The City of Taylor, Texas, is facing public outcry after residents found out a data center’s being constructed on land donated as a public space.
Texas
Of course. The people of Texas deserve better than what most of their elected officials delivery. But then, the majority keep voting for them, so…
The majority don’t vote.
https://www.sos.state.tx.us/elections/historical/70-92.shtml
Look at 2024. Less than half of the voting age population in Texas voted. It’s abyssmal.
The voter apathy is understandable. Look at Virginia’s redistricting. All that effort to get it passed and the Supreme Court of the state tosses it out on a dumb technicality.
It’s a cut and dry example of people going out to vote and their vote meaning nothing.
It’s not just apathy. Many states have been actively taking measures to make it more difficult for people to vote. Because they don’t want the wrong people voting.
If the votes mean nothing then why are they trying so hard to stop us.
Discouragement is understandable, but to me apathy is not. You don’t address frustration about loss of control by giving up control. That’s like responding to a burglary by leaving your doors unlocked.
That’s not even the most egregious example. There have been militias camping at voting sites, entire sections of cities have had their voting places closed or consolidated. That said, if everyone voted this marginal bullshit wouldn’t be as viable, it would be a fuck load harder to pull off, especially if they had never stopped voting.
The “user error” explanation given was complete bullshit. When you voted straight party, that was it. There was no way for the voter to accidentally switch the senatorial vote after that. You’d have to be very deliberate to pull that off. And it has nothing to do with “rendering”.
The Texas Tribune took the SoS’s statement as gospel. But the SoS was the fox guarding the henhouse.
Someone else’s words but yeah it probably doesn’t matter who votes in most of the states with fully electronic voting this time around. Billionaires have since become significantly more invested in voting machines.
Yeah but this is lemmy, them not voting meant they were taking a stand against the two party system by letting fascism win.
In Texas it means they didn’t give enough of a shit to show up.
Most of the time this is the real answer.
The fact that this is getting downvotes is pathetic. Shitbags dont want to admit they fuckekd up royally and put others in the cross-hairs for their sake of their own moral certitude.
“Genocide is bad so we’re going to vote for the maximum amount of genocide possible”
Weird, the state of Texas makes it so easy for people to vote /s
That farmer should get the money.
According to documents reviewed by 404, the conditional language in the original deed granted the land to the “Texas Parks and Recreation Foundation, a Texas non-profit corporation, to be held in trust for future use as parkland by Williamson County, Texas.”
But in the years since, ownership of the property kept changing hands. Texas Parks and Recreation Foundation granted it over to a different non-profit called the Williamson County Park Foundation in 2003 before they gave it to the City of Taylor outright a month later. So far, so good. But in 2008, the city sold the land for $15,000 to the Taylor Economic Development Corporation (TEDC). It sat unused until last year, when the TEDC sold the plot to the company currently developing the data center, Blueprint, for a cool $10 million.
I’m certainly no lawyer, but that seems like a lot of shenanigans to get around a condition of the original donation.
The city sold land for 15 thousand which was worth 10 million? Corruption a mile wide.
Not “the city”. Individuals made that decision. Corrupt individuals.
I don’t think it’s entirely that simple. They sold it in 2008. It wasn’t worth $10M then because nobody was planning to build a giant datacenter on it, and the economy was in the toilet thanks to the subprime mortgage bubble. Still, $15K for an 88 acre parcel seems crazy cheap even then. And since the original donation stipulated that it was to be held in trust and used to build a park, I’m curious why they were legally allowed to sell it at all. That’s what the group fighting this is pointing out, but the local judge has dismissed the case and refused to issue an injunction while they appeal.
This exactly.
Texas is a mess.
Even Austin suck ass now.
Are data centers flammable? Asking for a friend. /s
The ones powered by natural gas are … explosive
No good deed goes unpunished.
At least my shitty Republican burb won’t ever have a data center. All they care about is stuffing more overpriced apartments into what little is left of our open space.
I have bad news for you.
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/working-class-neighborhoods-are-resisting
