Agreed, the only calculation that makes sense is if they try to dismantle elections to stay in power. It’s the only way it makes sense.
I don’t think they were counting on so much hate that ICE agents were quitting long before getting their bonuses, or being so reviled; in their fantasy they were lauded as saviors, not mocked so badly that ICE agents quit.
I increasingly notice people say they were “never MAGA, I was always independent”. It’s been a noticeable shift.
It seems like a pretty obvious tactic to put ICE agents outside of every polling booth, checking papers and intimidating anyone with slightly brown skin from voting. "Best" case (for them) is if riots break out. Then they can call martial law and just call off the elections.
I'm willing to bet at least 1000 USD that a sufficiently trumpian republican in 2028 will be able to get near or even more latino votes than trump did.
They LOVE the cruelty. The people who hate immigrants most are other immigrants. Brazil didn't end slavery until 1888 and it continued de-facto far longer than it did in the USA. Spain/Portugal were far more cruel/racist than the English and especially french were. Their history is one of extreme, virulent racism.
Even today, they make huge distinctions between the "European" white mexicans who are "untainted" by indigenous blood.
Latinos also are extremely anti-LGBT, and used to be catholic but are having their own evangelization sweeping through their communities (I am personally witnessing it right now). That evangelization is primary in reaction to the precieved liberalism of the current and previous pope.
I’m going to ignore the racism at first, and point out that your argument can be disproven by the facts already stated: Trump is underwater with Latinos.
If you were right and Latinos just loved cruelty, why would this current push make Trump unpopular?
Second off: this is wildly racist. “Latinos” is clearly a massive brush, and then you make some point about how they “distinguish” whiteness, but again that wasn’t what you were trying to prove.
Your understanding of colonial oppression as being “better” under the French wouldn’t go down well in Haiti, or the English in India (or Ireland, etc, etc). Is Belgian Congo and King Leopold II in our class trading, or not?
It’s like you tried for three separate thoughts by shooting from the hip, but started off without basic reasoning and a massive dose of easily dispelled racism?
Trump was surging with Latinos precisely because of the hardline messaging on borders, crime, and "cruelty" (i.e., enforcement) that you dismiss and call Racist to call out. The post election dip in approval (which you haven't substantiated and I literally don't buy) after a year of governing is irrelevant to the 2028 bet!
On the "if they loved cruelty, why unpopular now?" bit: Popularity ebbs and flows. The surge came from voters who prioritized border security, gang crackdowns (MS-13 rhetoric landed hard in Central American communities), and anti "woke" vibes over abstract kindness. Many Latinos (especially newer immigrants or their kids) resent unchecked new arrivals competing for jobs/housing in their neighborhoods. This is classic intragroup competition. Polls and studies have long shown native born or earlier generation Latinos often hold hugely more restrictionist views on immigration than native born whites do on certain dimensions.
Now, the racism card: Calling the observation "wildly racist" while ignoring the actual sociology is lazy. Latin America has deep, enduring colorism and caste systems rooted in colonial hierarchies! Spain/Portugal's systems were explicitly racialized with categories like peninsulares > criollos > mestizos > indígenas > africanos and they are alive and strong today! "Limpieza de sangre" (blood purity) was and is a thing. Brazil abolished slavery in 1888 (last in the Americas), with de facto continuations via labor exploitation en mass. That's the historical record. Modern manifestations: In Mexico, lighter skinned people dominate media/politics/business! Skin bleaching products are huge! Job ads sometimes specify "buena presencia" (code for white passing). Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, same patterns but even stronger. Look at El Salvador especially! I'm acknowledging intra Latino hierarchies that make blanket anti-racism narratives from the U.S. left ring hollow when applied uniformly.
You bring up Haiti and India/Ireland/Belgian Congo. SOME French colonialism was brutal, i.e. Haiti, English in India/Ireland genocidal at times, Leopold's Congo a horror show (note I didn't bring up Belgium at all and will never defend their record given the scale). But the original point was comparative severity in the Americas' slave systems and indigenous treatment. Iberian systems often involved more explicit racial mixing at much larger scales (mestizaje as ideology) but also more rigid caste enforcement and FAR slower abolition. British systems in North America leaned toward segregation/expulsion over integration, but slavery ended earlier (British in 1808 in abolising trans atlantic trade, full emancipation by 1835, U.S. 1865, French colonies phased out even earlier). Spain didn't fully abolish slavery in Cuba until 1886!
French colonialism outside Haiti, in New France (Canada, Great Lakes fur trade regions), was downright cordial by colonial standards! The fur trade economy required deep alliances with Indigenous groups (Hurons, Algonquins, Montagnais, etc.). French traders lived in Native villages, learned languages, intermarried (creating Métis communities), respected customs to secure trade networks, and prioritized diplomacy over mass settlement or expulsion. They armed allies militarily but avoided the large scale land grabs and forced labor systems elsewhere. Historians note the French depended on these partnerships for survival against British numbers, leading to mutual respect and integration rather than domination. Contrast that with Spanish encomienda (forced tribute labor) or British settler colonialism (displacement, reservations).
Yes, "Latinos" is a broad category, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Venezuelan, etc., have different politics. But the trends hold: Trump overperformed with men (Latino men went +33 points margin shift in some data), working class, evangelical leaning segments (rapidly raising right now because catholocism is too liberal). The ongoing evangelical wave among U.S. Latinos (fastest growing evangelical subgroup, with projections of major shifts by 2030) is real and reacts against perceived Catholic "liberalism" (Francis era stuff). Anti LGBT attitudes remain stronger in many Latino communities than in the broader U.S. Your statistics claiming the opposite are from a decade and a half ago.
Anglo French (Protestant/Enlightenment-influenced) traditions produced the intellectual forefathers of modern liberalism. Locke (natural rights, limited government), Montesquieu (separation of powers), Voltaire/Rousseau (individual liberty, secularism), Smith (free markets), Mill (utilitarianism/liberty). These ideas fueled abolitionism, constitutionalism, and eventual democratic expansions. Iberian colonialism, tied to absolutist Spain/Portugal and the Inquisition's legacy, leaned toward hierarchical, corporatist, Catholic monarchical structures. This is literally the opposite of liberalism's emphasis on individual rights and equality before law. Mestizaje ideology mixed races but preserved sharp color/class distinctions. liberalism's universalist ideals (however imperfectly applied) came from the Anglo-French orbit. My disdain for Iberian influenced cultures is rooted in history.
Why are people on hackernews downvoting this? I am not American but from what I hear from americans, this is such a genuine and proven concern that AI does end up increasing their electricty and water costs.
I recently saw a county in america trying to have a deal and the deal itself is behind NDA and the govt cant tell its own citizens about the deal.
Personally I feel as if the problems aren't datacenters themselves (there were so many datacenters before AI) but AI datacenters in particular are really lucrative for the business but really hurtful to the average person in that area.
AI datacenters increase your electricity bill, water bill & now your ability to buy your hardware (ramflation)
Why are the demands of some billionaires preferred over the needs of the people who vote and how the mindset in many people themselves (I don't think there are billionaires reading my comment) is to be on the other side of line rather than fixing it, this whole philosophy doesn't sit right with me honestly especially within AI datacenters (I don't think that I am against normal CPU datacenters so much)
> I am not American but from what I hear from americans, this is such a genuine and proven concern that AI does end up increasing their electricty and water costs.
The media pretty much hates AI because it competes with them (people read the AI summary instead of visiting the publisher's website), so they're churning out one hit piece after another.
If you have a sudden spike in demand for electricity, short-term prices increase. Then the higher prices drive construction of new generation capacity (the cheapest option is currently solar) and long term the prices, if anything, come down, because you get more economies of scale and data centers used for AI training are actually pretty good at curtailing load during the rare extended periods of renewable generation undersupply which is one of the main things you need for the grid to take advantage of that cheap solar.
Meanwhile data centers don't inherently use any water. In some climates it's more efficient to use evaporative cooling -- it lowers energy consumption. That doesn't mean you have to do it that way, or even that it's the best choice for all climates. Moreover, many areas don't have the same water problems as the Southwest. "Millions of gallons of water" sounds like a lot until you realize the Great Lakes contain quadrillions of gallons of water, and it's really just being evaporated rather than actually consumed and then comes back down as rain shortly thereafter.
The media also likes comparing these numbers to household water consumption because households don't actually use that much water. Agriculture in just California consumes around 11 trillion gallons of water a year. Using the standard media units of household water consumption, this is the same amount of water used by 160 million households. There are around 133 million households in the US in total.
The water consumption is an entirely fake problem outside of areas where water is actually scarce, and not even the major offender in the areas where it is scarce. You can also obviously put new data centers outside of those areas, or use non-evaporative cooling systems.
> I recently saw a county in america trying to have a deal and the deal itself is behind NDA and the govt cant tell its own citizens about the deal.
This is likewise related to the media trying to impede them. If the local media is going to launch a vendetta against you as soon as they find out you're trying to build something, you'd want to keep it quiet for as long as possible.
That city with the NDA was in Wisconsin. This is not a place with water scarcity.
We have watched every good tech invention for the last 20 years become enshittified - nobody believes in the magical market theory thay “then prices will come down” - because they haven’t. Every service has gone berserk, and nothing feels like a deal any longer - and that’s before you add into the dystopian hellhole aspects of “tech”.
Water consumption and the infrastructure to leverage it can’t be nullified by pointing to… the Great Lakes. That’s not how that works.
This is before you get into “is this technology good for people”. It’s good for a few doughy tech bros in the Epstein list, but not the rest of us.
We don’t need the country to have an infinite pool of data centers, we need healthcare, clean air and water, etc.
We should stop these dumb ass data centers, and also ban all crypto. Tech people were supposed to help usher in Star Trek, not raise our power bills and destroy the environment by firing up new gas power plants for random number generating pyramid schemes and the suckers who fall for them. It’s all beyond embarrassing.
> We have watched every good tech invention for the last 20 years become enshittified - nobody believes in the magical market theory thay “then prices will come down” - because they haven’t.
Electricity isn't a tech product. Tech products become enshittified as a result of market consolidation.
But also, you're saying the prices of tech products haven't come down? The industry that has actually been doing that for decades?
> Water consumption and the infrastructure to leverage it can’t be nullified by pointing to… the Great Lakes. That’s not how that works.
Water consumption in the midwest is a nonsense issue. There is no lack of water there and it comes from rain rather than aquifers, which is the same place it goes back to when used for evaporative cooling.
> We don’t need the country to have an infinite pool of data centers, we need healthcare, clean air and water, etc.
This is like complaining about landlords or utility companies because they don't provide you with medical services. That's the wrong tree.
> We should stop these dumb ass data centers, and also ban all crypto.
It seems like you're blaming tech companies for enshittifying things when that was really a result of the banks having them buy each other up, and then also blaming them for trying to disrupt the banks.
> Tech people were supposed to help usher in Star Trek
This is what I mean by the media writing a stream of hit pieces.
Think about the actual technology in Star Trek. You can talk to the computer and it understands natural language, that's NLP. There is a Holodeck that you can provide with a narrative and it fills in the rest of the story and generates images for it, that's LLMs and image generation.
They're actually working on the thing you're asking for but you're demanding that they stop because the early implementations are primordial and someone keeps telling you to hate them.
Yeah they can pitch their startups to the technofeudalist fascist overlords to buy themselves a boat and retire with a lot of money, and really now, isn’t that the point?
> not almost as toxic just in the opposite direction.
It’s not toxic to be like “everyone should have the same rights, invading Greenland is stupid, let’s all have healthcare.”
We can compare toxicities accurately, and comparing the cesspool of “thought” that is X to…anything else? Is like comparing Polonium 210 to Tylenol. Sure, they’re both toxic, technically, but there is some critical distinction between them, right?
So we chose growth, and now are trying empire, because of memes about our supposed strength on paper, pushed by unserious “conservatives” who can’t form a cohesive argument about anything?
We stand a good chance of this totally destroying us, because the “technocracy” set actually believe their own Paper Divisions are unstoppable and the legal mind of “stick your fingers in your ears and say NAH NAH NAH” to be unassailable.
What an embarrassing ending to the American story this all is, eh?
Maybe whatever comes next will be more serious and will choose differently.
This; the “originalists” who dress up in wigs and shock of shocks, just so happen to rule contrary to the way things have worked for the last 50 years.
> On the other hand we have federal district court judges in podunk deciding that they have the unilateral ability to stop the president from exercising executive authority
He doesn’t have unlimited executive authority; it makes sense for a judge to be able to determine where that line is. It’s literally their job?
This is generational damage for anyone (R), and we’re only a year in. They’re losing elections in Trump +17 districts.
Never interrupt your enemy when they’re making a mistake.
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