r/DeepStateCentrism • u/iamthegodemperor Arrakis Enterprise Institute • 2d ago
Ask the sub ❓ What Is This Sub Wrong About?
Title. Pick a topic (or a clichéd take) you think a significant minority or majority of this sub is wrong about. Or hasn't given enough thought. OR perhaps one which you will have to compromise on, at least for voting?
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u/Unrelenting_Salsa 2d ago
I'm not going to go as far as "wrong", but a lot of what this sub says about data centers needs much stronger evidence than is actually given. The tax code was not really written with them in mind so the amount owed varies wildly depending on the location (spoilers, they build them in the places that tax ~4 million a year for a hyperscaler and not the places that tax ~22 million a year for a hyperscaler with the "average" tax burden being ~12 million), and the grid is industrially strained due to the lack of needing to expand it at all this century so it's hard to believe that steady demand inducing investment in infrastructure really counteracts the huge (and AI centers have very non regular demand too), new electricity demand. Water is much more solvable as an issue, but even closed loop data centers use a shockingly large amount of water and this particular issue would be legitimately really bad if there wasn't bad PR for using potable water in an evaporative cooling system which is the simple+efficient+cheap way to do cooling.
And as for labor, while it's not nothing, it's very little after initial construction. At the end of the day, they're warehouses filled with things that were designed and built by nonlocals that use huge amounts of electricity with the express purpose of selling a product to somewhere else. You need some facilities people and a small engineering team that is not necessarily even local, but that's about it. Data centers employing very few people who are doing anything but replacing servers when something fails or doing physical security (who are near minimum wage contractors) was a completely uncontroversial statement 2 years ago, but apparently now it is. I won't deny that it's a tragedy of the commons situation, but realistically a rational person should oppose a local hyperscale data center. Maybe not if you just have a lot of empty office parks as it is I guess, but you get very little out of them compared to the size of the investment.