One such violent repeat offender wrote a book about his experience helping build Leavenworth Fed while serving time at Leavenworth State – he would eventually serve additional time at this newly-constructed facility.
Warning, I am not linking to the book (it's on Amazon) because no amount of #TriggerWarning can prepare you for the mind of P - A - N - Z - R - A - M [the name of the non-fiction collection of this prisoner's personal letters].
When Mr. P was asked what made him such a monster, he wrote honestly and practically about the upbringing of a serial-killing rapist. Mr. P's EVIL puts JWGacey in the safehouse.
In the GP's case, it sounds like they were on a road show, and they do not live in Illinois at all. Of course, that doesn't prevent them from contacting a IL state representative for redress, but it is an edge case of sorts.
Correct. We were in Michigan, then later North Carolina. We did collector shows in a few states. The organizers told us to collect the tax and gave us vendors information on how to remit to the state agency. We didn't do it at first, then later, as more money came in, we did it for a few years in one state, then another, trying to be 'good' about the whole thing. Was a massive headache.
What would have made so much more sense is for a state agent to have someone come on site to trade shows like this to make it easy/simple to fill in the proper forms, take money, and increase state inflow. Two people working for a couple days would be a few hundred dollars(?). At a tradeshow with 200 vendors, most doing thousands and some tens of thousands in sales... it would be relatively easy money.
That obviously becomes intrusive to some folks, but... would have helped those states and made things easier on us.
> For one, when someone should not be remanded on bail because they are a danger to society, judges will often set the bail at eleventy zillion dollars, knowing that they won't be able to post bail
Why can't they just deny bail in such cases? Is it local laws that forbid them from doing so? In which case, it seems that the ability to set a ridiculously high bail is a net benefit to society.
Yeah, a lot of places required a bail amount of something. The joke is on the judge, though. When I checked in 2022 in Cook County there were 92 homicide cases out on bail, each having paid an average of around $150K cash.
There were also hundreds of minor shoplifting and other petty cases with bail set at $250 or less who had been locked in the jail for months since they could not afford to bond out.
My point is mostly that since the 80s there's a lot more trans-pacific flight from the Middle-east and Far-east to the United States. When the Concorde was developed this wasn't really a worthwhile market to consider for ultra-premium air travel.
I could absolutely see Emirates doing a super-luxury super-sonic flight to the West Coast of the US. Once you're in the States you can take a PJ.
Emirates just dominates long-haul flights to Dubai overall. Other (mostly flag carrier) airlines handle other airports in the region. Qatar Airways through Doha is also a big player in flights between the US/Europe and Asia.
> The ratio of jobs and taxes to local resources tied up has to be one of the worst possible trade-offs of any industrial use that you can envision
Why? There aren't much "local resources tied up" since it's land that isn't that valuable for the most part. DCs, once built, don't emit fumes or loud noises, or make traffic worse like other industrial land use might. They just sit there quietly and generate tax revenue for the locality.
Sure, there aren't many ongoing jobs at an operating DC. But I can't see why it's one of the worst possible industrial uses, from the point of view of the residents around one.
> data centers are proving to be profoundly unpopular
From what I can tell, this is just from a combination of AI being unpopular plus opportunistic fearmongering on the part of politicians.
The bigger thing here is just the idea that the alternatives are "Boeing assembly plant" or "data center". Like: if you have the option of getting the Boeing plant, get the Boeing plant! Racine County does not have that option. Meanwhile, the happy sounding businesses there --- like the duck farm --- are actually major polluters, and more problematic for the region than a data center.
The people opposing data centers oppose them everywhere, including in the middle of the desert in Utah, which really gives away the game.
> he bigger thing here is just the idea that the alternatives are "Boeing assembly plant" or "data center".
This is a false dichotomy, though. That region has enough land that you could do both. There just isn't much demand for manufacturing in the Upper Midwest right now.
What you're saying is just factually incorrect. Data centers absolutely are loud and they're disruptive.
They're not good for the environment. They consume large quantities of water, typically, and huge, absolutely staggering amounts of energy, which typically has the effect of raising rates for everybody else by driving up demand and causing capital infrastructure needs that are financed by everybody, not just the data center.
There is absolutely widespread dislike for data center construction in basically every region spanning almost every political axis in the United States right now.
There's polling on it. It's abysmal. The assumption that all these people are stupid sheep probably won't be a productive way to approach this public policy question.
> The assumption that all these people are stupid sheep probably won't be a productive way to approach this public policy question
I agree, and I do not assume that these people are stupid sheep. However, having said that:
> Data centers absolutely are loud
Compared to undeveloped land, sure. Compared to other uses of industrially-zoned land? Most likely not. I've been to a lot of datacenters. They're not very loud from the outside.
> They consume large quantities of water
I honestly do not understand why they don't just build closed-loop systems, or geothermal where they have a closed loop with the ground acting as the heat sink. Open-loop systems where they consume water just to evaporate sounds stupid to me. But I don't know how common that is.
Politicians showing off in front of the camera with a dirty jug of water, of course, is just grandstanding and has no real relation to datacenters other than they made construction happen.
> huge, absolutely staggering amounts of energy, which typically has the effect of raising rates for everybody else
This isn't just true of datacenters. They're building an aluminum plant near me that will consume on the order of 100+ MW, which is comparable to a fairly large DC. Any other large industrial plant would consume a lot of electricity, but nobody's blaming them for utility capital investment needs.
They do not in fact consume large quantities of water, and "they consume lots of water" is a pretty good shibboleth for "this isn't going to be a productive discussion". Golf courses in the US consume more than 8x the water of all data centers combined.
Obviously, that's my response to your polling claims as well: people getting polled thing data centers are consuming all the water.
You've got these people going on TV and doing interviews saying that this new technology will be capable of replacing huge amounts of jobs.
The people that say that most jobs will be eliminated by AI are making direct threats of violence against the families of millions of people. Telling someone that they will no longer have any way of feeding their children is telling them that you're going to kill their family.
I'm not saying this to convince you that that's true. You could make some counter-arguments to that, and I'm sure people will come along and do that. The point is to understand it that that's how it's perceived by the people hearing it.
And then to add insult to injury, they want to come do it in your town.
They want to pitch a giant "development" project. But remember nobody ever wants “development” except for the fact that it might bring jobs and economic growth, to them, not you living somewhere else.
Meanwhile, you've already told them that the reason we need so many more data centers all of a sudden is specifically so that we can eliminate whatever jobs are left that we didn't get a chance to eliminate over the last several decades when we exported most of the jobs we could to different countries.
By the way we're the same assholes who said "trust us" last time, and pitched the idea that it would lead to a prosperous future for everyone. Instead you made money off sending the jobs to china, capturing all excess value with software, and addicting our children to opioids.
And your next exciting offer for us is a giant windowless building that will take up open land, nature, and yes, water and electricity, and employ almost nobody.
People don't feel like they control a whole lot, but they do have some ability to complain about this thing happening where they live.
The actions of people opposing these data centers are completely rational. If I'm trying to make one point, that's it.
The actually interesting part of this back and forth on HN is that Silicon Valley (aka "tech") culture has grown so fundamentally rotten at its core that not only do people not have values that place humans first, they can't even recognize when other people do.
> But remember nobody ever wants “development” except for the fact that it might bring jobs and economic growth, to them, not you living somewhere else.
This is really the only point that matters. It's held true my whole life, and I expect it will be true until I die. Doesn't matter what you build. I was watching a couple transmission line projects over the past decade that are still in the "lawsuits and community rage" phase - proposed to bring wind farm watts to load centers - and now they will likely be killed since the anti-development folks can pretend they were always due to Datacenters.
Datacenters are just an easy scapegoat for the anti-development crowd. It's been amazing to watch how quickly it's gone, and how folks have such a strong opinion on stuff that otherwise would have been built half a mile from them and they'd never have known any better until they were told to care.
The rest of what you wrote is largely social media driven ragebait in comment form. Kernels of truth, but largely immaterial.
Datacenter land use is the least interesting thing you could possibly discuss. Knocking out some corn fields and building some warehouses off the road no one can see or hear, with almost no traffic to/from them after construction is pretty much the lowest possible bar for local community impact for quite literally any project. It change nothing for anyone, other than the farmers who sold the land and that a few local trades companies have a couple decades of stable highly paid employment.
Therefore, the only way to get communities up in arms about these things is basically lie about it.
It's going to be a real head scratcher to folks when electricity rates continue to march upwards even if they get all AI datacenter construction banned. The green tech crowd who had the datacenter bogeyman land in their lap is playing an exceedingly dangerous game here. What we are largely seeing is the bill coming due for generational lack of investment into the grid.
If your local community can't figure out how to get the money raining down from the skies like it is now to subsidize the build out of your local infrastructure for something as minor as municipal water treatment in Wisconsin You likely will never be building anything at all.
The people who want these data centers are telling us that the reason that they want them is to keep momentum on their plans to destroy our entire way of life.
They just say it. They go on TV and do interviews and say it out loud.
So then everyone who has any ability to stop it in any possible way tries to do that.
What exactly the fuck do you think they're going to do?
And more importantly, what causes you to feel that it's obvious that they are only coming to these opinions through ignorance?
Lumping together anti-data-center sentiment with anti-development sentiment in general is bullshit. Yes, there are certainly impossible to negotiate with NIMBYs who don't like apartment buildings because they cast shadows on a sidewalk corner or something. That has nothing to do with this.
The politics of data centers are completely different. If this was a real, actual job-creating industrial project, people would react differently.
> Lumping together anti-data-center sentiment with anti-development sentiment in general is bullshit. Yes, there are certainly impossible to negotiate with NIMBYs who don't like apartment buildings because they cast shadows on a sidewalk corner or something. That has nothing to do with this.
I mean, you just did it yourself. You made a great point by doing so.
It's generally the same people. Your rants pretty much prove it. Plus I've been in meetings where it's literally the same people. They will use any and all reasons to stop local development and then stick with the one that gets the most popular traction.
I'm not talking about folks against residential development. I'm talking being around projects and in local meetings about industrial development - primarily electric generation and transmission. The arguments are pretty much the same.
> The people who want these data centers are telling us that the reason that they want them is to keep momentum on their plans to destroy our entire way of life.
AI is now taking rural blue collar jobs? I find it very difficult to believe this is a real grass roots concern.
I find it very easy to believe white collar folks are using their relative positions of power to amp up concerns rural blue collar folks would actually care about. Often at the expense of said blue collar folks.
These facilities would often be a win for a local community with a little bit of foresight. It doesn't matter to your power bill if they are sited 5 miles down the county road from you, or 200 miles. Chances are they are using electricity from your regional interconnect and that's where your power bills come from.
> And more importantly, what causes you to feel that it's obvious that they are only coming to these opinions through ignorance?
Only? Of course not. Primarily? Obviously. For the simple fact that dozens of people in my orbit who never knew datacenters existed near them all of a sudden Care Very Much(tm) about the subject after watching a few very low information videos. These are folks who drove past local facilities most of their lives and never had a clue.
> If this was a real, actual job-creating industrial project, people would react differently.
Not in my experience. Pretty much every single industrial project is nearly impossible to build in the US. Heavy industry sounds fun until someone wants to build an aluminum smelter, copper mine, or wind farm down the way. There are tons of infrastructure projects that need to get done which will not because they are not point-source locations that employ lots of jobs for a single community.
My previous example are wind farms. Typically those are best sited a few hundred miles away from a major metropolitan/load center. Good luck getting anything of scale built these days now that we've more or less burned up every ounce of spare electric transmission capacity leftover from before we de-industrialized ourselves. Once you get out of re-using existing right-of-way you see nearly the same backlash as AI datacenters. The difference? The urban laptop classes don't take your side and the outrage tends to stay localized.
It's very interesting to me a certain class of folks have convinced people that the closest thing to "free money" for a local community is a bad thing. Construction phase might suck, but assuming it's simply a datacenter and not a power plant with a co-located datacenter off the to side, you really can't get any lighter-touch land use than this. It's probably less environmentally impactful (in a negative way) to the local community than the 100 acre corn field it replaces. And employs more people to boot.
I would 100% agree with you on any tax abatements/credits/etc. These facilities do not need them and would be quite happy to pay full-freight on taxes on top of contributing towards upgrading local infrastructure far beyond their expected impact on it. This is where I feel that local politicians have seriously shit the bed all over their communities.
The fact that opposition to one thing looks sort of vaguely like opposition to another thing isn't completely irrelevant information, but you're just missing the actual thing that's happening if you focus on it.
"Seven in 10 Americans oppose constructing data centers for artificial intelligence in their local area, including nearly half, 48%, who are strongly opposed. Barely a quarter favor these projects, with 7% strongly in favor."
This is another way of me countering your main point here.
It's not the same people you've seen in previous arguments.
It's those people plus almost all of the other people because overwhelming 70%+ majorities don't want these things.
So we know that. That's the given here, assuming you think there's at least some validity to Gallup and polling.
The question then becomes why? My rants are intended to illustrate why. They sound like "rants" because people are extremely fucking angry about how things are going, so accurately restating their opinions also sounds angry.
The culture has changed. People do not fucking trust tech companies and their leadership at all for extremely valid reasons. Talk about wind farms all you want. I can go ahead and talk about the Yankees. The conversation at hand is about data centers, and data centers are their own issue.
When people like you come along and say it's "free money" nobody fucking believes you because there is a rich and long history of that kind of bullshit already.
There's a point of view here that they oppose data centers out of ignorance. My countervailing point is that their distrust is almost certainly rational, considered, and correct.
Distrust is the only sane response to recent events.
My original post that started this discussion did not mention water:
> The ratio of jobs and taxes to local resources tied up has to be one of the worst possible trade-offs of any industrial use that you can envision. That is precisely why data centers are proving to be profoundly unpopular.
Nonetheless I can see that fixating on this instead of my obviously correct point which is that people absolutely hate data centers and the sociopathic tech billionaires behind them for rational reasons is a good dodge.
Hardly unexpected when I am posting on the promotional discussion board of a private equity firm responsible for launching many of these sociopaths into society.
My later comment about water usage is both unneeded for that point to stand and trivially proven true.
This is a story about Microsoft building data centers and people opposing it.
So yes, one of the two key players here is the heavily financed tech sector.
Starting to think these disingenuous replies are in fact the point here.
Since none of of these conversations on HN make much difference anyways, my only hope is that one person, somewhere, who is a part of the "tech community" that usually gathers here (and of which I am a longtime member) becomes newly aware that people fucking hate us now for excellent and extremely well-supported reasons and thinks a little about how that happened and how they might change it.
I simply disagree with you. I'm not a fan of populism, and, more importantly, I think that people have had very good reason to "fucking hate us" for decades --- we are in the business of automating away people's jobs, and have been since the 1960s.
It's fine that you think the discussion is unproductive; I agree, our premises are too far apart to get anywhere. But you'd get further with, well, everybody that doesn't already agree with you if you'd stop accusing anybody who doesn't agree with you of being "disingenuous".
Well at least you're honest then. I hope your team loses because the outcomes here suck and are destroying our culture.
And on a personal level, I hope you reconsider your life decisions a little and realize the importance of a culture where people can feed their families and lead healthy productive lives of dignity, regardless of who their parents are or how gifted they happen to be intellectually.
You can just say "fuck you". You don't have to do this kind of violence to the concept of civility. "Fuck you" is what this kind of populism inevitably devolves to anyways. Skip the middle steps!
If having your values questioned sounds like "fuck you" then that's on you.
What I actually said is perhaps you should think about the people who end up worse off under the system you advocate for.
Your call of course but this is definitely not violence.
Violence is what happens when attempting to work through civic institutions and discourse has failed so many times that people no longer try this approach.
It's a very meaningful statement when people claim that thing X's purpose is Y which is good, and therefore thing X is good, even though the actual outcome Z is not Y and in fact may be diametrically opposed to Y. Happens quite often.
I don't know if it really applies to the current thread, but I just wanted to point out that POSIWID is certainly not a vapid, empty concept.
The "birthright" citizenship clause of the 14th amendment was intended to clarify the citizenship status of the recently freed black slaves. That intent is clear by contemporary written material.
Now, you could absolutely argue that whatever the intent of the amendment was, it still protects the present-day state of Chinese mothers having zero ties to this country popping over for a few months and giving birth to a fully-fledged American citizen, because the law says what it says. That's a much better argument than saying that the Civil War was fought for the right of transient visitors or illegal immigrants to this country to birth citizens, because that's just absurd.
> Plenty of studies have made very clear that immigrants contribute more to the community and the nation, and have lower rates of crime, than people born in the country.
You should distinguish between the American model of immigration, which has long been the beneficiary of positive selection effects until recently, against the European model (which seems to be more relevant to the GP), which unfortunately seems to have been designed for the exact opposite.
It's trivially easy to find research from Europe that consistently shows immigrants and descendants of immigrants as having higher rates of criminality than the native population. Even a pro-refugee source has to admit that immigrants in Denmark commit crimes at a level 2-3x higher[0].
And taking a step back, your statement on immigrants contributing more than the native population is absurd on its face. Why are immigrants immigrating to begin with? To seek a better life. Who made a better life possible on the other side of the fence? The native population. The degree to which immigrants, especially to the US, outperform the native population, you're just looking at the aforementioned selection effects; you're comparing the cream of the crop of one group to the median of another.
One could argue that's really dehumanizing is the callous disregard the system displays for the victims of such repeat violent offenders.
reply