Walrus Aurelius 🇺🇸☦️

If you think the problem with data centers is just stupid people, think harder. The problem is perverse incentives. To a shallow analysis, data centers win on cost-benefit every time. But if you wedge the term "incentive" firmly into your brain before you do that analysis, you can see what they problem is, because it reminds you to think about just who each cost and benefit applies to. Nuclear plants have local costs and local benefits. Data centers have local costs and global benefits. That's why proving that the benefits outweigh the costs isn't enough. You have to fix it so the benefits to the guy next door outweigh the costs to the guy next door. There are several ways to do this. First, you can put the DC where no one lives, so local costs don't matter. The very fact that benefits of DCs are global means that, unlike nuclear plants, they don't have to be nearby to be useful. So put them in space if you can. Power is free in space anyway. Second, you can hold DC owners responsible for mitigating local costs. Make them bring their own power and water. Use regulations to make them mitigate noise, light, and air pollution. Structure land purchases or leases to mitigate real estate market and property tax impact. Also, deport "Georgists" to Antarctica, then tax them heavily for not building casinos there. Third, you can make DC owners bribe locals, preferably with recurring profit sharing schemes. For example, you could make them lease land from the local community for a percentage of DC gross income, rather than buying it outright. Then spend that money on the local community, or just distribute it as dividend checks. In other words, take some of the global benefits and convert them into local benefits. Otherwise you're not going to win. It's easy to object to solutions like this on principle, if your principles are retarded, and oversimplify the problem. For example, double-digit IQ libertarians like to argue that drug use and addiction is entirely a private matter involving personal choice. That's because their model isn't sophisticated enough to ask what happens to your personal liberty when your city is filled with feral drug zombies. If you want to model problems using libertarian, capitalist, or free market principles, that's great, but you have to model all aspects of the problem that actually exist and effect people, not just the ones that occur to you in thirty seconds of sitting at your desk thinking about it. If you don't localize some of those benefits, then people are going to start asking why they have to pay more for power and water, and live next to a permanent rave, so that people in Hyderabad can bombard boomers in Florida with a higher density of scam emails. Calling them stupid will not change this perspective. Changing the actual incentives that apply to them will.