Data Center Hysteria

This is the big scary data center going in near Marshfield…”Arf! Arf! Arf!!!”

I didn’t wake up this morning thinking I’d be defending data centers. Up until this point in my life, I never thought I had to. It seems like the benefits are obvious to the most casual observer, but boy was I wrong. The depth of pluralistic ignorance on the matter is astonishing and I kept thinking of the saying, “I don’t have the time or the crayons to explain it to you” and this was the first time I felt like it fit. It’s the latest sheeple cause. This is the direct result of eliminating critical thinking classes in school.

I live near the town of Rogersville, Missouri just east of Springfield. I’m about nine miles away. It’s just far enough that I don’t go there very much. It’s a town that was badly planned to begin with so there is no real town. It’s a few strip malls scattered around with no cross relationship, one gas station, a McDonald's, a Sonic and a lot of people standing around wondering why their business won’t fly. It seems like every restaurant meal in town is mediocre and subsidized with borrowed money. I’ve only concluded recently that about the only thing that’s thriving is ignorance.

I was COO of a company where much of their business came from project managing data centers. In my time at that company, I don’t remember anyone ever having an issue, which is why the whole thing is such a surprise to me.

I also know the model in politics; you first create or point to a problem, get people riled up over the problem, then be the one to claim that you’re going to fix the problem and that’s how you get votes. I would have had some faith that the community made up of this many sheeple would have a few with enough common sense to check the reality of the problem in the first place. I was wrong on that too.

Keep in mind, I don’t want to listen to the sound of a data center running twenty four hours a day any more than the next guy. This one is located in Marshfield near interstate 44 so I’d guess the white noise would be welcome if there is any.

The phantom and unlikely noise misses the point entirely and nobody looked at what this actually was in the first place. When I first heard a data center was going in, my first reaction was, that’s great! It’s more well-paying jobs for locals. They don’t require a lot of people to run, but they are in a constant state of updates and bug fixes. Even the power and water consumption is unremarkable. The daily water consumption is the same as roughly three toilet flushes. I’m not even kidding.

The majority of protesters come from the community without much knowledge of what they are talking about and I’m not here to correct them. From my point of view, they just look stupid and I can’t fix stupid.

When I pointed out the facts of the matter as released by the company building the ten sheds with an air cooler, of course they then attacked me when they suddenly didn’t have an enemy. Once again, they didn’t bother to check their facts. It reminded me of a giant pack of Yorkies running to see who knocked and when there was nobody there, barked at a nearby bumble bee instead. I couldn’t help but be amused by the whole thing, but then I realized what made up the community and how panicked people were over this. Of course now they are protesting a data center in Utah.

Now to save face, these same people are out to stop ALL data centers everywhere. The shocking irony is that the organization they put up, is entirely funded by left wing NGOs and the primary donor is the Bezos foundation. The irony is that the largest data centers in the US are owned by Amazon, which IS Jeff Bozos company!!! When I looked that up, I burst out laughing. So here is an entire small community riled up over something that will make less noise than a passing semi ten miles away that does nothing but medical research, also funded by a private foundation, and they want to shut it down. Never mind that it will save lives.

Rogersville is now about the last place I’d ever recommend building a business because theses people claim to have the power to just shut down any business they don’t like, even when it’s operating within the law. These people personally attacked the employees of Webster Electric, our power co-op and called them crooks. Webster Electric is made up of a group of wonderful humans, but never mind that. We have some seriously nasty self-richous people here and they couldn't look like shittier humans if they practiced. It was all over nothing. Bad people are everywhere I guess and Rogersville seems to be full of them. I just wish they didn’t live so close.