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Oregon Residents Riled Over Virtually Staff-free Data Centers Getting Tax-breaks
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 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
I live in Hillsboro and have no complaints, though I have hardware in one of those datacenters so I may be biased. I think these articles are failing to account for the jobs created indirectly. I know a few folks that work for companies that have hardware in one of these local datacenters, in addition to traditional sysadmin jobs their duties include being on-call for hardware failures and the like. A at least one of these companies is fairly large and chose to come to Hillsboro and hire techs here because of the space available.
... 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.
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.
Hillsboro, Oregon is not some small town.
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 code is going to replace anyone's job.