Raise taxes on the working class.
Poor people, naturally
The question was “who should”, not “who will”.
Poor people should pay because they keep voting for servants of the ruling class.
🤡
The people who want more power. Ie, the data center.
You want it? You bought it.
Datacenter. The end.
Datacenters build their own micro power plants for uptime anyway. This is a line item and an investment. Little Timmy’s parents need to feed little Timmy… Not finance some techbro or deluded CLevel’s fomo into the next big bubble.
It’s interesting to me that we don’t do this for all industries. Like, if a big auto manufacturer or textile company sets up shop, the local power company is compelled to build more power plants for them (sometimes the power company eats the cost, sometimes a deal with the provider, etc. See the article). Monopolies are weird.
Most industries create jobs. Datacenters do not.
Just like Google in Lenior, NC. They played the local government with the idea they would boost the local economy and create jobs. The only job a local can get there is janitorial and there is like 10 of those and they don’t pay that much.
Wow, you can’t even apply to be smart hands? That’s nuts to me.
You’d be supprised to see how many industries probably have some sort of backups in place for power … But it’s typically more costly to run and they may not have plans in place for extended outages. At the end of the day it comes down to money.
What’s frustrating about the current situation with the power companies is people just are unaware they are getting bled or don’t have options for recourse… Whereas monopolies and large companies are getting (fuck if I know why) white glove treatment and discounts. It makes little sense to be deferential to these massive companies - as while they promise jobs, economic benifits, and the moon itself… Data shows this rarely materializes. Its baffling.
I just don’t understand why this is a difficult question. Make the data centers fund their own power needs. End of story.
Yes. They can pay to build their own sources of power of their own choosing. Or put more resources into doing data centers more efficiently, their choice.
Make the data centers build their own power plants. Then they get all the risk and all the reward.
Make them put the power plant right next to the data center, that way they’re not stressing out the rest of the grid. And that way the exact same community that gets the benefits of hosting the data center also gets the environmental costs of the power plant.
I find the different ways places answer this question really interesting. By this, I mean the systems we’ve had in place, the committees and applications and rules, for power providing the whole time.
It is interesting because power is a privately owned monopoly that we regulate to the extreme; so we get all sorts of weird relationships and arrangements. Now we see them all getting stress tested.
Well put.
Then they will build coal plants.
Mandate renewable energy and van open loop water cooling. Can’t afford it? You don’t need a datacenter then
This is where requirements as part of the data center zoning and purchase agreements comes in.
When unemployment is low in the construction sector, we can’t have them pay. When they pay, they’ll outbid us for workers who were previously building homes and public infrastructure. We’d either have to outbid cloud for these workers, or we’d pay by having higher housing prices and crumbling infrastructure, which incurs other social costs. Real resources are finite. The only way for us to not pay is for them to not build the power plants and datacenters. In a truly democratic system we’d be able to say no. In this system, capital outvotes us.
E: I’m not arguing that the corpos shouldn’t pay. They should. I’m arguing the economic effect doesn’t stop with that payment and we’re still fucked.
The resources are finite whether the taxpayers pay for the construction or the corporation that needs the electric upgrade pays.
Yes and my point is that even if the corpo pays, which it absolutely should, that’s not the end of the economic effect when that resource is used to the limit at the moment. We will end up paying too.
Wouldn’t the market just expand to absorb the extra demand?
The demand for construction workers? If so, it could, if there’s enough unemployment. Otherwise workers from some other industry would have to shift to construction. Creating a shortage in that industry. Switching industries is a more difficult process than getting an unemployed worker to work in construction though. But if there’s already a labour shortage in the construction industry, then that answers the question. There isn’t enough unemployment or shifting from other industries to fill the demand. And there seems to be one.
If there’s underemployment in construction or higher unemployment, then yeah, the construction labour market would likely expand without much effect in housing and infrastructure.
Agreed.
According to betteridge’s law: No.
A funny application of the law. Seems a little silly as an answer here.
