Hermantown approves controversial Google Data Center during late night meeting

Local officials granting tax breaks to data centers are just total morons. There is no polite way to say it. They have these companies over the barrel, any negotiation should be about how much extra money the data center shovels directly to the locals to make them enthusiastic about the DC, not about tax concessions.

But amazingly, they might not be the biggest morons of the story. This data center will make Google billions in profit per year. What beancounter is choosing to jeopardize that for avoiding $3M/year in taxes? How out of touch do you have to be to be to make that call, and why does that person still have a job?

They voted to raise their own electricity prices in exchange for hiring at most a handful of people to work at the data center...

My cousins were raised in Hermantown. My uncle used to be one of the few people that qualified for an in-city hunting license and he would hunt deer in his back yard. Hermantown is above Duluth and has views of Lake Superior. The weather is usually much cooler than 20 miles south of the lake and it's also fogged in a lot which is bad for the Duluth airport that is nearby. I remember laying on the exposed bedrock at night in complete darkness looking up and watching the northern lights.

I'm not against progress and I think it's great that Duluth is growing - people moved there during Covid and supposedly others moved there because of climate change but I'm skeptical of that. Places that used to be kind of gross and full of methheads are now hip and cool with nice restaurants and breweries. It's a much better place now than it used to be - at least it's less depressing.

But I just don't see how people in Duluth benefit from this data center - the revenue goes elsewhere. Google presumably won't be opening an office there.

Well I guess the question is whether those protestors were representative of the community as a whole. 3 million dollars in tax revenue per year is a pretty good upside.

We need a framework for permanent funds, modeled on that in Alaska and other petro-economies, where a fixed fraction of revenue from the facility is put into a fund that pays out a cheque to residents.

Maybe if a company complies they get expedited federal review or something.

None of these protesters are from Hermantown, they're useful idiots from Duluth losing their minds over crazy and factually wrong anti-datacenter posts on Reddit, fueled by Chinese agitprop campaigns designed to prevent the US AI industry from leading in the space. The idea that this is anything other than that is fan fiction. Hermantown city council did a brave thing and stood up to the non-resident psychos trying to mob rule their city law. They were literally getting doxxed by the protesters, if a crazy person goes to their houses and tries to kill them (this happened to the MN speaker of the house recently so don't tell me this is a crazy thought) they'll have blood on their hands.

If these pitchfork mobs get what they want, don't be surprised when you ask the future frontier LLMs about the Tiananmen Square Massacre and they refuse to answer you.

> We are angry that our local city council is representing a corporation instead of the citizens that they are supposed to. We're protesting against citizens losing their rights in their own city. No amount of money is worth that.

What rights are they losing?

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