How many of them are build near wealthy neighborhood?
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Wealthy people just hire lawyers to resist.
Holtzman describes himself as “a philosopher and data scientist who writes about quantitative propaganda and scientistic rhetoric,” and he often does so at his science & Power newsletter. His peer-reviewed work has been published in places like the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and The American Journal of Bioethics. He had also heard the oft-repeated suggestion that the data center protest movement was led by wealthy, NIMBY folks, so he set out to investigate. He analyzed a dataset of current and proposed data center projects alongside US census data1 and has graciously offered to share the results in an exclusive here. He came to at least three stark conclusions:
- The poorest neighborhoods resisted data centers at nearly five times the rate of the wealthiest (19.0% vs. 3.8%)
- Recently proposed data centers that faced pushback were canceled or suspended at more than five times the rate of data centers that didn’t (28.2% vs. 5.2%).
- Cancellation rates are highest in lower-income areas, a fact fully explained by their higher rates of pushback.
This polling seems to work extremely hard to avoid noticing the elephant in the room: a company isn't going to build a datacenter in the middle of Beverly Hills.
The data from the article seems to suggest that people in the top quartile of income resisted 14 DCs out of the 365 projects considered.
They then decided that that is a resistance rate of 14 / 365 * 100 = 3.836%.
Um. No.
The resistance rate is number resisted / number proposed for that income quartile. If only 14 were proposed in upper-income areas, and 14 were resisted, that would mean that the resistance rate for high income areas was 100%.
Send all those richies free tickets to a trump rally then squat, baby, squat!
I'm going to go out on a limb here: Nobody is building data centers near wealthy neighborhoods.
It might also be the kind of data center that is being built. Cheaper data centers are noisier, inefficient with water, etc
Working class areas may already be distrustful towards large companies coming along and using up all of the local resources
The rich are also more educated. Lemmy hates AI, but other upper-middle-class types might just see a datacenter as a big box full of cool technology.
To plumbers and cashiers, it's more of a new-fangled abomination we don't need.
Being more educated doesn't make llms more useful. Being less educated doesn't make them less fun.
Problem with them is the magnitude of the push vs their usefulness. There was no need for that massive of scaling. It's all "we must get all the investor money before we have to raise prices to become profitable".
If there was any education behind making those slopcenters, they wouldn't make them gas powered in a desert.
No, but appreciating what a big generic building does could require education.
If there was any education behind making those slopcenters, they wouldn’t make them gas powered in a desert.
Yes, they're designed and built by illiterate cavemen. /s
Like, obviously you know engineers do that, and are educated and well compensated. It seems like you've drifted off to a different argument here.
Also, poor people are likely to already encounter a massive polluter or nuisance being dropped around there for no benefit to them.
Yeah, past experiences with a wonderproject that actually turns out to be meh may very well be part of it. Especially if it's an older person.
Speaking of pollution, the whole "wifi/5G causes cancer" thing is still out there too, and might be conflated with a datacenter.
Great, they should build them in those neighborhoods.
Not to be a wet blanket, but might that be because data centers are being built in working class neighborhoods at a higher rate than wealthy ones?
Maybe try reading the article before useless speculation on a topic that is clearly outlined in the data provided?
Ok, I've read the article and come back. I have the same question. The only statement that tangents my point is this one:
“The lowest-income, least-educated neighborhoods resist most, even among the low-income, low-degree areas facing proposals,” he adds.
But the variable the article cares most about is what happens to data centers that encounter community resistance, vs ones that don't. Yes they categorize those 2 groups by income level, but there doesn't seem to be a chart saying "data centers are 5 times more likely to be proposed in low income areas compared to high ones."
Care to point me in the right direction?
There are nonprofits that help organize to prevent the exploitation/displacement of low income populations while higher income areas are left to self organize. It would also have been useful to track political affiliation of these neighborhoods since it could be a political divide instead. I think people in the the $133k-$250k would be more conservative and thus more pro data center.
As an aside: I wish people would quit using the term 'working class' to refer to income level, its such a fuzzy term. Using 'low income' and 'high income' makes more sense in this case as it better reflects what Geoff Holtzman is talking about and working class could be refering to employment type.
I find this hard to believe. wealthy neighborhoods near me don't even want warehouses or dense housing.
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