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.
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 technologies 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.
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.
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.
This all seems reasonable to me. If you want my money or things, you’ll have to use them like I suggest.
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.
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'.
How does a Farmer donate land? There is no legal system on the planet that lets you own land. You own a deed which the state can choose to enforce. This is basic property law.
Donate is doing a lot of lifting here, he probably hasn't paid taxes in years.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Simple fix don't trust the government to do anything
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.
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 technologies happens has such an impact. We should really enable that as much as we can.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactor_Institute_Delft
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.
If you want to have the moral authority over a gift, don't gift it.
That's an ignorant simplification of how property ownership works. For example, defeasible estates are not a new or rare thing:
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.
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.
This all seems reasonable to me. If you want my money or things, you’ll have to use them like I suggest.
If you don't want to abide by the conditions of a gift - don't accept it.
The intent was to gift a park.
Why can’t gifts have contracts?
They can, but if the legal entity on the other end of the contract is a breathing person who has deceased, who has standing to enforce it?
Are deeds with conditions like that legal in that jurisdiction?
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.
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'.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48446439
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.
Possibly, but only if the mayor and a couple of city council members own the new land
How does a Farmer donate land? There is no legal system on the planet that lets you own land. You own a deed which the state can choose to enforce. This is basic property law.
Donate is doing a lot of lifting here, he probably hasn't paid taxes in years.
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.
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.