4.2M views · Jul 24, 2025 · 21:10 · 1 HN recommender · 3 mentions · discussed 2025–2026
A More Perfect Union report from a small Texas town next to a large Bitcoin mining facility, where residents describe constant noise and health problems. It looks at the political and corporate power behind the facility.
Why Hacker News points people here: Linked in crypto-mining threads for its picture of what nearby residents endure, though some commenters treat it as a case of corporations overriding locals.
“gives a better visceral sense of what these people are dealing with”HN comment, 2025
“gives a better visceral sense of what these people are dealing with”
Gives a visceral sense of what residents near the mine endure
The wall they built looks like its kind of a joke when you see it in context and the situation is a lot worse than just not having the "original peaceful quiet". More Perfect Union did a video on this a few months ago that gives a better visceral sense of what these people are dealing with: this video
“This reminds of a video[1] from More Perfect Union about another (the same?) crypto mining facility in Texas.”
This reminds of a video[1] from More Perfect Union about another (the same?) crypto mining facility in Texas. [1]: this video
“corporations running roughshod over locals”
Biggest problems with "Abundance" are: 1) Somehow he decided euclidean zoning was a leftist project. Most leftists and environmentalists I've ever known hate euclidean zoning and this includes many urban planners. Euclidean zoning exists pretty much because property owners want to be able to exclude nearby land uses. It's fundamentally conservative, especially when the goal is to enforce limited housing density. 2) Setting up euclidean zoning as the main whipping boy and then saying "and also air quality regulations are basically the same thing" is a form of straw-manning the stuff he's arguing against. 3) He sets up a dichotomy between California and Texas ignoring that a lot of California's problems are conservative (downzoning, prop 13) and also ignoring the weaknesses in the Texas model including corporations running roughshod over locals ( this video ) a fragile power grid, huge flooding problems etc. It's possible to look at quality of life metrics and see that Texas is doing quite badly. Also, you had the whole tech moving to Austin thing that already fizzled out. 4) He set up developers as the heroes in the story and apparently got a lot of his info from private equity ride-alongs. He ignores that developers are also often land speculators and are in favor of blocking competitors projects and downzoning areas to keep land value high. ( link ) Basically Abundance is a way for Ezra Klein and his fellow travelers to repackage Clinton-era triangulation and Obama-era neolib
