Comment by sophacles
18 hours ago
It's incredibly disingenuous to wonder why people would be concerned about projects that:
* Take a bunch of their tax money with no benefit to them
* lower their property value
* Make electricity and water more expensive (both of which make other things they use more expensive also)
* can cause other environmental impacts that raise inconvenience and expenses both directly and indirectly
so some AI douchebags can have a shiny datacenter to enable their bosses' stated desire to replace them with the very same AI might be opposed to the current AI drive datacenter boom.
Whatever actual benefits AI has, or tech in general, the way it is being approached right now is a disgusting and blatant attempt to steal as much as possible from everyone. People don't like that, and the like even less how the people doing it pretend they don't understand the dislike while building bunkers to protect themselves from the anger.
i don't think either of the first two things are generally true (usually tax positive, new usecases generally raise property value).
it sounds like you just want to ban American industry altogether, we've quietly let extreme conservatism sneak up on us in the US it seems.
WTF are you on about?
They aren't tax positive. The deal might "theoretically" be tax positive in 30 years if things go exactly according to some plan. In the short term they are usually associated with large tax breaks for some number of years, accompanied a guarantee to occupy the data-center for less than the payback period (so the tax breaks can be extended later with threats to move on so those tax paybacks never happen). They also come with the locality footing the bill for a lot of infrastructure build-out.
That's just a bad use of my tax dollars. Let the datacenter people pay for themselves at the very least - my taxes don't need to go subsidize some pile of shit AI fanatic. If you like AI, pay for your AI, don't take it from me. It has nothing to do with me being pro- or anti-industry, however if an already profitable industry can't exist without my tax subsidizing it just so some rich guy can be a little bit richer... well maybe it doesn't need to exist.
I have no idea how any of this is conservatism... I'm opposed to a specific set of changes, not all changes. Perhaps you are just trying to throw shade because I think you should pay for your own toys?