this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2025
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A Boring Dystopia
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Why aren’t they building these things underground or repurposing old mines in areas where geothermal is plentiful for power and aquifers are stable, instead of in water-poor, temperature extreme places like Texas and KY? …Oh right, poverty and red voters. Better to exploit and damage then have some upfront cost and long-term stability. I forget.
Building anything like this is seen as a jobs creator. Data center companies then pass the proposal around to municipalities and ask them who want jobs. These places then bend over backwards to offer tax incentives, fast permitting, etc. with no regard to whether their location can actually support the building.
So of course they get built in the most corrupt places.
Yep most local governments will give tens of millions away for "local jobs" even if there's only like 3 local jobs.
Could literally just hand those 3 people 4 million each, and save the environmental disaster.
Literally dealing with that in my own local community. They want to build an outdoor concrete batch plant in the middle of downtown to create like 10 jobs. I mean you'll make the small city into a ghost town. Shut down the multi-million dollar observatory, all the small business down restaurants. Not to mention they will cause everyone wealthy enough to move out of town. This will leave the poorest residents left in the tax base but hey they're creating jobs!
It's not just jobs as in the physical bodies that are going in to work at the place, it's also the taxes and the net expansion of the local economy (eg, the people working there will be spending money at local restaurants and businesses, the facility will be paying for utilities, and so forth). It's a complicated thing to evaluate.
It's not complicated when you factor in that tax payers are paying for the incentives. And they rarely work out for the local residents.
When Amazon was flirting with building their second headquarters for AWS, a small number of cities tried to band together and require a floor amount for reinvestment into the city. Amazon, being one of the richest companies in the world, said, "Nah...well just cancel the building."
These companies want to socialize the cost of their buildings but privatize the profits those buildings create.
Was this concrete batch plant being built by one of the richest companies in the world?
If this was the case for literally every project, then every project would cause cities to lose money and I have no idea how cities could still exist.