Could Data Centers Survive as Plain Warehouses? A New Series

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Samuel Johnson: Good evening. I am Samuel Johnson, author of A Dictionary of the English Language, and I have been engaged to call a series of six debates from this booth.

Niccolo Machiavelli: I am Niccolo Machiavelli, author of The Prince, and I have been engaged to tell you what is actually happening.

Samuel Johnson: Our subject is the data center. It is a windowless building full of calculating engines, which drinks like a town and draws power like a city.

Niccolo Machiavelli: And our question is a simple one. What if the law treated that building as the thing it resembles, which is a plain warehouse?

Samuel Johnson: Under that rule it may take from the grid only what a warehouse of the same size would take. It may draw from the city main and the aquifer only what a warehouse would draw.

Niccolo Machiavelli: It receives no tax favor written for its industry alone. Whatever else it needs, it must generate, find, or buy at the full price.

Samuel Johnson: Could such a building still turn a profit? Or does the whole enterprise stand upon gifts from people who were never asked?

Niccolo Machiavelli: That is too large a quarrel for one evening, Doctor, so we have cut it into six.

Samuel Johnson: In the first bout, Henry George meets Leland Stanford on whether a state should pay an industry to come.

Niccolo Machiavelli: In the second, William Graham Sumner and Andrew Carnegie dispute who is truly paying the bill.

Samuel Johnson: In the third, John Locke and Jeremy Bentham contest who owns the water under the ground and the air above it.

Niccolo Machiavelli: In the fourth, William Blackstone and Otto von Bismarck argue over whether a farm may be taken for a private customer’s power line.

Samuel Johnson: In the fifth, Sumner returns to face George, for both men despise the subsidy and neither can abide the other’s cure.

Niccolo Machiavelli: And in the sixth, Walter Bagehot and Alexander Hamilton open the ledger and settle whether the thing can pay its own way at all.

Samuel Johnson: Here is how the evenings will run. Before each debate we shall introduce the two men and the stakes. Then we go down to the floor and we do not interrupt.

Niccolo Machiavelli: When the shouting stops, we come back and score it. The Doctor scores on virtue, and I score on victory.

Samuel Johnson: I shall judge who was right, sir, as any honest man would.

Niccolo Machiavelli: And I shall judge who won, which is a different matter and a far more useful one.

Samuel Johnson: Then the audience may rely upon one honest scorecard at least.

Niccolo Machiavelli: The Doctor will now promise to be fair, so do enjoy it.

Samuel Johnson: I must assure the audience that I come to this task entirely without prejudice.

Niccolo Machiavelli: Doctor, you once wrote up the debates of Parliament for a magazine after sitting in the gallery a single time. You confessed that you took care the Whig dogs should not have the best of it.

Samuel Johnson: I saved appearances tolerably well, and I shall do so again.

Niccolo Machiavelli: Whereas I shall simply back whichever man is getting away with something.

Samuel Johnson: Sir, that is an evasion of every duty a judge possesses.

Niccolo Machiavelli: Where you see an evasion, Doctor, I see beautiful footwork.

Samuel Johnson: One caution before we begin. The sums in this quarrel are very large. One state expects to forgive two and a half billion dollars in a single year, and four companies are spending more than seven hundred billion.

Niccolo Machiavelli: And many of the contracts are sealed. So when our fighters are guessing at a figure, we shall make them say so.

Samuel Johnson: That is the nearest thing to a principle I have heard from you this evening.

Niccolo Machiavelli: Do not grow accustomed to it, Doctor.

Samuel Johnson: If this series interests you, please like and subscribe, and pay no attention to the Florentine beside me. He was dismissed from the government of Florence, and he has been offering advice to princes ever since without one of them asking.

Niccolo Machiavelli: Yes, do like and subscribe. And remember that the Doctor’s Dictionary has a word for everything except losing gracefully. He defined a lexicographer as a harmless drudge, which remains the only modest thing he ever wrote and the only accurate one.

Samuel Johnson: I shall see you at the first bell, sir.

Niccolo Machiavelli: I shall be the one enjoying myself.