Why do AI stocks rely on corrupt assholes being in charge?

Seems like a moment for "are we the baddies?" style reflection.

That's a motivated take. Obviously the party and candidates which promotes less regulation are preferable to the stock market. It doesn't require accusations of corruption, and it doesn't mean their opponents are wrong, either.

To a public already apprehensive about what A.I means for their jobs and their future, the shady and irresponsible way the industry went about the Datacenter build-out convinced them that the industry is not to be trusted. Can't say I blame them. If they don't get their act together, datacenters will be the least of their worries. With what happened today, many Republicans will be thinking twice about standing in the way of choking regulation.

Then those who believe specific datacenters need to be built should provide better arguments.

If anything the pro-build people should be for regulation so that citizens can know a local buildout means no power outages, water shortages etc. - preventing communities from rejecting DCs for purely defensive reasons.

It's clear the AI companies have not managed the message here, they have fumbled the politics. This is a deserved loss on their part.

I think you are oversimplifying the situation. The problem were not data centers per se, but Mr. Paxton, who, except being a rather horrible person (his own party tried to get rid of him) was taking money from lobbyists and then was trying to push their agenda without taking into account any concerns.

I should clarify: I'm not talking about Texas; this trope was used across the country this election cycle, even at the most local of local elections.

Dog-catcher candidates were taking disingenuous anti-datacenter stances if they thought it could get them votes.

With all due respect, your sector deserves the shellacking that's coming after the past two years of intolerable behavior.

Not my sector, friend.

Don’t let one bad sector ruin the whole disk

oh oh oh. My time to shine (? shine seems wrong. Cringe? I don't know). Allow me to present https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/doc/alpha-v8.3/ovms_archived..., The VMS Bad Block Utility. In my first real job I had to port this from 32 bit VAX to 64 bit Alpha, which meant recompiling it, then testing it with:

- a SCSI floppy drive (! amazeballs all by itself) - a box of fresh disks - an unfolded paperclip

Method:

- take fresh disk. - pull back spring-loaded protective cover - make scratch on disk with paperclip - insert disk in still experimental Alpha hardware - check for evidence that the bad block utility had run, remapped some (physically damaged) blocks, and gone back to sleep

Definitely not, especially with the rising cost of storage

https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/internal-hard-drive/

It will be interesting to see if and how people who campaigned on broad "anti-datacenter" platforms actually make it happen. I imagine it's easy to take a stance but getting the real political capital together, especially as a governor who will almost surely need their legislature, when it means turning down jobs—few as the ongoing ones might be—and real economic development. I hope it works because it potentially sets a precedent and maybe a legal framework for a state to actually say "we don't want this kind of business here" for things that aren't just data centers.

I'm not sure there being fewer jobs for a handful of datacentre engineers is going to be much of a problem for the voter base. Unless profits made from these datacentres are going to be directly helping the public somehow (if they even can make profits), there's fundamentally no reason for anyone to want DCs in their area. People might want to do things that require DCs, but that's different from wanting one near you. What arguments can you even make to ordinary people as to why they should want datacentres? It's the easiest populist slam dunk ever.

Legislation or not, good luck getting those permits.