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Who will pay to protect tech giants from rising seas?

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11–20 of 48 posts

Re: Who will pay to protect tech giants from rising seas?

#11
post #7

No matter what you think about climate change, that subhead is a rookie mistake and a false dichotomy: The private companies are taxpayers.

Tech companies generally get away with paying less than their fair share: https://fortune.com/2019/12/06/big-tech-taxes-google-faceboo...

Re: Who will pay to protect tech giants from rising seas?

#12
MV, EPA and MP becoming Venice. Giving the unstoppably rising price of real estate nobody is going to move away from such a valuable land, even if it is covered by 3 feet of water (to illustrate - imagine the gold rush if real estate development in the shallow waters of the Bay would get allowed today). And once we get used to building in water i can see a new SF built few miles off the Ocean beach :) It can possibly be a future demand generator for various VTOL, human and package carrying, developments around. Google even has its own - KittyHawk. By the time of flooding we'll have batteries improved another order, automated air traffic management, etc.

Re: Who will pay to protect tech giants from rising seas?

#13
post #7

No matter what you think about climate change, that subhead is a rookie mistake and a false dichotomy: The private companies are taxpayers.

Tech companies generally get away with paying less than their fair share: https://fortune.com/2019/12/06/big-tech-taxes-google-faceboo...

10 billion a year in global tax avoidance for those tech companies combined doesn't sound like a lot considering their revenue is around 600 billion a year.

Also consider that all the workers are also tax payers and they want the company to continue existing, their taxes would also go towards protecting the bay. Their tax dollars wouldn't exist in California if those tech companies weren't there.

Re: Who will pay to protect tech giants from rising seas?

#14
I wonder if some particular hard to establish fabs are going to move into market disturbance resistant vessels.

Basically move the chipplant into an old aircraft carrier, stabilize in production mode with pillars and piers - and thus be encapsulated from local market turmoils, international politics and local politicians.Seasteading, without the sea, but all the negotiation benefits of mobility.

Re: Who will pay to protect tech giants from rising seas?

#15

I wonder if some particular hard to establish fabs are going to move into market disturbance resistant vessels. Basically move the chipplant into an old aircraft carrier, stabilize in production mode with pillars and piers - and thus be encapsulated from local market turmoils, international politics and local politicians.Seasteading, without the sea, but all the negotiation benefits of mobility.

There are no old aircraft carriers. They get turned into museums or scrapped.

Re: Who will pay to protect tech giants from rising seas?

#16

It would probably be easier for Facebook or Google to just reboot their headquarters, in multiple offices, wherever their labor pool migrates when their homes get flooded. For the most part it's just people at desks in buildings, which can be set up anywhere there is electricity. These companies would take a freebie if municipalities decided to mitigate flooding on their behalf, but it wouldn't end up being an existe…

Just as plausible they would seek to protect their existing investments, which could become increasingly valuable due to increasingly limited shoreline protected from weather volatility, while also helping surrounding communities. Win/win.

Re: Who will pay to protect tech giants from rising seas?

#17

I wonder if some particular hard to establish fabs are going to move into market disturbance resistant vessels. Basically move the chipplant into an old aircraft carrier, stabilize in production mode with pillars and piers - and thus be encapsulated from local market turmoils, international politics and local politicians.Seasteading, without the sea, but all the negotiation benefits of mobility.

You can't run a fab in a ship for a large number of reasons.

Re: Who will pay to protect tech giants from rising seas?

#19
I live near Facebook and Google. It's doesn't seem to me much of a task to build dikes. Those trillion dollar companies can pay for it themselves

Costs of sea dikes – regressions and uncertainty estimates (2017)

https://nhess.copernicus.org/articles/17/765/2017/nhess-17-7...

Re: Who will pay to protect tech giants from rising seas?

#20
post #7

No matter what you think about climate change, that subhead is a rookie mistake and a false dichotomy: The private companies are taxpayers.

>The private companies are taxpayers.

Yes, in the sense that you would still nominally be a taxpayer if you had ways to pay $1-$5 tax per year, while still making $300K.

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