Comment by LarsDu88

17 hours ago

I live in Santa Clara where the first chip fans in the world existed. In places like Santa Clara (home to Intel, AMD, Nvidia), and neighboring Sunnyvale and Mountain View there are maps of chemical leakage of industrial solvents which had contaminated the groundwater.

The very first Google offices sat directly over one of these sites around 2004. It took decades to dissipate. People complained about noxious fumes and this was more than 20 years after the spills had occurred.

There are real tradeoffs to having heavy industry to human health and well being.

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LarsDu88

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xrd  17 hours ago

Elon Musk and Colossus have generated 3000 jobs in Memphis, according to Tesla propaganda (I mean "propaganda" in the original neutral term, of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda).

But, locals don't love that because of the environmental concerns.

https://mashable.com/article/naacp-data-centers

I, for one, would not want to live within 100 miles of these data centers. But, people that live there already are not being given the choice.

And, I imagine not many of the people that live there are being offered one of those 3000 jobs.

  • giantrobot  16 hours ago

    I find it disingenuous to talk about construction jobs as being "generated". Construction jobs are contracts. Building a datacenter might put 3000 people under contract temporarily but it doesn't "generate" jobs. Once the contract is complete those contractors they're no longer paid by the builder.

    The word "generated" is used to make it sound like the project opened up 3000 new permanent jobs for people. Those contractors were employed before the contract and will be employed on another contract at some later point. There's no net gain of jobs in the long run. The contractors won't even necessarily be local. The builder isn't going to call up Bob's AC repair from Collierville to do the specialized datacenter HVAC. They'll fly in a company specialized in that task who will fly home at the end of the contract.

    The companies scrambling to build datacenters take advantage of that linguistic ambiguity and then the local politicians end up doing the same. They give these companies sweetheart tax/zoning incentives, proclaim contractors as "generated jobs", and then leave the locals with all of the negative externalities and none of the revenue.