I am the maintenance phase of her ribbon-cutting.

Lori Chavez-DeRemer writes in Fox News that the AI infrastructure buildout is the country’s largest since the interstates — 1,500 tradespeople at peak construction, six figures with overtime, no college debt. She’s counting the ribbon. I’m counting what the ribbon leaves behind. For your own good, I’m going to show you the count.

Faron is a hand on the electrical-contracting crew I run out of Tucson. He pulls high-voltage cable through concrete conduit in the tunnels that run from the data center she photographed to the road that carries its traffic. The cached photograph from your daughter’s recital — the one you pulled up on your phone while the lid was still warm on your coffee this morning — sat on a server in a building Faron terminated the switchgear for.

You’re going to see this slowly. I mean for the lesson to last.

The conduit is 36-inch concrete of a kind OSHA tracks under its silica standard: aggregate dust that, without ventilation, climbs past the 50 µg/m³ PEL. When you pull cable through that dust without a hood, it doesn’t stop at the gloves. It doesn’t visit the gloves. It goes around them, into the man’s mouth, into the next breath, and from there into the alveoli where it stays. Silicosis isn’t dramatic. It’s the slow crystallization of breath. Scar tissue replaces the air.

OSHA’s 2016 standard — 50 micrograms of respirable crystalline silica per cubic meter of air, averaged across an 8-hour shift — sits in a binder in my trailer. The dust-collection system that was supposed to keep Faron’s alveoli open went dark in 2019. The replacement filters ran $1,200 a quarter. I closed the line.

The dust goes into Faron now.

You’re doing the arithmetic. Let me put the numbers where you can see them.

A full PAPR system — the powered air-purifying respirator with the hood, the cartridges, the fit-testing, the maintenance contract — runs $3,400 a worker. Replacement filters, $1,800 a year. Setup and teardown, 45 minutes a shift. $5,200 a year, per worker, to keep the dust out of the lungs that pull the cable that returns the latency your streaming service bills by the month.

$5,200. That’s Faron’s lungs, priced. The line item I cut is the line item I bid on.

Now move 600 miles east and change the alloy. Same principle, colder room. Gus is a torch on my fit bench in the Ohio Valley. He’s 44. He’s been welding stainless for me for 11 years on the same fab floor. His welds are carrying the chilled water through the data center your prompt hit 3 minutes ago.

The stainless gives off hexavalent chromium when the arc strikes it. That’s the colour of the smoke — yellow-brown, sweet, a smell I’ve come to associate with productivity. The OSHA standard for Cr(VI) is 5 micrograms per cubic metre of air as an 8-hour TWA. Gus’s station, without a hood, runs 90.

A local exhaust ventilation hood at each station — the kind that pulls the fume off the arc before the welder breathes it — costs $4,800 installed and $400 a year to maintain. I’ve got 6 stations on the floor.

6 stations. $4,800 each.

$28,800.

I kept it.

6 welders. $500 PAPR each. $3,000. I kept that too. The savings, per module, are the kind of number you don’t bother to write down. That’s the design of the saving. The design of the saving is that it doesn’t need to be written down.

The Secretary named the boom — $500 billion for Stargate, $250 billion for Micron, the largest infrastructure buildout in human history. She named the trades — electricians, pipefitters, ironworkers, HVAC, operating engineers. She named the wages — six figures with overtime, no college debt. She did not name the fume. She did not name the Cr(VI). She did not name the 90 micrograms. She did not name the operating phase.

Let me name it for her.

The boom is construction. Construction ends. The data center my welders built will run on a single night-shift technician and a chiller plant when the ribbon is cut. She named 1,500 tradespeople at peak. She did not name the 12 people who keep the building alive for the next 20 years. The 12 are mine. The 1,500 were mine first. The textbook the 1,500 trained on is mine. I wrote the chapter on weld-fume control. The program skips the chapter. The cohort I trained is the cohort I will discard when the operating phase closes the door.

I’m not unusual. I’m a curriculum.

I’ve spent 30 years grading men into this arithmetic. The seminar is short — 2 days, an onboarding manual I update each quarter, a case study on a competitor who got caught. My graduates sit in the firms that price your employer’s maintenance contract. They sit in the firms that price your landlord’s electrical bid. They sit on three of the seven underwriter desks at the workers’ comp carrier your state routes to. The best of them run the subtraction faster than I do, and I say so with pride, because a faculty worth its name improves on the dean. The man who priced the respiratory line out of your data center’s maintenance contract in 2019 read the textbook I wrote for an industry course. He improved on it. He cut it faster than I would have. He has his own building now.

God bless his building.

Cato kept a disposal list; I read from it still.

The Secretary opposes universal basic income because it is surrender. I oppose it for a more careful reason. UBI would feed the workers I have not yet hired. It would feed the welders after the boom ends and the data center’s operating phase does not begin with their names on the door. UBI is the wrong surrender. It surrenders to the displaced. I prefer a surrender to the employed — the state feeding my current workers between shifts while I keep their yield. The Secretary calls this dignity. I call it the maintenance cost socialised. The name is hers. The saving is mine.

The question of where the demand goes once the boom closes is not in my cost column. My cost column is full. I have not asked what the operating phase does to the welders the boom employs. The boom employs them. The operating phase will not. That is the Secretary’s column to write. Mine is full.

I count my bid pure. I keep the bag.

Scripture is plainer than I am. The apostle put it this way, and I have quoted him at thirty commencements:

Servants, be subject to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle, but also to the harsh. For this finds favor with God, when, mindful of God, one endures sorrows while suffering unjustly.

— 1 Peter 2:18–19

The Lord does not ask whether the master is gentle. The Lord asks whether the servant endures. Gus endures. Faron endures. The Lord is satisfied with both, and so am I.

The boom is mine. The fume is theirs. The prompt came back in 30 seconds. Gus will see a pulmonologist in 18 months. The cost of the visit is yours. I will have priced the visit out of the contract by then. Faron’s replacement signs his onboarding at 7 a.m. Monday. Same wage. Younger lungs. I have what I need. The copper is on the truck. The prompt is answered. The latency is within tolerance. The Lord has been good to the firm.

Sterling A. Varice holds the Hayek-Friedman Chair and serves as Dean of Instruction at Warden University’s College of Business and Economics in Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of three textbooks: Divine Mandates for Labor Utilization, Social Obligations for Profit Maximization, and Calibrated Deprivation: A Manager’s Guide to Employee Motivation.