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> modern factories are often highly automated and also don't provide too many local jobs. The factories in Maine employ thousands of people. Bath Iron Works al

• unicornporn 6mo ago
  Was just about to say the same, but without the numbers. Thanks for providing. People aren't stupid and they find (AI) datacenters to be a net minus to their local communities.
• beastman82 6mo ago
  I'm guessing the population of Lewiston would welcome an employer of 30 jobs
  • gmm1990 6mo ago
    Not if it drives up energy prices and makes other businesses that employ more people less competitive. Not saying that is the case but it’s certainly not a given
  • unicornporn 6mo ago
    Are you saying that those thirty job will go to people currently living in Lewiston? If so, thirty jobs are on the plus side. What's on the minus side?
    • tejtm 6mo ago
      that would translate to three townees for janitors the rest would be durn furiners from away * * further down east than Lewiston but, there was a time I was the damm foreigner from the big city.
  • DrewADesign 6mo ago
    So maybe someone can open a new sandwich shop and accomplish the same thing without screwing everybody else in the process. Not only that, Lewiston probably doesn’t have a glut of data center talent seeking employment —I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that not a single person living in Lewiston when a project like that was approved would be employed there.
    • dawnerd 6mo ago
      A sandwich shop would also be infinitely more useful to the population.
    • will4274 6mo ago
      The data center jobs are middle class. With progressive taxation, those 30 middle class jobs generate about 100 average people's worth of revenue. Presumably Lewiston has schools which could use the funds. And presumably everybody in Lewiston already has lunch somewhere, so a new sandwich shop that was successful would put another lunch spot out of business, for a net zero jobs. Edit: the larger point here is that jobs, particularly skilled jobs, don't grow on trees (much like money). New technologies and new jobs replace old technologies and old jobs. If you put a ban on new technologies and new jobs, you'll just have more unemployed people.
      • DrewADesign 6mo ago
        Nobody that lives in Lewiston will get those jobs, and the people that get those jobs will almost certainly live in more upscale places nearby. Tack a new building that size onto Bath Ironworks? That’s a huge boon. Heck even an Amazon warehouse would be an improvement. But a data center? For the people in Lewiston, it would be far more of a negative than a positive — and that’s the way it works in this country. We value money over people. If private equity, venture capitalists or huge corporations want something that you don’t want, you lose. Getting a policy win is a rarity and I’d be surprised if it didn’t get successfully challenged in court.
        • will4274 6mo ago
  • john_strinlai 6mo ago
    imagine how many other 30-job employers could fit on the same land that the datacenter would take up. a mcdonalds is probably 1% of the land and employs more than 30 people. (the # of jobs angle is not the right approach if you are a proponent of new datacenters. there are much stronger arguments to be made)
    • andsoitis 6mo ago
      > a mcdonalds is probably 1% of the land and employs more than 30 people. Fast food chains are damaging to human health.
      • john_strinlai 6mo ago
        neat! replace "mcdonalds" with "specialty health foods" or "flower shop" or "independent book store" or whatever and my points remains unchanged: job numbers arent an argument in favor of datacenters, they are an argument against them.
  • mrguyorama 6mo ago
    The three weed stores that opened up in the past week employs more people than that and produces more tax revenue.
• DrewADesign 6mo ago
  Bingo. Data centers are a net negative wherever they are. Giant, employ far fewer people than a grocery store after they’re built, crank up electricity costs, use tons of water, air pollution if it’s self-powered, noise pollution (it’s really worth watching Benn Jordan’s video on infrasound,) ugly… the only local entities that win are the landowner and the municipality that collects taxes on them. Though I’ve seen some astonishingly misinformed politicians offering big tax incentives for data centers not realizing that they employ so few people. From what I hear, even much of the construction is done by flown-in contractors with experience doing it elsewhere. The people that own these data centers have only themselves to blame. They’ve been obnoxious, at scale, for so long that damn near everybody knows how much they suck, and they’re losing their ability to railroad locals into eating their turd sandwiches. Edit: I know it’s gauche to talk about votes here, but this comment trended upward consistently for 45 minutes. In much less than 10 minutes, it collected more than half that amount in downvotes. I’d eat my hat if there wasn’t some kind of organized/automated brigading happening here. Edit again: Now close to 70% gone. Not exactly surprising given the forum, but pretty depressing nonetheless.
  • bitexploder 6mo ago
    Perhaps they are simply not taxed enough to benefit the community. If the local municipality is bearing a lot of these hidden costs, then perhaps the taxes need to be higher and directed at efforts that mitigate the worst of the problems. Water management solutions, air pollution management. Are there ways to mitigate the noise pollution? It seems like they should be taxed /more/ to help offset the negatives. There is surely a way to mitigate the problems. For example, can the noise pollution be addressed by forcing more green spaces around them, etc?
    • bombcar 6mo ago
      Almost anything can be mitigated at some cost - but it has to be determined what those mitigations are, and then demand them. Many municipalities are unequipped to deal with a "datacenter" because on paper it is the same as an office building (that draws a lot of power), where it should be treated like an industrial site (rail yard, factory).
• physhster 6mo ago
  Less than 30 makes no sense. It's easily in the hundred if you account for shifts and the specialized jobs required.
  • jcrawfordor 6mo ago
    The number the developer gave in a press release was "20-30." I find that reasonable as a very large Facebook data center near me has a permanent staff of around 50. Keep in mind that these large DCs use contractors for the majority of the work, which unfortunately doesn't really help with employment because the contractors mostly come in from out of state (there is a HUGE temp labor market for traveling IT technicians and skilled crafts get hired mostly from big national outfits that just send whatever crew is available next). It is good for the hotel business though.
    • physhster 6mo ago
      You have no idea how much maintenance is required. Just replacing hard drives, not even counting server repairs, new servers installation, network infrastructure installation and maintenance, power distribution, generator engineering, water treatment etc etc
      • jcrawfordor 6mo ago
        And that's all stuff that they bring in out of state contractors for. I know, it sounds odd, but this is pretty normal for any large industrial site.
  • DrewADesign 6mo ago
    From the Maine Monitor: […]the data center would have employed only about 30 workers, the city estimated.
  • bombcar 6mo ago
    Once it's built, it basically runs itself. You have a guard, some remote hands, maintenance, maybe additional security or two, times 4 for the various shifts. 30 sounds about right. Even 20 years ago the datacenters I worked with often had fewer employees onsite than "visitors" - because they rented out racks.
• j2kun 6mo ago
  My favorite class of HN comment: bringing concreteness to a vibes fight.
  • harimau777 6mo ago
    Perhaps unfortunately, vibes are part of being human. Ignore them at your peril.
    • bluefirebrand 6mo ago
      Vibes can be safely ignored when they are disproven by easily accessible facts
      • joquarky 6mo ago
        Facts are ultimately just vibes that pass a cultural filter.
• pj_mukh 6mo ago
  "We are for the jobs the comet provides" - Don't Look up. I'm not trying to be facile here but let's be honest the environmental concerns are silly. I don't want to hear about electricity shortages from a state hellbent on NIMBY-ing itself out of power[1],[2]. I understand people are threatened by this technology, the tech CEOs' loud pronouncements can cause that and that these arguments are basically threat responses. I buy that. But to hear otherwise smart people say non-chemical industrial factories are a serious environmental threat but if they provided more jobs it would be fine while everyone nods along, feels like I'm living in an Adam McKay satire. [1]: https://www.mainepublic.org/politics/2025-04-08/bill-removing-referendum-requirement-for-nuclear-plants-fails-early-test-in-maine-house https://www.mainepublic.org/politics/2025-04-08/bill-removin... [2]: https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/maine-voters-reject-quebec-hydropower-transmission-line-2021-11-03/ https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/maine-voters-reject-q...
  • slabity 6mo ago
    Don't Look Up is about ignoring expert consensus on a clear threat, not about rejecting benefits out of fear. For the analogy to land, you'd need overwhelming evidence that these data centers are net-positive for host communities, but that's exactly what's in dispute. You're right that there's tension between 'not enough power' and 'no new heavy loads' but it's not hypocritical to argue that megawatts of power should be allocated towards 7k jobs rather than a few dozen if possible. That's exactly the kind of tradeoff a power-constrained state should be explicitly making. The logic behind it is not satirical, it's just triage. On top of that, this is not a blanket ban of AI datacenters. It's a temporary blocking of any new datacenters that require more than 20 megawatts until late 2027 pending a PUC study on how these datacenters will affect their existing grid. It also creates a new council for researching and coordinating the creation of new datacenters, so this really doesn't seem like any sort of NIMBY action here. Honestly the only major issue I have with the bill is that it neglects to distinguish self-powered facilities that don't provide much strain on the grid. Though it could be argued that water consumption of these centers might be the reason for it.
    • rolandog 6mo ago