Discussion
Owner of ICE detention facility sees big opportunity in AI man camps
gmerc: Feels like one of the solutions to get rid of poor people as a whole?https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA011569...
vrganj: Work in a camp run by the people that also run concentration camps for undesirables, what a tempting proposition...
apothegm: So a company town by any other name?
OJFord: View from across the globe:> Owner of ICE detention facility [...]Oh, right, of course these things are privately owned..!
geremiiah: >AI man campsAnyone who studied Engineering or Computer science already knows what this is like, lol.
999900000999: Obviously they'll force detainees to build data centers in due time.This is the ultimate dream of Late Stage Capitalism. The vast majority of detainees are non violent, most aren't even 'criminals' aside from overstaying a visa. There's a parallel with California's prison firefighter brigades.In order to pay the merciful State for your own imprisonment, you shall work on the data centers. Oracle demands it. Sure on paper it's a voluntary program, but Oracle as promised better food in exchange for work .It's not completely out of the realm of possibility for a detainees to end up manning these detention facilities as well. You'd be surprised at how many skilled workers, many of which actually have status, end up getting detained anyway.
vrganj: Class warfare is very real.The oligarchs are the only ones fighting right now. Maybe that should change?
iainmerrick: I’d like to recommend Kate Beaton’s book Ducks to get a vivid feel for what these “man camps” are like. That book is about camps attached to oil fields in Alberta, but the “AI camps” described here sound very similar.
Aurornis: Or you could click the link in the article where they talk about the temporary housing for data centers, including the perks they’re including like “free steaks” and golf.Oil fields in Alberta are a very different situation than high budget AI data centers in the US.
Aurornis: They tried to fit a lot of ragebait into this article and headline, but the TL;DR appears to be that this company wants to build temporary housing near construction sites so workers don’t have to commute as far if they don’t want to. The only actually criticism of the temporary housing is that it’s “gray” but they note it has access to a gym. Clicking a link to the other article describing them says they have “free steaks” and access to golf.My cousin works in construction and some times gets job where the money is great but he has to drive 2 hours to the site and 2 hours home or even more. Temporary housing seems like it would be helpful while doing those jobs.
Lerc: The existence of temporary accommodation for workers in construction projects should not be the issue. It seems like this is a necessary and sensible thing.The problem is with the quality of that accommodation.It is also worth noting that there should not be an issue due to the fact that the accommodation provider also supplies accommodation for asylum seekers, because they should be providing acceptable accommodation to those people too.You can probably add prisons to that list too.Workers, immigrants, and prisoners all deserve reasonable living conditions. Why people are being housed in a place is irrelevant.The AI link in this story seems to be simply because there are construction projects involving AI, that seems rather spurious. They wont be the first or last construction projects. Those workers deserve (and probably don't get) the support they need whether they are building a data center, a Casino, or a hospital.
dustractor: I like steak as much as the next guy but there's no way I'd eat the free "steak" offered to me by someone who owns an ICE facility.
mikkupikku: Flagrant clickbait, flagged. Headline makes it sound like concentration camps with AI wardens, but actually it's just normal temporary housing for construction workers building data centers.
duncan-donuts: The key distinction here is that the temporary workers would presumably be people who are in federal custody and currently housed in ICE facilities. The temporary housing isn’t the issue.
nahuel0x: Arbeit macht frei
spiderfarmer: The next time any EU politician visits the US they should bring up human rights, like we expect(ed) them to do when they visit China.
antonvs: Also election integrity. It’s past the point where the US needs international observers for its elections.
Lerc: I'm not sure what part of that classifies it as Late Stage Capitalism.The Hulks Act was passed in 1776.The 13th amendment in 1865 explicitly carves it out "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for a crime"
numeri: No, that's what the headline implies, and the body of the article doesn't support at all. It's (currently, and with no indication of intent to change this) two separate branches of their business.
u_sama: This is a good idea, they also need to enforce ID registration for voting and issuance of an ID per individual, what is funny is that some people see this as oppression
Forgeties79: ^that’s bait
antonvs: There’s no suggestion of that in the article.
pimeys: Last time our (Finland) president visited US he was playing golf and shaking hands. Supposedly signed some nice deals...
consumer451: I am confused, who in the Finnish government wrote the book that PM of Canada quoted at Davos?
adolph: This style of camp was popularized as housing for men working in remote oil fields. Its kinda weird to not see temporary workforce housing as some recent phenomena, especially given a recent TV show (I havn't watched it) about a particular railroad construction camp. Work that occurs in remote places requires holistic logistics for the workforce, similar to expeditionary warfare. Hell on Wheels is an American Western television series about the construction of the first transcontinental railroad across the United States [...] chronicles the Union Pacific Railroad and its laborers, mercenaries, prostitutes, surveyors, and others who lived, worked, and died in the mobile encampment, called "Hell on Wheels", that followed the railhead west across the Great Plains. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_on_Wheels_(TV_series)
iainmerrick: What makes it very different? It sounds quite similar to me. Each is a lucrative business that requires lots of physical infrastructure to be built out, and therefore needs a large but temporary influx of construction workers and engineers.
Aurornis: How is it not different? These aren’t remote oil fields. The workers could commute to the data centers if they didn’t want to stay at temporary housing.The article and the one it links to say that the temporary housing is a perk that they’re offering to try to entice workers. It includes gyms, nice food, and activities like golf.The comparison above to bad oil fields in Canada is arbitrary. Not all temporary housing must be like oil field accommodations in remote Canadian oil fields.
iainmerrick: Well, hang on, the brief TechCrunch article we're discussing here links to two different Bloomberg articles. The first is from 2018 about "housing for men working in remote oil fields", the second from 2026 about a data center in Dickens Country, Texas.I think you're getting overly fixated on "remote Canadian" here. West Texas is plenty remote. Those temporary workers in Dickens County must far outnumber the local population. If people wanted to commute, where are they going to commute from? The closest big city is Dallas, four hours away.It sounds like you're maybe envisaging a Googleplex, a cool campus where young college hires will want to come and hang out with like-minded peers (and work for long hours as a convenient side-effect). I definitely think it's going to be much more like an oil rig -- people will be paid well, and a decent amount of money will be thrown at entertainment and benefits, but fundamentally it's a place to house hundreds of men who have no reason to be there except that the work has to happen at that specific site.This article and the linked ones specifically talk about "man camps", not even something like "company towns" where they're maybe trying to establish an actual long-term community.
sebastiennight: This just in: the facility just got bought by Soylent, LLC. They now offer smoothies as well as free steaks
red-iron-pine: that sounds like misery. similar uses of nutraloaf have been ruled cruel and unusual punishment in the prison system
Aurornis: > It sounds like you're maybe envisaging a GoogleplexNo I’m envisioning what the article is describing combined with my experience with construction projects. You’re the one injecting other stories about Canadian oil fields to the story about something completely different.
