alt Hacker News> In the latest example of corporations existing outside of the law, SpaceX (who is for some reason the controlling entity of xAI now) announced they'll be removing the illegal, unpermitted gas turbines they've been running at their Memphis Colossus data center... by July 2027.
This is the thing the HN crowd doesn't seem to get whenever a post is on here about data centers. They are often times doing outright illegal things and we simply don't have the mechanisms to punish "white collar crime" the way we punish other crime. The populist uprising against them is happening because people have tried everything else first
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The HN crowd that doesn't seem to get it is like that because they're either white collar criminals themselves, or they work for such criminals.
Of course the government has permission to punish crime. However government officials might find themselves in a courtroom having to demonstrate how they applied the law equally, and would be subject to discovery to see if they were being corruptly influenced (there is organization and international funding for the anti-data center movement in the US”; there is very little grassroots opposition other than typical NIMBYism you see in all development projects).
And the government would have to pay to fight and might be on the hook if they lost.
And “clearly breaking the law” isn’t always clear; I don’t k ow anything about this particular case but it sounds like zoning or applying utility laws to non-utility companies or environmental regulations being used to make construction financially untenable. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for opposition to off-grid natural gas turbines; you don’t get much cleaner off grid power that works 24x7.
Yes, and big part of it is public is ok with that. For example, did you protest while Uber was breaking many local laws while growing?
>we simply don't have the mechanisms to punish "white collar crime" the way we punish other crime.
Sure we do. We just don't use those mechanisms because the law doesn't move fast enough. That 7/2027 deadline was probably calculated as being not worth it to pursue legal damages for since court fights work slowly.
Now closing up those "stalling" loopholes... I don't know enough about the justice system to really make a judgement call on that.
Similarly, I have a rant from last night [0] which connects it to Federal versus State laws and enforcements.
> TLDR: Corrupt crooks have sabotaged the normal careful legal-compromise route, so they are partly to blame when American communities seek hard-line measures instead.
I mean it depends what you mean by "we". There are laws on the books to do so, they've just never been used against Epstein associates like Musk. We have a surface system of politics and laws, and then a deep system. Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.
> They are often times doing outright illegal things and we simply don't have the mechanisms to punish "white collar crime" the way we punish other crime.
Do we punish other crimes?
>> The populist uprising against them is happening because people have tried everything else first
From everything I've seen the populist uprising is happening because 99% of the people shouting don't know anything about data centers other than "bad".
“Move fast and break things”. That was the gospel of Facebook that drove an entire industry and was preached by every entrepreneur in existence. So now that it’s applied on a global scale the things that are broken are society itself. Well we reap what we sow.