[saulpw]

If it actually helped the economies flourish, then that would be interesting. NIMBY is in some part a reaction to the belief (likely true) that there would be neither jobs nor tax money from a data center in their community backyard--it's all downside with no upside.

[simianwords]

The Loudoun county has Datacenters that pay enough in taxes equalling the salary of 30k residents earning $40k dollars each (in a county of ~400k population).

This is a shockingly high upside relative to any other industry, like Car or Steel industry which pollute way more.

These taxes can be used to create better infra and have other things going on. Better schools and maybe even research facilities.

But I do think the opposition is largely ideological in nature so these arguments don't matter at the end.

[JuniperMesos]

Taxes have relatively little to do with how good schools are, that is dominated by the quality of the students who live close enough to attend the schools.

[y1n0]

I can't believe you blame students for bad schools.

[JuniperMesos]

A school is fundamentally a social environment - children are legally compelled to be there, and the specific educational structure is centered around being forced to be in classrooms with large numbers of similarly-aged kids, for large portions of the day. Much of what one learns in school is social acculturation to the specific segment of society represented by the other kids there, rather than the contents of classroom learning.

How good a school is - which we can expand into more detailed definitions like "how much do children learn there?", "how much does any individual kid like or hate it?", "is this a good use of a child's time?" - is dominated by what the other kids they are in a shared social setting are like, and not by how expensive the facilities are or how well the teachers are paid.

[simianwords]

They are somewhat right but it’s irrelevant. Good students can be brought in because there’s enough tax money.

[AngryData]

They could be used for infastructure, but when power and/or water bills go up in responce to local data centers being built it is hard to believe because power and water is infastructure and should have costs going down.

[toast0]

Post construction, data centers don't have a lot of employment, so you don't get much income tax or in-community spending from employees.

But, companies put a lot of capital equipment in them, and capital equipment accrues property tax, so there should be taxes paid from that.