cross-posted from: https://piefed.blahaj.zone/c/michigan/p/403803/a-small-town-is-fighting-a-1-2-billion-ai-datacenter-for-america-s-nuclear-weapon
Ypsilanti, Michigan has officially decided to fight against the construction of a ‘high-performance computing facility’ that would service a nuclear weapons laboratory 1,500 miles away.
Good for them, meanwhile in Tulsa they are building 27 of these with little push back, almost no active ones I can see.
Fucking things should be fired bombed.
Ypsi is in the Ann Arbor zone. This is otherwise decent real estate. A data center would tank that. I hope the data center loses, but we’ve seen many a city council sell out their constituents for these leviathans.
Since this will be a facility owned by a public university, I think the city would see no property tax revenue from this project. So why should a city trade its health and/or morals for a nuclear weapons datacenter and not even get anything out of it?
It’s mostly another NIMBY neighborhood getting their knickers in a twist because the facility will be used for nuclear research. That’s the main point they’re taking exception to.
The moment we use the NIMBY label we prejudice ourselves against potentially legitimate local and global concerns and specific local protest movements. I do that too on some issues but do wonder sometimes whether I’m being unfair. I guess the determining factors would be how big a sacrifice a local community is asked to make, how great the greater good that sacrifice will serve, also who is protesting and what arguments they bring forth, what values they stand for, how these values align with yours, etc.
