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.
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.
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.
There are people with cardboard signs, and there are BLM protests or occupy Wall Street. Can't remember when the last disruptive protests were in Switzerland, but in Germany I'd say tame protests are the norm and disruptions are an exception
99% of BLM protests were just people with cardboard signs. There's always the occasional anonymous asshole who might throw a rock at a window and run off, but that's the nature of any gathering of 100,000+ people. There will always be a turd.
In the other 1%, the police decided on a policy of always picking a fight with crowd, every fucking day, until they ran out of gas.
There was a lot of arson at BLM protests, and plenty of people beaten in the street, some of whom were in no way asking for it. The majority of the violence probably was the cops though.
Americans don't even protest on weekdays, they wait for a weekend to do it. So it is easy to say that they aren't serious but on the other hand, they are they're a lot closer to the knife's edge of stability and missing a day of work can get them fired (especially in at-will employment states), Europe is not like this as much.
In the US if you're with a group of people and there is some leader or group planning unlawful property destruction or violence, there is a very very good chance it is a fed or confidential informant operation.
I know that "French strikes" and "French setting fire to things" is a popular American trope, but things really don't work like that. If that were the case France would be a much better place than other European countries, and it really is not.
I feel like in the US if you punched a cop the cop and his colleagues are much more likely to just shoot you, or at least unleash brutal violence on you and the rest of the crowd. I guess the idea is to provoke these kind of battles in hopes that the cops can be overwhelmed or at least public opinion goes to your side?
If a government does not respond to the wishes of its people, violence is an inevitability. It is in the best interest of the state to be accommodating enough to placate the citizens.
Only if what those people want is something I agree with otherwise I think the state holds the monopoly on violence and we need to mobilize it against the wrong thinker.
Mwah, that depends on what you consider walking distance. I remember walking back from a Rite-Aid in SF when attending an IETF conference, entering the conference hotel and being asked by other attendees 'where the hell I managed to find a Rite-Aid here'? Well, it may have been a 1.5 km walk but it was there, sure enough. I did not look it up beforehand, just started walking out of the centre and found one. Sure, if you only look in the local block you won't find one but then again if I walk 1.5 km from where I live I only find more trees so everything is relative.
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.
It all makes sense once you realise the purpose is to maximise the amount of car storage. You're allowed to build car storage in every zone. Many zones even have a minimum amount of car storage required to accompany anything else you want to build.
What? This depends entirely on where you are. And for far more people, I would expect they can far more easily walk to a grocery store than they can any sort of industrial thing.
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.
We can right these wrongs. Vertical cooling seems feasible. A Google Maps 3D tour of the interior would be much more accessible. You’re not anti-accessibility, right? This is a moral imperative. Thank you for pointing this out.
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.
After she died they never built it. The town remains pretty much the same as it always was.
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
Bear in mind this fishing town is next to Marbella perhaps the richest destination in the mediterranean.
Its almost as if as a child I fell asleep and woke up in a nightmare, when I visited.
Fortunately they left what remains of the old town alone and its still a beautiful (in parts) tourist destination.
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.
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.
Letting kids into places where science and technology happens has such an impact. We should really enable that as much as we can.
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.
They could say anything and the visitors would have to believe it. A canyon tour guide tells me a story about why a rock formation is named the way it is. I have no clue if it’s true. But I enjoy it still.
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.
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.
I can't blame them, I'm from a small place like that, and have seem some atrocious deals go through.
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.
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:
> 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.
The word "any" does some heavy lifting here, I'll admit.
> 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
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.
Did a representative for the city ever sign the deed?
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Unenforceable or not, picture how welcome you'd feel as a POC reading that in the HOA covenants for a prospective home purchase.
$10 gift became $10M for city government, with $30M tax expected over next decade
I mean... pretty easy to see why...
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.
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'.
It contains a war memorial, albeit with Mr Park's name on it, albeit his son. WW1 for you.
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.
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.
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.
As for the story that 'land' might just be land, but, in time, it could have been another wonderful 'Park Gardens'.
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.
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.
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.
American police are much more inclined to escalate any violence instead of trying to de-escalate.
There are people with cardboard signs, and there are BLM protests or occupy Wall Street. Can't remember when the last disruptive protests were in Switzerland, but in Germany I'd say tame protests are the norm and disruptions are an exception
99% of BLM protests were just people with cardboard signs. There's always the occasional anonymous asshole who might throw a rock at a window and run off, but that's the nature of any gathering of 100,000+ people. There will always be a turd.
In the other 1%, the police decided on a policy of always picking a fight with crowd, every fucking day, until they ran out of gas.
There was a lot of arson at BLM protests, and plenty of people beaten in the street, some of whom were in no way asking for it. The majority of the violence probably was the cops though.
Americans don't even protest on weekdays, they wait for a weekend to do it. So it is easy to say that they aren't serious but on the other hand, they are they're a lot closer to the knife's edge of stability and missing a day of work can get them fired (especially in at-will employment states), Europe is not like this as much.
In the US if you're with a group of people and there is some leader or group planning unlawful property destruction or violence, there is a very very good chance it is a fed or confidential informant operation.
I know that "French strikes" and "French setting fire to things" is a popular American trope, but things really don't work like that. If that were the case France would be a much better place than other European countries, and it really is not.
Those two things are contradictory. Obviously the government isn't very responsive if they are constantly protesting.
It’s not contradictory, protesting doesn’t make sense as a one time thing, you have to continuously put pressure and show you have power as a group
Is the French government more responsive than those of neighbouring countries?
I feel like in the US if you punched a cop the cop and his colleagues are much more likely to just shoot you, or at least unleash brutal violence on you and the rest of the crowd. I guess the idea is to provoke these kind of battles in hopes that the cops can be overwhelmed or at least public opinion goes to your side?
You're edging on terrorism
What is left when all other options are exhausted?
The American War of Independence, French Revolution and English Civil War were acts of terrorism.
Were those acts justified? Not if you're the ones who were initially holding the power.
The funny thing is it's neither terrorism nor illegal if you're just lobbying the government to do it on your behalf.
People have weird kinks these days
If a government does not respond to the wishes of its people, violence is an inevitability. It is in the best interest of the state to be accommodating enough to placate the citizens.
90s medical advertisement disclaimer voice
Only if what those people want is something I agree with otherwise I think the state holds the monopoly on violence and we need to mobilize it against the wrong thinker.
American zoning is weird. You can't walk to a grocery store, but you can walk to a data center.
Mwah, that depends on what you consider walking distance. I remember walking back from a Rite-Aid in SF when attending an IETF conference, entering the conference hotel and being asked by other attendees 'where the hell I managed to find a Rite-Aid here'? Well, it may have been a 1.5 km walk but it was there, sure enough. I did not look it up beforehand, just started walking out of the centre and found one. Sure, if you only look in the local block you won't find one but then again if I walk 1.5 km from where I live I only find more trees so everything is relative.
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.
And just up the road in Arlington you can walk to a grocery store
Literally in the article is a proposed development that is (easily) walkable from residential houses.
It all makes sense once you realise the purpose is to maximise the amount of car storage. You're allowed to build car storage in every zone. Many zones even have a minimum amount of car storage required to accompany anything else you want to build.
What? This depends entirely on where you are. And for far more people, I would expect they can far more easily walk to a grocery store than they can any sort of industrial thing.
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.
Just makes you wonder how many of the SV types are wanting to use AI as the final solution for the poor.
Today the Sagrada Familia, now the tallest church in the world, was inaugurated in Spain, 100 years after the death of its architect Gaudì.
Can you imagine the number of H100s we could have put in there if this was Texas?
We can right these wrongs. Vertical cooling seems feasible. A Google Maps 3D tour of the interior would be much more accessible. You’re not anti-accessibility, right? This is a moral imperative. Thank you for pointing this out.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48446439
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.
After she died they never built it. The town remains pretty much the same as it always was.
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
Bear in mind this fishing town is next to Marbella perhaps the richest destination in the mediterranean.
Its almost as if as a child I fell asleep and woke up in a nightmare, when I visited.
Fortunately they left what remains of the old town alone and its still a beautiful (in parts) tourist destination.
Yep its Texas.
I'd seen these headlines but until you said that I didn't realize how close it was to me.
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
Or build a park on top of the datacenter as a living roof?
Maybe even use the waste heat to help grow things in cold, dark climates?
It’s pretty different; but locally they covered a good chunk of a freeway with a very nice park to mollify the residents.
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.
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.
Letting kids into places where science and technology happens has such an impact. We should really enable that as much as we can.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactor_Institute_Delft
DC tours are probably a nightmare to do in a PCI-compliant (and the myriad other standards they claim compliance with) environment.
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.
They could say anything and the visitors would have to believe it. A canyon tour guide tells me a story about why a rock formation is named the way it is. I have no clue if it’s true. But I enjoy it still.
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.
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.
I can't blame them, I'm from a small place like that, and have seem some atrocious deals go through.
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"
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:
> 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.
The word "any" does some heavy lifting here, I'll admit.
> 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
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.
Did a representative for the city ever sign the deed?
https://lonestarlandlaw.com/deeds-in-texas/
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Unenforceable or not, picture how welcome you'd feel as a POC reading that in the HOA covenants for a prospective home purchase.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48446439
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.
Totally unrelated fun story.
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'.
It contains a war memorial, albeit with Mr Park's name on it, albeit his son. WW1 for you.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Don't forget Israel and Qatar
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