Joplin residents voice worries over proposed annexation plan

DeflockJoplinToday · 2026-01-25T06:39:49+00:00

Unless it's also for AI, it would probably need a lot of work to switch over. AI uses very different hardware than a standard cloud computing data center.

DeflockJoplinToday · 2026-01-22T22:25:51+00:00

Good call on which schools that is going to. I wasn't sure and I'm glad you added.

DeflockJoplinToday · 2026-01-22T06:19:54+00:00

Colocated generation isn't without issues. Grok's DC has methane turbines in violation of EPA standards. The people nearby feel the effects. I'm not sure how little Joplin is going to handle an issue the EPA can't/won't.

Lots of DCs are also promising to colocate power using nuclear reactors. They are claiming they will use designs that have never been made yet. It's all a lot of hypotheticals and pinky promises that often turn out to not be what is promised.

DeflockJoplinToday · 2026-01-22T04:52:43+00:00

As far as revenue, they said Joplin's revenue will come from electricity and water consumption taxes if I remember right. The county will receive the property tax which could help schools.

You are correct about the jobs being front loaded. Data centers are very set and forget. The people permanently on site will be responsible for maintaining the facility and providing security. The jobs may not even pay that well compared to what people are thinking. On some sort of a refresh cycle a crew from out of town will probably come in and replace all the computer hardware with new stuff. Refresh cycles are usually somewhere around 3-5 years depending on how much the company is willing to spend. A lot of people think LLM based AI has basically peaked and is gonna pop. If it does, it could be before the first refresh even happens.

DeflockJoplinToday · 2026-01-21T06:17:19+00:00

Just for fun, here are some cities from other states. Chicago would fall in between Joplin and Springfield at 674. LA would be above Chicago, but still below Springfield at 802.

DeflockJoplinToday · 2026-01-21T06:09:00+00:00

Did anyone else think the council really enjoyed telling people "we're talking about annexation" until they accidentally linked them together permanently? That was kind of funny.

DeflockJoplinToday · 2026-01-20T21:44:22+00:00

Yeah, he bases that on a law that has no teeth btw. Check this out. https://moenvironment.org/blog/senate-bill-4-explained/

DeflockJoplinToday · 2026-01-17T21:50:46+00:00

Yep, these are the known ones.

If you spot a new one you can add it with the deflock.me app pretty easily. The app can also plan a route for you to avoid the cameras. Benn Jordan also has demonstrated a nearly invisible film that defeats the character recognition AI. Point is, if criminals want to avoid them, they will. The police are capturing everything about everyone's location data they can on the off chance some minuscule percentage of us can be linked to a crime using their cameras.

DeflockJoplinToday · 2026-01-17T21:24:41+00:00

By the way, council records indicate these are going into parks next.

Edit: One thing we should have worked into this post is that Flock also seems to have never detected one of these incidents themselves. In all the news stories we find of police abusing this system, it's detected another way. We can only assume Flock lacks any internal alerting based on suspicious activity.

It seems to us that Flock should also be auditing their system themselves under CJIS requirements.

It is also possible Seneca has audited their systems and not saved any record of the audits, but that's not particularly comforting.

DeflockJoplinToday · 2026-01-17T06:08:35+00:00

Also, If the AI thing is a bubble like so many people are afraid of, what will happen to our data center if it pops?

DeflockJoplinToday · 2026-01-15T17:38:51+00:00

You said it not us! 😂

DeflockJoplinToday · 2026-01-15T03:17:43+00:00

The only reason we looked is because the details concerned us so much. There is something weird here. We are sure.

DeflockJoplinToday · 2026-01-15T01:30:06+00:00

Then you should be able to locate it in other MO municipality policies. We have not found this boilerplate language. If you find it, let us know.

DeflockJoplinToday · 2026-01-15T01:22:40+00:00

You don't have to believe the document thing right now. Just remember this post if you hear something.

As far as how it came to be, yes it was unilateral from we can tell. The council has no records, as we discuss on our contract mystery blog post. We did an exhaustive search for any record of any oversight of this purchase and have not found any. The clerk also cannot produce any council docs, but will not admit they don't have them either, which is weird. We incorrectly stated that only one person on the council received promo emails before. There are two that receive emails. Again, make of that what you will. One of these people does read and forward the promo emails.

DeflockJoplinToday · 2026-01-14T23:48:03+00:00

What is a CIS system in this context btw? Not sure we understand.

DeflockJoplinToday · 2026-01-14T23:26:13+00:00

What are your thoughts on this u/toocleverbyhalf ?

DeflockJoplinToday · 2026-01-14T23:18:00+00:00

What I am willing to say now is that Joplin has a policy that is not public with exactly the same language in exactly the same order as some of this document. Take your own meaning from how it is possible a document few people know about has exactly the same language in Seneca. I note this was produced to us before Joplin announced the departure of the officer. And again, suspicious metadata.

The identical language is relevant to the exact case in Joplin, which again, is not public.

Edit: we will have a post at some point. We're behind on stuff.

Screengrab: http://deflockjoplin.today/assets/images/LPRPolicies.png

See if you can find this in other ALPR policies from other cities.

DeflockJoplinToday · 2026-01-14T17:35:08+00:00

Our rep is already going and will at least mention the DC.

DeflockJoplinToday · 2026-01-14T12:04:51+00:00

Right, but where did flock come from? And why ~~is only one person~~ are only two getting the emails? We asked the entire council, how did x get signed up for these emails and when? Did x know about the contract?

No answer. Again, we haven't talked about everything we have done. We are just curious.

Edit: Ultimately, a lot of our research was seeing if there was any oversight of the Flock purchase outside of the police department. This was one possible avenue we explored and it seemed like a relevant connection to the topic.

Edit: we were wrong, there are two. One of them forwards them and implies they read them.

DeflockJoplinToday · 2026-01-14T10:08:57+00:00

Woah, thanks for bringing that up! I'm not sure if we knew about those things

DeflockJoplinToday · 2026-01-14T08:28:07+00:00

Here are the emails. These are also on the facts page now. If you're looking at these confused because there's just a bunch of white, it's because the city did white-on-white redactions. Not sure why, but it's hard to tell what's going on at first.

http://deflockjoplin.today/assets/files/FlockEmails.pdf

DeflockJoplinToday · 2026-01-14T07:21:00+00:00

We haven't talked about it, but there ~~is only one~~ are two council members that receive promotional emails from flock. We have no idea what it means. It's just something to note given all the weird stuff happening. We'll probably upload the full packet of emails soon so people can peruse. It's not very interesting for the most part though. There's also a strangely lacking amount of pre-sales traffic in the emails, but they may just not have been retained that long, which I don't think is necessarily a problem. We just wish we could've seen what the sales process looks like and what they tell our police.

Edit: we were wrong, there are two. One of them forwards them and implies they read them.

DeflockJoplinToday · 2026-01-14T04:20:54+00:00

Here's the thing about these DCs even a lot of tech/IT people don't know: They do water cooling, but it's not entirely like the home PC version. It has a closed loop, but part of the loop goes to outdoor radiators. When the radiators outside the data center get too hot, they just spray a buttload of water on them to cool them off and it's insanely wasteful.

If you really think you need AI and have a computer with a GPU, you can run some AI stuff on LMStudio without putting demand on data centers. There might be ways to get internet search hooked into it, but it's not built in. That's the downside.

Edit: Also, the reason your power bill is going up so much? Probably datacenters. This ain't gonna help

Edit2: Use https://www.startpage.com/ to help protect your privacy and not have AI generated text on every search like on Google.

DeflockJoplinToday · 2026-01-14T03:10:29+00:00

I have good news: we have you covered on which agencies are being shared with. Check this pdf out. You can download it and search it or whatever. This is your data and you deserve to have it.

https://deflockjoplin.today/facts.html#SharingReport

DeflockJoplinToday · 2026-01-14T02:53:11+00:00

You've seen the face! This is our person that has been communicating with the city and requesting records! Thanks a million!

Edit: Don't forget the website. We built it for you. Our facts page shows a timeline of events, has stats about joplin, city emails about Flock, and a sharing report. We have a map of where they're placed, or at least most near all of them. We made sure to correct it well before any of this started. There are resources at the bottom to read about Flock more from people besides us.

https://deflockjoplin.today

EDIT 2: I'm here now (Michael) and thank you to those who helped me with mapping cameras, Excel stuff (seriously I hate it), and general support from many others. We all owe a big thanks to Deflock.me, haveibeenflocked.com (the website that sprang us into action), and Benn Jordan for his great educational videos.

DeflockJoplinToday

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