They're building a mass of DC's near me as well in northern IL (not quite as many as by you). I see a lot of weird stuff on social media - people inactive for years all of a sudden becoming super-activists and posting non-stop anti-DC content. Nearly identical content to what's being pushed by a bunch of faceless accounts named like "Water4All","Nature Reign" - something vaguely environmental sounding.
Talking points like:
"We should call data centers what they actually are: surveillance centers designed to put us all in a digital prison by 2030"
It's fishy. People aren't quite showing up and saying the same things at city council meetings, but the local city anti-DC group is full of people reposting this stuff. One clickbait article in particular, "there's no such thing as a closed loop system".
There's real concerns with the data centers. But, the opposition to them doesn't feel entirely organic (imo).
That's not incorrect though; you're still needing to shed the heat energy SOMEWHERE. Thermodynamics alone dictates that basic fact. You may not waste the cooling solution but all that excessive GPU heat is going to need to go somewhere - and the only place it ultimately goes is right into the environment.
Ever stand a bit away from a campfire because you got too warm, only to have the wind hit it and blow hot air over you? Same thought exercise applies here.
This one data center in Ohio claimed to be a closed loop system, but then dumped their blowdown directly into the water table or something and now everyone's tap water is weird.
That is miles away from how your average "closed loop" system operates. There should be accountability for DC operators, but that's not what people take away from the article. What people take away from the article is, "All the data center companies lie, and are the worst sorts of damn dirty polluters and they will ruin your town".
Yeah, but the thing is - those guys aren't using the majority of data center capacity out there.
The Anti-DC crowd doesn't appreciate that the surveillance state is coming with our without all these DC's being built. That is going to get hosted some where, some way. The fix is regulatory and political.
The government has the kind of power needed to rein in all of these privacy issues by regulating big tech. It will be difficult, but more difficult things have been achieved in our lifetime. Join the EFF. Contact your congress people.
What I'm actually saying is the anti-DC people are trying to solve a societal level problem only peripherally related to the thing they are trying to ban at a local level. That seems a lot harder than getting congress to care about privacy issues.
That is why the E stands for Executive. COO's run the company. The CEO wines and dines and handles vision and escalations. You have described it to a T.
Now, sometimes CEO's run he company. Often not though.
It's also the rolodex they come with. They've got the friend that knows someone on the board of the company you want to talk to so now instead of sales doing a cold outreach your company has a meeting with their CEO directly that no one else would normally be able to get. Neither CEO is that technical, and your technical merits had absolutely no impact on if you got the meeting or not, literally just a who-knows-who game. But yeah sure, an AI will replace that.
Texas is particularly wild to me as a midwesterner. All the bibles and megachurches and all that and... They have strip clubs freaking everywhere! Really weird zoning laws as well - I recall seeing a strip club across the street from an Office Depot, next to a deli. The suburbs where I live, you have to go to a seedy part of town so you feel good and ashamed about it. lol
Some TV shows rightfully take aim at this contradiction (recently: The Hunting Wives).
> That's different from hearing their client saw a picture of the abuse of a total stranger.
I get it, actually. It's totally possible the picture in question was not known to authorities prior. That's called due diligence to look into it.
Adults not looking into things or following up on things are how the system fails children if you read some accounts of people who were abused by their guardians. Horrifying stuff.
It could theoretically help to flag those images. But that kind of submission should be anonymous. It shouldn't ruin the ability for someone to get therapy.
Mandatory reporting makes sense for situations you are connected to. And even then there's presumably good reasons not everyone is a mandatory reporter. This goes way beyond that, mandatory reporting once removed for someone that doesn't know a single person involved.
Hell, reporting someone for that doesn't even guarantee the images get looked into! If they didn't save history they're probably not feeling like going back to the site to demonstrate. Similar if it was sent against their will and they deleted it right away.
(We're not supposed to talk about downvotes, but boy have I seen my comments fluctuate up and down at the top, which is highly unusual. In most web open forums I take part in, anything connected to this brings in lots of "new" users, some or many of which end up being bots. I upvoted you, for the record.)
I've noticed on Facebook that when you make a comment on a political article, you will sometimes - within a minute or two - start getting failed login attempts or password reset attempts on your account.
Given that your email address and phone are not visible unless you explicitly share them (and I use a pseudonym on FB), the implications are frankly chilling.
Could be coincidence, could be a data leak from Meta that wasn't reported, could be outside groups using LLMs to match profiles of text to external sources that do have your name...
It's a wild world out there in political technology, and I probably can't even guess what's going on with half of it.
Way back in the early 2010s I went to a data science meetup, way before facial recognition and face processing was easy, and found out that Facebook was tracking the faces in every photo, building databases of locations, times, and people out of it all, even for people without accounts, etc. And that was just a side project! 15 years ago!
For motivated groups operating without the usual bounds of being part of the US government, the sky is the limit in what they can do. Buying data from Thompson Reuters is really mild compared to what I'm sure is going on inside of PACs within the US. When you add in the state groups operating outside the US on US social networks with the goal of spreading distrust and disunity, I have zero doubt that it's possible somebody is scraping the replies to political articles and trying to take control of accounts that show any interest in politics, to use those accounts for other purposes because they appear to be valid accounts instead of bots.
> I have zero doubt that it's possible somebody is scraping the replies to political articles and trying to take control of accounts that show any interest in politics, to use those accounts for other purposes because they appear to be valid accounts instead of bots.
I can't prove it, but it sure looks like this is what's going on with some of the accounts which are posting anti-datacenter content on FB. Old ladies inactive for years who all of a sudden become super activists.
A wild world indeed, and frustratingly one that Meta doesn't seem bothered by. Presumably because it drives engagement.
In addition to the immediate gains of engagement, the ability to manipulate public opinion through campaigns like this are pretty explicitly the goal of some Silicon Valley oligarchs, especially the PayPal Mafia. They believe that they can control the monster that they have created in their own favor. Time will tell!
VPN is also common in those discussions, it's more setup on the client side but can win on security. Of course there'd be a lot of people in trouble if you couldn't trust tailscale to be better than a beginner selfhoster on security so it's still a good goto option.
It is legal by default. The question is: why isn't it illegal?
Some quick searching suggests this scenario hasn't been tested in the courts. Like most things, you have to take it to the federal courts and establish case law, OR pass a law (good luck).
It shouldn't be allowed. Microsoft shouldn't allow this, but they do, because they like having revenue from business partners.
I grew up with a C64, and the story resonated with me. Not as much about getting pirates games to run, but more trying to play the latest games on our old 386 which came after the C64.
A friend of mine said, "PC gaming creates techies". Does it still? I hope so.
Talking points like:
"We should call data centers what they actually are: surveillance centers designed to put us all in a digital prison by 2030"
It's fishy. People aren't quite showing up and saying the same things at city council meetings, but the local city anti-DC group is full of people reposting this stuff. One clickbait article in particular, "there's no such thing as a closed loop system".
There's real concerns with the data centers. But, the opposition to them doesn't feel entirely organic (imo).
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