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Comment by whyage | Hacker News Reader

Are "3,000 new jobs" enough to make a dent though?

it doesn't fix everything wrong in the state but it's > 0. There's a lot of additional economic activity that comes with the construction too. Restaurants get busier, Walmart gets busier, lots of auto repair/servicing will be needed etc. Som e people will move for construction and end up staying there. It can be a shock to the local communities though but i think the positives still outweigh the negatives.

The biggest issue is these kinds of construction jobs are temporary. It's similar to but not quite as bad as datacenters where you get a very short term influx of skilled highly paid labor but those jobs don't stick around after the construction is over. Starbase will require more people on site at least.

yeah but that site is huge, that's a multi-decade construction project.

The construction is temporary but what are the economic impacts of having a fully operational spaceport that launches 20,000% more tonnage to orbit than the Florida Space Coast?

Probably a great deal of long term economic impact.

You mean the negative economic impacts?

One would think the same thing about having some of the biggest chemical manufacturing and refining industries around and yet the people of Louisiana are some of the poorest in the US.

Tons of money flowing through the state. Just to a select few people who own the plants for the most part, not for the people working there day to day. I don't see why one would think that would change.

My friend. If you know anything about Louisiana and their current government is that the people are there to be exploited. This is not going to help the people of the area at all.

The whole "temporary jobs" line is completely irrelevant nonsense. Sure, it's correct, but who cares? The alternative is zero. It's not like there is only a limited amount of undeveloped land and a bunch of people bidding for it. And of course those jobs don't stick around after construction is over. They're construction workers. They move on to the the next construction job.

>It's similar to but not quite as bad as datacenters where you get a very short term influx of skilled highly paid labor but those jobs don't stick around after the construction is over.

The issue with Datacentres is that you cant model the advantage of lower colo costs on jobs in the area.

The problem is that some people dont want to permit anything unless they can measure the benefits, when the market doesnt always work like that.

aren't literally all construction jobs temporary? once something is finished you usually stop construction.

Sounds like "legal language" threshold for whatever reason? The Terafab announcement used the same phrase:

>The initial phase of Terafab is estimated to require approximately $16.8 billion in capital investments from SpaceX and Tesla, with potential future expansion phases bringing total investment much higher. This facility will employ at least 3,000 people, many of whom will be from Grimes and nearby Brazos County — continuing the trend of our other Texas sites where between 60% and 80% of new hires are local residents.

https://www.spacex.com/updates#terafab

That Starbase concept (not that the numbers are realistic by any means) is orders of magnitude more ambitious than what SpaceX does today with 22k employees.

> many of whom will be from Grimes

That required a double take

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