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Posted by sseagull 9 hours ago

Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers(www.wpr.org)
296 points | 328 commentspage 2
yunohn 8 hours ago|
> “I know the opponents currently disagree, but I think the city acted in as transparent a way as they could,” Campbell said.

The audacity of public officials these days is astounding.

onionisafruit 8 hours ago||
I’m having trouble with the football-field to acre conversion in this article. It talks about the complex being the size 12 football fields and the data center being 520 acres. I could believe it if those numbers were swapped and there was a 12 football field data center in a 520 acre complex. So I don’t know if they swapped the sizes of the complex and the actual data center or the author thinks football fields are much larger than they really are.
bluedino 6 hours ago||
For non-Americans, an American Football field is about 1-1/3 acres, a little smaller than a football/soccer field at about 1-3/4 acres
rkomorn 6 hours ago||
Not sure if serious because you're converting from football fields to acres, but the acre is another unit that non-Americans generally don't use.
tzs 4 hours ago|||
Acres are still widely used in the UK and Ireland for measuring rural and agricultural land. The legal documents for the land will use hectares, but lots of people and documents will use acres outside of legal documents.

India has has a substantial number of acre users.

irishcoffee 6 hours ago||
Yeah, as you say, 12 football fields are an order of magnitude smaller than 500+ acres.
outside1234 8 hours ago||
Someone is going to have to explain to me why anything at the state or local level should be allowed to be secret like I am two years old because I don't get how this helps citizens.
jeffbee 6 hours ago|
It helps because the NDA enables a regulatory function of the local government that they otherwise wouldn't have. If there's no state or local statute that says the proponent has to reveal a given fact to the local government, then the local government has no way to demand it. The NDA is a negotiating instrument, they get to know the thing they want to know without having to go pass a law.
bell-cot 9 hours ago||
The most important news is in the subtitle -

> Wisconsin has now joined several states with legislative proposals to make the process more transparent.

Legislative or constitutional, good democratic government really needs limits on how much its supposed officials can do in secret.

imglorp 9 hours ago||
It's literally "we the people, by the people, for the people". Except for personnel/employee matters, state and local government should be completely transparent with secrets explicitly forbidden.

Secret deals with corporations is corruption.

newsclues 9 hours ago|||
Secrecy needs a time limit.
hrimfaxi 9 hours ago||
Why do we allow municipalities to keep secrets in the first place? Unless it is personnel-related it should be public. If the communications happened on taxpayer funded equipment they should be open.
petcat 8 hours ago|||
In a lot of cases, it's the only way that municipalities can submit bids for projects they want. And in the commercial space the bidding process is usually confidential. So it's just basically a requirement of public private partnership.

Of course the municipality could just say that they don't want the project and they won't submit a bid. That's fine too.

buellerbueller 8 hours ago||
Municipalities should not be bidding on corporate benefaction; this is exactly the opposite of how the relationship between the public and private sector should be.
petcat 8 hours ago||
> the municipality could just say that they don't want the project and they won't submit a bid. That's fine too.
buellerbueller 5 hours ago||
The submitting of corporate largess to multiple government entities for bids is (imo) a de facto hostile act, and should be treated as such.
bloak 8 hours ago||||
They'll tell you it needs to be confidential "for commercial reasons". They always do.
hrimfaxi 8 hours ago|||
If corporate IT can read the CEO's emails despite commercial reasons I think we the people can see what our servants are doing with our equipment on our time.
9dev 8 hours ago|||
Then you'll need to tell them democracy overrules commercial reasons.
SpicyLemonZest 6 hours ago||||
Because municipalities want to be able to collaborate in the early stages of a potential datacenter project, when it's not fully nailed down and may never happen. A world where municipalities aren't allowed to keep secrets is a less transparent world, where Meta dumps a fully formed datacenter project on the local government and nobody has a chance to suggest that residents would prefer it on the other side of the creek.
bell-cot 8 hours ago|||
There are valid uses. McDonalds may not want Burger King to know they're planning to build a new location in Smallville, 'till they actually break ground, or vice versa. Don't blabber to everyone that the City wants to expand a park, so neighboring property owners will know to demand top dollar. Etc.

But yeah - honest uses are pretty limited. Which limits we can hope will be tightly enforced by new legislation.

buellerbueller 8 hours ago||
Tough shit, Mickey D's, that's the cost of doing business.
bell-cot 6 hours ago||
Smallville is entitled to a no-exceptions policy.

OTOH, if Smallville seems too unfriendly to developers, the latter may decide to build outside the city limits. Which might become a problem over time, by holding down Smallville's commercial tax base. Forcing the voting citizen to make unhappy choices between high taxes on their own homes, and Smallville having too little money to afford nice things that they want.

buellerbueller 5 hours ago||
If McD builds outside of Smallville, they don't get any of the services that Smallville taxes subsidize. Smallville taxes serve Smallvillians, not corporate villains.
bell-cot 5 hours ago||
True. But McD may decide that the services in developer-friendly Small Township are just as good, for their use case. And Smallville residents may be content to drive another 500 yards down Smallville-Littleton Rd., to spend their money at the new McD out in Smallville Twp.

In public policy, everything is a tradeoff.

buellerbueller 3 hours ago||
In which case, one might expect Borger Kong to build in developer-unfriendly Smallville, because they will capture the people driving outside of Smallville. All your arguments are easily countered by basic supply and demand hyoptheticals.

There is no reason that McDonald's shouldn't own the risk of developing a McDonalds, and instead make secret deals with local governments to offset some of that risk. Thats a cost that should be borne by the business.

rayiner 9 hours ago||
I agree, but what do you do when people are steeped in misinformation about water use and 5G signals?
hallway_monitor 9 hours ago|||
Doesn't everyone know that dihydrogen monoxide can be lethal? https://www.csun.edu/science/ref/humor/dhmo.html
hrimfaxi 9 hours ago||
I can't believe this is still around. I remember printing this out to show my science teacher decades ago.
toast0 6 hours ago||
Of course it's still around. They're still putting this crap in schools!
nemo 9 hours ago||||
You can tell them the truth, you could do public reach out, you could do a whole lot of things. Secret back-room deals deliberately hidden from the public who will (justifiably) assume maliciousness just creates even worse PR, less trust, and opens up avenues of corruption and abuse.
throwhn1232 9 hours ago|||
Then you don’t get to build there, obviously. "Oh they’re too stupid to know better, let’s do what we want anyway" doesn’t seem like a sane solution, especially since the framework would be just as applicable to actually undesirable industrial plants and the like. They’re free to convince/bribe the people to allow it, not just push the poors around
nythroaway048 9 hours ago||
This is happening all over the country. This is the Disney World playbook; people in these towns should understand what their land is worth to companies like Meta et al, and make a decision after having all the facts laid out for them in public.
insuranceguru 8 hours ago||
It's the standard municipal playbook now: obscure the deal until the ground is broken to avoid NIMBYism, then present it as a fait accompli for jobs. The interesting part will be the resource strain. These centers guzzle water and power at a rate most small municipal grids aren't scoped for. I wonder if the secrecy deals include clauses about priority access to utilities during peak load events?
parpfish 8 hours ago||
Do data centers create that many jobs? Especially if you break it down by jobs per sqft, I can’t imagine it compares well to any other type of industrial development
insuranceguru 8 hours ago|||
That's exactly the issue. The jobs are front-loaded in construction. Once operational, a massive data center might only employ 30-50 high-skill technicians.

Compared to a factory of the same square footage that might employ 500+ people, the 'jobs per megawatt' ratio is terrible. It's essentially renting out the local power grid to a remote entity, not creating a local economy.

jauer 6 hours ago||
Unlike enterprise datacenters, systems inside these datacenters are tightly coupled to compute system design to eke out PUE, so network cabling, electrical, and cooling to a lesser degree gets reworked every 3-5 years. On a campus with several data halls this means that there’s work for those trades well beyond initial construction. Sure, you don’t have the steel and concrete work happening that went into the shell, but it’s more than a handful of operations people.

From the 00s to mid 2010s I did fiber splicing in factories from Kenosha to Beaver Dam and even then they were fairly well-automated to the extent that I’d see just a few people on the factory floor moving carts of metal between machines or handling shipping and receiving.

infecto 8 hours ago||||
They bring in temporary construction jobs but once running they provide no meaningful jobs.
parpfish 5 hours ago||
If we just want to front load a bunch of construction jobs, I vote for some megalithic stone structures.

Let’s give something to the archeologists 5,000 years in the future.

m4ck_ 8 hours ago||||
Aside from the initial construction, you need a few shifts of dc techs (for remote hands, running data cables, escorting vendors), electricians, and security. Not much else really needs to be done onsite.
SoftTalker 7 hours ago||
You might have an electrical engineer on staff for planning and management but most of the actual work (and plumbing, HVAC) will be contractors hired as needed.
irishcoffee 8 hours ago|||
They neither directly create many long-term jobs or use copious amounts of water.

If we haven't collectively established at this point that LLMs, data centers, "AI", "the next industrial revolution" are created and controlled by the wealthiest people in the world, and said people don't give a fuck about anything but money and power, we're hopeless. The elite don't care about jobs, or water. At all.

If I were wrong, the whole charade would have been shut down after LLMs convinced people to kill themselves. We have regulations on top of regulations in all corners of the US because of the "Safety" boogieman.

I wish we had the same riots about LLMs that we do about other things. If this isn't the biggest evidence yet that social unrest is engineered I'm not sure what would be more convincing.

bayindirh 8 hours ago|||
> use copious amounts of water.

If you're in Europe and/or using completely closed loop systems, then yes. Your only water use is humidifiers, and maybe the sprayers you use on drycoolers in the summer months.

On the other hand, if you use water spraying into air as heat absorption system or use open loop external circuits, you're using literally tons of water.

Source: Writing this comment from a direct liquid cooled data center.

basket_horse 8 hours ago|||
> If I were wrong, the whole charade would have been shut down after LLMs convinced people to kill themselves.

I hate this argument, and every time I see it in the news it feels like propaganda to me. Everything has risk. People have been committing suicide off google searches for years. There are thousands of fatal car crashes a year. Does that mean we should just abandon progress and innovation? Seems like a fragile argument made by people who dislike LLMs for other reasons

irishcoffee 6 hours ago||
Propaganda? Did people kill themselves at the direction of an LLM or not?

That's like saying ICE outrage is propaganda, and is, at best, insulting to the memory of those lost.

Brushing this point off seems more like propaganda than acknowledging it does.

LLMs are neat tools. They can do some neat things. Dynamite is also pretty cool, and it can do some neat things. How many more people need to get "blown up" by LLMs before we un-brainwash ourselves? At least one more I guess.

basket_horse 4 hours ago||
Comparing chatGPT to ICE and dynamite is reaching… my hunch is that most of the people who who killed themselves at the direction of an LLM were already mentally unstable. What about the people who were planning on committing suicide and were talked out of it by LLMs? Are we counting those anywhere? If it’s truly causing a suicide crisis I would imagine the rate of suicide would be spiking. Is that the case?
irishcoffee 4 hours ago||
> my hunch is that most of the people who who killed themselves at the direction of an LLM were already mentally unstable

Your hunch is "meh, couldn't be helped?" :(

basket_horse 18 minutes ago||
Yes, exactly
simianwords 4 hours ago|||
> These centers guzzle water and power at a rate most small municipal grids aren't scoped for

Source?

Here's why I think this is wrong

"A typical (average) data center on-site water use (~9k gal/day) is roughly 1/14th of an average golf course’s irrigation (~130k gal/day).

On-site data center freshwater: ~50 million gal/day Golf course irrigation: ~2.08 billion gal/day"

On both local and global levels - golf uses significantly more water than data centres.

bayindirh 8 hours ago||
> These centers guzzle water and power at a rate most small municipal grids aren't scoped for.

Are you NIMBYing for our AI overlords which will replace all the work we do and give us unlimited prosperity at the push of a button?

This incident will be reported. /s

On a more serious note, when the last tree is cut down, the last fish eaten, and the last stream poisoned, we will realize that humans cannot eat money (or silicon for that matter).

insuranceguru 8 hours ago||
Ha, point taken. But the 'NIMBY' argument is interesting here because unlike a housing development (which uses local resources for local people), a data center extracts local resources (water/power) to export value globally. It's an extraction economy dynamic, just with electrons instead of ore.
renewiltord 5 hours ago||
Almost everything in our society should be by-right not discretionary. We should make a set of rules (ideally policing by outcome - e.g. x dB and y NOx) and then allow anything that meets the rules. Our current approach allows for too much rent extraction.
almosthere 6 hours ago||
These data centers are causing people with specific (probably autistic) hearing (disorders or specialties) to go insane. It is unfortunate that these data centers are being considered by only the electric and water issues, but not direct insanity that it causes some residents that hear the "hummmmmmmmmm"
cyanydeez 7 hours ago|
Foxconn on steroids
duped 7 hours ago|
Foxconn was just bribery, they never planned on building anything.
cyanydeez 4 hours ago||
Hint: Many people think there are no reasonable plans to use these data centers.
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