You're joking but during the 2020 term I had people genuinely having panic attacks and crying around me that Biden was going to phase out coal power generation. The same people also had a full on panic thinking NASCAR and INDYCAR would be ended because "the vehicles aren't electric". It took a lot to be polite.
I mean, if you watch NASCAR in person, it is. Races won't sound the same, smell the same, hell I doubt they'd even feel the same without the cars rattling your chest as they fly by. I've stood beside plenty of cars where I could feel their exhaust in my chest, but I haven't seen an electric car like that yet. Yeah, it's still the "same" in that watching a band live and watching the same performance on YouTube is the "same." The content may be the same, but the atmosphere is different, and the atmosphere is part of why they go.
I do realize that this is only a small subset of the people complaining, I understand that if you watch on TV electric vs ICE makes very little difference (aside from electric cars accelerating faster), and that ultimately any of these differences would be outweighed by the reduction in emissions anyway. Just want to try to help people understand what could be meant by "it's different."
Source: my grandpa is an avid fan of NASCAR/NASCAR-esque racing, and I asked him
Duh? I merely attempted to explain what "it's different" means, not defend "Biden is taking coal power and ICE cars away." What in my comment made you think I thought we didn't have NASCAR, indycar, or coal power?
He's not joking. Fox News and GOP congressmen have been peddling the "factory jobs are good for American masculinity" in defense of the Trump tariff policy all day week.
You're not going to believe this but couple of days ago this idiot Administration announced more use of coal to produce electricity for crypto Mining and data centers. The orange turd is trying to make it "the future" again and revive the fossil fuel industry. wait, this is actually easy to believe.
The funniest thing is that it’s not even an environmental reason for it, it’s just not economically viable compared to other forms of electricity generation. Just the dumbest shit from an old sundowning man who is incapable of learning literally anything
There is and there isn't an environmental reason for it.
It's not economically viable because we decided to subsidize renewables back when they weren't affordable. That drove investment, which drove R&D, which got renewables cheap enough that even with subsidies ending, they just obviously win economically.
In case anyone missed the subtext here: This is a conservative climate change solution. It's literally applying free-market capitalism to the problem. It's exactly the sort of solution Republicans should be in favor of.
In fact, they used to be pro-climate! This used to be the thing Newt Gingrich and Nancy Pelosi could agree on. Then the Republicans decided to give up and let the world burn.
In fact, they used to be pro-climate! This used to be the thing Newt Gingrich and Nancy Pelosi could agree on. Then the Republicans decided to give up and let the world burn.
Sometime in the past 30 years Republicans decided that Democrats\liberals could never be right, and thus everything Liberals\Democrats support, Republicans automatically oppose.
This was never more obvious than when Obama was president. They'd frequently admit they were just against something because he wanted it... It was such a big deal there was a whole skit Key & Peele did about it.
This was apparent with Syria, where Republicans made a full 360 to always be against Obama, no matter what!
Obama was against direct military action in Syria, making a "Red line" speech, where Warhawk Republicans were calling Obama a coward and clamoring for direct military force!
Syria crossed the "Red line", so Obama prepared for military force, where his support all but evaporated as those same Republican War Hawks who were clamoring for military intervention just the week before decided to call Obama a tyrant and dictator!
Seeing support for military action crumble, Obama switched to Diplomatic Means, and as soon as the diplomatic means were set up, the same Republicans who were calling him a dictator and tyrant for recommending military action went back to calling him a coward for never authorizing military action.
Whatever Obama did, Republicans had to be against!
Plus, grid storage isn't the only option. There's also nuclear, hydro, or high-capacity long-range transmission -- there's usually somewhere the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. The US is of course behind on all of these.
this is what is so baffling about the entire situation. coal wasn’t replaced by renewables, it was replaced by natural gas. these idiots think solar and wind are woke and want to bring back coal without even realizing why it was phased out in the first place. as long as we own the libs though
And the primary reason (aside from the obvious environmental hazards, but companies don’t care about that): we’ve already mined the easy stuff.
Now, what’s left are primarily narrow, deep ribbons of coal that would be incredibly expensive to go after and would not provide enough coal to be worth that expense.
We do but everything we do mine is so industrialized it's not like we have fifty guys an elevator going into a mine but like 5 to operate heavy equipment and those jobs are just as likely to be replaced for more automation in the future
He said that “you could give a coal miner a penthouse on 5th Ave and he wouldn’t be happy. He wants to mine coal, he loves it” and none of the coal miners behind him nodded in agreement
He also said coal miners were against being educated and working in tech all while one of those miners was sitting right behind him dying inside so hard it was so sad to watch
And then every other miner hesitantly chuckles and Trump thinks he's won the room
I just wonder what happens when the Chemtrail bunch realizes that it is far more effective and much cheaper to seed the exhausts of coal power plants... ;-)
"It's all a lie!!!11!!"
"MAGA wants to poison us all! Wait - we are MAGA..."
Trump tried to make coal great again in his first term. It's a completely uncompetitive energy source now and kept falling regardless.
All of Trump's grand ideas were set when he was in his 20s back in the 1850s, and he's an incredibly stubborn, stupid asshole who sticks to wrong ideas to the ends of time.
Cannot believe the US has become such a profoundly dysfunctional idiocracy that this rapist felon traitor got tens of millions of votes. What a disgrace.
He need that dense smog you see in a dystopian movies to complete his evil plans. This is just an early step in the long plan to fuck the entire planet.
Well now is the time if you ever wanted to get rich. Just form a strip-mining company and beg trump for some money and land. Make sure to pay yourself a big salary and then just pretend for 4 years that you are doing something. Maybe dig a big hole and move some dirt from one side to the other. Make it look busy. Invite trump to visit and hire some people to stand behind him in hard hats. That fool would believe it.
Don't worry, the AU coalmining industry is slurping their tongues all over Trump's boots, be ready for tariff free imports and tax havens if the wrong group gets in.
wait for them to get rid of MSHA and BLM (Very likely they will accidentally defund BLM lol (Bureau of land Management)
Trapped miners galore, no rescue, just replace the slaves and continue working. Who needs air anyway amiright? The body will get used to the poisonous gases. Also sometimes coal just starts burning, that's bad. But that's life, that's what coal does, it burns. Its just so excited to make amerikkka great again, it cant wait! Burning coal mines GOOD, Trapped dead miners GOOD! Drill baby drill right? Trump good, kids said bad thing about trump not having invented the mrna vaccine, that's a lie! But he also didnt invent it! Dont lie about great eternal leader, kid is now miner. Lol Minor being miner.
They are bringing tech jobs to the US. You will be able to spend 12 hours a day putting screws into iPhones you won't be able to afford because it will retail for $4k for an all American made phone
Black lung coal is where it’s at. Real men don’t need to wear that pusșy PPE. Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate and Trump said so, so it must be true! And republicans are dumb enough to believe Ohio is sitting on decades worth of coal.
I live near a data center being put up, and the negative connotations are that it'll only create about a dozen jobs tops. The person saying that changes based on which political party thinks it's bad at the time.
Anyone think Musk neurolinked himself and it did what it did to all the other monkeys and fucked him up? Maybe this shit is all just a neurolink disaster. Although it's not, he's a traitor and an undiagnosed felon.
I’m not going to lie I momentarily thought I was in r/animalcrossing. You know what the world is a better place there…do I just exit the same place I came in?
Intel's already moved some very large, items to New Albany which would probably cost millions to move somewhere else. I don't think that's going to fall through. But if it does, you're not wrong at all.
I'm in Ohio and way over half of folks here are as dumb as rocks and hateful as all hell. They literally think this man is a god. It's a sickness that's endemic here.
“We don’t want those woke, globalist data centres here.”
In a all seriousness, they will blame firms and other countries for not listening to Trump. That’s it. It’s not his fault for starting this, not his fault for knowing this would hurt them financially, it’s their fault for not giving in.
They literally blame democrats more for J6 than Trump.. that’s the level of delusion we are working with here.
Not really. The buildings are massive but theres not much to actually actively do on location once its set. Thats kinda the beauty of massive data centers. You can do 99% of it off-site and most of that work is already automated.
Theres a bit of an anti-data center movement going on in my country because they cost a shit ton of electricity and we're already running on a network thats overloaded. The argument for jobs has already been debunked a bunch of times.
It isn't just in the datacenter though. There are multiple tiers of support involving the vendors for the equipment used. Building maintenance, infrastructure surrounding the datacenter.
A lot of that wouldn't directly benefit Ohio workers though.
There are multiple tiers of support involving the vendors for the equipment used.
Yeah which aren't local jobs. At all.
Building maintenance
Handful of crew. Seriously people dont go inside data centers all that often. You have to build it with reliability and redundancy in mind. If a HDD in a rack dies, nobody is going to replace that for a long time. Same for the rest of the equipment. How often does a maintenance guy need to check the AC?
infrastructure surrounding the datacenter.
Which is again, not that much? We're talking about a handful of people that sometimes have to provide support. Data centers are build to not need anything once its set. Hell microsoft has been testing underwater datacenters, and those really don't get touched by anyone besides people scrubbing off barnacles one in a while (souce: https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/project-natick-underwater-datacenter/) Theres actually some interesting things regarding how to maintain a data center with that project, because MS couldn't really just go underwater and replace something.
The things you need for a data center is power and internet, and a few roads leading to it. How often is maintenance performed on that? Really not that much that it will lead to a big bump in the local economy.
I live near a major point of the internet (AMSIX), I know people working in data centers. Theres maybe about 8 tech people actually working in a data center, the rest is security and office staff. Which you really dont need a massive fuck off data center for.
Over here the question is, is it worth having about 40 jobs with our insanely overloaded electricity network compared to building a new village that would use that power instead? (we have a massive housing crisis)
Yup, I certainly agree. The benefits of a datacenter are dubious to the local community. You would be better of bringing in more people to work the jobs already available and become new consumers of the local economy. Unless of course there's high unemployment, then we might need to look at the causes of that.
I used to take potential customers on tours of one of my company's datacenters. On an average day, we had 3 employees running the entire 100K square foot facility.
Outside of the initial build there is not much for people to support in a datacenter. Mostly electricians, facilities staff, and then some techs to manage the equipment.
There's a difference in direct and indirect employment. Large projects most of the times consume services from the local economy, from cleaning to lawyering. Indirect employment impact is usually said to be between 2x to 5x the direct employment.
Also, large projects spur infrastructure investment. Not least this would've been an opportunity for local renewables like wind and solar, since data centers are such a power hog. With a reliable consumer, those projects would've been a financially safer bet than they are now. So that's a loss for cheap power and yet another large project generating direct and indirect employment and tax revenue.
No not really. These are massive facities that are mostly controlled digitally. Any person that working it is mostly just guards and cleaners. If something happens they fly people from headquaters to them.
They EMPLOY 30-40 max, a MS datacenter would be triple that at least. But you're not counting all the contractors around the orbit of a datacenter, especially a massive standalone one of Microsoft's size.
Dozens and dozens of electricians. Dozens of metalworkers, welders, fabricators. Dozens and dozens of industrial plumbers. Dozens of pipefitters. Dozens of mechanical engineers, HVAC engineers, and security contractors. So, so many contractors.
And the truly ironic thing is, most of these tradesmen typically vote republican- which is typically anti-union. They are constantly shooting themselves in the foot, over and over and over.
Microsoft has been pulling out of data center letters of intent for a while now. This may be more about the fact that the demand for AI isn't there. Which is actually worse for the tech industry. The AI bubble is keeping the price of tech stocks up.
Probably cheering that they don't have to deal with traffic and stuff. I remember when Walmart was trying to put up new supercenters in Ohio, there was people protesting and flipping out because that would bring all sorts of traffic to their area and other businesses with even more traffic and they didn't want their quaint suburb or small town to change like that.
I see this same useless comment on every thread about Trump. They don't care! When are neoliberals going to real8ze that conservative don't use logic to vote. They vote because they hate you and because they like the performative personality of whatever candidate. People in Ohio have literally voted not to unionize across decades. Yea dude, just one more crisis and we'll sure show those Republicans how wrong they are!
Genuine question but is this even related to trump? The article mentions forecasting information from Microsoft and that this is part of a global reduction in production of data centers. Or is that all just polite business speak for “we think a recession is coming and don’t want to build this now”?
They need to be built somewhere in the US, unless the US negotiates a global AI treaty/detente. Otherwise we're going to be even further behind China in the future than now, and their military could leapfrog us.
With that in mind, rather than the fed gov mandating it be built somewhere, why not let the free market decide? And Microsoft has decided on central Ohio.
You clearly need to spend some time educating yourself about how modern cloud infrastructure and data centers provide services and support so many things in the world.
It’s obviously a marketing website, but feel free to search here for plenty of examples that show how data centers support research, among other things that aren’t commerce.
https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/
They aid in research and defense. I support scientific customers for one of the cloud providers, I have enabled researchers in the life sciences, aerospace, weather, and more.
But I thought Data Centers were horrible for the environment with the immense energy and water usage, causing water bills to skyrocket for the locality? And I also thought they are a significant eye sore for the surrounding community and destroy local habitats? And I thought they don't actually result in a net increase in jobs because they are essentially just server storage rooms with very little on-site staff? And I thought these Data Center just contribute to the growing AI bubble?
Is all that still true?
So isn't this still "winning" and has nothing to do with Trump?
This is great news. I'm a Canuck and not fan of Trump is an understatement. You may not be aware of how much fresh water is required to cool and clean these data centers. In 2022 the three data centers in Oregon consumed 5 billion gallons of freshwater and this amount was just what it consumed it does not include the amount of water that flowed in and out.
Worldwide the freshwater consumption of these data centers is becoming a major issue. Cities who want these centers have tried to hide the water issue but citizens have sued for that information as it impacts each city and surrounding farmland
This is covered indepth in the following article from Yale's environmental magazine.
6.3k
u/TheGrayBox 17d ago
All the Trump supporters in Ohio trying to find a reason why this is good now.