Comment by bell-cot
10 hours ago
The most important news is in the subtitle -
> Wisconsin has now joined several states with legislative proposals to make the process more transparent.
Legislative or constitutional, good democratic government really needs limits on how much its supposed officials can do in secret.
It's literally "we the people, by the people, for the people". Except for personnel/employee matters, state and local government should be completely transparent with secrets explicitly forbidden.
Secret deals with corporations is corruption.
Secrecy needs a time limit.
Why do we allow municipalities to keep secrets in the first place? Unless it is personnel-related it should be public. If the communications happened on taxpayer funded equipment they should be open.
In a lot of cases, it's the only way that municipalities can submit bids for projects they want. And in the commercial space the bidding process is usually confidential. So it's just basically a requirement of public private partnership.
Of course the municipality could just say that they don't want the project and they won't submit a bid. That's fine too.
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They'll tell you it needs to be confidential "for commercial reasons". They always do.
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Because municipalities want to be able to collaborate in the early stages of a potential datacenter project, when it's not fully nailed down and may never happen. A world where municipalities aren't allowed to keep secrets is a less transparent world, where Meta dumps a fully formed datacenter project on the local government and nobody has a chance to suggest that residents would prefer it on the other side of the creek.
There are valid uses. McDonalds may not want Burger King to know they're planning to build a new location in Smallville, 'till they actually break ground, or vice versa. Don't blabber to everyone that the City wants to expand a park, so neighboring property owners will know to demand top dollar. Etc.
But yeah - honest uses are pretty limited. Which limits we can hope will be tightly enforced by new legislation.
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I agree, but what do you do when people are steeped in misinformation about water use and 5G signals?
Doesn't everyone know that dihydrogen monoxide can be lethal? https://www.csun.edu/science/ref/humor/dhmo.html
I can't believe this is still around. I remember printing this out to show my science teacher decades ago.
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You can tell them the truth, you could do public reach out, you could do a whole lot of things. Secret back-room deals deliberately hidden from the public who will (justifiably) assume maliciousness just creates even worse PR, less trust, and opens up avenues of corruption and abuse.
Then you don’t get to build there, obviously. "Oh they’re too stupid to know better, let’s do what we want anyway" doesn’t seem like a sane solution, especially since the framework would be just as applicable to actually undesirable industrial plants and the like. They’re free to convince/bribe the people to allow it, not just push the poors around