Comment by willis936
6 hours ago
Yes, that's good. It also prices out a lot of other better uses for their labor. Projects I work on have seen prices soar. I don't consider building the things everyone hates because they promise concentration of wealth and an attack on labor at the expense of building literally anything else to be somehow a big W for labor because a few people get a slightly higher temporary paycheck. Ask the Wagyu cows how they feel about the hand they are dealt.
"It also prices out a lot of other better uses for their labor...."
"Projects I work on..."
Considering we are in a gigantic housing shortage, it would be great if a house didn't have to compete for talent with a data center.
The housing shortage has nothing to do with a lack of electrical engineers or plumbers. It’s entirely self inflicted and cheaper electricians will not change that.
More directly: I doubt there will be a meaningful increase in housing in states that have banned construction of new data centers (NY, Maine) than those where data centers are allowed to be built.
tbf, I don't think Wagyu cows were that thrilled about their lot in life before Wagyu became a thing, either.
You may have a unique perspective on that, though...
wouldn't the analogy be Wagyu farmers?
resi has been drained pretty hard in the last 10 years, this just adds more fuel to the fire.
I am, exactly right this minuit, trying to explain that I am not able to quote competitivly for certain types of specialised metal work as there are specialists for that, but am facing insistent inquirys anyway.I do clean sheet custom one of a kind projects as a rule, for which, due to AI recomending my company through some imaculate process, I am exploring how much I can charge for helping the singuarity along, though all in all I am glad I have other skill sets to deploy should we run the whole thing into the ground.
> Projects I work on have seen prices soar.
Could you be more specific? Things are still competitive in the large commercial electrical market I am bidding in, if you’re bidding to make more than 10-15% you’ll get underbid by someone willing to accept a lower profit margin.
>a lot of other better uses for their labor
Who on Earth are you to decide what is the "better" use for labor? And do you scrutinize every construction project or only AI?
Is it a waste when contractors build a temporary set for a trashy reality TV show? A factory that makes cosmetics for dogs?
Having someone the arbiter of what is the "right" use of labor is communism. In capitalism, people get to decide for themselves what they work on and what they buy.
Uhm, aren't we all allowed to have an opinion on what's best for mankind?
FWIW I am a high voltage test engineer.
I used to be an electrician.
I would prefer to build the substations that power machines for the benefit of all mankind, rather than data centers that feed the already wealthy.
For example, keep the lights on for schools.
You have a warped view of the world if you believe anything should be allowed to be built just because someone has the capital to build it.
These sort of moral grandstanding arguments are annoying.
1 reply →
> Who on Earth are you to decide what is the "better" use for labor?
> In capitalism, people get to decide for themselves what they work on
Feels like there are some mixed signals here.
If Meta decided to pivot to a brothel and meth lab building spree would you consider that to be a worse, equal, or better use of their capital and the labour in the regions where they are building out this infrastructure? Why?
I mean, at least some of us would consider it better with meth and hookers than them ruining the internet with their panopticon shit.
There's sort of no winning here!
AI unemploys middle-class workers: AI is stealing jobs from the middle class!
AI employs unionized middle-class workers: AI is stealing cheap labor from the rest of us!
The employment is temporary, what follows a net negative, is the idea.
And "AI" as a concept has has no agency. This is all about humans who seek to further concentrate wealth.
That's pretty disingenuous.
The people losing jobs to AI can't just pivot into the trades. When you think about it, companies announcing they're pivoting into some other area where they have no prior background is usually a bit of a desperation move, aided by the fact that companies don't need to be licensed in any way to offer particular services, other than maybe in the military/national security sector.
As for the second point, it's true that this is just old-fashioned supply and demand. I predict the outcome is that there's a rush into the construction/contracting sector followed by a bust due to either the tech bubble popping and construction slowing way down, or the replacement of construction workers by humanoid robots, or perhaps some better form factor like robot spiders that can squeeze into small places - all the benefits of child labor but with double the appendages and double the productivity!
However, I'm not worried about the possibility of a robot takeover. The American people's final safeguard against a robot uprising is the irrationality of imperial weights and measures. Robots are digitals and can't do fractions like us higher beings. That's why I'm building my data centers measuring everything in cubits.
As an engineer in the US - we already do all the math in metric units. There are conversion functions in the UI layer to transform our units to whatever you want to see. (they also convert metric units if you don't like the units were are using internally)
> AI employs unionized middle-class workers: AI is stealing cheap labor from the rest of us!
What cheap labour? Tradespeople are not cheap (especially if you factor in the quality of the work). This just makes them even more expensive. Meaning a big impact on homes – you know, the things people and families live in, in order to survive. Pretty important
>Meaning a big impact on homes – you know, the things people and families live in, in order to survive.
Maybe those people should pay their tradespeople better then. Everybody's all "workers should be paid more" until they're the one paying the worker.
7 replies →
And in time AI robots will reduce the need for these blue collar workers who are presently helping replace the white collar workers.
Just learned of a new acronym today "NILF," not in the labor force with over one million supposed NILFs out there -- dropped out and gave up.
Good luck with robots traing to lay up bricks, or doing plumbing in a home.
4 replies →
That's correct! AI is a negative for society no matter how you look at it. That's the entire idea!
> There's sort of no winning here!
> AI unemploys middle-class workers: AI is stealing jobs from the middle class!
> AI employs unionized middle-class workers: AI is stealing cheap labor from the rest of us!
Come on, you've got to know it's not going to employ those "unionized middle-class workers" for long. Their jobs are sort of like these jobs: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/business/ai-white-collar-... ("people participat[ing] in feeding their own careers into the A.I. wood chipper...Many people who contract for these companies understand that this is a short-term opportunity...before they themselves are automated out of the job").
And yeah, there's "sort of no winning" when you're gobbling up resources to build stuff people don't like.
I don't think that ANY project employs electricians and carpenters for long, because they are there to build something that will ideally last decades or more...
I'm not even sure it's as simple as "stuff people don't like." Many of the anti-AI crowd use ChatGPT which kind of complicates the question of "do they REALLY dislike it?"
I guess you could complain that robots will replace electricians and carpenters, but it's still going to be a decade before anyone trusts an LLM to wire a house.
10 replies →
But that's true of most carpentry and electrical jobs. In-house carpenters and electricians are a minority.
2 replies →