It often seems that police officers' most sacred duty is to protect the property rights of the wealthy.

>>> Claremore police arrested Darren Blanchard for trespassing during the meeting after officers said he refused to follow the rules after going over his allotted time to speak. Police escorted the man out of the meeting and booked him into the Rogers County Jail.

There's something very very wrong with that.

On the other hand, even if the town council takes concerns seriously and denies permission to build, the companies doing the building will just sue and build them anyways[1].

[1] https://fortune.com/2026/05/06/ai-data-center-michigan-salin...

You know there has to be money being passed under the table to the council members, state legislature, and governor's office by the billionaire's wanting to build these things. There is absolutely no benefit to the local's to have this in their backyard. The construction money will go to out-of-the-area contractor's to build it, they'll staff it (minimal as it will be) with H1B visa holders from India, and money that won't see light of day in the community. All they'll have is higher property taxes, water, and electricity bills. Of course, being republican, they'll continue to vote these same people back into office.

To be fair, 99.9999% of all new datacenter projects are explicitly for AI and only for AI. Only AI projects want this much rack space. All the big tech companies combined (except their cloud computing arms) could fit together in just one of these AI datacenters.

I have family in Lakeland, Fl which is an area that is currently deciding on whether to build one. All I've heard from them is they're worried about their power rates and water bills going up. Their assumption is the added strain on the local infrastructure will be passed on to them.

People are drowning everywhere with inflation and anything that is perceived to lead to a higher monthly bill is going to encounter resistance.

Some of the people are upset that it's AI. Most in Utah are upset about drought conditions and reports of heavy metals in the air thanks to parts of The Great Salt Lake's lakebed being exposed to the air, and now this being rammed down their throats with no explanation of how it doesn't make all that worse.

Not to mention it's being given an 80% tax break, and the air quality is Salt Lake City being the worst in the world on bad days (the plan is for this data center to be natural gas powered).

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I am absolutely amazed to discover that, despite spending my whole life living in the US, I've never known that states also have their own senates. I'm starting to think that there is no age at which I will stop being embarrassed by the things I do not know.

He is a Utah senator. It is a job title.

If you are right that it's all a scam then that makes it even more upsetting that government leaders are falling for it