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.
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.
In Paris the burning and destruction typically happens in the outer "boroughs" of the city -usually by disaffected groups -sometimes they happen to be disenfranchised- though typically they harm the older generation's property and that generation typically frowns upon the destruction.
Of course, in the US, we've had organizations who on paper are for justice and redress being found to foment agitation. It's a total corruption of their mandate. We had an "anti-hate" group paying hate groups to "do things"[1].
[1]https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/119311/witnesses/...
American police inclined to do nothing, because it is locally hired and not paid/controlled by government.
This increases stakes to protest quite a lot, compared to European worker protection and social security.
Guys, I feel like we should get another anti-union thread here soon. It’s getting a little too hot for comfort. I’ll start. Whew While I do like unions in theory, I was really peeved when I was getting my start in the working forces as a banana picker and this guy Bob took midday naps...
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.
Now when I was a kid...getting thrown into a paddywagon while hammered after mouthing off to a cop was a right of passage.
I'm trying to wrap my head around this as well. Do these people want "punching the police and lighting things on fire" to be a freely permitted form of free speech?
If so, should anyone be legally allowed to destroy any amount of stuff, for any reason they feel unhappy about? Or is this a case of "blowing stuff up should only be permitted for causes I like, not for causes I dislike"?
If not, do they see the irony in endorsing behaviors that they simultaneously believe should not be legalized?
I haven't given that a lot of thought, and it feels weird to say, but maybe the opinion that an act should be done and should be illegal can be true at the same time.
When a citizen commits a crime, they messed up. When ten commit a crime, they messed up. When half the village destroys the chief's home, the chief messed up.
Suppose you are living under very corrupt or autocratic governance, and you protest in the conventional way (marching, waving signs and banners and so on) bu the government simply ignores it, or slanders the protestors for having a different opinion. What do you do then?
The media in the US often ignores the protests they (or their owners) don’t agree with. This also weakens them significantly. I remember having to go to Twitter to see what was going on with a lot of the Occupy Wall Street stuff, because the news was acting like it wasn’t going on. Without attention, and fractured across the country, it faded out. The protest area where I was living at the time slowly shifted into a homeless encampment, before they eventually cleared them out.
If anything, the longevity of the Fifth Republic is starting to become unusual (only the Third Republic and the Ancien Régime have lasted longer). Maybe we're overdue to flip the table again as per tradition.
>two empires, three monarchies and a bunch of short-lived totalitarian regimes, coups and other major political events.
Do you think you'd still have the Health insurance, unions, and paid vacation after another roll of the dice
I don’t know that regular political violence is positively correlated with worker protections.
They worked like that when I was in Paris ~3 years ago! At the time, people were rioting over the retirement age changes. I walked around the city the day after the protests. The city smelled like burned plastic. There were burned out rubbish bins and the husks of melted lime bikes & scooters all over the place.
I've never seen anything like it.
The U.S.'s institutions of power are heavily fortified. Political leaders of most countries travel about with a security detail of a few cars at most. The U.S. president has a gargantuan motorcade that's only rivaled in size by those of third world dictators. Arguably, the U.S. president doesn't hold power so much as wield it in the interest of oligarchs, who are even more insulated from the public.
If Americans want better government, what they really need to do is make oligarchs and politicians feel like they might actually be made to feel the consequences of their actions. That doesn't necessarily have to mean violence though, if people are creative enough.
e.g. Elon Musk wants so much to control what the world thinks of him that he bought Twitter and had Grokipedia made in an attempt to kill Wikipedia, since they have honestly reported on his misadventures with the same standards of rigor applied to other public figures. If you want to make Elon Musk feel consequences, just never let up on him. The dude made Nazi salutes during Trump's inauguration twice. His DOGE idiocy is why Texas livestock is being banned in other countries because of screwworms. Keep talking about that and don't stop.
They have 8% unemployment, 30% less GDP per capita than the US, and many other problems.
Government by caving in to riots is not in general being responsive to the needs of the people.
One of the problems with just using economic metrics is it seems to confuse the fact that the economy is supposed to serve society, not the other way around. So it leads one to wonder: with those better economic measures, what is it buying for US citizens?
“I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken a stronger hold on the affections of men…”
Besides work/life balance, the US gets much better as you earn more, and frankly high earners are generally less concerned with time off work too. Also why the US enjoyed ~30 years of European brain drain, those benefits are much less enticing when you are the one paying more and getting less.
Also keep in mind that French pay a lot for healthcare too, except it's called taxes. That $23/hr in France would be taxed at 30% compared to 12% in the US.
This only gets more dramatic as you climb the income scale, which inevitably means (in France) you are paying way more taxes (41% at $100k) while using those social services the least.
Compare to the US where you are paying 22% on $100k and likely getting high tier health insurance for ~$200/mo from such a job.
The takeaway is that America sucks if you are poor, but gets much better if you can make it out of the bottom half, and way better if you can get to the top 25%.
P.S. there is a reason the media only talks about the bottom 50% and the top 1%. Talking about the 50-99% would reveal where the real money in the country is (and offend/call out half the country too).
but if somebody else wants to organize I will 100% show up
So consider me first on the list of people ready to do whatever it takes to fix this shit
Was there ever a deed restriction? The government says no, but they say there was something else which I don’t understand.
> In the notes about the grantee, the cash warranty deed states that the property was to be held in trust for future use as parkland by Williamson County, Texas. This was not a deed restriction.
The rest of the page doesn’t display properly on iOS. https://taylortx.gov/1293/Blueprint-Projects-Data-Center
I don't know enough about texas real estate law to know if the restriction would tend to follow or not. I also don't know if the city would have done title research to have seen the restriction, so they may not have knowingly violated it (which may or may not matter; and maybe they should have known).
Also, fwiw, the 'one month later' sale reported in the article was more like a few months later, in case you date restrict deed searches.
I think politicians have completely lost the plot in their job and who they represent. Instead, they seem all ideologically or financially motivated, and largely seem to get their marching orders from select wealthy CEOs. It's a very bad look that will get worse since trust in govern being so low goes hand in hand with voted apathy. And voted apathy means we get more of the same.
It's a bad cycle and I think we'll land on a civil esque war sooner or later.
I, too, worry that they're going to rediscover this the hard way at some point.
I always assumed that this was the end goal of the AI. It's not for normal people, it's for the super wealthy to magnify their power, both economically and physically.
This argument you make is fine for spur of the moment violence, but for acts resulting from the structure violence of the super wealthy. Dunno.
Its calling for "Law and Order". Its violence against the 'correct group'.
You absolutely can call for violence (now) against protestors, ANTIFA, anti-surveillance (DEFLOCK), unionists, homeless, drug users, and other deemed by federal, state, and local officials as undesirable.
You cant directly call for violence to black people by name, but eupamisms are still fine to allude to. "Those people", "ghetto", etc.
And the violence BY police and government way exceed the violence by the public they target.
Also, thou shalt NEVER advocate for violence against CEOs, business leaders, politicians, and the like. Their lives are worth like 1M of us plebes. So those who come to their defense will do so crazily and way over-respond, like cops do routinely.
Thats why the feds threw threw the book at Luigi Mangione. Cause if he did it, his way is illegal but tremendously effective. And the elites have little defense against this.
(Case in point. In my local area, a person took $100 from a cash register, and got arrested for a class A misdemeanor and 2 other charges. Whereas the same restaurant had their owner committed mass wage theft of 27 people to the tune of $72000, and only had to pay a fine.
There absolutely hypocrisy who can advocate and not for violence.)
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.
Systematic use of terror as a policy to induce fear in the general public to push them to coerce their government's policy was not widely used.
[1] https://signalscv.com/2025/03/fbi-launches-task-force-to-inv...
Here's a very recent example of public authorities describing activism against data centers as a possible vector of 'anti-tech extremism': https://www.wired.com/story/us-law-enforcement-warns-of-anti...
Likewise, the proponent of a huge data center project in Utah and the Secretary of the Interior are both arguing that opposition to data centers is the result of Chinese communist propaganda: https://fortune.com/2026/06/10/kevin-oleary-trump-administra...
As far as I'm aware there have been zero acts of violence related to data center construction, or even threats of same.
I will be happy to steer you to work by philosophers and legal researchers on the construction of 'terrorism' as a political concept and the difficulty of cleanly differentiating it from 'legitimate' forms of violent political action.
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.
Farmer gives land to city.
City goes "We can have 10 million dollars AND a brand new data center, hot diggity"
City is enriched in both money AND services.
Thanks Mr Farmer.
If you are my friend and I gift you a nice item … I would be majorly pissed at you and would not talk to you ever again if you would sell it online.
I would expect you give it back or pass for free to someone who is also close to you.
This story is different though, the farmer sold the land for cheap in exchange for some conditions. This situation is more like going back on a contract.
Farmer SELLS land (for $10) with a deed restriction that it is to be used for a public park.
Hand wavey timey wimey...
Deed restriction 'magically' goes away.
Gets sold for $10M.
Tired of paying property tax? Gift your house to the city with a deed that says they have to rent it back to you forever for $1 a year?
Lets be clear, this wouldnt even be news if it wasnt for "Datacentre"
What if I write a note saying that you need to pay me $10,000? That's not a contract, that's just a fever dream. But if you shake my hand and sign that piece of paper, that's a different story.
The same applies here. If you get the city to agree (and they don't get raided by the FBI after that), then sure, they should be bound by the deal they made.
Note that this works both ways. If you own nice rural acreage, the federal or state government will often be happy to pay you some token amount and give you a tax break for a conservation easement that prevents not only you, but all future owners, from using the land in certain ways. It's still yours, but it's now a scenic corridor and you can't build there anymore. There's plenty of such easements in California and other Western states. If I'm bound by such a perpetual, deed-attached restriction, why can't the government be?
The real problem seems to be one city gave the land to a parks nonprofit who then sold it to another city, but the original park intent did not follow those sales.
Setting aside whether I think data centers or good or bad and just focusing on the sale of the land (for whatever purpose).
The land was donated back in 99 and looks like they never followed through on making it anything. Which is pretty shitty to Mr Bland's vision.
Though that donation itself is a bit weird because literally on the just the other side of the neighborhood is. a park!
https://maps.app.goo.gl/jwcANZ59bW17sTmm7
according to the town site the park was dedicated in 1955 https://www.taylortx.gov/244/Fannie-Robinson-Park
I suspect It just sat fallow for 25 years because there was already a park nearby and nobody bothered to press them on using the land for it's donated purpose. It switched hands a few times. Likely someone turned it up in some meeting and realized at this point they were never going to do anything with it and might as well sell it.
Edit: In considering the protracted timeline, I revise the assumption to "nobody at the office knew why they had the land or any stipulations attached to it". it's even possible that the buyers in 08 didn't know the terms of the original deed from nearly a decade before. Not that it makes it right to sell it but the intent wasn't likely malicious, the land wasn't donated just last year or anything.
To be fair, parks don't just mean playground equipment. It could be a forested area with trails. It could be a drainage pond you can fish in. It could be a garden or prairie. It could even just be a big grass lot where people can play games and do whatever.
edit: all humans are psychopaths, sociopaths are merely the extreme end of the psychopathy scale
Can you imagine the number of H100s we could have put in there if this was Texas?
It's not the sort of thing I'd think would happen here. Small town folks talk. But with the huge new Samsung fab going up on one side of town, this datacenter on the other, and the unfathomable growth in this part of Texas; I guess things are a changing.
Hopefully all the attention this is getting will enforce the original deed restrictions. It's too bad it's a data center; there's already so much hysteria around those and this being a data center project really has nothing to do with the city purposely going around the deed restrictions. But the money, I guess.
Was there ever a deed restriction? The government says no, but they say there was something else which I don’t understand.
> In the notes about the grantee, the cash warranty deed states that the property was to be held in trust for future use as parkland by Williamson County, Texas. This was not a deed restriction.
The rest of the page doesn’t display properly on iOS. https://taylortx.gov/1293/Blueprint-Projects-Data-Center
Although even there, if you donate land in a location they feel they won't be able to manage, they may sell it to purchase other land/pad the endowment. In theory they will end up being land swaps if you wait long enough, but nana's favorite tree could still end up under a Walmart.
My brain officially only understands "up" as "down"...
I REALLY hope there was a clause in there that if the city does ANYTHING other than turn it into a park the man can sue the city for 120% of the value of the sale or he gets 90% of the sales revenue.
The text says 135,000 square feet for the data center. Given the area marked city owned property says it is 560 feet. 135,000 square feet would be an area 240 feet wide alongside the road.
The area marked in red. is substantially larger than that.
130680 square feet is three acres. I wonder if the number is a rounded conversion from acreage. It seems a bit short of the 87acres that is specified as the amount given to the city.
Maybe the entire red outlined area is 87Acres, It's kinda hard to eyeball an irregular shape like that.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1601-Martin-Luther-King-J...
Each of the three marked buildings (assuming the two grey and three white rectangles make up a single building) is 135,000 square feet.
Regardless, the government says there was never a “deed restriction” but they say there was something else which I don’t understand:
> In the notes about the grantee, the cash warranty deed states that the property was to be held in trust for future use as parkland by Williamson County, Texas. This was not a deed restriction.
The rest of the page doesn’t display properly on iOS. https://taylortx.gov/1293/Blueprint-Projects-Data-Center
NIMBYism is not just a matter of wanting to preserve exorbitant land values, but a knowledge that every square foot of land and gallon of water is in demand by nefarious people who are not revealing their actual intentions.
This stuff is legal in Texas. It's exactly the desired outcome from the lack of regulation.
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.
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.
Was it only a rumor or did you find a reliable source? Presumably that type of thing would make at least the national news, especially if it’s been years - a university costs exponentially more than (empty?) parkland.
Put a million Euros into an endowment, and at 5% annual returns, that's 50,000 Euros, enough to hire maybe one person to run and teach everything. Even if it was 10 million Euros, that's a lot less than you think if you want to start even a small school and not run out of money in a few years.
as in she was rich bro
edit> are you trolling me?
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?
Letting kids into places where science and technology happens has such an impact. We should really enable that as much as we can.
It's a combination of post-9/11 security paranoia, companies not wanting to do anything that doesn't directly make them money, and the loss of manufacturing and heavy industry in the West, all together. It's sad.
The servers themselves are in cages, of course, and presumably the tour wouldn't actually go into those. Plus, yeah, what the other comment said.
Having said this I do feel like these data centres should be built in such a way that waste heat is used in some way. Use it to heat structures, greenhouses, whatever. I used to live in a place where a large fraction of the block heating came from a nearby power plant with additional gas-fired heating for when the waste heat wasn't enough. The same can be done with waste heat from data centres by using heat pumps. This can work in colder climates and in the cooler seasons in moderate climates.
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.
Modern information warfare
> 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?
The land is owned by the city, that much is not in question.
If they signed the deed, they agreed to the condition that they would use it to build a park. If they didn't sign the deed, they never agreed to that condition.
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.
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.
IMO the non permanent nature of these sorts of grants is a good thing because if we don’t have limitations then we’ll eventually end up in a necrocacy where the long dead have more say over how property and the government is managed than the living.
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'.
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.
This all seems reasonable to me. If you want my money or things, you’ll have to use them like I suggest.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defeasible_estate
Granting land conditionally such that the ownership reverts once the condition stops being met is very much a thing. 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.
Demand the government be made accountable.
Government can actually work despite all the vapid puerile tropes.
$10 gift became $10M for city government, with $30M tax expected over next decade
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.
Also, I've had more black outs since the data center has been active than I've ever experienced. I'm sure these things are unrelated. Along with the increased cost of electricity. And I'm on the other side of town from the data center. The locals nearby complain about more.
I still don't know what supposed benefit I got from it being here. We already had a well funded government before the data center was here.
I think this situation is why many are so anti-data center. The city gets the cash from the land sell and they get some temporary industry from the construction and then it's just a drain on the area.
Also, there is already a park right to the west of the residential section shown in the map, called Fannie Robinson park.
And I am concerned that the purpose of slanted anti-datacenter coverage by the likes of 404media.co and perfectunion.us is to inspire memetic NIMBYism that has and will cause tremendous damage to the US.
This only came up because living people also care about it.
If you want to make it illegal to dictate how land is used, do so directly. I'd be fine with the state passing a new law, voted on by the people, stripping such deeds of their status. But until then, it doesn't seem good at all to ignore an existing law at the whims of local government.
And of course, at that point, don't be surprised when the people keep voting to toss data centers out - if individuals can't be expected to dictate what happens to their land, neither should corporations.
In practical terms, it’s not clear that an entity with the power of imminent domain can meaningfully be constrained by deeds.