is nothing new. This is just the most recent and obvious version. Air anbd water pollution are the old ones. They make the pollution and the public pays for it with superfund sites or increased health care costs.

The solution is having the consumer pay for the externalities when they use the product. But this would make AI so much more expensive. When you use AI you are exploiting other people. Just keep that in mind.

How will this be fixed when the public doesn’t have any power to make changes, and politicians are bribed—i.e., lobbied—by all these companies building data centers?