Data centers are easy to fight against because there is no constituency really pulling for them. They create only a handful of jobs. Ultimately the entire thing is a waste of time, data centers can be built basically anywhere, and that's why a lot of them are moving to rural red states where they welcome the construction.

The fight against AI should just be about taxing token usage. We should also tax the hell out of anyone using AI as an excuse for layoffs. It's far past time to ban buybacks and dividends for any company doing layoffs. We also should have a requirement, you have to provide a bonus pool that goes dollar-for-dollar for any buybacks or dividends you do.

> rural red states where they welcome the construction

The state legislatures might be all for it, but I can say as someone who lives in South Texas, the actual communities are up in arms against datacenters. Of course there's lots of irony in that one of the reasons the datacenters like the area is that there is a gas pipeline that the locals welcomed that can be used to run turbines.

> data centers can be built basically anywhere, and that's why a lot of them are moving to rural red states where they welcome the construction.

There’s no such thing as a red state or blue state, these are fictions created to generate political fighting for no value to society.

Second - many states such as Ohio have begun pushing back strongly against data centers. In Ohio we had been offering tax breaks for construction because we welcomed the economic activity, but thankfully the government here after seeing a lot of pushback across the state has realized providing tax incentives or subsidies is economically and politically stupid relative the benefits of the new data centers.

To your point, they can be built anywhere. So many folks are saying yep, let’s build them somewhere else and drain water and raise energy prices there instead of here.

Smart politics in a state like Ohio would require data centers to relocate corporate jobs to the state or face full or perhaps even surcharges for utility rates because why not?

Banning buybacks and taxing dividends like earned income (or at least with higher tax brackets for higher dividend income, just like earned income) is basically the same thing as taxing tokens. I'd go even further and reduce income taxes by the same amount that is raised by taxing dividends.

As far as I can work out, tokens aren't fungible which makes them a pretty poor thing to tax instead of just taxing the profits of the companies behind the models.

> data centers can be built basically anywhere

this is especially true for AI use cases, where compute is hugely more important than latency / bandwidth

> you have to provide a bonus pool that goes dollar-for-dollar for any buybacks or dividends you do.

So, reallocate some exec comp to a pool that gets bigger when you give shareholders back money?

Would be great to balance the market better between labor and capital, but there's no easy button...

> The fight against AI should just be about taxing token usage.

What about self-hosted models?

It should be illegal to lay workers off for AI like it is in China, where sensible policy exists.