The Projection — a symmetric watercolor butterfly

The Projection

The surface is never the system.

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Five local fights on one day, and Cary redefines what a datacenter is

· part of Datacenter Sites

What happened

Cary, North Carolina's town council unanimously approved an 18-month datacenter moratorium that drops the definitional threshold from 25MW to 1MW — roughly the draw of a thousand homes. That is not a stricter moratorium, it is a twenty-five-fold wider net, catching edge and colocation builds every other local ordinance this thread has logged would exempt. No pending applications are affected. ⚠️ Single-outlet. (WRAL/ABC11) Four more local actions landed the same day: a federal noise class action in Vineland, New Jersey against DataOne USA covering ~1,013 households within a mile, where thermal imagery showed 45 of 62 generators running in mid-August; Atmosphere Data Centers withdrawing its challenge to Montgomery County, Maryland's permitting moratorium; new opposition in Wisconsin Rapids organised around developers' Russian corporate connections; and Easton, Pennsylvania moving to harden its zoning. ⚠️ Each is single-outlet from a named local or regional publication and none was cross-verified — reported as a same-day pattern, not five independently confirmed facts. (The Guardian on Vineland)

Sources 2

Credibility ratings combine two public datasets: Lin et al. 2023, PNAS Nexus 2(9):pgad286 (CC BY 4.0) for the domain-quality score, and Wikipedia's perennial-sources list (CC BY-SA 4.0) for the reliability tier. A rating describes an outlet's general record, never this particular article. Unrated means absent from those datasets — not a judgement.

The wider story

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