Oregon Residents Riled Over Virtually Staff-free Data Centers Getting Tax-breaks 158
An anonymous reader writes: The population of Hillsboro, Oregon is becoming vocal about the state's enterprise zone program offering enormous tax concessions to companies setting up data centers in the region — even though the five-year deals on offer only require data center operators to employ one person. That's exactly as many people as one DC plant, Infomart Portland, employs full-time, yet it gets more tax relief than highly-staffed enterprise zone neighbor Solarworld. The current influx of data centers to Hillsboro have only generated seven jobs to date. More installations are coming, and all Hillsboro residents are seeing is space taken up that might have gone to businesses that give something of benefit to the community.
And so it begins ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And so it begins ... (Score:4, Funny)
I hear that it frees up people to do more creative things though. ;)
Re:And so it begins ... (Score:5, Funny)
as a resident of Lane County OR, I'd say we have faaaaaaaaaaar too many under employed creative types.
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Can't you keep them occupied by coming up with better ways to remove dead whales than dynamite?
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As a resident of the Portland Metro area, I'd say we have you beat in that department by miles, and miles, and miles... ;)
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Reminds me of a thing I read by an anarchist writer on how he propsed city tasks like garbage collection would happen. He said the city would ask children to do it, because children "like rubbish" so they didnt have to get paid.
Somehow i don't think the guy had kids.
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Did this same one person build the Data Centre? Lay the concrete, build the walls, install the Air-con, the electrical, the plumbing? I'm pretty sure there's more than 40 hours a week worth of work in constructing one of these things.
And somehow this translates to property tax exemptions how? There are other businesses that went through the same construction costs, that created more permanent jobs and that end up (or ended up) paying more taxes during the same tax period these tax breaks occurred. From a sensible, logical point of view, how to we justify that?
Notice that I'm saying "justify", not "explain" because I can explain anything away with a barrage of cynicism. Justification, the rationale behind something, however, that is w
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It creates construction jobs. It also creates new jobs that previously didn't exist. Also where the digital revolution displaces people it means those people are now free to work on other things.
The human race is expanding at an ever increasing rate. The faster we can replace meaningless service jobs, or augment construction jobs so construction can happen faster, more easily or on more fronts the better off we are.
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Construction jobs are not temporary. These people don't come out of the service industry, build something, and then go back. Construction jobs are on-going with expanding infrastructure.
Technology on a macro scale does not displace jobs. It moves them around and increases human efficiency. It now takes less people and less time to build a building compared to 50 years ago. That does not mean there are less people working now, it means there are more building projects happening at a faster pace.
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Construction jobs are not temporary. These people don't come out of the service industry, build something, and then go back. Construction jobs are on-going with expanding infrastructure.
Tell that to the construction workers who lost their jobs when the housing bubble burst. A lot of them went into service industries to make ends meet. Others simply couldn't find jobs.
Also, building out infrastructure takes capital investment. Since it's not a "pay-as-you-go" proposition, it's funded by debt, which increases taxes. Much of the cost is materials, not labour, and those materials (cement, structural steel) come from other countries.
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I would gladly tell them that. I work in construction management. Our biggest problem is not getting enough people continuously. The primary problem for people who are in construction is that they chose a career which doesn't have a fixed home base. I know construction workers who exited the industry because they didn't want to move to another project. Well that is part of the job description, much like a taxi driver can't work from a home office. Frankly if there's anyone in construction out of work at the
Sure it can. (Score:3)
Instead we must think of population control. this planet can't susta more than 2.7-3 billion Homo sapiens any way.
Sure it can.
It *does*, therefore it can. Proof by example.
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If anything, the digital revolution obviates the need for tedious, drudgerous work. In the 1960s that was George Jetson speak! Poor George had to work an entire hour per day! [wikipedia.org] But now that we've adopted far-right, archaic ideology and let the super-wealthy get all the spoils of the digital revolution, suddenly "eliminating drudgery" means "eliminating jobs".
The digital revoluion is set to disemploy up to 50% of Americans over the next 2 decades [economist.com]. It's going to get lots worse before it gets better. That is, u
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That is, unless you are a software engineer.
Hahahahahahahahaha ... guess you didn't follow all the links in all the articles to supplementary material. One makes a darned good argument for the elimination of writing software by having computers do it. And why not - a computer can mix and match billions of code snippets already written and brute-force the "creativity" out of creating software by testing each one. I give it 20 years.
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That is, unless you are a software engineer.
Hahahahahahahahaha ... guess you didn't follow all the links in all the articles to supplementary material. One makes a darned good argument for the elimination of writing software by having computers do it. And why not - a computer can mix and match billions of code snippets already written and brute-force the "creativity" out of creating software by testing each one. I give it 20 years.
If you have a library of 25 code snippets and need to find the magic order to combine just 10 of them to do your task, that's around 1.1 x 10^13 combinations that need to be tested. So around 10000 more than a "billion".
if you have a library of 50 code snippets and need to find the magic order to combine 25 of them to do your task, that's around 2 x 10^39 combinations. If you can test a billion billion (1e18) every second, it would still take 60 trillion years to test them all.
I don't think brute forcing
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If your code snippets are all working modules (not just functions) will well-defined inputs and outputs, the brute-forcing takes on a different meaning - combining modules that have the appropriate inputs and outputs with each other. Entirely doable.
That doesn't change the numbers - if you have a reasonably sized library of code modules and try to brute force an app by putting them together randomly to see what you end up with, it's going to take an obscenely long time. And it's not even clear how this code writing AI will know when it gets a useful app -- It may create a working calculator app that can only calculate the cosine of base 13 numbers... it's a valid app, but is it a useful app? How would it know? What about the billion other apps that do
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Example - you have several different database crud operation code modules to choose from.
You also have several different database user interface to pick from.
Additionally, you have several database schemas to choose from, including different indexing options depending on what is important to get fast, the mix of reads, deletes, writes, and rewrites, etc..
And several data input modules - keyboard, external data feed, whatever.
And several logging modules, each compatible with the back end.
And several dif
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Example - you have several different database crud operation code modules to choose from.
You also have several different database user interface to pick from.
Additionally, you have several database schemas to choose from, including different indexing options depending on what is important to get fast, the mix of reads, deletes, writes, and rewrites, etc..
And several data input modules - keyboard, external data feed, whatever.
And several logging modules, each compatible with the back end.
And several different error-reporting modules (do we put up a user alert and give a chance to edit it, do we not allow it and send a text message to a phone, whatever).
It would be able to give a list of data we want, like Name, etc. without specifiying the data size or internal type, because that's all been standardized (last name, first name, middle name, etc).
Given the requirements in more or less plain english, it should be possible to come up with the optimal solution pretty quickly, since each module has standard interfaces to the others.
For example, I need a way to track a million people. The information that's mandatory is their name and address, date of birth, and gender. When the address changes, the old address should be preserved so that I can trace back if necessary.
Optional fields are cell number, email, home and work phone numbers, and 1 or more emergency contacts. When any of these change, the old ones should be preserved so I can trace back if necessary.
Initial input is via a record dump on a usb key stored in SDF format, with updates being done by either using the same method or by someone typing them in.
A sequential account number should be auto-generated for those records that don't have an account number from the initial dump. The account number is 2 letters, 6 digits, then 2 random digits to help detect bad account numbers.
I should be able to search by account number, name, or any phone number.
Input data from the initial dump should be flagged if not valid, and input data from later should only be entered if all required fields are there.
Auto-generating such an application should be doable now.
What you are describing now is not what you were describing earlier. Earlier you suggested that a computer could "mix and match billions of code snippets already written and brute-force" a program.
What you're suggesting now is that you want the computer to parse your natural language of a problem and turn that into a program.
Do you not see the vast difference between the two?
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Of course. One of the articles I found proposed to do brute force solutions, and given the terabytes of code out there, it should be possible. Even the creation of the original modules should be open to brute-forcing.
But note I described the results I wanted - not the code to achieve them. And since I've already written code to do it that way around the turn of the decade, and I don't have the resources to brute-force code creation, I'm figuring I'll go with automated code generation from a simple wish li
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Of course. One of the articles I found proposed to do brute force solutions, and given the terabytes of code out there, it should be possible. Even the creation of the original modules should be open to brute-forcing.
Having terabytes of code to choose from does not make brute forcing any easier.
But note I described the results I wanted - not the code to achieve them. And since I've already written code to do it that way around the turn of the decade, and I don't have the resources to brute-force code creation, I'm figuring I'll go with automated code generation from a simple wish list.
Sure, natural language processing is becoming more refined and will continue to become more powerful. But that's not brute forcing - the natural language processor doesn't piece together random combinations of code to give you what you asked for, it already has algorithms to retrieve data from a database, perform transformations and updates, etc, so it puts together the code logically, not through blindly pasting code snippets t
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As I said, I don't have the resources to brute-force, so I came up with a better way. However, given enough resources (sometime before we reduce the solar system to computronium particles, I hope) others have already said it's possible.
For now, there's still room for humans :-)
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Isn't feasible for ME. Doesn't mean it isn't feasible for someone with adequate resources.
Genetic algorithms are one form of brute forcing (as opposed to introspection/design) that can work.
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First sentence from the fn article:
What a joke. The commenters on OregonLive now represent the entire population of Hillsboro? Half of the article is just reprints of
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The question is, could those 300,000,000 datacenters all employ the same person, controlling a horde of robots?
Re:And so it begins ... (Score:5, Insightful)
There are certianly hundreds, maybe thousands, of jobs in businesses that utilize the gear in that data center.
Which doesn't help the community unless those jobs are paying in tax revenue to Hillsboro to offset the tax breaks. You're clearly being intentionally dense if you don't understand the complaints.
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Which doesn't help the community unless those jobs are paying in tax revenue to Hillsboro to offset the tax breaks.
They don't, because Oregon has no state sales tax. So all the equipment comes in tax free.
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They don't, because Oregon has no state sales tax. So all the equipment comes in tax free.
I'm sure the regulatory fees and taxes the paid to PGE and NW Natural (if they use gas to heat the place) says otherwise, since they in turn have to pay rent to the city for right-of-way, permits for new construction to service the joint, etc. ;)
Funny thing is, I used to work for SolarWorld... and there are no saints there either when it comes to jobs. While they do employ a lot of folks, it tops out at around maybe 800-900 or so employees, a majority of which are entry-level jobs contracted from Kelly Serv
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Which doesn't help the community unless those jobs are paying in tax revenue to Hillsboro to offset the tax breaks.
They don't, because Oregon has no state sales tax. So all the equipment comes in tax free.
But there are property taxes, business related purchase taxes and so on. You are just being deliberately obtuse for the sake of having an ideological argument.
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It was news to me that anybody was doing this, but liquid nitrogen costs about 20 cents per liter as far as I can tell online (probably cheaper in bulk). You would need about 1.4 l per cubic meter of air you want to displace.
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You can get nitrogen concentrators [alibaba.com]that are even cheaper. They're power hungry but otherwise fairly inexpensive. And if you are just trying to do fire suppression, you don't need a pure nitrogen atmosphere by any means.
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Security is increasingly automated. I've seen estimates that 19/20 security jobs will be replaced with robots. Humans will only handle exceptions.
They are testing a security robot now which patrols the grounds, record everything, and call for human backup if something unusual happens. It can't do steps but that's about the only limitation.
At the level 3 data center in houston, there are no security guards anyway. A double airlock style door which requires a card and password at each door to get in the c
Re:And so it begins ... (Score:5, Informative)
the 67 THOUSAND page tax code needs to be scrapped and simplified.
Except this is about Oregon state tax, and has nothing to do with the federal tax code.
Stop Shoehorning Your Pet-Peeve Issues (Score:2)
you are correct there, Not living there I have no idea how bad their tax code, if its anything like NYs its just as bad as federal and should also be scrapped
But since you do not know for sure, you might as well STFU and learn about it before trying to conjoin this issue with federal taxation issues (or more to the point, stop trying to shoehorn your pet-peeve issues into every single issue you come across unless you factually know the two are related.)
Re:And so it begins ... (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, and then you'll have a bunch of out work accountants in addition to everybody else.
The unemployed accountants could be paid to throw rocks at windows to generate jobs for glaziers.
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I see what you did there... but no one has really made any convincing argument that the tax code should be scrapped. It got to 67,000 pages (if that's even a real statistic) for a reason. How many man-hours of work does that represent? It reminds me of young cowboy programmers who always want to chuck the whole thing and start over, actually believing they can single-handedly replace 1000s of man-years of work, because everyone who came before them was an idiot.
You could make the exact same argument about t
Re:And so it begins ... (Score:5, Interesting)
As long as people are stupid enough to give megacorporations tax breaks for nothing in return ...
It is really a prisoner's dilemma. The states would all be better off if there were no tax breaks. But if the other states defect, they win unless you defect too. So everybody loses, as it turns into a race to the bottom. The states would all be better off if they had a mutual agreement to stop the preferential subsidies.
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Hey funny you mention that, There was this article [slashdot.org] earlier that said selfish extortion is the best way to win the prisoner's dilemma. That sounds like modern corporations dealing with local governments in a nutshell1
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I know, right? I mean, look at all the young people that moved to SoCal during the glory years of the dotcom boom.http://i.imgur.com/Hwpiv6W.jpg
Where are the big arrows coming into California from Mexico, China, and Russia, among other countries? That map seems incomplete.
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I know, right? I mean, look at all the young people that moved to SoCal during the glory years of the dotcom boom.http://i.imgur.com/Hwpiv6W.jpg
Where are the big arrows coming into California from Mexico, China, and Russia, among other countries? That map seems incomplete.
And where are the arrows coming into the rest of the country from Mexico, China and Russia, among other countries? Yes, the map is incomplete.
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Amazon, anybody...? (Score:1, Flamebait)
1 employee? Not the entire story. (Score:5, Informative)
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I would think a large datacenter would end up with a lot of ancillary jobs for electrical, HVAC, technicians to work with customer equipment, delivery guys to get the stuff there and so on. Even the best large single company data centers have all manner of stuff that needs fixing.
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That was true before the days of disposable servers. Today, when it breaks, drop it from the pool of working systems. The HVAC is on a lease contract which makes them far more reliable as the manufacture no longer gets s cut by selling parts that used to be used for maintenance. The same is true with power systems but the electrical wiring is massively overbuilt between the stuff under contract and the racks. I have a rack in a recently built data center and they have an electrician on site less often t
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The replacement servers come from somewhere.
But they don't come from the local community offering the tax breaks.
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Yeah, but what community with a datacenter actually supplies the replacement servers? Maybe Taipei and Shenzhen?
I think the "community economic value" varies greatly by the size of the community.
Small communities only have so much value add but this can work against the datacenter because now everything has to be brought in, especially people, and that gets expensive.
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If your city has a population of 100 residents then that may be ok. If not, then yeah that's not enough to keep everyone in the black so to speak. It does not take 10+ people to replace a blade server, or a failed hard drive. Definitely not full time and definitely not year round. Maybe for that one person, maybe, but he'll have other tasks assigned to him or he won't get paid for large portions of the year.
That's the issue here, to go with what another poster said, that indirect jobs are created, hiring o
It could be worse... (Score:5, Interesting)
I've actually lost count how many megachurches have been built on farm land in Upper Marlboro, MD. I assume the land must be cheap, as we have The First Baptist Church of Glenarden, which was built just 1.2 miles from Riverdale Baptist Church. And it's not to be confused with the First Baptist Church Upper Marlboro, which is about 8 miles away as the crow flies.
All of these are non-profits, so there will likely never be any more tax revenue from them, and unless they also have a school (which Riverdale does), it sits nearly empty for most of the week.
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Built obviously on the site of the old LCG of DEC?
Fifth Third Bank (Score:2)
It's a real bank:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... [wikipedia.org]
Free heat please (Score:3)
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A "flat" in Beaverton? You should really re-evaluate your vernacular... primarily because you live in Beaverton, Oregon where the only "flat" you're gonna find is of fruit or a pickup truck.
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You call this a winter? (Score:3)
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The problem is... (Score:4, Informative)
... these local governments are still of the mindset that "industrial/technology" means factories, which means jobs. But as we all know, everybody that builds a datacenter wants as little staff as possible. A datacenter full of staff is seldom a good thing. When I walk past our datacenter on my way to work, if I even see the lights on or more than one car in the parking lot, I clench up, because I know it isn't going to be a good day when I get to my office on the other side of the campus.
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Living here I can say I am frustrated by how much the local big businesses get big tax breaks simply by occasionally threatening to leave now and then. Nike, Intel, and now these datacenters. The rest of us, and other employers foot the bill to cover their shirked responsibilities to their communities.
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Living here I can say I am frustrated by how much the local big businesses get big tax breaks simply by occasionally threatening to leave now and then. Nike, Intel, and now these datacenters. The rest of us, and other employers foot the bill to cover their shirked responsibilities to their communities.
You mean the "shirked responsibilities" that would be being paid to the lowest bidder in Topeka or Wichita Kansas, rather than in Oregon, were it not for the tax breaks?
The people who build data centers don't care where they are located physically; they care about taxes, land costs, and power costs. If power were more reliable in Kabul Afghanistan, and the local government a bit more stable, they'd be located there, instead.
Intel's newest fabs (Score:2)
are located in Hillsboro Or. Also located there is a major part of their design group and process science.
The tax breaks were given to Intel, But in an an attempt by the county and city gov. to not look biased, I presume they extended the breaks to all tech. Of course, The companies are eating the infrastructure for lunch.
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They should have taken a leaf out of Washington States book when it comes to company specific tax breaks - the breaks they wrote in for Boeing were written generically but were so specific for the Boeing 787 program that it could not apply to any other aircraft manufacturer. Number of engines, length of fuselage, number of seats, percentage of efficiency increase over previous generation, production to start no later than X etc etc etc. Literally, it could not have been taken up by anyone other than Boein
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are located in Hillsboro Or. Also located there is a major part of their design group and process science.
Almost all of the microarchitecture changes and die shrinks come out of Haifa, Israel. Not Hillsboro. The Itanium came out of Santa Clara, California. Willamette came out of Hillsboro (the Pentium 4, which was arguably a pretty big failure, with 35%-50% of the 115W power consumption lost to leakage power). There was also the well-know SMT issue, where the dispatch ordering was (effectively) random, meaning the IPC between SMT cores never really scaled very well. Prescott never really scale above about
How many part-time jobs? (Score:2)
I see the opposite side of this problem (Score:2)
I really wish these tax deals didn't exist. I'm on the opposite end of this problem, living in New York. Taxes are high, cost of living is high, but in my opinion quality of life is high too. Florida, North Carolina and Texas constantly go trolling for companies in high-tax states (NY, CT, MA, CA, etc.) and bribe them to move. Some of these bribes are crazy, as in, "We'll build you a headquarters, give you free utilities for 10 years, and you'll pay zero property taxes." The problem is states end up playing
Re:indirect jobs (Score:5, Informative)
and i can counter with just about that many MORE indirect jobs that the place employing say 25 people would generate (added to your list).
Food delivery folks
Supplies delivery folks
Clothing shops
car dealers
Entertainment venues
Schools (wanna see if you can make a team of folks that DON"T have kids without doing something actionable??)
Food shops
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How many of those jobs are in the vicinity of the data center? Localities don't give tax breaks to help the global economy. They do it to help their local economy.
Re:indirect jobs (Score:4, Insightful)
The question isn't whether ANY economic benefit is brought to the community, but whether that benefit exceeds the ~750k per year of tax reduction given to the company mentioned in the article. Some people seem to think so, some not. Hard to tell who is right, but it deserves to be highlighted that communities simply paying corporations to establish isn't automatically a great deal.
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In general, another factor in the equation is what tax revenue would have been generated on the land consumed by the DC if the DC hadn't been built. In an area where land is plentiful, the land might be (under)utilized for the next five years by something that would generate less net tax revenue.
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I was wondering abput this myself. Keep in mind, the tax value of the property might not have been as high before the data center was built either.
But Oregon and the counties in it also tax business income in the state. The state is like 6.7% on the first $10 mil and some higher number after that. So lets guess that the property tax was half as much and the data center pays $5000k in income taxes a year. Is it worth it considering a likely or possible alternative of less than $400k a year without it?
And kee
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and i can counter with just about that many MORE indirect jobs that the place employing say 25 people would generate (added to your list).
Food delivery folks
Supplies delivery folks
Clothing shops
car dealers
Entertainment venues
Schools (wanna see if you can make a team of folks that DON"T have kids without doing something actionable??)
Food shops
Versus how many people would be doing the above jobs if instead of a 25-person data facility, an old-time 1500-person factory was located there?
It's like the old trickle-down fallacy. If a CEO earns 400 times what the other employees do and lays them off, is he going to buy 400 times as much toilet paper?
Re:indirect jobs (Score:5, Insightful)
See, once you start racing to the bottom there's no end in sight. And all the trickle down (voodoo) economics in the world won't save you.
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I get entire racks prebuilt shipped in and out, it just takes one on-site person to plug it in then the shippers get back in their truck and go back whence they came.
That said, if the company cited really does only have one employee, I'm glad not to do business with them. I'd require a bare minimum of three to at least pretend someone is on site 24x7.
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The rest are probably contractors, which wouldn't be employees. So, the whole metric of the number of full-time [on-site?] employees is quite biased to underestimate the number of people involved in the operation.
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I get entire racks prebuilt shipped in and out, it just takes one on-site person to plug it in then the shippers get back in their truck and go back whence they came.
That said, if the company cited really does only have one employee, I'm glad not to do business with them. I'd require a bare minimum of three to at least pretend someone is on site 24x7.
If you have a lights-out datacenter, you don't need employees on-site 24x7 because replacing hardware is not a time-critical task, if a disk drive, server or switch fails, you can replace it during your next monthly maintenance sweep. If a power system failure takes out half the datacenter, you failover to your backup datacenter while you wait for a repair crew to arrive at the failed datacenter. Whether you have an employee on-site or not, he's not likely to be able to fix anything himself anyway.
You don'
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I think this fails to take into account the indirect job creation that this operation permits. For instance, the building maintenance and construction had to be done by locals. Any time the A/C breaks down, it has to be repaired by locals. If a server fries, there has to be someone to build that machine and swap it out. There is a lot of consumption of infrastructure resources, like power and water, that also feeds into the economy. There are a lot of DC jobs that you can't see. Granted, they aren't the same number of people as a factory might employ, but there are a lot of unseen positions that these data centres create.
Not really. Most of the materials are imported and configuring them is very quick. Your "lots of jobs" = not local.
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Not really. Most of the materials are imported and configuring them is very quick. Your "lots of jobs" = not local.
If only there were some way to make Oregon economically desirable to businesses...
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There's also the reality that those tax incentives could be spent on things like education that would bring more jobs to the area on a per dollar basis. That's the real issue with subsidizing datacenters that employ basically nobody locally.
So you can give the tax breaks, and have the data center built locally, and employ construction workers, ongoing site maintenance workers, etc., which you don't count as employees because they are contractors, yet they have jobs.
Or you can *not* give the tax break, and have a vacant lot, as the data center is built in Kansas or wherever instead.
Pick one.
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It was a big story on the front page of The Oregonian this morning. That's the first time I heard about it. If those guys are worried about having enough space they ought to put their data centers in Prineville. Tons of room out there.
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It was a big story on the front page of The Oregonian this morning. That's the first time I heard about it. If those guys are worried about having enough space they ought to put their data centers in Prineville. Tons of room out there.
Hah. Yeah well Prineville doesn't seem to be complaining too much about the Facebook center there, since the only other thing around is Les Schwab HQ. It's true however it's not supplying any jobs to a pretty depressed economy in that county. I think they're planning to expand, or are already. I've forgotten. DC's like it here though; low humidity allowed for an interesting cooling setup there, and the electricity is relatively cheap.
But really our general world-connectivity in central Oregon has impro
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There's an Apple DC there too, isn't there?
They moved the Les Schwab HQ to Bend in 2008 after Les died in 2007 but they still have the big distribution center in Prineville at the bottom of the rimrocks.
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How does a data center drive up land and home prices if there are only a few employees?
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Because the supply of land (which is also required for homes) is finite; any project that removes a large chunk of it from the market is going to drive up the price of the remaining available space (and by extension, homes that might be built on it).
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Reminds me of the data center shit that happened up in Quincy Washington, Sure, they created a few jobs, but it also made the land and homes so expensive that the locals couldn't afford to buy and live there any longer...
Because everyone wants to live next door to a data center because of all the jobs there, or why? Why would it be more expensive to live near a data center, than not, if there were no economic benefit to doing so?