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Don't know why people think Texas doesn't have natural beauty. It's a huge state.
by seniorThrowaway 5mo ago
Don't know why people think Texas doesn't have natural beauty. It's a huge state.
- piker 5mo agoYeah, sorry that wasn't intended as a slight to Texas. Texas just does have a lot of barren landscape where datacenters wouldn't offend as much. I modified it to make that clear. Also, energy is playing a role here.
- bastardoperator 5mo agoI've been watching a series on YT that is specifically about rural towns in Texas that are being abandoned or on the brink of total collapse. Much of it has to do with highways and routing around these communities decades ago. I don't know if a datacenter is the answer, but it has to be better then what looks like a post apocalyptic America.
- bombcar 5mo agoReviving Radiator Springs with a datacenter! The plot of Cars 4. Those small towns are often positioned such that even if you plopped a billion dollar datacenter on top of them, it wouldn't change much, as even with second and third order effects it's adding 100-200 total population.
- ryandrake 5mo agoIs that really the primary concern about datacenters? Their aesthetics? I thought the major problem with them was that they muscle in on valuable resources like water and electricity, consuming what would otherwise be used by people, and driving the prices up.
- nemomarx 5mo agoTaking up land is one of the resources they use - consider cutting down trees to clear space for a large one, or the habitats that might have been in that space. That's not really an aesthetic thing.
- jandrewrogers 5mo agoData centers use a lot of electricity but negligible water.
- ericd 5mo agoGuessing some used swamp coolers to save electricity on chillers, and some motivated people decided to make a big stink about it? Now everyone seems to think that DCs inherently use up tons of fresh water. They are definitely driving up electric costs for residential customers, though (along with EVs and heat pumps) which is a major problem.
- TitaRusell 5mo agoWould you build one on Pennsylvania Avenue?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- AshleyGrant 5mo agoFolks have been conditioned to consider the deserts of West Texas, especially the Permian Basin, to be wastelands with no redeeming value. Personally, while it isn't my favorite landscape or even my favorite desert landscape, I still think it is a landscape with intrinsic value and beauty.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- ZeWaka 5mo agoSame with swamps and wetlands.
- asadm 5mo agoyes but they likely won't build datacenters by destroying national parks would they?
- _2d30 5mo agoBecause it's Republican, obviously.
- bsimpson 5mo agoI'm from Nevada, another state that people presume is all desert. (Really, it's all mountains.) The only part of Texas I've driven is between Austin and S Antonio. It was perhaps the least-beautiful wilderness I've driven through. It really did just feel like desert and billboards - like if Walmart was a highway. But I also presume Texas marketing itself as a less-regulated alternative (e.g. to California) is why it's easy to imagine Texas wanting infrastructure that Maine might not.
- taormina 5mo agoBetween Austin and San Antonio is so developed that it's considered by many to be a single "metro" area, DFW-style. There's very little not developed directly between the two.
- JuniperMesos 5mo agoI drove that way in 2024 for the solar eclipse. Some parts of that route struck me as a bit exurb-ish and spread-out, I wouldn't call it a single metro area, but there were definitely people living there. And it was way too green to be called a desert; I've driven through actual deserts in southern CA and nowhere that I saw in that part of Texas was anywhere near that dry (I guess you have to go further west to get to actual Texas desert, which we didn't do on that trip).
- CuriouslyC 5mo agoThe deserts around El Paso are still quite a bit more alive than the ugliest desert I've ever seen (the stretch between Phoenix and San Diego gets that dubious honor).
- bsimpson 5mo agoThis was 15 years ago. Maybe it was less developed then, or maybe my memory conflated that drive with another part of that trip.
- lizknope 5mo agoMost people never bother to look at a map. It takes 2 seconds to look at google satellite view of the area and see lots of desert with strips of green https://maps.app.goo.gl/R8HuWBi66548Jq5BA https://maps.app.goo.gl/R8HuWBi66548Jq5BA Of course you already know this but for everyone else it is called the Basin and Range province. You have desert areas and then a mountain range with much higher elevation with cooler temperatures and more precipitation which means trees and forests and green in color https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basin_and_Range_Province https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basin_and_Range_Province
- CuriouslyC 5mo agoI've driven through all of Texas twice, and had to spend time in Austin and Houston for work, but never had to live there, so I'd like to think I'm informed without being biased. Besides the heavily oak covered hill country west of Austin it's pretty much the ugliest landscape in the country. I will admit the west Texas desert is less ugly than the desert of southern Arizona/eastern California, but north/east Texas is the flattest, least interesting part of the Mississippi basin (Nebraska/Kansas/Oklahoma are similarly meh but you don't have the insane humidity).
- PaulDavisThe1st 5mo agoDriving across Texas is relatively easy, driving "through all of Texas" is an almost possible task.
- DANmode 5mo agoWhat beautiful part do you live in? or…have you never been?
- mapotofu 5mo agoBy size there should be more. That’s why they feel that way. Maine is significantly more beautiful than Texas. The ugliest part of Maine probably still looks better than most of Texas. I can’t even think of an example of “ugly Maine”.