From https://sherwood.news/tech/hyperion/
>> Per the report, the package of tax breaks and incentives was achieved through local officials bound by nondisclosure agreements, quietly struck legislative deals, and parliamentary sleight of hand to avoid public scrutiny of the deal.
>> So the residents of Richland Parish did not have much of a heads-up on what was coming.
No voting, no public interests, only closed-door politics.
Yet another moment where Strangers in Their Own Land[0] is prescient.
From an interview[1] given by the author: "I think the next most important reason they distrusted the federal government is their experience with protective agencies in the state of Louisiana, and they thought, “Gosh, these are a lot of people we pay taxes to but they don't really protect us.” And they’re right, because Louisiana is an oil state - that was a big discovery for me - and it outsources, in a way, the moral dirty work to the state. So, the state actually pretends to protect the citizenry from hazardous waste and pollution of air and water and ground, but it doesn't actually protect it very much. It gives out permits, as one Tea Party person said "like candy." And so, they felt the federal government is just a bigger, badder version of a state government which isn't protecting us. So, they'd had bad experience. They’d been burned, and I think that's the second kind of source of resistance to the government. But the third is that they saw the government as an instrument of what I'll call “the line cutters.”"
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangers_in_Their_Own_Land [1] https://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=18-P13-000...
Man, "instrument of the 'line cutters'" describes my government to a tee and I live in one of the wealthiest states.
but there will be voting; all of the elected officials will have to face elections at some point, and voters can put their feet down right now: everyone is voted out.
When the damage is already done?
It's okay, as the on-going damage continues Americans tend to be well armed enough to go on a few rampages here and there.
Americans are very good at talking tough like that, only to use their arms against innocent randos.
That's the point. Society suffers and continues to suffers while the elites run havoc.
That is how everyone decision works, yes. That's why you want limited government. Voting where you can't vote with your money is a very low-quality, delayed signal.
If you assume that decision makers operate entirely in silo from their constituents then yes, that's how this works. Howver if you are operating in the normal mode of democracy where decision makers consult impacted parties through town halls, solicited feedback, subcommittees, etc etc then there are ample opportunities to obtain high-quality, low-latency signals. "Voting with your money" is (IM personal O) a scapegoat for government leaders to avoid doing their due-diligence (not to mention the massive power imbalance that results from people with lots of money 'voting' way more than people with less money).
That's already factored in the cost of doing business for them.
What negative consequences does being unelected have?
And then those companies can give them their due ~~bribes~~ totally free and unrelated gifts out of the goodness of their hearts to such illustrious paragons of American governance, as legalized by the supreme court recently.
There was a public hearing of the state public service commission I attended which essentially boiled down to well all these big Wall Street banks are guaranteeing payment so it should be fine and plus we need jobs up there.
I wonder if they actually believed it would bring more than a handful of permanent jobs or whether they're just saying to get their bribe.
Foster Campbell is a famously honest person. He also famously drove his car into a gap in pavement on an under construction interstate at 40 miles an hour so you decide for yourself what that says about him.
I'm not at all surprised to learn that Republican politicians royally screwed their constituents. I was going to say maybe these people will vote better next time just to read that Colorado governor is commuting the sentence of Tina Peters. Democratic leadership is so freaking weak it's unbelievable. With one party full of grifters and the other with full of weaklings, we need to abolish this two-party system.
Louisiana had a Democratic governor from 2016-2024.
Don’t worry, if you take a step back it’s been a one party system for decades already.
Does the commutation of Tina Peters' sentence have anything at all to do with this situation?
Which is what we keep electing so boohoo. I'd like to be less pessimistic but people are irredeemably irredeemable. I am hugely pro-AI, but the tech bros need to channel more Ronald Reagan* and less f**ing Homelander or this ends very badly for everyone.
*And I hated Ronald Reagan at the time
Now bring me some downvotes to show me the error of my ways... Thank you for restoring my lack of faith in humanity...
> >> So the residents of Richland Parish did not have much of a heads-up on what was coming.
> No voting, no public interests, only closed-door politics.
This is exactly what NIMBYs say about attempts to build housing; and resisting efforts on the part of local people to exercise political pressure against proposed housing development projects is a core component of YIMBYist activism. If it's possible for local activists to be short-sighted, self-interested, or straightforwardly wrong when they exert political pressure against housing developments, then it's also possible for them to be similarly wrong about data centers, or any other built structure that someone, somewhere has a problem with.
So, the massive tax breaks that were given at the expense of the residents...how do you explain that away?
What back-deals are yimbys doing?
There's a huge difference between extremely publically pushing for laws that allow buildings to be built vs private negotiating tax breaks that only affect a singular building.
This is a strange comparison.
If a real estate developer already owns land and wants to build at their expense on their own land, quite a few people think that, in general, they should be permitted to do so as long as they comply with applicable laws.
But this set of tax breaks is modifying the effect of the applicable laws (namely sales and use tax, according to the article) for the benefit of a landowner. That seems rather different.
There's a lot of ground between gifting $3.3 billion in tax incentives to a megacorp for a short-term increase in construction employment and allowing a homeowner build a second dwelling on their lot.
Incidentally, that same $3.3 billion could build around 10,000 accessory dwellings in Baton Rouge.
What are the details of the tax incentives? Some are "real loss" (e.g., the area produced $10k a year in property tax before, and now produces $0) and others are "lost future taxes" where it produces nothing now, and now will produce nothing for 10/20 years (this is the type often used to convince Walmart to build here rather than there).