alt Hacker NewsPeople are perfectly content to accept pollution if it provides actual jobs not just money for tech bro douchebags living on a yacht in Tahiti.
Instead of buying politicians if you want to build a datacenter start sponsoring the local high school gymnastics club. And for fuck sake never talk about how much you hate society and want to put people out of a job.
Silicon Valley is so terrible at PR. They could learn a thing or two from the industrialists of the early 20th century.
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> start sponsoring the local high school gymnastics club
I would prefer using taxes instead of one-off theatrical gestures. And it looks like data centres already pay tax. Maybe what you want is higher taxes? Possibly a good idea if it doesn't disincentivise the construction in the first place.
> People are perfectly content to accept pollution if it provides actual jobs not just money for tech bro douchebags living on a yacht in Tahiti.
> And for fuck sake never talk about how much you hate society and want to put people out of a job.
Let's say for the sake of argument, AI eliminates most jobs. In that case, the government will need to replace income tax.
Will the American government have an easier time taxing the physical datacenter in the United States or the billionaire that owns it in Tahiti?
And will the American government have any ability to tax a datacenter built in Dubai because there was too much bureaucracy in Virginia?
> They could learn a thing or two from the industrialists of the early 20th century.
We could learn a thing or two from the industrialists of the 18th century, who built all their infrastructure in the United Kingdom because it was convenient for them.
The British government's early advantage in factories snowballed into the largest empire on Earth and they maintained the advantage until WW2.