This polling seems to work extremely hard to avoid noticing the elephant in the room: a company isn’t going to build a datacenter in the middle of Beverly Hills.
The data from the article seems to suggest that people in the top quartile of income resisted 14 DCs out of the 365 projects considered.
They then decided that that is a resistance rate of 14 / 365 * 100 = 3.836%.
Um. No.
The resistance rate is number resisted / number proposed for that income quartile. If only 14 were proposed in upper-income areas, and 14 were resisted, that would mean that the resistance rate for high income areas was 100%.
That’s because that’s where the cheap land and bribeable officials are.
How many of them are build near wealthy neighborhood?
Five times fewer!
Could be 100x fewer, or 10,000x fewer. 5x fewer would mean that rich people and poor people resist DCs at the same rate, but that there are 5x fewer DCs in rich areas. But, my guess is that rich people would actually resist a lot more if someone dared to consider building a DC in their area… but that probably never happens, because why would a company buy up expensive real estate for a DC?
Given the noise pollution, and sometimes air pollution, as well as the water getting ruined, and the skyrocketing electric prices. Probably not many. Why would rich people put up with that if the povvos can break under it instead?
And how many people live in wealthy neighborhoods compared to poor ones?
Size of each demographic used for the statistics is in the article, approx. N=220 for each of them.
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Wealthy people just hire lawyers to resist.
NIMBYs gonna NIMBY
yep thats exactly what I would expect.
Holtzman describes himself as “a philosopher and data scientist who writes about quantitative propaganda and scientistic rhetoric,” and he often does so at his science & Power newsletter. His peer-reviewed work has been published in places like the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and The American Journal of Bioethics. He had also heard the oft-repeated suggestion that the data center protest movement was led by wealthy, NIMBY folks, so he set out to investigate. He analyzed a dataset of current and proposed data center projects alongside US census data1 and has graciously offered to share the results in an exclusive here. He came to at least three stark conclusions:
- The poorest neighborhoods resisted data centers at nearly five times the rate of the wealthiest (19.0% vs. 3.8%)
- Recently proposed data centers that faced pushback were canceled or suspended at more than five times the rate of data centers that didn’t (28.2% vs. 5.2%).
- Cancellation rates are highest in lower-income areas, a fact fully explained by their higher rates of pushback.
Send all those richies free tickets to a trump rally then squat, baby, squat!
