Meanwhile, golf courses are a traditional green space where people in a community gather for both work and leisure. They're not ideal themselves, but they at least provide some benefit against which their negatives can be weighed.
If all you hear from critics of data center building is water use complaints, that's strictly because you've chosen not to listen to people.
> golf courses are a traditional green space where people in a community
I have a feeling those two sets of communities are disjoint
It takes the limited resources of land and water from a community and sells the result for profit as food or fuel. The vast majority of profit is made downstream and outside the community.
Golf courses being a traditional green place where people gather seems a bit far fetched to me when most of them are elite private clubs.
The golf courses are a business like any other (although we do have some publicly-owned golf courses around here too). The cost to play 9 holes on a weekday is $10 at one of them. I'm not really sure what you're asking for here.
Once of those negative externalities is water usage. The parent was commenting on the also high water usage of golf courses.
Perhaps that's the connection you've missed.
The proper answer would be to simply charge appropriate prices for large scale uses of water from the water utility, or else this is a discussion about riparian rights and law and possible changes needed to that.
On the other hand, if AI data centres all disappeared today, humanity would continue on completely fine.
Is that fair? Probably not. But I don't think golf is a particularly inclusive sport, unless you live in a golf course gated community... in which case everyone is included.
This is, ironically, the NIMBYism that so many people hate.
People generally don't want anything built in their surroundings unless it directly benefits them and has no downsides, however low the impact.
These data centers are specifically being scouted for communities whose governance is too weak to negotiate for some "sizeable share of their profits" and too ill-prepared to have suitable environmental regulations on the books already. The Ivy League sharks planning these buildout initiatives are sharp people who are looking out for the interests of their employers and know how to pick locations where they have the best opportunity to exploit locals unprepared for their kind of esoteric deal-making, political lobbying, and lawfare. They'd be failing at their job if they did what you're suggesting, and that's why we don't really see that happen.
For any benefit to national or global society AI data centers might provide to someone, the buildout looks a lot like the dirty and exploitative stories of rail expansion in the 19th century. That rail infrastructure proved a good thing for the US, but that doesn't mean the process of making it happen was honest or good for the people immediately affected.
Never thought I’d say that.
You mean the AI datacenters doing it? No, they are not doing it.
They seem to be doing the opposite. They being loud is really hard to accept, decorrelating the fans cooling them would probably pay for itself in less than an year. It's like it's some Capitan Planet villain building those things.
If the equivalent numbers for electricity and water usage were being being used for streaming video, I seriously doubt people would be demanding no more Netflix data centers. The news story would immediately die.
But I live in a place where we have plenty of water and relatively cheap power (lots of renewables). There's not much risk to data center construction, but people are opposing it here, too. Because for most people, it's not actually about that.
Or another question to ask is - how does this data centre benefit the people who live there? If it doesn't, there's no reason they should want one to be built. Rubbish tips are necessary. I still don't want one built next to my house and would fight such a thing tooth and nail.
There seems to be an alarmingly high amount of questionable data centre construction going on, such as projects being built in places with no access to power with an assumption they can somehow force the utility to provide it later. These buildouts seem to be being done for financial reasons (they are not Meta, Amazon, Azure, etc. facilities) with the hope to lease them out or sell them half-completed in the future. People rightfully don't want that kind of thing in their back yard.
To give a feel for the scale involved, this one (the new Amazon east DC) in my podunk area of the state is 250 MW (the existing us-east-2 in Columbus is 200 MW, although I'm not clear if this will be a new region or is just an additional availability zone). But that's small potatoes compared to the speculative project in Piketon, which amongst more absurd things is planned to be:
- 10 gigawatts (equal to 50% of current power consumption statewide) - "Modular" nuclear reactors built on site - 35,000 construction workers needed to build it (in a county with a total population less than that) - $30-$40 billion for the data centre, plus another $33 billion to build the 9 gigawatt natural gas electric plant - Meta agreeing to build an additional 1.2 GW nuclear plant on site - OpenAI in negotiations to lease the facility
This is a really big project, of the scale of "nothing like this has ever been done before". Nobody has ever built that much power generation at a single site before, nor has a datacentre this large ever been constructed. There is a very real risk of the project getting halfway done and then being unable to be completed. The prospect of a state literally doubling its electric generation is a bit ambitious, too (doing such means basically a complete revamp of the power distribution grid, or else some very novel designs to only use the power locally). For example, the normal type of shutoffs data centres have to prevent eg an incoming have are unacceptable in this situation because the grid cannot cope with 20 GW of demand suddenly disappearing.
This is a poor comparison, but I do get what you’re attempting here. It’s also absurd that we are leveling land everywhere around me to build warehouses. No one is really complaining about that, either.
Personally I would happily close down all golf courses and put them to better use as literally anything else.
Even just making them public parks would be great
The winner ended up just choosing to keep the current employees and keep operating it. Nobody, I mean nobody, wanted the land for development. It was in an era with basically no zoning either.
America is not suffering from too many golf courses being constructed. They are, rather, going extinct, and I don't really think the mass loss of green spaces and third spaces is necessarily a good thing, even though I'm not someone who enjoys playing golf and don't really spend any time at golf courses.
Maybe we could make them public green spaces and third spaces, instead of exclusive clubs?
Many golf courses are really expensive. Golf itself is dying like you said, because it's a very expensive sport
Idk. There's something like 35 golf courses where I live in Calgary and it's a city of less than 2 million people. That seems super unnecessary to me and they don't seem to be going extinct here
According to google AI, the average square footage of a Tim Hortons generally between 1000-2300 square feet, with some older locations taking up 2500 or more.
So let's assume every one of the 132 is an older location taking up 2500 square feet. That's 330,000 square feet, or 7.57 acres
According to the same AI, the smallest golf course in Calgary is:
Lakeview Golf Course: The city's smallest 9-hole executive course covers approximately 60 acres and features mostly par-3 and par-4 holes
60 acres!
Unless my numbers or math are wrong, Literally all of the Tim Hortons in the city can fit into the footprint of the city's SMALLEST golf course
These things aren't equivalent. Come on. We can use the space for golf courses for better things. :/
Edit: That's not even accounting for the fact that a single tim hortons probably serves more people in a couple of hours than many golf courses do in the course of an entire day.
That said, it would be nice if the so called sport didn’t take so much land, water etc. Especially in prime locations
Whether they actually actively oppose those things to the point of impacting building permits, that's a completely different matter. It really doesn't take much legislation to make golf courses economically unviable and force them to close, especially if you've got enough population within 30 minutes to support 22 of them (I speak from experience, I helped write a water reclamation ordinance that shut down at least one in my SoCal city)
If anyone actually bothered to talk to their local reps instead of posting internet comments about how much they "care", they'd get something done. If they don't, their care is just a fart in the wind for all the good it will do.