If you think outrage at data centers is merely a CCP plot, then you're going to be in for a bad time. Is China doing something similar to what Russia did during Black Lives Matter, promoting real and fake US accounts to stoke domestic discord? I'm sure. But did that mean there weren't real issues around policing and race in America? Of course not.

Same here. Techies like to say that data centers have always existed, so people must not be objecting to data centers, it must be something else, something nefarious. People don't object to the floors AWS has in some random office building that looks like every other building. Because those were built with planning by corporations usually seeking their own long-term sustainable self interest. If there were tax breaks given, it was usually during periods of economic growth.

Those aren't the kind of datacenters being pumped out and dropped onto communities today in this mad rush to win the new missile race with the new USSR. People are broke, we're in stagflation, none of these datacenters are bringing much of anything of value uniquely to the people who have to deal with their externalities. Even when they bring their own energy to not overload the grid and raise prices, it's usually an onsite literal jet engine powered by natural gas that screams as loud as, well, ever lived by an airport? Now imagine a low-flying plane exactly over your house, 24/7, forever.

I've had a "datacenter" in my apartment or house for decades. Usually it has been a minitower that runs pretty silently in a closet. I got my hands on a used rackserver with 128GB of DDR4 RAM, you know the kind that have fans as loud as a jet engine. Guess who didn't realize exactly how loud those are, even if they're in a closed closet? Or how much heat they generate, especially in the summer? Or exactly how much a sustained 500 watt load costs in California and how that will bump us over our baseline and into extra charges territory?

Yeah, I did to my family exactly what the data centers people are protesting did to those communities. Had I bought a Mac Studio (with even more compute) that sits in a cabinet, my wife would not have vetoed my data center. But I wanted to cut costs and didn't even think about the externalities, just about what I could do what that sweet sweet 128GB of DDR4.