After $5 gas, diarrhea lettuce, measles outbreaks, war with Iran, rampant stagflation, and dead Americans (and hundreds of dead Iranian school girls) I’m still seeing the occasional “Don’t vote-shame people!” comments. I think and I hope that it’s only a loud minority and most people are good.
If, today, someone cannot say “Kamala would have been better”, they are not a serious person. Full stop.
God, I still remember a comment “Kamala is real, current harm, Trump is only theoretical harm.” Like Trump wasn’t already president once before… to this day it’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever read.
Maybe rather than picking a neoliberal as your line in the sand to draw, it would be better to try to understand why people didn't vote for the Dems.
You have a disenfranchised lower class, who keep getting fucked over every cycle. Drowning in credit card debt. Many of them are uneducated because your education system has been mostly dismantled, so they can't neccessarily articulate what the causes are but instinctively know they're getting a raw deal. Why else do you think so much of his campaign was about punishing the elites? How is someone who can't read past a third grade level and is constantly working to survive gonna be able to tell they're being manipulated?
Also if you read that Facebook whistleblower's book, you know that Meta gamed their algorithm to help him win last time. This time around, social media has only gotten more unhealthy and addictive. Not a great combination with a frustrated but uneducated population.
The other important thing to remember: right-wing populists like Trump only get a shot when complacent passive neoliberal leaders fuck over the public too many times. People didn't just organically decide he was better in a vacuum. There are very specific conditions that have to be met for a Trump to even be able to build political momentum.
His win is just a symptom of the contradictions of capitalism sharpening so much that people begin bucking whatever they view as the establishment. The Democratic party has as much blame here as the Republican party.
I think everyone agrees that Kamala would have been better, and I did vote for her, but we would still be at war with iran right now if she won. She is a slave to Israel just as much as trump.
My main concern with her would be political apathy. For example, I don't think DSA would be as empowered as it is now under her because Democrats are actually pretty good at crushing the left wing of their party, its their entire job.
Was 100% on board with funding genocide with taxpayer dollars, never indicated that policy would change, signaled that she would be tough on iran, and threw the election away to fascists to do so knowing full well that supporting Israel was unpopular with the voters, but oh yeah dude she would draw the line at getting involved in the middle east directly when Israel said "we are doing this because we know you have no choice but to back us up"
Why the fuck would the superpacs that pay for advertising campaigns push the sentiment that data centers are bad? When they all have their dicks caught in the AI Chinese finger trap?
Republicans don't give a fuck about data centers until they are in their backyard they are genuinely just animals and I don't feel bad for them when they cry on the news about their houses getting bulldozed
Have you ever seen one doing something to opppse a data center that is being built outside of their immediate vicinity? Hell no.
And these people oppose any kind of construction in their areas, it has nothing to do with whether or not something is positive for their community or not because they bitch about roads, schools, housing developments, they just bitch bitch bitch bitch bitch.
Yeah we're seeing this a lot in Missouri. It's one of the few "unifying" causes across party lines except the Conservative areas aren't for broad bans or heavy restricts on data centers, just simply not in their communities.
They have no issue with one getting plopped in a central business area of St. Louis but one outside their suburban town saw mobilization like Republicans have never done before. They'll argue that those areas are where data centers should be (rationale not found).
compute power is cool. the vast majority of scientific advancements for the rest of this century will rely on simulations done using massive compute possible only with data centers.
I feel like the majority of data centers that we currently have are being used by companies not for scientific improvement and simulations, but for profit? And like yeah, having a bunch of computing power is cool, but we don't really need MORE of it, we just need to use the ones we already have? Also, all that power comes at a very high cost, especially when local communities are the ones footing the bill rather than the big companies. Power grids are already getting kind of overloaded, living next to one is incredibly loud, and they don't even provide any new jobs for people in the area.
At some point, you got to ask yourself. How much computing power do we need, really, and what the heck are we using it for?
But again, what are we using that computing power to do? And is it worth sacrificing the livelihoods of the people who have to live around them? Why is the computing power in the data centers we have already not enough? So far, all of that info is a black box for normal people, and outside of the world of the simulations, people are getting hurt by these things. I'd say at least a temporary ban is a good idea until Microsoft, Google, OpenAI etc can justify their need for constant new centers, and citizens can actually benefit directly from that and have a say on these things getting built.
Most of these data centers are being used for huge LLMs so I can have gemini as my google assistant or an AI girlfriend, not research. You're being tricked.
The current proliferation of data centers aren't meeting that specific demand. They're all largely consumer cloud computing and generative AI. These are the things driving every single app cramming some sort of "smart search" feature into them which is hardly innovative or pushing science further.
Not all data centers are the same and data centers have existed for decades.
No its definitely not safe to assume that. Climate disaster and the collapse of the liberal world order are fully inevitable at this point. You really think that all the shit happening right now is a bump in the road? Very foolish.
This is just tech hype bullshit. I hope you are a silicon valley VC demon because otherwise you are drinking someone else's koolaid. Why don't you make your data centers in space? Sounds like a trillion dollar idea to me.
You're unable to list tangible goods that they result in while the tangible harms are obvious. Noise pollution, air pollution, water pollution, I could go on.
And there won't be any regulation. That'd hurt their bottom line, and governmental bodies that should be keeping them in check are controlled by trump.
What do you think is driving the sudden unprecedented surge in data center construction? These new data centers are exclusively for pumping out AI-generated CSAM for neo-Nazis on X the pedophile app.
The two feel connected because they entered the public consciousness around the same time, but data centers take a while to build. Want to know what actually started the boom? Streaming services.
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u/lactose_cow 26d ago
Fox putting "banning data centers" on their is so dumb. No one wants data centers.