> the bubble

> the jenga tower

I am not so sure about these narratives anymore.

I don't think it's a bubble

>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.

> 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.

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?

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 mean, like this?

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/pfas-forever-chem...

"Great" news indeed.

Seems to me public review is a failsafe - an acknowledgement that laws and regs can't always keep up with real life harms.

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.

"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.

> 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...