American Democracy in a nutshell
this post was submitted on 10 May 2026
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How much sugar goes in the concrete again?
Why not just build all these overseas? I hear UAE has some recently demolished plots perfect for new data centres
Why not just build all these overseas?
Iran keeps having a say in their operation
Another lying headline. You all will up vote anything that makes you mad without reading it or thinking critically at all.
- Residents didn't vote on this, the town board did
- The town board was sued by the developers
- The developers were likely to win so the town settled and got some concessions from the developer
I mean, it's shady for headlines, but it's not false. The board are residents, and the did vote it down. Then they "settled" and I'm betting it was a pittance compared to the data center value. In reality, it was probably a situation where whomever was backing the data center said to throw lawyers and/or money at the problem until it went away.
If ONLY there was SOMETHING the Residents could Do when their Voices are VIOLENTLY Ignored by Rich People and Politicians! OH WELL make sure you FOLLOW the LAW or Go To Jail POORS!
There’s a handful of quite genius ways to cause massive problems with minimal effort. I mean, there has to be… there always is. Like the trick to dump sugar in wet concrete, so it never sets… what are the equivalent tricks for obstructing data centers?
Evidently they're being patrolled 24/7 by state police
Your Texas Tax Dollars At Work
indeed
I drove past the construction site every day. They call it "The Barn" after hiring a marketing firm to come in and try to make it more appealing. It's massive and just gets bigger and bigger. iirc they got permission to begin construction before it was approved, then the zoning drama began. There's now a razor wire fence around the perimeter and the area is patrolled by state cops during the day. Clearly they know the situation.
The worst thing is I constantly get targeted ads about the construction. The ads say "we'll pay for the giant increase in energy consumption" and "it'll help reduce costs for everyone!" which is obvious horseshit. What costs are gonna go down, how will they be reduced? Energy costs? Fuel costs? Taxes? The marketing firm knows people are stupid enough to believe anything, even sentences that don't make any fucking sense.
Bottles can fly from real far away
Come down here and give it your best shot
But I see a lot more armchair militancy than actual actions
oh this sucks man.
they are already losing AI race to china: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-27/why-china-s-deepseek-qwen-and-moonshot-are-a-worry-for-us-ai-rivals
why even make people suffer from high electric bills
Interesting read. Here’s a link without the paywall: https://archive.ph/20260507223322/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-27/why-china-s-deepseek-qwen-and-moonshot-are-a-worry-for-us-ai-rivals
Edit:
Anthropic has accused DeepSeek, Moonshot and another Chinese AI lab, MiniMax, of “industrial-scale distillation attacks” — illegally extracting capabilities from its proprietary Claude model using 24,000 fraudulent accounts to gain an edge
Anthropic’s says:
Illicitly distilled models lack necessary safeguards, creating significant national security risk
So open weight models are a national security risk? Guess we’d all better pay subscriptions, let the data centers be built, and let a couple companies building proprietary models have a monopoly to protect our security, then. 🙄
Demockracy
You seem to be labouring under the misapprehension that the vast sweep of the common people have any power over the decisions that govern their lives at all, beyond the doomsday power of revolution. Which is hardly ever used because of the mess.
The common people always have more power than they think
I have told the leaders of my county they were unwise to give our water supply to Amazon. The balance of wealth and power is staggeringly on the side of Amazon. They could buy and sell our entire county 100 times over but somehow our board of supervisors thinks we are going to get a fair deal? Idiots.
I've been rewatching Community and the more I watch it, the more I feel like Britta's "dumb" comments are real.
"If voting had any effect, it'd be illegal!"
“If voting had any effect, it’d be illegal!”
The joke of that is voting is illegal, for quite a few people.
Voters are segregated, consent is manufactured, seats are gerrymandered, populists are vilified... But when all else fails, the elections don't matter and industry does as it pleases.
Democracy exists as an illusion of majority governance, so individuals in opposition feel alienated and at odds with unknown neighbors. The policy outcomes are put at the feet of popular majority, whether or not people actually want them.
Well the thing is that they're really trying to make it illegal for more and more people to vote.
That line is actually a quote from "Red" Emma Goldman.
Voting has the effect of allowing the population to feel they are steering the ship when actually they are swabbing the decks.
Unless those infrastructure promises are built into law and enforced, they're lies. Why do we have so many superfund sites and leaking abandoned oil wells? Because industry gets to lie and destroy as they please before using lawyers to evade responsibility through the courts until residents give up or die.
America was founded and created by lawyers and landowners, so they could acquire more land the British government denied them access to.
Burn it down over and over. Napalm it. Vandalize the trucks and equipment. Sabotage the shit out of it until their insurance costs just aren't worth it.
No we only let police use their helicopters to bomb citizens not businesses
This actually happened btw
For anyone curious:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_MOVE_bombing
Though they could also be talking about:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre
Or
Join the crews working on it. Mark out and soften up a secret access point for a plucky freedom fighter.
Or just sleep on the job. Collect a paycheck and waste their time, money, and resources hopefully hiring another person who will do the same.
Fuck em right in the wallet.
Include an unprotected exhaust vent in the trench.
Pour sugar in the concrete mix.
Somebody help me out here. What's the opposite of "construction" again?
Direct action 😁
deconstruction
Sounds orderly, doesn't it?
mercans dont have any political or legal power anymore
We never really had any to begin with all the way back to the founding. It is just now those in power do not give a fuck and tore off the mask.
Now all that high tech electronics jacking from the first Fast & Furious movie doesn't look so dumb lol.