How does it cost your community money?

How does it damage the environment? By using energy? Like literally any other human enterprise?

What's wrong with it creating wealth? You don't have to spend money on it, it's none of your concern what other people do.

> Eating meat fills my belly.

So do many other things which use less water.

The estimates I've seen place the water consumption of water at such a low level that a whole month subscription consumes roughly as much water as 1-120 grams* of beef.

> Setting my AC to 68 keeps me cool.

What, is 70 not good enough?

Air con, and basically all things connected to the power grid, also "costs [your] community money, damages the environment directly and indirectly, and further enriches a few already rich people."

* yes, one to one hundred and twenty, there's that much uncertainty in the estimates for the AI.

You are posting on a website that is hosted in a data center right now. You use data centers at your job to send email, share documents, run software. When you go home and watch netflix, that video is streamed to you from a data center. All of the internet, your phone, and modern digital entertainment and life is run through data centers. My guess is that you don't seriously want to turn all of that off because 'reasons'.

A data center allows the website you're whining on to function. If they're really as inconsequential to your life as you're implying, maybe you should boycott them by not using any websites or apps that rely on a data center to function.

> A data center costs my community

No one was objecting when pornhub was building out data centers. Anything they like to consume, no matter how frivolous, is accepted as morally better on a metaphysical level.

> further enriches a few already rich people.

Meat eaters damaging the Earth is okay because it's "equal"? 300 million people deciding they're entitled to consume anything they want in ever-increasing quantities is a problem because... there's 300 million of them!

What a weird line to draw. Data centres do a lot more than what you report. E.g. they might host your electronic health records. They might host census data, or weather data, or your kid's school learning management system.

People say this and then use AI for literally everything they do.

"i can't eat a cargo container so it's useless" -guy who can only see one level up the chain of abstractions that allow him to fill his belly.

It directly and indirectly increases your quality of life and it is something you use every single day.

The datacenter means I don't have read/write YAML anymore. Checkmate. I would burn the world than ever deal with YAML again.

AC at 68F is obnoxious and wasteful. At least data centres enable me to communicate with distant colleagues, watch enriching movies, and use very strong AI tools to accelerate my research.

Data centers generate export revenue. For a country that has struggled to export as much as it imports, that seems very valuable to its national economic health, and sabotaging one of the few major export industries, and one that's growing rapidly at that, seems counterproductive.

Data centers also generate local tax revenue. In fact, across industries, they have the best tax revenue to tax resource burden ratio, using very little government services while paying significant property tax.

And the environmental damage, whatever that is, is negligible relative to other industries. Their only output is some noise pollution nearby and whatever emissions are produced in the power plants that give them electricity. All industries require electricity in proportion to how much economic value they produce. So unless you want degrowth and no industry, you're going to have energy consumption.

In fact, rising energy consumption is a sign of a growing economy. That's why China has seen its energy consumption grow far faster than any other major economy while its economy has also grown far faster.

They do use water but their water usage is mininscule compared to agribusiness, or even fast food restaurants and golf courses. And the potable water usage can be brought down. They just use the water for cooling. So they could use treated wastewater or recycle the water they use. Newer data centers use these more water efficient cooling systems. So water usage is not a major long-term concern. Not one that justifies crippling this key emerging industry.