All hours humming is absolute torture and anyone who dismisses it has lived a very privileged life. Low humming penetrates walls, goes through ear plugs, and can be felt by the body. It carries for miles. It's inescapable. It makes it impossible to focus. It ruins sleep and destroys health. If I were the CIA and I wanted to demoralize a population and also cause a violent uprising, I'd have low bass humming constantly howling in the background within earshot of residential areas.

Years ago, I lived in a town where low humming would start up in the early mornings and go for hours. It drove me insane with the back of my mind trying to figure out what was causing it while simultaneously trying to ignore it and failing. I moved far away but sometimes I hear a rumble that goes on a little too long and that sense of dread starts to creep back into my mind.

A building that makes no physical products and has barely any workers isn't the kind of industry we lament losing.

But I would say datacenters are fine if they're prevented from screwing up electricity prices and have proper pollution controls.

If only datacenter developers started with the tax and power arrangements we wouldn’t be where we are.

If only the LLM-peddlers didn’t slurp up all tech supplies using VC money leaving regular people scraping up a small fortune for a heavily used DDR3 1GB stick, we wouldn’t be where we are.

> It's sad. For all the lamenting that the US is losing industrial capacity (or lost it long ago), we can't even handle some of the lightest industry possible. A big building that hums and releases slightly warm water, and the only sector in which we could still be called a world leader.

No. Data centers have very, very few positive externalities for the people who live around them. They employ very few people, use a lot of infrastructure and resource, to provide services for people far from the community.

And on top of that the technologies they enable are loudly marketed as things that could destroy us all, or at least take most of the well-paying jobs.

If they're so great to live by, build them in Atherton.

A hum but 24x7 is devastating, and even a very little increase in water temperature can kill local fauna. Additionally you are occupying public space for a private profit.

You are a voice a reason.

You can see this as an American thing if you want... but you might look at the rest of the world to ask whether you're trying to convince the world to un-invent gunpowder.

If China gave superior paid offerings we might just start transferring all our data over to them instead. Anyways, have we considered building our compute infrastructure in China's backyard instead?