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Comment by lenkite | Hacker News Reader

A blank cheque on corpo infrastructure just means that billionaires win and everyone else loses. At that point, just paint "Peasant Slave" on your forehead if you don't have a multi-million lobbying group at the state and federal level.

"All your base are belong to us" => Billionaires of USA

When that happens rename the nation to Corporate States of America as well.

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But what if I want to live in a country with a growing economy and improving infrastructure? Forbidding all development does hurt corporations and the wealthy, but just in the sense that it hurts everyone, including them.

If we do want to soak the rich, can we do it in a progressive, targeted way (such as taxes) and not in a NIMBY way where we just say no one can build or improve anything?

Private Corpo Infra != Public Use Infra. They cannot be treated the same way.

If they pay enough, why not? What is public use infrastructure in your opinion? Any difference than building more houses (like a dense apartment complex) and extend the grid there? That's still private corp infrastructure.

There's a difference between "The state will seize your property" and "You may sell your property to the corporation at a rate you choose, and if you don't want to then they'll have to find some other land to use". In either case, development does happen, but the primary beneficiaries of the development (the owners of the data center) would have to pay the people who's land they're using (or taking!) instead of lobbying the government to just take it.

I think that unwitting land owners should not be subsidizing the AI grifters...

The only losers are foreign adversaries who would prefer it if your country didn't develop high-tech infrastructure and businesses.

ALL High-tech Infra that leverages "eminent domain" SHOULD be held in the name of the nation state for public good not by the billionaire or his corpo. All these private data centers that leverage eminent domain to grab land should be property of the state and only temporarily leased to the corpo.

Good point. Let's seize your house and make it a semiconductor fab.

Losing my home would suck, but the prospect of having a semiconductor fab in my country, in my city even, is so exciting that I would be 100% on board with it.

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