In principle, I think there aught to be a rule against perpetuities. Including conservation easements. The community should be able to decide where their parks will be, not some former landowner. There is another 55-acre park (Fannie Robinson Park, 1009 E MLK Jr Blvd) about 1/2 mi down the street from the datacenter site (1601 E MLK).
It’s a shame that the deed was poorly granted. Perhaps it would have been better for everyone if it had been held privately and taxed as such.
And as far as newsworthiness is concerned, the actual deed lost its restriction in 2003, and the city transferred it to the Economic Development Corporation in 2008. It could have then been sold to any industrial purpose. This is not really a national story about datacenters. It is the story about a 2008 sale for industrial purposes. The fact that this is recirculated as a datacenter story is meant to poison the public on any mention of the word datacenter. I think this trend of biased news is intentional.
According to opus 4.8, here’s the chain of title for the 87.797‑acre Taylor tract:
1. 7/7/1999 — Bonnibel Bland Cromwell & family → Texas Parks & Recreation Foundation (deed carries the "held in trust… for parkland" restriction). Recorded #199947198. Consideration: $10 (charitable donation).
2. 10/7/2003 — Texas Parks & Recreation Foundation → Williamson County Park Foundation, Inc. Recorded #2003100356. Consideration: $10 (nominal/recited).
3. 11/20/2003 — Williamson County Park Foundation → City of Taylor. Consideration: $10 (nominal/recited).
4. 11/12/2008 — City of Taylor → Taylor Economic Development Corporation. Recorded #2008084718. Consideration: $15,000 cash + a land swap — the EDC also conveyed two tracts back to the City “by exchange” (a ~22.708‑ac tract in the Samuel Pharass Survey + a 16.658‑ac tract in the Coursey Survey); no dollar value stated for the swapped tracts.
5. 11/19/2024 — (Plat Map Recording Sheet; not a transfer)
6. 4/11/2025 — Taylor Economic Development Corporation → NCP Travis TPP Project, LLC (Blueprint Data Centers). Consideration on the deed: "Cash and other good and valuable consideration" — no figure stated; reported at ~$10 million in the press.
On the one hand, the wishes of a donor should be respected to some degree. On the other hand, the government should be allowed to make the best use of land in its jurisdiction for the people who live there today, since “The earth belongs in usufruct to the living” and we should “preserve the soil of the country from being daily more & more absorbed in Mortmain” as Thomas Jefferson might say. Our land should not be bound forever by the preferences of the dead.
And I am concerned that the purpose of slanted anti-datacenter coverage by the likes of 404media.co and perfectunion.us is to inspire memetic NIMBYism that has and will cause tremendous damage to the US.
On the one hand, the wishes of a donor should be respected to some degree. On the other hand, the government should be allowed to make the best use of land in its jurisdiction for the people who live there today, since “The earth belongs in usufruct to the living” and we should “preserve the soil of the country from being daily more & more absorbed in Mortmain” as Thomas Jefferson might say. Our land should not be bound forever by the preferences of the dead.
And I am concerned that the purpose of slanted anti-datacenter coverage by the likes of 404media.co and perfectunion.us is to inspire memetic NIMBYism that has and will cause tremendous damage to the US.
I think companies with valuable data to scrape (e.g. media companies) will eventually lock it behind APIs that verify Apple App Attest or Google Play Integrity. And deprecate websites which are easily scraped too. Then it will be useless to reverse engineer APIs used by apps and we will have to run the unmodified client on an unmodified OS.
I wonder if you could make a bare computer (user provides the OS image) + DVD player + DVD rental company without triggering the public performance clause of copyright law because it is the user that decides what to do with it. Like Aereo or Zediva, which were shut down because they provided a user experience. But if you just rented out hardware and didn’t care what software was running, would that be considered a private playing instead of public performance + transmission?
Seems like a lot of people’s problems with AI come from talking to the dumber models and having it not provide sufficient proof that it fixed a bug. Maybe instead of banning AI, projects should set a minimum smarts level. e.g. to contribute, you must use gpt-5.4-codex high or better for either writing it or code reviewing it.
I don’t know how ReadableStream.tee() got specified to backpressure when the faster branch is not consumed, since this is the opposite of what nodejs does when multiple Writables attached via Readable.pipe() and also the opposite of what the requirements document (https://github.com/whatwg/streams/blob/e9355ce79925947e8eb49...) says: “letting the speed of the slowest output determine the speed of the tee”.
I like the idea of the more ergonomic, faster api in new-stream with no buffering except at Stream.push(). NodeJS and web streams put infinitely expandable queues at every ReadableStream and WritableStream so that you can synchronously res.write(chunk) as much as you want with abandon. This API basically forces you to use generators that yield instead of synchronously writing chunks.
The blog post makes no mention of the cellular network congestion/dropped packets that affected people during the power outage. I had bars but was unable to load websites for most of the day. Were Waymos unaffected by the network problems, or were request timeouts encompassed in the word “backlog” used by the blog post?
> Jackie Fielder, a progressive San Francisco supervisor who represents the Mission District, has been among the most vocal critics. She introduced a city resolution after Kit Kat’s death that calls for the state Legislature to let voters decide if driverless cars can operate where they live. (Currently, the state regulates autonomous vehicles in California.)
If this had anything to do with safety, this so-called “Progressive” supervisor Jackie Fielder would be investigating what safety features would be feasible on Waymos: emergency stop switches or stop commands, under car cameras, questioning whether the Waymo detected the cat and then just forgot about it when it walked under the car, etc.
Instead, she is using this to secure territory for obviously less safe Uber and Lyft drivers who are represented by the Teamsters. Such a cynical politician.
The difference is that you’re comparing labor income (making your own dinner) to rental income from land (imputed rent). Poor people tend to not own property, whereas poor people do tend to make their own meals, so I doubt your claim that taxing home meals would be equally progressive.
A sad development. At least in the US, the fact that rent is taxable income to the landlord but imputed rent is untaxed is a regressive tax break for property owners (and was apparently a mistake of the original Form 1040; see Lawrence Zelenak, “The Early Income Tax and the Imputed Rental Income of Homeowners” https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108377157.008). I wonder what convinced majority-renter Swiss voters to enact such a tax break?
It is the act of supporting DOGE after the dumb implementation (e.g. 1/28/2025 Fork in the Road letter) that would concern me (which I think a16z has continued to do).
In my opinion, Elon Musk approached DOGE all wrong because he is used to running companies where payroll is the #1 expense, and cutting workers is how he has always cut costs at his previous companies when they were strapped for cash (e.g. SolarCity, Tesla). He did’t realize that the US Government is mostly an insurance company, so cutting office staff is a drop in the bucket. A tragedy of his own juvenile ignorance.
> is sharing a house illegal, or is it only illegal to separate leases for each room?
Too many unrelated people living in a housing unit is illegal. Here’s San Francisco’s version of this law which was used to shut down house sharing companies such as HubHaus; see definition of “family” https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/san_francisco/latest/s...
The article also mentioned dormitory-like “group housing” apartments (which differ from housing units in that they don’t have a separate kitchen for each unit). San Francisco is pretty enlightened in that it allows group housing in many zoning districts, but even they have group housing density limits and now common space requirements which are designed to prevent much group housing (see definition of “group housing” https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/san_francisco/latest/s...).
I have the opposite takeaway. The city should be mutable. A subway line should be buildable within one political term. The property tax rate should rise or fall within a time frame that would incentivize people to vote with their feet. A lot of the author’s learnings are actually indicators of 21st century American stagnancy. Real life should be more like Sim City.
What’s special about the airport is that the City of San Francisco owns and regulates it (as opposed to the streets that are regulated by the state CPUC), and the Board of Supervisors previously were regulatory captured by taxi medallion owners and Teamsters union (https://missionlocal.org/2024/12/waymo-rolls-toward-san-fran...). Specifically, Aaron Peskin (BoS supervisor from 2001–2009, 2015–2025, and board president for the last 2 years) said, “Their entire M.O. is, ‘The state regulates us; we don’t have to work with you, we don’t have to partner with you.’ My response is: There are things we do control. Including where you charge your cars. And the airport. What I intend to do, is condition their deployment and use of the airport property on their meeting a number of conditions around meeting this city’s minimum standards for public safety and transit.” https://missionlocal.org/2023/11/waymo-rebuffed-by-sfo-sf-gu...
I think there’s a kernel of truth in what he said, surrounded by some exaggeration. The rural parts of the country, where people get married under 25 years old and have a higher fertility rate, probably do place a higher value on having a family than the urban parts of the country where career is prioritized. Good politicians (like Barack Obama did in his prime) take pains to acknowledge truths from the other side.
I have only seen Charlie Kirk on this interview with California Governor Gavin Newsom. Apparently he was someone who was promoting tolerance to more diverse political points of view. And he made many valid points that made the Governor squirm and agree. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XJ6rQDRKGA
> Singapore, Dubai, Rwanda—they're all copying the Chinese model: authoritarian capitalism
I don’t know much about China, but I’m not sure the Chinese model of economic modernization today is much different than post-war US model that worked of defense-led capitalism, strategic resource stockpiles to maintain price stability, and strong antitrust. I think the Chinese economy is probably more free-market (in the sense that it is easier to start a business, and the Econ 101 model of pure competition that drives down prices applies to more markets) than the US is today.
> Sales and property taxes are regressive. Income tax with marginal tax brackets is progressive. This is a pretty simple concept.
Not true. Income taxes (as implemented in the US) have enormous blind spots that favor homeowners at the expense of renters: untaxed imputed rent and the capital gains tax exclusion for your main home. These undermine the claim that the income tax is more progressive than the property tax.
> Landlords will pass on the cost of property taxes to renters.
Not for the most part. The question is, when the property tax increases, how much of it is eaten by the landlord (in lower post-tax rent), and how much is a burden on the tenant (in higher gross rent due to reduced housing supply)? In California where supply is inelastic, I would argue that the low property tax is almost all a windfall to the landowner rather than the tenant.
> Rents in CA (bay area in particular) are a function of demand more than landlords' cost
Exactly. In other words, especially where supply is constrained, the property tax is incident on the landowner rather than the tenant.
> my take on that is that's more caused by NIMBYism and an unwillingness to build enough housing to meet demand
Yes, the difference in land use is bigger than the difference in tax rates. However, when property taxes are higher, there is more incentive for cities and households to allow more housing. And even if you believe that property taxes are regressive, it should give you pause to realize that it is more than made up for by California’s bad land use restrictions.
> Property tax is absolutely not a progressive tax, by definition: everyone pays the same rate based on the value of their home, not based on their income or means.
No, that’s just who writes the check. You had it right the first time. The tax incidence is who bears the burden of the tax. Since property taxes are capitalized into the price and the supply is not very elastic, an increase in projected tax payments (due to an increasing rate or increasing property value) are largely borne by the landowner (in the form of a lower sales price or a sales price that grows more slowly) rather than the young worker who buys/rents it.
Legally, this case is about the terminology of a deed that was sloppily made “in trust… for parkland”, and standing to sue. It’s currently on appeal. (Trial court: https://judicialrecords.wilco.org/PublicAccess/CaseDetail.as.... Appeal, 15th Court of Appeals: https://search.txcourts.gov/Case.aspx?cn=03-25-00831-CV&coa=.... Appeal, 15th Court of Appeals: https://search.txcourts.gov/Case.aspx?cn=15-25-00202-CV&coa=...).
It’s a shame that the deed was poorly granted. Perhaps it would have been better for everyone if it had been held privately and taxed as such.
And as far as newsworthiness is concerned, the actual deed lost its restriction in 2003, and the city transferred it to the Economic Development Corporation in 2008. It could have then been sold to any industrial purpose. This is not really a national story about datacenters. It is the story about a 2008 sale for industrial purposes. The fact that this is recirculated as a datacenter story is meant to poison the public on any mention of the word datacenter. I think this trend of biased news is intentional.
According to opus 4.8, here’s the chain of title for the 87.797‑acre Taylor tract:
1. 7/7/1999 — Bonnibel Bland Cromwell & family → Texas Parks & Recreation Foundation (deed carries the "held in trust… for parkland" restriction). Recorded #199947198. Consideration: $10 (charitable donation).
2. 10/7/2003 — Texas Parks & Recreation Foundation → Williamson County Park Foundation, Inc. Recorded #2003100356. Consideration: $10 (nominal/recited).
3. 11/20/2003 — Williamson County Park Foundation → City of Taylor. Consideration: $10 (nominal/recited).
4. 11/12/2008 — City of Taylor → Taylor Economic Development Corporation. Recorded #2008084718. Consideration: $15,000 cash + a land swap — the EDC also conveyed two tracts back to the City “by exchange” (a ~22.708‑ac tract in the Samuel Pharass Survey + a 16.658‑ac tract in the Coursey Survey); no dollar value stated for the swapped tracts.
5. 11/19/2024 — (Plat Map Recording Sheet; not a transfer)
6. 4/11/2025 — Taylor Economic Development Corporation → NCP Travis TPP Project, LLC (Blueprint Data Centers). Consideration on the deed: "Cash and other good and valuable consideration" — no figure stated; reported at ~$10 million in the press.