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A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center

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Re: A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center

#481

Post by no-name-here »

ionwake wrote: post #289

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…

> Rumour was an old lady donated posthumously … to build a university

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.

Re: A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center

#482

Post by radpanda »

ionwake wrote: post #289

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…

That reminds me of the story of the university librarian who lived frugally and left his savings to the university, which went ahead and spent a million of those dollars on a silly football scoreboard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Morin_(librarian)

Re: A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center

#483

Post by CivBase »

ticulatedspline wrote: post #463

Gonna play a little devil's advocate here. 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…

> Though that donation itself is a bit weird because literally on the just the other side of the neighborhood is. a park!

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.

Re: A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center

#484

Post by bawolff »

ozim wrote: post #372
protocolture wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whats the problem here? 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.

Farmer donates land for a park 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.

When you put it that way, i disagree. A gift is a gift. Once you give it to someone its their's to do with as they please. A gift with strings is not a gift.

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.

Re: A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center

#485

Post by ranger_danger »

josephg wrote: post #303
zug_zug wrote: post #279

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 gove…

That only works for the French because they're afraid to disappear their own citizens. US has been doing it for the last year and a half.

Re: A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center

#486

Post by WarmWash »

bumby wrote: post #437
WarmWash wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All these things become meaningless when you cross the ~50th income percentile. 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.

Median US income is $45k. Almost 18% of US household income goes to healthcare costs. So you’re saying healthcare access/quality, time off, and mortality are moot once you make $23/hr? Color me skeptical.

I mean, you're on the cusp there but $23/hr is around where "full benefits" jobs become the norm.

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).

Re: A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center

#487

Post by msisk6 »

no-name-here wrote: post #478
msisk6 wrote: post #462

Huh. I lived in Taylor about 6 years ago. It's your typical small Texas town about 30-minutes east of Austin. Very 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…

> the deed restrictions 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/129…

Perhaps not. I'm certainly not an expert in Texas property law. Be interesting to see what happens. Quite a deal for the city if it sticks; get land for $10, hold it for awhile, sell for $10M, get taxes from a $1B data center build.

Re: A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center

#488

Post by no-name-here »

bawolff wrote: post #479

Umm so if the deed had a legally binding condition on it, why is that condition being ignored? The article doesn't say what the rationale was. Was the condition not legally binding in texas? Is there some time limit on it? Something else? What is the legal excuse being used?

I agree that the OP article isn’t great - deep in the article it seems to say it’s legal but doesn’t explain why, even though the article goes into detail on less important matters.

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

Re: A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center

#489

Post by cindyllm »

thin_carapace wrote: post #476
snickerbockers wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sam Altman already tried to counter the accusation that AI uses too much energy by complaining that raising children who can't contribute to the economy for the first 18 years of their life is more wasteful than building data centers.

I wish that there could be a normal world where people who want to cooperate don't have to deal with sociopaths and all the sociopaths could go live in another world to have fun and rape each other instead of raping normal people, it's a pity that humanity never evolved to handle globalism and it's a pity that life itself is selfishness codified edit: all humans are psychopaths, sociopaths are merely the extreme end…

[dead]

Re: A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center

#490

Post by anigbrowl »

Aloisius wrote: post #376
hilbert42 wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Calling the American Revolution terrorism, in the modern sense, is a stretch. It was a war waged primarily between soldiers and materiel with the goal of ending the enemy's ability to wage war. 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.

This is massively disingenuous. If you showed up in public in the US today with a bunch of men in uniform and announced your intention of using military force to secure some perceived political rights, you'd be denounced as a terrorist by the authorities while you were still reading out your carefully drafted rules of engagement.

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.

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