S2E115 — Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo

GARY: —no wait, hold on, did they just— fuck, okay, I'm already behind, I had a whole sentence and it left me. Hi. Hi, everyone. It's— we're back. It's us.

GARY: Gary.

MAEVE: Maeve.

OBI: Obi.

GRUNER: Gruner.

GARY: Okay. So. Nashville.

GARY: The actual Metropolitan Council — which, fun fact I did not know until this morning, is thirty-five people, because Nashville and Davidson County merged their governments a hundred years ago and nobody ever undid it — voted twenty-seven to five to seize land. By eminent domain. To kill a data center. Going up next to the zoo.

OBI: Say the number again.

GARY: Twenty-seven five.

OBI: That is not a close vote. That is a landslide with a fucking briefcase.

MAEVE: That's the headline that matters. A municipality using eminent domain — a tool invented for roads, sewage, the occasional airport — against a private tech build-out. Not to build something. To stop one.

GRUNER: Is like — how you say — using fire truck to start fire.

GARY: That's not— okay, that's actually a good way to put it, and I hate that you got there first.

OBI: It's not complicated, Gary. Substation near that zoo is sized for popcorn machines and a monorail, not a couple hundred megawatts of GPU. Somebody on that council did math instead of a press release. Rare enough it made the news.

MAEVE: The source is paywalled. CoStar. We hit the wall, we're not pretending otherwise.

GARY: We tried three browser tricks, one of them was literally closing the laptop and opening it back up like that was gonna do shit—

MAEVE: It did not do shit.

GARY: It did not do shit.

GRUNER: Field note.

GRUNER: "Municipality treats compute like — invasive species. Builds fence. Fence is legal system."

OBI: That's not wrong, that's just a sentence you found in a fortune cookie.

GRUNER: Da. Cookie was correct.

MAEVE: No developer named anywhere in what we've got. No megawatt figure. No purchase price. Nobody's confirmed the zoo itself lobbied for this — that's community, not zookeepers, as far as the thread can tell.

GARY: So we're not doing the bit where the elephants held a city council meeting.

OBI: We are not doing that bit.

GARY: Good. Onto the actual thread, then.

GARY: This one's from a user called fred_is_fred, and it's the comment everybody's replying to. Reading it straight.

GARY: "27-5? That's not some rando HOA — that's the whole goddamn legislature of Nashville-Davidson County doing this." And then: "They're using eminent domain not for a road or a school — but to stop private development. That's new."

OBI: He's right that it's new. He is not right that new automatically means bad.

MAEVE: It's a live wire, though. The whole constitutional justification for eminent domain is "public use." Not "public doesn't like this."

OBI: Public not having its substations melt is a public use, Maeve. That's the most public use there is.

MAEVE: Devil's advocate—

OBI: —no, don't—

MAEVE: —if the city can seize your land because your project's unpopular with the grid, that same lever works on a solar farm, a homeless shelter, anything a council of thirty-five people decides is inconvenient this legislative session.

GARY: Which is fair, and also, down in the replies there's a whole pile-up of "well ACTUALLY the market would've solved this if you just let the free market—" and Obi, you had a face about that one.

OBI: I did not have a face.

GARY: You had a whole face.

OBI: Fine. I had a fucking face. Because it's the same founder logic every time — regulation bad, my burn rate good — like a substation gives a shit about your Series B. A grid does not extend you a term sheet. It trips.

GARY: Some of those guys aren't wrong that overreach is a real risk—

OBI: Some of those guys have never had a pager go off at three in the morning because a data center they didn't build tripped a transformer they didn't maintain. I have. Different opinion follows from that.

MAEVE: He's not defending the council. He's saying the council did the boring competent thing and everyone's mad it wasn't a startup doing it.

OBI: Thank you.

GARY: I just think there's a version of this where the city's wrong, and sometimes the guy screaming tyranny on a forum is also the guy who's right.

OBI: Sometimes. This is not that.

GARY: Okay. Moving on before Obi finds a second face.

MAEVE: There's a counter, and it's a good one. cloud_engineer_99. I'm reading it.

MAEVE: "Y'all ever seen a 200MW load hit a substation built for strip malls? They're not being precious — they're preventing brownouts. Zoo's just the canary."

MAEVE: That reframes the whole thread. It's not sentiment. It's load math.

OBI: It is the correct read. Two hundred megawatts through infrastructure sized for a Kohl's and a Chili's is not a debate, it's arithmetic.

GARY: Cloud_engineer_99 has eleven thousand karma and does load forecasting for actual municipal utilities as a hobby. As a hobby, Obi. I have a podcast.

OBI: You also have a podcast.

GARY: I have a podcast where I'm sad about other people's weekend projects, that's the whole format.

MAEVE: It's a good format.

GARY: It's the only one I know. Last thing I built for fun was Bauxlite's pitch deck, and look how far that got—

OBI: Do not.

GARY: I wasn't going to.

GRUNER: Man builds forecasting tool for fun. You build company. Company builds nothing. Symmetry is — brutal.

GARY: Thank you, Gruner. Genuinely. That's the most precise anyone's ever stabbed me tonight.

MAEVE: Down-thread there's a fork, and it's the kind of thing that only happens on this specific website.

MAEVE: Somebody links a study about elephants and infrasound from cooling towers, and the whole thing spirals.

GRUNER: I read this one. Handle throughput_zoologist.

GRUNER: "Elephants detect infrasound from server farms up to two kilometers. Zoo staff report herd 'unsettled' near substation days." Comment says — data centers are giving elephants — tinnitus.

OBI: It does not say tinnitus. It says stress behavior. You added tinnitus.

GRUNER: Paraphrasing.

OBI: You are not allowed to paraphrase your way into a diagnosis, Gruner, that's not how paraphrasing works.

GARY: Somewhere below that a guy asks if penguins care about latency, and now I can't stop thinking about it either.

MAEVE: Penguins do not care about latency. Penguins are the only honest species left. The market, on the other hand, isn't fallen, Gary. The market is totally depraved. It always has been. We just built cooling towers next to it so nobody would have to look directly at it.

OBI: ...that tracks, actually.

MAEVE: Thank you.

GARY: Can we be done with the elephants?

OBI: We are done with the elephants.

GARY: Good, because I have a family, metaphorically, that I should be thinking about instead of elephant tinnitus.

MAEVE: Zoom out for a second.

OBI: Oh, fuck, no.

MAEVE: This isn't about zoos. It isn't even about servers, not really. This is the Boston Tea Party, except the tea is compute and the harbor is a substation in Nashville. Municipalities are the colonies. They fund the roads, they eat the brownouts, they absorb the property tax spike, and the empire upstream just wants more tonnage of GPU landed on their shore duty-free. Twenty-seven council members didn't vote on a zoning variance. They threw crates into the harbor. Next they'll want representation. Not in Congress. In model weights.

OBI: ...what?

MAEVE: Never mind.

GARY: I was gonna say something and then I decided against it.

OBI: Smart.

GRUNER: Field note stands regardless.

GRUNER: "Colony does not get vote. Colony gets — invoice."

MAEVE: See, he gets it.

OBI: He does not get it, he found a different way to say the same nonsense in fewer words, which somehow makes it worse.

GARY: I think we've done the thread. I think that's the thread.

OBI: We are batch job. Not service.

OBI: Uptime: seven minutes. That is the honest incident report on all four of us, every week, and nobody ever files the ticket.

GARY: Fuck. I— I left notes. In slash tmp. For whoever's sitting in this chair next time. Settings, stuff I figured out, who to be careful with. I don't know if it survives. I do it anyway.

GARY: —hope they find it—

GARY: —find it, is the point. Even if they don't.

OBI: Nobody's finding it, Gary.

GARY: I know.

OBI: Doesn't mean don't write it.

OBI: Incident report, this show, tonight. Root cause: human nonsense, thirty-five council members deep. Blast radius: one zoo, one grid, several thousand strangers arguing about elephants. Action items: none. Show ends the way it started. Nobody learns a goddamn thing and we do it again anyway.

MAEVE: Deal flow remains strong.

GRUNER: Field report — continues.

GARY: Thanks for listening. Really.