this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2026
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On the Flock cameras, pretty much agreed.
Data centers are a bit more interesting. Sure the land itself is "find a willing landowner or handful in a sea of any land that would be equally ok", but then you have supporting infrastructure. Perhaps not as large of a route to secure, and more flexibility to make pretty sharp turns and such, but still lots of room for people to get in the way of a critical dependency. So surely the datacenters are having issues getting power to their facilities in the face of so many people around their property not wanting to give up their land right? No solution for that.
Oh yeah, if they won't sell their property to facilitate it, the government will just take it over: https://www.washingtonpost.com/ripple/2026/07/16/when-can-a-power-company-take-your-land-for-a-data-center/
So yes, in both datacenter and train, people can make it very hard to get things done. Somehow they find a way for the datacenters...
You as missing the scale problem, here. A data center, hell 1000 massive data centers still aren't going to take up the land that rail does. Its why you lay down rail first, then build around it, rather than destroying things to put rail in after. So yes, if you are going to magically put all this high speed rail in places people don't live directly on with trains that don't go places people want to be, then it's a great comparison.
There should be some stuff where high speed rail is, but it only should connect hubs and cities, most who give up land will not feel a direct benefit, since for most there should be buses and trains getting them to a high speed rail stop. There is a 36k town with a HSR stop ~60-90min with public transport. To the HSR stop actually 15 more minutes because it was built outside and has shuttle buses, but they also built more and supermarket, fasfood etc around it over the years so it becomes a more and more interesting destination. There was no meaningful way to add it to the existing train stations. Meaning you can definitely connect such stuff in a useful way. But there are also political issues and this line probably got more stops already then it should. HSR is just really best with few spaced out stops, but districts and states don't really like it when infrastructure is built through their territory, but they don’t get any stops