There's always someone who wants to take document bullet-points literally. Indents should be in a paragraph, not in a door.

I foresee the creation of this datacenter as a long shot

Perhaps the shooter mistook Gibson's home for that of Miles Dyson? But such drama!

In a statement posted on social media site X, Gibson said the bullets struck just steps away from where his eight-year-old son had been playing with Lego the previous day, and described the event as "deeply unsettling."

Having some nutjob shooting up your home is unsettling enough, but didn't really need to drag his kid into it. Unless his kid is in the habit of playing outside with his Lego in the early hours of the morning.

This is deeply un-American. The 8year old should have been playing outside with his own assault rifle, not some peaceful hippy foreign Lego

Bullets can go through doors and retain plenty of momentum. Your suggestion that the child would need to be outside for the comments to be correct is flawed. The early in the morning aspect reduces the risk somewhat, but by the time we're getting to that level, I think we both know we're not talking about useful differences. If a child as a potential victim makes this any worse, then regardless of the time of day, that is relevant.

Your suggestion that the child would need to be outside for the comments to be correct is flawed.

No, the councillor's statement is clearly flawed. If he'd said the bullets hit near where his child/him/his partner was sleeping, then the statement would have been more accurate, and no less shocking. Instead it's a statement that jumped out at me for being obviously irrelevant. It's one of those things that tends to trip BS meters, then people might start wondering what else the councillor might be exagerating. Like cost, job creation, economic impacts etc in considering and supporting the datacentre proposal. From a quick search, the datacentre proposal seems another speculative one though.

"If he'd said the bullets hit near where his child/him/his partner was sleeping, then the statement would have been more accurate, and no less shocking."

Unless he and his partner and his child happened to be sleeping on the opposite side of the building, in which case it would be less accurate but a meaningless difference to the general danger of shots being fired at the house. The relevant part, that the bullets were going through a part of the house frequently in use, remains the same, even though the early morning meant the chance of that part being in use during the shooting was lower. Someone having an early appointment or difficulty sleeping could easily have changed the circumstances in a more tragic direction. I don't understand why you consider this difference to be as important as you do, but your minimization of it, suggesting that you would have to be outside to be at risk for instance, is tripping my own "why is that the point you're making" alarm.

Data centers do employ some people locally, though it's usually in the hundreds rather than the thousands

And in low paying positions, such as cleaners, security, and maintenance.

You do not gain masses of highly paid, high disposable income workers from a Datacentre.

I really cant understand how anyone would support one in their backyard. Well, not without resorting to the cynical view, that the love of brown paper envelopes is behind the councillour's support...

It might no be stuffed envelopes, the councillor might just be thicker than a whale omelette.

That could be part of it and does seem to have happened at times, but there's also two more options, both much more sympathetic:

1. The politicians misunderstand this and think there are more jobs available. The companies wanting to build them are easily able to claim so, and politicians aren't experts on what a DC needs.

2. The politicians correctly understand this and think the jobs are worth the cost, possibly because they misunderstand the costs for even more sympathetic reasons. A couple hundred jobs is still worth something, and the DC providers are often good at pretending they'll cover all the costs of powering their new site. If they're covering the cost and the only downside for the residents is an ugly building, that is a much lower cost to pay. The fact that the promised payment is contingent on contracts between the DC and the local power provider which actually will pay for all the power costs assuming everything goes well and no plans change any time in the next ten years is more difficult to prove and may rely on information politicians don't have since they're negotiated between those two directly.

And for that matter, the citizens who oppose it generally don't have any more information about whether there will be problems from the proposal. They are likely using similarly limited information and coming to the opposite guess. It happens that, with modern GPU-heavy proposals and move-fast-hide-everything logistics, that guess is more often correct, but the same people object to lots of things that don't have negative effects on similarly knee-jerk reasoning.

I really cant understand how anyone would support one in their backyard

I think the same of most industrial buildings, from warehouses to nuclear power plants, yet somehow they get built everywhere. Maybe towns will really accept anything to survive.

But warehouse and nuclear plants tend not to suck up the local water and electrical supplies to put entire neighborhoods at risk. Åh forgot, these are usually built near the less well off areas, sooooo.... Carry on?

Nuclear plants, in general, use a shitton of water. For cooling. That's why they tend to be built close to large bodies of water.

Yes but you can already scare people away from allowing nuclear powerstations by saying nuclear

The only way to scare people away from local data centers is by confusing them about internal water flow and water usage

Seems to be the American solution to everything.

E.g. Grandad woke up this morning caked in his own shit, so he got angry and threatened to exterminate the whole of Iran.

One bullet - one vote

Since the Supreme Court ruled that guns were people, automatic weapons do enjoy an electoral advantage

The Indianpolis in the US ? Incredible !

The average American gun crazy (pardon the tautology) normally leaves innocent doors and similar inamimate objects unmolested while cutting to the chase and striving to rapidly "de·animating" as many fellow American as possible. (God given second amendment right you know.)

" I understand that public service can bring strong opinions and disagreement, but violence is never the answer, "

Which nation does he think he actually lives in ? Certainly can't be the US if you take this statement at face value unless he meant that violence is never the answer unless he and his were inflicting the violence.

In the USA shooting is protected free speech, it's just their way of communicating.

Rather like my dog barking excitedly at every leaf

Ah! Reminds me a bit of [1]Don Davis of Indianapolis' Don's Guns and Galleries whose slogan was " I don't want to make any money. I just love to sell guns, heh-heh-heh. ". He passed away in February 10 years ago. And Indy also had the " [2]deadliest mass shooting in the history of Indiana " at one of its FedEx Ground facilities, 5 years ago this April. This all was (obviously) decades after the 1930 [3]Lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith 85 miles away in Marion, IN, as presented in the song [4]Hazy Shade Of Criminal (for example).

In this here (so-called) datacenter-opposition-oriented shooting, it's worthwhile to observe that Rep. Ron Gibson is a Democrat, African-American, the proposed datacenter is 75 MW which is 1/26ᵗʰ of Musk's Tennesse Colossus (2 GW) or 1/93ᵗʰ of whonot's Stargate (7 GW), the land is a " long-abandoned drive-in theater " ('local media' link in TFA) near KDC Truck and Trailer repair (industrial area), and so forth ... imho.

With this background info, I'd say what happened here is bog standard white-supremacist MAGA nut domestic terrorism, not popular protest against the building of yet another AI (so-called) datacenter that turned into a shooting affair. It's nothing but bog standard violent and cowardly racism (again) disguised as oppositon to the building of a 'small' datacenter, imho. ;(

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Davis_(gun_retailer)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indianapolis_FedEx_shooting

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_of_Thomas_Shipp_and_Abram_Smith

[4] https://genius.com/Public-enemy-hazy-shade-of-criminal-lyrics

All the jokes that those of you across the pond like to make about our guns/politics/culture/everything, these situations are going to get worse. Our politicians are corrupt at all levels. It doesn't matter who you look at or what level of service they hold. They are all bought and sold by corporations. When people run out of options to have an effect on the things that impact their lives, they are going to resort to violence. It doesn't make it right but it doesn't mean that we can joke our way out of it.

AI investment and job loss will make this get worse.

But looking on the bright side, a few guillotinings, a brief experiment with democracy, a reign of terror, a futile land war in Asia and in a 100 years you achieve the croissant

"Our politicians are corrupt at all levels."

You vote them in.

But if you don't vote for the criminal the wrong criminal will get in

One of those websites filled with comments by people who hate datasheds and AI. Shocking stuff.