Stories like this always remind me of the Peter’s parking deck at GA Tech. The couple that donated the land wanted it to be a park, so that the students would have a green place to play and relax. Once Tech had the land, they put a parking deck there instead. But they put a basketball court on the top level so that they technically met the letter of the law.
In fairness, as a student I needed that parking deck way more than I needed the park.
I’m curious what would be the better approach if someone wanted to donate land to be used for a park? Give it to a charity? Or somehow find the cash and just build the park yourself and let people visit your land?
My town had a guy that loved baseball a long time ago, he had money and wanted it local so he built a baseball field right on the river, made a big park and donated it to the city. He was pretty smart about it and worked the deed so that it would take a two-third vote of the citizens to sell it.
Fast forward to a couple of years ago and the mayor petitioned the governor to change the deed under an NDA as he wanted to lease the park to a minor league baseball team. In the deal he also gave them the naming rights for the park, so the baseball team renamed the park after a local bank that gave them money.
Damn, you really can’t control your legacy, huh?
Depends how it was dontated, you can specify a loan of the land indefinetly to the city as long as its use is xyz.
If its a straight donation with no caveats attached then the city can do what it wants
My local council tried to build on some park land donated 100 years ago but the donator had specified its usage in the donation so they got shut down pretty hard.
Sell a part of your land and use the money to build a park on the rest.
a while back when i was a animal physio class a university, the profess told how he knew someone about to retire/Will but he wanted to donate it to STANFORD on the sole purpose of it being used as a research station in some island/country. the guy somehow heard the stanford lawyers said they were going to sell it or rent it out instead right behind his back. he gave it to Berkley university instead to be used for science.
the moral of the story make sure you have something in place so that the land/property being donated is used properly by a lawyer or a trust org.
Universities are a business and have the morals of your generic street thug. Why anyone would consider donating anything to them is a mystery.
Whistleblowers with morals are also more important that people realise.
Pave paradise and put up a
parking lotdata centerAI is starting to show that it isn’t worth the investment and they are STILL building more?!? WTF is going on?
Because I do not think AI is the actual end goal. I think the actual end goal is cloud computing. They want everyone to use thin clients and connect to their data center instead of using a pc at home.
Good thing my rural internet isn’t strong enough for that
I think the real goal is the billionaires uploading their minds to achieve immortality. Definitely impossible, but that’s what I think.
That was my theory to why Zuck was so interested in his Metaverse. Every billionaire is planning some sort of post-life or extending their lives one way or another. The same way kinds and emperors of history have.
AI LLMs are definitely a smokescreen for justifying more compute.
What the real goal for all those CPUs is I have no idea.
full circle, back when I started, main frames with thin clients.
Don’t forget the surveillance state! The global buildout for the NWO one government surveillance state will be paid with your pension and retirement savings.
Nothing to do with a so called new world orde just the same people as before. It is just the government and industrialist that want more power. We are just living though the beginings of a cyberpunk setting.
Yeah but without the cool tech or space exploration. We just get the shitty parts.
Jensen Huang has been pretty open about that being the plan lately. Although he still insists that even the cloud computers will be run by AI agents.
The bailout money will be double what they lost I am guessing.
That is crazy and would make no sense for them to do. Why do you think they’re doing that?
Red line go up.
Profit Cults gotta commit to the behaviour
It should be legal and acceptable to take back things given for one purpose that end up being used for something else.
It’s legal to burn down data centres if you don’t get caught.
It actually is if the gift is conditional on a specified use - in writing of course.
In my country it is legal to do so
deleted by creator
Hmmm Providence RI by any chance? LOL
OP claims to be from southwestern europe here: On a post about his cat
Lol, that’s clearly Portugal. They have burrokracia over there, and they are honorary Balkan.
Not judging but curious, why did you dig into post histories? I see plenty of people doing it even if I never do, so I’m just curious why.
Can’t answer for them but the few times I’ve done it is to make sure I’m talking with someone that can actually hold a conversation and I’m not arguing with a shill or looney. Sometimes just to see what a person is like on average. Especially if they act like a cunt for little reason. Some do it just for curiosity sake.
Makes sense. Thanks for the answer!
Lol I wasn’t expecting op to actually reply don’t need them doxxing themselves was just poking fun at how that crap happens more often than you’d think with the corruption , shits a plague everywhere
Don’t even mention:
Datacenters Behaving Like Acoustic Weapons
I know the saying is “don’t mess with Texas” but Texas seems to fuck itself over all the time. I would be raising hell about this if it was my backyard.
That’s kind of but not exactly a mistranslation. The original Chinese is closer to ‘do not interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake’, but in the american vernacular, you can just say ‘don’t mess with Texas’ and it means the same thing locally. Its one of those very regional sayings.
Any time I think of the art of war, I think of this song:
Any time I think of the art of war
That is how Americans do things. A third of angels fell, but that’s ok because we have the Illuminati to kerfuffle their feathers.
Pretty sure “Don’t mess with Texas” began its life as an anti-littering campaign in the late 80s or early 90s. It has been appropriated to mean all sorts of things, though. The original meaning might be even more relevant to data centers…
No, the EPA just appropriated sun tzu.
I mean… I guess it could mean that now, but that is certainly not what it meant originally or how it was ever used.
Oh, you speak Chinese?
In the most Peggy Hill way possible.
Is “don’t mess with Texas” Chinese?
I just said its a translation. Yes. From sun tzu I think. In england they translate it the other way I said here.
Except the actual phrase didn’t originate from whatever Chinese saying you’re talking about. It was an anti-littering campaign, from Texas, in the 1980s.
No, its from translating ‘the art of war’ into an american dialect. EPA just appropriated it.
This has nothing to do with any translation of any language, it’s a US English expression.
It is a joke.
They are intimating that texas makes so many mistakes that “Don’t mess with texas” may be a blowhard boast to texans, but to everyone else it means “just let the idiots wreck themselves”
Also that ‘Texas’ is synonymous with ‘enemy’ for all Americans.
Still has nothing to do with translating anything from any other language.
And since they doubled down on it being the actual origin when pressed on it, I don’t think they were joking.
…it was pretty obviously a shitpost, dude.
Absolutely not. You don’t double down on a joke.
Thank you for the correct interpretation, I really need to remember that one
She’s gonna get a share of the lease revenue on that, right?
…right?
Even if they didn’t do her dirty, she wouldn’t. She donated it to the city and relinquished ownership of it. The expectation, even written into the deed, was that the land was to be used as a park, but they turned around and sold it multiple times. Despite the stipulation in the original deed to the parks and recreation department, the data center is still going forward.
The story is just such a tragedy all around.
Huh, I’m not an attorney but that sure seems actionable if the intended use was documented in a contract.
You don’t get it, they will build a data center park!
She’s got an attorney and they’re trying to stop it based on that, but it just seems like everyone involved (edit: besides her) just doesn’t give a fuck.
Interesting to witness societal decay in real time.
They’ve been taught that if they ignore the law and do whatever they want to they don’t get punched in the face.
That will only go on for so long but it’s going to suck until someone gets punchy.
Especially with the recent East Wing argument, the lesson is “if you do it fast enough and ignore other people getting angry about it, you can do whatever you want.”
The only reason they ever didn’t ignore people getting angry about things was because when people used to get angry they also got shooty.
What’s the saying? “Ownership is 90% posession.”
Like with the stuff going on at the East Wing or the Kennedy Center, some people just move forward even if they’re not allowed to because chances are they won’t be stopped or penalized.
“Possession is nine-tenths of the law” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possession_is_nine-tenths_of_the_law
gimme some wiskey and point them out, I get punchy, 1 shot or 20
The relevant case law may be found in Molotov vs. New Construction .
Can’t find what it was, what did that one end with?
A bang
While in many ways it is a tragedy, the cure is often worse. I on balance oppose deed restrictions, either you own the land and pay taxes, or you give up all control. Deed restrictions just force future generations to live by your values and that is a bad thing.
It’s a lot like another commenter mentioned about eminent domain. It can be used for good (roads, fiber deployments, district heating, etc) but also for things not so good (data centers, etc).
I went out of my way to find a house that didn’t even have a vestigial HOA deed restriction, so I get that. But when a private citizen donates something to the local municipality, it’s pretty egregious to not honor those restrictions, especially for things that may take a while to develop.
I’d donate my share of my family’s farmland to build a park, but I wouldn’t sell it for all the money in the world to build a datacenter or landfill or anything else, really.
It is a jerk move for sure and the voters should be mad about this. If you can’t keep your word without a contract that says a lot about your lack of honor.
I’m talking pure legality here though. The cities actions are legal and should be. They are however dishonorable and nobody should deal with the city again.
No takey-backs! ✝️
Best they can do is no trees, half of everyone riding mobility scooters and neighbors with dogs that can poop EVERYWHERE.
Nice try, Big Dungbeatle Inc. 😑
One of the more fucked up aspects of eminent domain. City/county/state governments can nuke deeds by using eminent domain. It allows them to turn a plot of land, regardless prior restrictions, into things like dumps.
The fucked up part about it is they can also turn public lands into private lands with that same trick.
What’s frustrating is we still need eminent domain for good. It’s basically the only way to build railways and roads. It even ends up being one of the few ways to deploy things like district heating/cooling and new fiber lines.
Serving the public interest is not already a prerequisite? Surely gov’t cannot arbitratily pull this card?
I might be talking out of my ass but i’m pretty sure using imminent domain is not only needed for matters of public interest but specifically needs to be backed by it when you want to use it.
Eminent domain didn’t factor into this particular case. The Taylor Economic Development Corporation simply ignored the deed and sold the land to BPP Projects LLC/Blueprint while Taylor City Council and Judge Ryan Larson approved and upheld it respectively.
I believe eminent domain should have a very limited scope legally and should mostly only be used for public infrastructure projects and housing honestly…
But AI is Public Infrastructure.
/s^just in case
We have different definitions of good. I don’t see how building a highway system through other animals homes is considered “good”.
A road in of itself is definitely a public interest…
Where they should and should not be built is another discussion.
Shoulda got that in writing I guess.
Sounds like she did and the city just ignored it.
People should know that donating land like this is not at all guaranteed to keep the land from being developed. Promises to keep parks in existence is nothing when the city “needs” a new development, hospital, data center, whatever.
I was curious where the land was, and if I could help in any way.
It’s in Texas. I made a promise to myself that I’d never go back to Texas.
Texas. Fucking. Suuuuuucks.
“Don’t mess with Texas” now has a different meaning.
“Don’t mess with Texas, it might be contagious”
Just like “Everything Is Bigger In Texas” is considered a self-own to the rest of the world, they’re the brunt of the joke. (Sorry Austin, you too. Yes, even SXSW)
“Texas hurt itself in its confusion.”
And this is why you need a lawyer when you’re doing this kind of thing.
If this farmer was smart, there would be a clause in the contract that the land may only be used for a park or other public space. And that if the city decides to resell the land, the farmer or their descendants will have the right to reclaim it.
Thus, farmer could either stop the data center or at least get a solid payday.
If you read the article, there was exactly this sort of clause in the deed, and now the courts are saying “fuck you”
and now the courts are saying “fuck you”
It’s one Court and unsurprisingly it’s the Court located right there in town. I strongly suspect that the Third Court of Appeals is going to have a different take on this mess.
At least where I live you can’t wash away a deed restriction like this by transferring the property a couple times.
It is wild to me that this wasn’t handled elsewhere to begin with. There is no way to at least somewhat guarantee a fair process with this massive potential for conflict of interest.
IANAL. The general approach to this isn’t to sell it, from what I’ve seen. It’s to lease it for purpose.
We have a number of scouting camps near me that have permissive leases. Technically, the family that “donated” the land has a conditional lease with BSA, with terms like “BSA may use the land so long as one Boy Scout sleeps on the property at least one night per year.” With stipulations that if this requirement is not met, the land returns full and unconditional ownership to the nearest living descendant.
In the mean time, BSA is responsible for all taxes, costs, upkeep and improvements.
Basically, until BSA dissolves, they will be free to use the land. Failure to meet the condition would immediately revert ownership and void the lease.
I can just see it- ‘Okay kids it’s that time of the year again, whoever wants to get their computer merit badge and their camping merit badge, bring your tent at meet at 6:00 p.m. in the parking lot of the data center on our old campground…’ 🤣
(I’m sure that’s not the only restriction heh)
But yeah I agree that’s the way to go, basically guarantees the donation recipient stays in line and the instant they don’t the donation evaporates.
