Why? Datacenters have smaller effects on neighbors than other industries. No runoff like farming, no pollution like factories

One out of three. Datacenters use small land and water compared to just about any other industry. The power consumption is significant.

The French are just arrogant enough to believe themselves major players on the world stage.

do you still believe in democracy?

every election, americans make a big stink about how you belive in republicanism because democracy is evil, and that being a republic is somehow mutually exclusive with democracy

It is quite silly to say things like that while armed paramilitaries patrol your streets and throw innocent people in torture campsm

In 2025, USA GDP grew by 2.0%. In 2025, EU GDP grew by 1.5%. Government spending (a proxy for government power) is a fraction of GDP, usually between 10% of GDP and 30% of GDP.

So, while the US may not be doing particularly well right now, it's still doing better than Europe.

If Europe didn't have America as an ally, Europe wouldn't exist in 50 years.

The data center jobs are middle class. With progressive taxation, those 30 middle class jobs generate about 100 average people's worth of revenue. Presumably Lewiston has schools which could use the funds.

And presumably everybody in Lewiston already has lunch somewhere, so a new sandwich shop that was successful would put another lunch spot out of business, for a net zero jobs.

Edit: the larger point here is that jobs, particularly skilled jobs, don't grow on trees (much like money). New technologies and new jobs replace old technologies and old jobs. If you put a ban on new technologies and new jobs, you'll just have more unemployed people.

Nobody that lives in Lewiston will get those jobs, and the people that get those jobs will almost certainly live in more upscale places nearby.

Tack a new building that size onto Bath Ironworks? That’s a huge boon. Heck even an Amazon warehouse would be an improvement. But a data center? For the people in Lewiston, it would be far more of a negative than a positive — and that’s the way it works in this country. We value money over people. If private equity, venture capitalists or huge corporations want something that you don’t want, you lose. Getting a policy win is a rarity and I’d be surprised if it didn’t get successfully challenged in court.

You forgot to include an argument in your comment. I cited specific positive impacts (tax revenue) but you just talked about negative impact in the abstract, without citing anything specific, and then went on a rant about how the world works.

- Datacenters don't use tons of water compared to just about any other business.

- It's not really fair to blame datacenters for using the municipality's electricity and then blame them again for being loud and generating electricity instead of using the municipality's electricity. Any given datacenter is only doing one of these.

- Presumably, the municipality's tax dollars benefit the people who live in the municipality in the form of better services

> Datacenters might not be as potentially destructive, but they're also a massive net negative for the community in many real world ways

No they aren't. Datacenters are air conditioned buildings that consume a moderate amount of power and generate a moderate amount of tax revenue through a small number of middle class jobs. They use a negligible amount of water compared to golf and farming and produce a negligible amount of heat compared to cars.

In this case, it was the opinions of the politician who would receive more votes than anybody else in the history of the USA just a few years later.