Comment by comrade1234

14 days ago

I have a property in NW Wisconsin. It's incredibly poor there - it seems like most people working age are on disability - the new form of welfare. Money is earned mostly in summer and hunting seasons. It's pretty depressing. Lots of alcohol problems. I hired someone to clear some trees and make lumber out of them once and he showed up for the job three months later. At least he showed up though. Weirdest thing - he never came back after the job to get paid. I end up often hiring contractors from 90 miles away to get good ones.

But a data center wouldn't help. It would raise electric prices and doesn't really employ people.

It's kind of like one industry that is in the area - there's a company that grows huge amounts of cranberries but its mostly automated. As far as I know only three people work on this huge site. They let the cranberries grow, flood the area when they're ready. The cranberries float to the top for robots to skim the surface and harvest them. The humans just move things around for the robots.

35 comments

comrade1234

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ianm218  14 days ago

If the data center was paying a decent amount of taxes surely it would help though right? In theory the taxes would go towards pro social uses.

  • deadbunny  14 days ago

    Which would be a good argument if the datacenters actually paid any taxes. They shop around for tens to hundreds of millions in tax breaks from officials who believe the lies like "we'll create thousands of jobs!".

    • ofrzeta  14 days ago

      TFA cites "Each project requires thousands of skilled workers during the two to six year construction period (nearly 10,000 in Mount Pleasant)" so maybe it's not totally fiction (at least during build time).

      9 replies →

  • bob001  14 days ago

    City taxes don't fix a broken economic flywheel. State taxes go to others and also don't fix it. You need a functional economy with jobs, income, spending and all that jazz. A small amount of taxes with no second order benefits is worth relatively little.

    • ianm218  14 days ago

      Sure but progress over perfection right? More tax revenue puts you in a better spot to attack those problems than not having it.

      Even just doing what Northern Virginia does and lowering people’s property taxes gives homeowners more disposable income/ lowers prices for renters which is a start.

      1 reply →

  • ModernMech  14 days ago

    A school and hospital would do that more than a data center tho. Look at Merced California, used to be a nowhere destination. They built a UC there and now it’s a place students, PhDs and MDs from around the world want to move to. If UC Merced were a data center it would attract no one, it would drain and pollute the lake, and Merced CA would still be a nowhere destination.

    • ianm218  14 days ago

      We’re talking about rural Wisconsin - there is no world where you need to make a trade off between having school and a data center. Put a school in one field and a data center in a field further away. It just seems like you should tax the data center and then build a school or whatever else you think would help the local economy.

      8 replies →

  • mapontosevenths  14 days ago

    They often don't. In my area the locals gave them giant tax breaks in the hope of bringing in jobs that dont exist.

  • blitzar  14 days ago

    > If the data center was paying a decent amount of taxes

    if my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle

    • ianm218  14 days ago

      This is a needlessly low effort reply that hurts the discussion.

      Some data centers are paying lots of taxes and upgrading local grids, others are bribing local politicians or lobbying for abatements.

      That is a much more substantive discussion than blanket anti growth.

ransom1538  14 days ago

Exactly. Let's leave data centers to other nations. Let them run the intelligence and manufacturing, lets focus on getting (more) disability.