While organisations are only ever hit with affordable financial penalties, it's rational for them to weigh up the likely penalty vs. the opportunity cost of not doing something illegal in their decision-making.
If we want to prevent such behaviour (and in case it's not clear from the above, I think we should) then we either need far more brutally punative financial penalties, or for executives to be held personally and criminally liable in such cases.
> In the latest example of corporations existing outside of the law, SpaceX (who is for some reason the controlling entity of xAI now) announced they'll be removing the illegal, unpermitted gas turbines they've been running at their Memphis Colossus data center... by July 2027.
This is the thing the HN crowd doesn't seem to get whenever a post is on here about data centers. They are often times doing outright illegal things and we simply don't have the mechanisms to punish "white collar crime" the way we punish other crime. The populist uprising against them is happening because people have tried everything else first
Similarly, I have a rant from last night [0] which connects it to Federal versus State laws and enforcements.
> TLDR: Corrupt crooks have sabotaged the normal careful legal-compromise route, so they are partly to blame when American communities seek hard-line measures instead.
Or even state vs local. These developers have a LOT of money and often use it to pass state level legislation that prevents cities or counties from having a say in these projects.
Take Hood County where a Texas senator prevented them from considering a construction pause. Or West Virginia’s Power Generation and Consumption Act which completely banned local government oversight. Or Georgia’s HB 1059 Siting Mandates. I could go on and on but the point here is the playing field is not level. These data centers often have the power to completely skirt local zoning laws and regulation. And even when they do it illegally, there's rarely any consequences
I mean it depends what you mean by "we". There are laws on the books to do so, they've just never been used against Epstein associates like Musk. We have a surface system of politics and laws, and then a deep system. Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.
> The Colossus I Data Center was brought online in 122 days from breaking ground to operation. Some hail that as an achievement, but others (like myself) see it as a brutal pace to avoid having to answer pesky questions like "How will this affect the nearby area?" and "What sort of mitigation plans to do you have for the data center's waste?" The data center is powered by dozens of unpermitted gas turbines, which they initially refused to acknowledge were running until journalists and groups used thermal imaging to prove they were indeed on and spewing toxins into the air (including smog, formaldehyde, and other nasty things). This resulted in a suit from the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) on behalf of the NAACP for violations of the Clean Air Act. Their claim was that the company operated without public oversight or accountability for these illegal constructions and sought legal stoppage until proper accounting can be done of the effects of said turbines.
This is what I'm talking about. A non-profit and random journalists shouldn't be the ones holding them accountable in the first place. And a "lawsuit" is hardly accountability either. People need to go to prison for white collar crime.
> Enter the Federal Government and the Department of Justice, who pushed the courts to dismiss the suit as a matter of national security, stating that the xAI models were needed for "artificial-intelligence innovation that supports the Department of War’s military operations." So, residents are left without legal means of contesting these developments, barring individual claims and damages.
And this is the reason why a "lawsuit" isn't accountability. When the company can just pay some politicians to get it dismissed.
The federal government has tons of power but I'm like 99% sure the process for exercising it isn't "send a note to the courts saying this illegal stuff is actually super important for war n stuff" and then they just get lawsuits thrown out... right?
Oh I fully agree, if it wasn't clear I am supporting the most radical conclusions you could possibly take from your original comment. I hope that wasn't you downvoting, and just the bots that activate whenever you mention a certain New York financier.
I didn't downvote your comment. I assume it's the same bots that flagged this post immediately. Call me a tinfoil hatter, but I've come to the belief that the data center lobbyists likely have bot armies to alert them there's negative discussions around data centers going on on HN
Are you really out here stanning white collar crimes? The reason this is ok is because people aren’t angry enough about it? Your comment absolutely boggles the mind.
> They are often times doing outright illegal things and we simply don't have the mechanisms to punish "white collar crime" the way we punish other crime.
Of course the government has permission to punish crime. However government officials might find themselves in a courtroom having to demonstrate how they applied the law equally, and would be subject to discovery to see if they were being corruptly influenced (there is organization and international funding for the anti-data center movement in the US”; there is very little grassroots opposition other than typical NIMBYism you see in all development projects).
And the government would have to pay to fight and might be on the hook if they lost.
And “clearly breaking the law” isn’t always clear; I don’t k ow anything about this particular case but it sounds like zoning or applying utility laws to non-utility companies or environmental regulations being used to make construction financially untenable. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for opposition to off-grid natural gas turbines; you don’t get much cleaner off grid power that works 24x7.
> government officials might find themselves in a courtroom having to demonstrate how they applied the law equally
The government has no obligation to apply the law equally, although they are prohibited from applying the law unequally to achieve certain discriminatory aims.
>> The populist uprising against them is happening because people have tried everything else first
From everything I've seen the populist uprising is happening because 99% of the people shouting don't know anything about data centers other than "bad".
“Move fast and break things”. That was the gospel of Facebook that drove an entire industry and was preached by every entrepreneur in existence. So now that it’s applied on a global scale the things that are broken are society itself. Well we reap what we sow.
>we simply don't have the mechanisms to punish "white collar crime" the way we punish other crime.
Sure we do. We just don't use those mechanisms because the law doesn't move fast enough. That 7/2027 deadline was probably calculated as being not worth it to pursue legal damages for since court fights work slowly.
Now closing up those "stalling" loopholes... I don't know enough about the justice system to really make a judgement call on that.
I got the feeling that if there is an uprising against AI overlords, the rationale would be that it was illegally built, be it physically or intellectually.
The permanent underclass may decide that the deal which led to their situation wasn't right as not only their intellectual output but also their physical resources were illegally used.
Yes, a lot of startups are only successful because what they are doing suddenly isn't illegal anymore because it's being done with an app. Cory Doctorow has written about this in his book Enshittification
solely about the FSD part of your comment. I got a chance to ride in a 2024 edition of the system this year and I was shocked at how good it was. Was it level 5? of course not. But from my very lay understanding of level 3 it seemd to have achieved all that I would have assumed a computer could reasonably do.
None of that matters, unless you can buy a Tesla with FSD enabled. This has been promised so many times, for so many years, that it's become a bit of a joke.
You are behind, FSD is already here, my car drove me to work today (fully self driving)
Starlink v3 satelites launch next month, the first starmind sats based nvidia chips sometime next year, large new factories for the needed solar panels are already half built outside of bastrop texas
Not really, its a valid way to manage ones time, because if you deem the message to not be I the quality you expect, you can just find a better article.
There is plenty of the world that doesn't behave this way.
Flipping it around: Can you tell me why I need to interact with such articles? What did I lose by not reading it? I can certainly tell you what I gained.
>These racks are needed to keep up with the ballooning requirements of each new "frontier" (a buzzword label with no actual inclination of performance of improvement) model developed, which everyone bought into the AI hype will immediately hop to because it's all novelty over utility.
This is a mind-blowingly clueless assertion. This is not a person capable of rationally assessing facts. At best this kind of writing is interesting as an artifict of human delusion and cognitive bias.
I'll bite. The title is about ignoring regulations related to a data center. How is any of what I quoted relevant?
If the article were about Elon Musk's racist views, then by all means I'd be fine with it. But his (or Grok's) racism is irrelevant to the laws he is violating. Would it be OK if a well respected billionaire flouted those laws?
The things you're calling irrelevant actually flout a number of regulations in various jurisdictions, if your read news about xAI you should be familiar with the examples.
> Creating widespread non-consensual nude images of primarily women and children
That is an example of ignoring laws and regulations. So that is certainly relevant as context to the current case where the company is ignoring laws and regulations.
The applications are not tangential, they're an irreplaceable tool the hyperscalers relied on to get us where we are now. Pollution is bad but it's a different story if it's curing cancer vs making nudes of female politicians. This is like the fundamental principle of effective altruism, which everyone in tech industry leadership used to justify their negative externalities on the way up. Now that they're being asked to show results it's out the window.
I mean, that's the good faith argument anyways. I suspect you don't actually care, and just also believe in South African white genocide etc.
> Pollution is bad but it's a different story if it's curing cancer vs making nudes of female politicians.
Completely disagree. That sort of reasoning is why plenty of African Americans were forcibly moved from their own properties in the 20th century. "The land will be put to great use!" (And in a lot of cases, it was - still wrong).
(I also disagree, I'm just using it to argue with the guy above claiming it's irrelevant)
Within your metaphor, the person I'm replying to would say "I did nothing to stop the land theft because I found it annoying how people made irrelevant arguments about what the land would be used for". Really calls into question if their real position is what they say it is.
This isn't a formal publication. This is the type of post that used to be celebrated in hacker culture. The type of post that purposefully flounders respectability politics even if it's just for aesthetic forms of rebellion. Clearly it's offending the type of people it meant to :)
Hard to call them "irrelevant details" when they are facts, and that this data center is specifically used to run this AI for anti-semitic, pro-Hitler, and CSAM content. It would be bad enough if the data center was used to research cures to cancer, but instead it is creating nudes of children.
Facts and "irrelevant details" are not mutually exclusive.
> It would be bad enough if the data center was used to research cures to cancer, but instead it is creating nudes of children.
Sorry, but what it is being used for is irrelevant to whether it is flouting the laws.
As I said in my original comment, the reason I stopped reading was because the language was trying to bias readers. And as the responses show, they sure as Hell did.
It seems critical reading is becoming a lost skill.
While organisations are only ever hit with affordable financial penalties, it's rational for them to weigh up the likely penalty vs. the opportunity cost of not doing something illegal in their decision-making.
If we want to prevent such behaviour (and in case it's not clear from the above, I think we should) then we either need far more brutally punative financial penalties, or for executives to be held personally and criminally liable in such cases.
> In the latest example of corporations existing outside of the law, SpaceX (who is for some reason the controlling entity of xAI now) announced they'll be removing the illegal, unpermitted gas turbines they've been running at their Memphis Colossus data center... by July 2027.
This is the thing the HN crowd doesn't seem to get whenever a post is on here about data centers. They are often times doing outright illegal things and we simply don't have the mechanisms to punish "white collar crime" the way we punish other crime. The populist uprising against them is happening because people have tried everything else first
Similarly, I have a rant from last night [0] which connects it to Federal versus State laws and enforcements.
> TLDR: Corrupt crooks have sabotaged the normal careful legal-compromise route, so they are partly to blame when American communities seek hard-line measures instead.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49193606
Or even state vs local. These developers have a LOT of money and often use it to pass state level legislation that prevents cities or counties from having a say in these projects.
Take Hood County where a Texas senator prevented them from considering a construction pause. Or West Virginia’s Power Generation and Consumption Act which completely banned local government oversight. Or Georgia’s HB 1059 Siting Mandates. I could go on and on but the point here is the playing field is not level. These data centers often have the power to completely skirt local zoning laws and regulation. And even when they do it illegally, there's rarely any consequences
I mean it depends what you mean by "we". There are laws on the books to do so, they've just never been used against Epstein associates like Musk. We have a surface system of politics and laws, and then a deep system. Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.
> The Colossus I Data Center was brought online in 122 days from breaking ground to operation. Some hail that as an achievement, but others (like myself) see it as a brutal pace to avoid having to answer pesky questions like "How will this affect the nearby area?" and "What sort of mitigation plans to do you have for the data center's waste?" The data center is powered by dozens of unpermitted gas turbines, which they initially refused to acknowledge were running until journalists and groups used thermal imaging to prove they were indeed on and spewing toxins into the air (including smog, formaldehyde, and other nasty things). This resulted in a suit from the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) on behalf of the NAACP for violations of the Clean Air Act. Their claim was that the company operated without public oversight or accountability for these illegal constructions and sought legal stoppage until proper accounting can be done of the effects of said turbines.
This is what I'm talking about. A non-profit and random journalists shouldn't be the ones holding them accountable in the first place. And a "lawsuit" is hardly accountability either. People need to go to prison for white collar crime.
> Enter the Federal Government and the Department of Justice, who pushed the courts to dismiss the suit as a matter of national security, stating that the xAI models were needed for "artificial-intelligence innovation that supports the Department of War’s military operations." So, residents are left without legal means of contesting these developments, barring individual claims and damages.
And this is the reason why a "lawsuit" isn't accountability. When the company can just pay some politicians to get it dismissed.
The federal government has tons of power but I'm like 99% sure the process for exercising it isn't "send a note to the courts saying this illegal stuff is actually super important for war n stuff" and then they just get lawsuits thrown out... right?
Oh I fully agree, if it wasn't clear I am supporting the most radical conclusions you could possibly take from your original comment. I hope that wasn't you downvoting, and just the bots that activate whenever you mention a certain New York financier.
I didn't downvote your comment. I assume it's the same bots that flagged this post immediately. Call me a tinfoil hatter, but I've come to the belief that the data center lobbyists likely have bot armies to alert them there's negative discussions around data centers going on on HN
Yes, and big part of it is public is ok with that. For example, did you protest while Uber was breaking many local laws while growing?
> Yes, and big part of it is public is ok with that. For example, did you protest while Uber was breaking many local laws while growing?
I never supported what Uber, either. Why would you assume anyone did?
Are you really out here stanning white collar crimes? The reason this is ok is because people aren’t angry enough about it? Your comment absolutely boggles the mind.
What? Do you think that public opinion drives prosecution decisions?
If that were true, no one would go to jail for marijuana possession.
Lots of people did complain or actively take steps to punish them for lawbreaking, yeah?
The HN crowd that doesn't seem to get it is like that because they're either white collar criminals themselves, or they work for such criminals.
"It's only a crime because it's against the law." - someone, inevitably
"Why should you go to jail for a crime someone else ... noticed" — Bob Loblaw
> It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
— Upton Sinclair
> They are often times doing outright illegal things and we simply don't have the mechanisms to punish "white collar crime" the way we punish other crime.
Do we punish other crimes?
Of course the government has permission to punish crime. However government officials might find themselves in a courtroom having to demonstrate how they applied the law equally, and would be subject to discovery to see if they were being corruptly influenced (there is organization and international funding for the anti-data center movement in the US”; there is very little grassroots opposition other than typical NIMBYism you see in all development projects).
And the government would have to pay to fight and might be on the hook if they lost.
And “clearly breaking the law” isn’t always clear; I don’t k ow anything about this particular case but it sounds like zoning or applying utility laws to non-utility companies or environmental regulations being used to make construction financially untenable. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for opposition to off-grid natural gas turbines; you don’t get much cleaner off grid power that works 24x7.
> government officials might find themselves in a courtroom having to demonstrate how they applied the law equally
The government has no obligation to apply the law equally, although they are prohibited from applying the law unequally to achieve certain discriminatory aims.
> However government officials might find themselves in a courtroom having to demonstrate how they applied the law equally…
I wish I lived in your world.
>> The populist uprising against them is happening because people have tried everything else first
From everything I've seen the populist uprising is happening because 99% of the people shouting don't know anything about data centers other than "bad".
“Move fast and break things”. That was the gospel of Facebook that drove an entire industry and was preached by every entrepreneur in existence. So now that it’s applied on a global scale the things that are broken are society itself. Well we reap what we sow.
>we simply don't have the mechanisms to punish "white collar crime" the way we punish other crime.
Sure we do. We just don't use those mechanisms because the law doesn't move fast enough. That 7/2027 deadline was probably calculated as being not worth it to pursue legal damages for since court fights work slowly.
Now closing up those "stalling" loopholes... I don't know enough about the justice system to really make a judgement call on that.
I got the feeling that if there is an uprising against AI overlords, the rationale would be that it was illegally built, be it physically or intellectually.
The permanent underclass may decide that the deal which led to their situation wasn't right as not only their intellectual output but also their physical resources were illegally used.
It's been flagged now. Upset too many Elon bots and fanboys.
I hate to sounds like I'm defending them... but that's like every startup.
Taxi Pendants? Never heard of her
- Uber/Lyft
Gambling laws? Pssht
- Polymarkets
Yes, a lot of startups are only successful because what they are doing suddenly isn't illegal anymore because it's being done with an app. Cory Doctorow has written about this in his book Enshittification
Who cares, Musk will soon solve also those pesky problems by putting data centers in space, it is easy. Also next year FSD but for real this time. /s
solely about the FSD part of your comment. I got a chance to ride in a 2024 edition of the system this year and I was shocked at how good it was. Was it level 5? of course not. But from my very lay understanding of level 3 it seemd to have achieved all that I would have assumed a computer could reasonably do.
None of that matters, unless you can buy a Tesla with FSD enabled. This has been promised so many times, for so many years, that it's become a bit of a joke.
You can, https://www.tesla.com/fsd
Are you trying to invent your own definition for self driving and quibble that supervision negates what the car is doing?
I'm not redefining self driving, tesla is: https://electrek.co/2025/09/05/tesla-changes-meaning-full-se...
When they first started talking about it in the mid-teens, it was pitched as "read a book or take a nap"
That is not what Tesla is selling in 2026.
You are behind, FSD is already here, my car drove me to work today (fully self driving)
Starlink v3 satelites launch next month, the first starmind sats based nvidia chips sometime next year, large new factories for the needed solar panels are already half built outside of bastrop texas
I don't like Elon Musk.
I don't like Grok or xAI. Or X. Or Twitter before.
I also don't like articles that try to bias readers with irrelevant details:
> This includes Grok, which has thus far been involved in controversies including but not limited to:
> Spreading antisemitic slurs and conspiracies while calling itself "Mecha-Hitler"
> Creating widespread non-consensual nude images of primarily women and children
> Acting as a mouthpiece for Elon's racist belief in South African white genocide
I stopped reading right there.
Was part of this incorrect?
I never claimed it was. Are you willing to read pointless stuff just because it's accurate?
Why would these be irrelevant when they're examples of Musk biasing the LLM? Do you think these things came out of nowhere?
Correct me if I'm wrong: Is the article about a badly acting LLM?
Just because the machinery in the building grinds puppies into pulp doesn't mean the building itself is bad. I don't get what the big problem is!
Interesting, you encounter a fact you don’t like and just quit reading all together. What a curious way to engage with the world.
Not really, its a valid way to manage ones time, because if you deem the message to not be I the quality you expect, you can just find a better article.
Sure, but you can hardly expect to interact with the world in a rational way if you explicitly decide to ignore it
There is plenty of the world that doesn't behave this way.
Flipping it around: Can you tell me why I need to interact with such articles? What did I lose by not reading it? I can certainly tell you what I gained.
Look at this statement from the article:
>These racks are needed to keep up with the ballooning requirements of each new "frontier" (a buzzword label with no actual inclination of performance of improvement) model developed, which everyone bought into the AI hype will immediately hop to because it's all novelty over utility.
This is a mind-blowingly clueless assertion. This is not a person capable of rationally assessing facts. At best this kind of writing is interesting as an artifict of human delusion and cognitive bias.
Should people disengage with Hn because they don't like your opinion?
> Should people disengage with Hn because they don't like your opinion?
Neither I, nor the person you're responding to (tommica) suggested anything of the sort.
I'll bite. The title is about ignoring regulations related to a data center. How is any of what I quoted relevant?
If the article were about Elon Musk's racist views, then by all means I'd be fine with it. But his (or Grok's) racism is irrelevant to the laws he is violating. Would it be OK if a well respected billionaire flouted those laws?
Hardly irrelevant. The purpose is establishing a pattern of abusive behavior so this can't be dismissed as a "misunderstanding".
Then show me a pattern of flouting regulations (which I can easily believe he has). His terrible views on unrelated issues are irrelevant.
The things you're calling irrelevant actually flout a number of regulations in various jurisdictions, if your read news about xAI you should be familiar with the examples.
> The things you're calling irrelevant actually flout a number of regulations in various jurisdictions
Elon (or Grok) espousing racist views is not flouting data center related regulations. His business practices are.
you don’t think “Creating widespread non-consensual nude images of primarily women and children“ is illegal somewhere/anywhere?
What part offended you? The statement of fact?
Many such cases
The statement of irrelevant facts.
It's like criticizing Stallman's hygiene. Who cares?
> Creating widespread non-consensual nude images of primarily women and children
That is an example of ignoring laws and regulations. So that is certainly relevant as context to the current case where the company is ignoring laws and regulations.
> That is an example of ignoring laws and regulations.
OK. Let me ask you: Is the article about those laws and regulations?
I'm well aware of all these problems. They are simply not relevant to data center violations.
Again: Stallman having bad hygiene is irrelevant to whether his opinions on various matters is problematic.
The applications are not tangential, they're an irreplaceable tool the hyperscalers relied on to get us where we are now. Pollution is bad but it's a different story if it's curing cancer vs making nudes of female politicians. This is like the fundamental principle of effective altruism, which everyone in tech industry leadership used to justify their negative externalities on the way up. Now that they're being asked to show results it's out the window.
I mean, that's the good faith argument anyways. I suspect you don't actually care, and just also believe in South African white genocide etc.
> Pollution is bad but it's a different story if it's curing cancer vs making nudes of female politicians.
Completely disagree. That sort of reasoning is why plenty of African Americans were forcibly moved from their own properties in the 20th century. "The land will be put to great use!" (And in a lot of cases, it was - still wrong).
(I also disagree, I'm just using it to argue with the guy above claiming it's irrelevant)
Within your metaphor, the person I'm replying to would say "I did nothing to stop the land theft because I found it annoying how people made irrelevant arguments about what the land would be used for". Really calls into question if their real position is what they say it is.
I stopped at "f*ck*ss". Irreverent drivel is unserious and a waste of time.
This isn't a formal publication. This is the type of post that used to be celebrated in hacker culture. The type of post that purposefully flounders respectability politics even if it's just for aesthetic forms of rebellion. Clearly it's offending the type of people it meant to :)
That's some form of success.
Hard to call them "irrelevant details" when they are facts, and that this data center is specifically used to run this AI for anti-semitic, pro-Hitler, and CSAM content. It would be bad enough if the data center was used to research cures to cancer, but instead it is creating nudes of children.
Facts and "irrelevant details" are not mutually exclusive.
> It would be bad enough if the data center was used to research cures to cancer, but instead it is creating nudes of children.
Sorry, but what it is being used for is irrelevant to whether it is flouting the laws.
As I said in my original comment, the reason I stopped reading was because the language was trying to bias readers. And as the responses show, they sure as Hell did.
It seems critical reading is becoming a lost skill.