It's exhausting that the "solution" to problems like this is getting tens or hundreds of thousands of citizens stressed until enough public attention gives some small chance of redress. I'm not calling for violence, but if we can't get these things fixed in court there has to be a more effect and more forceful avenue for protest than venting on internet forums.
I saw a clip the other day of an American comedian doing crowd work in Paris. He asked the audience what America should do, and the French said - something like - they should punch the police more and light things on fire.<p>To me that sounds crazy! But, I can see how it works for the French. They protest all the time, and the government is very responsive to the needs of the people. Much more so than the American government sees to be.
I don't know how effective the French protests are, since I haven't lived in Europe for a while. But even as a Swiss, at least judging from TV, protests in the U.S. generally seem very tame.<p>Not advocating punching the police as a default, but in my opinion, protests need to be disruptive if they're going to get anyone's attention at all. I don't really see what a few people standing on the sidewalk with cardboard signs are supposed to accomplish.
Those two things are contradictory. Obviously the government isn't very responsive if they are constantly protesting.
Is the French government more responsive than those of neighbouring countries?
> I'm not calling for violence<p>We should, and the longer we wait the more violent it'll be in the end
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You're edging on terrorism
American zoning is weird. You can't walk to a grocery store, but you can walk to a data center.
You cant walk to a data center either
You obviously have never been to Ashburn, Virginia. Look up Lord Fairfax Pl. in Ashburn, VA on Google Maps and note the data center just outside that neighborhood.
Literally in the article is a proposed development that is (easily) walkable from residential houses.
Whats really frustrating is how silicon valley fights tooth and nail to stop housing from being built in their community only to force these data centers onto everybody else's communities.
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48446439">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48446439</a><p>Have there been any updates?
No good deed goes unpunished
Rumour was an old lady donated posthumously alot of money she had saved up her whole life, to build a university at Estepona in Spain.<p>After she died they never built it. The town remains pretty much the same as it always was.<p>Last time I was there they had replaced the red marble promenade that was cracked on the beach with some sort of rubber playground cement, and for some reason that I can only put down to malice, built a large statue that resembles a rat about 8 feet tall and placed it at the intersection of the promenade with the town center, where there used to be old spanish men and youths playing on many free foosball tables<p>Bear in mind this fishing town is next to Marbella perhaps the richest destination in the mediterranean.<p>Its almost as if as a child I fell asleep and woke up in a nightmare, when I visited.<p>Fortunately they left what remains of the old town alone and its still a beautiful (in parts) tourist destination.
<p><pre><code> $10 gift became $10M for city government, with $30M tax expected over next decade
</code></pre>
I mean... pretty easy to see why...<p>I think if the city tried to communicate what that money is going to be used for, perhaps it'd be slightly more palatable.
Or perhaps the pitchforks are already out, and it wouldn't.
Can it be both? Trying to think of a data centre themed expedition now where you go visit the robots and interact with the machines
You know, you joke (I think?) but data center companies could genuinely at least open up for tours to try to appeal to the public, if public approval is apparently such a concern. It's funny that they haven't done it at all yet.<p>Think nuclear power plants in the 60s or 70s, many of them were open for tours or school field trips or such to try to make them more appealing to the populace around them. I haven't heard of a single DC doing the same thing, unless you're a potential customer. Isn't this stuff kind of basic?
In the Netherlands I visited a nuclear reactor in middle/highschool. Literally something that left such an impression that I still talk about two decades later.<p>Letting kids into places where science and technology happens has such an impact. We should really enable that as much as we can.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactor_Institute_Delft" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactor_Institute_Delft</a>
That won't work when your tour guide can't even answer questions about what the computers do because theyre all running VMs that are rented out on an ad-hoc basis.
Yep its Texas.
More than once I've read stories about small local counties selling huge plots of lands to companies promising to build data centers, only for those companies to flip the land instantly for double or triple the price.<p>There seems to be no shortage of desperate rural areas that are more than willing to sign ridiculous no-strings-attached deals with companies, in the hopes that they'll geta a couple of years with economic stimuli.<p>I can't blame them, I'm from a small place like that, and have seem some atrocious deals go through.<p>I think that if you're unscrupulous enough, there's a killing to be made by those type of grifts.
Well the city could just sell the land for 2-3x the price from the get go, but Karen and the people she elects wants to pretend like their zoning and red tape policies are saving the spotted owl or keeping their retirement nest egg valuable or whatever, so inevitably they red tape themselves into a corner at which point the grift just becomes too juicy and the greedy voters hand the opportunity to an even greedier and cunning bastard on a silver plate who will package it up and sell it to a fake "data center" and the developers get their way anyway.
"value creation"
Today the Sagrada Familia, now the tallest church in the world, was inaugurated in Spain, 100 years after the death of its architect Gaudì.<p>Can you imagine the number of H100s we could have put in there if this was Texas?
Are deeds with conditions like that legal in that jurisdiction?
IDK about Texas but supposedly there's a cemetery in southern Virginia that legally becomes the property of some member of my extended family (possibly even me, not that I actually want it) if the county ever digs up the bodies because it was gifted to the county by a distant ancestor on the condition that it is only public property so long as it remains a cemetery.
IANAL but Texas law seems to allow a great deal of flexibility in deeds. One interesting quote I found:<p>> spelling out any additional agreements between the parties within the four corners of the deed itself can eliminate any doubt or ambiguity as to the content of those agreements.<p>The word "any" does some heavy lifting here, I'll admit.<p>> How can a grantor insure that the “as is” provision is unconditionally accepted by the grantee? The answer is to require that the grantee sign and acknowledge the deed<p>This quote is using as-is provisions since those are very common, but it seems like this doctrine applies to any condition in a deed.<p>Did a representative for the city ever sign the deed?<p><a href="https://lonestarlandlaw.com/deeds-in-texas/" rel="nofollow">https://lonestarlandlaw.com/deeds-in-texas/</a>
Property law in America is insane from all sides. It's one of the few countries where you can just say something is yours, and someone else can disagree, and you get to argue about it forever. The only reason it is like that is we are still pretending all lands belong to the King of England. We never went back and fixed it. Even England itself fixed this, but we're too stupid.
Except when they violate civil rights (i.e. "whites only" deed restrictions are not enforceable, though they do exist), I think the answer would generally be yes. In some places in Texas, there is no zoning, only deed restrictions, Houston being the largest city where that's so, though that has evolved a bit and the city does have more say about land use than in the past.<p>Anyway, deed restrictions run with the land and are legally binding on subsequent owners in Texas. Buying land is agreeing to the contract implied by the deed restrictions. It's part of the due diligence of acquiring land in Texas.<p>Of course, governments can change the terms of that kind of thing in some cases. But, I suspect any honest reading of this situation would have required the city to go through a public hearing process so that the neighbors of the property were aware and had a voice in the decision, at the very least (but maybe even with that, their was a clear agreement to reserve the land for parkland, they shouldn't have taken the land if that wasn't an acceptable obligation). Property rights and contract law are pretty sacred in Texas. I lean YIMBY about a lot of things, but this gets my hackles up. It looks illegal on its face and shouldn't have made it through the cities lawyers going over this deal.<p>Edit: I should also mention that it is literally the neighbors right/obligation to sue in these cases. I've seen the argument that the neighbors of the land don't have standing. But, for deed restrictions, the neighbors are exactly the people with standing to sue over violations of deed restrictions. Cities in Texas are not obligated to enforce deed restrictions in most cases and most do not, Houston is one major exception to that rule.
> Except when they violate civil rights (i.e. "whites only" deed restrictions are not enforceable, though they do exist)<p>In my deeply blue city in my deeply blue city there were several HOAs with covenants around "non-whites" could only live in servants quarters on property, etc.<p>These clauses and covenants were non-enforceable, but when my city went after the HOAs to physically remove the clauses, they still encountered pockets of resistance, from "historical significance" to "what's the point, they're unenforceable" to "ugh, we'd have to hire attorneys to do that" to the point where the city had to announce sanctions ranging from fines up to investigating the possibility of forcible dissolution of the HOA.<p>Unenforceable or not, picture how welcome you'd feel as a POC reading that in the HOA covenants for a prospective home purchase.
[dupe] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48446439">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48446439</a>
Totally unrelated fun story.<p>Recently I learned that the park nearest where my parents lived was named after a Mr Park, hence the name of the park, 'Park Gardens'.<p>It contains a war memorial, albeit with Mr Park's name on it, albeit his son. WW1 for you.<p>Up until 1920 the park was pasture, then Mr Park bought it and it was landscaped very nicely. Since then it has been a well maintained park and actively used.<p>For housing it would make a very good earner for the council, due to its location. As a data centre though? Only lots of bribery and tear gas would get that approved.<p>Once upon a time the park was just a farmer's field, for pasture. Nowadays it is proudly owned by the town and more than just land.<p>As for the story that 'land' might just be land, but, in time, it could have been another wonderful 'Park Gardens'.
New homes for AI agents.
Good deed for our robot overlords!
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Transfer the land to the city either for free or for a nominal fee, but with a covenant. City resells the land and ignores the covenant.<p>Yes, we know that title or deed is only as good as the enforcement behind it. But if governments discard that to enrich themselves, then that's what a certain amendment is for, as that is pure tyranny.
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Lots of endowments come with strings attached. We made a charitable donation to a local university for them to buy some specific science outreach equipment, they bought it.<p>This all seems reasonable to me. If you want my money or things, you’ll have to use them like I suggest.
To a reasonable extent, including this case, yes.<p>But there are limits - with finite resources like land, the present-day owners should not be subject to the whims of men who've been dead for 150+ years.<p>If in my great-great-great-grandfather's day he wanted part of his legacy to be land passed to his son who'd pass it on to his son and so on - that shouldn't stop me passing it on to my daughter.
And they end up in court cases where the people using it contrary go in with an argument like, "we really need it" or "we already spent it". Depending on how connected they are versus the person who has already passed, they frequently win.
If you don't want to abide by the conditions of a gift - don't accept it.
That's an ignorant simplification of how property ownership works. For example, defeasible estates are not a new or rare thing:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defeasible_estate" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defeasible_estate</a><p>Granting land conditionally such that the ownership reverts once the condition stops being met is very much <i>a thing</i>. I can't find the full details of this particular case, but it sounds like the property went through a long sequences of transfers that probably make the legal situation tricky.
The intent was to gift a park.
Why can’t gifts have contracts?
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Maybe this will fund a bigger better park with playgrounds and water features?
It will, just not in the U.S. Probably in private resorts in Albania, Saudi Arabia, etc.
that costs a $200 monthly subscription to access, the profits going directly to grifter's pockets.
Possibly, but only if the mayor and a couple of city council members own the new land