Useful Idiots
No, there wasn’t ANOTHER blackout in Spain, but the cartoon is the best thing I had on my computer as a lead in for the first story of the day.
Welcome back, pull up a chair, dinner tonight is pulled pork Mac and Cheese. You know where the liquids are, grab something, you’re going to need it. Please don’t forget the tip jar where we collect for the mess, and thank you to those that have thrown a few bucks in the jar.
I’ll start with a little argument I just started with a fellow blogger who writes under the handle of Ada Nestor. She’s been on a tear lately about “Data Centers” calling them “Surveillance Centers” and losing her mind over how they are stealing your data, they’re up in your business, they’re spying on you, they’re destroying your peace, and they’re stealing your water.
Well, YES. They are using whatever data you allow them to see, and the massive data crunching of “AI” (Not actually intelligent, just something that can crunch billions of chunks of data and look for relationships and patterns, but try to explain that to a luddite) to determine what to pitch to you, how you’re likely to react to something, and so on.
The only thing you can do about it, is stop being stupid. Quit sharing everything you do to social media; govern your electronic footprint. AI is here, it’s not going away, and the only question is: Who controls it? You can’t make it go away.
The thing is, she conflates unrelated problems in search of ways to make Data Centers in America BAD. She tries to make the case that somehow biological men competing as women (an issue I’m strongly against) has something to do with data centers, as an example.
Her latest thrust is Water Rights. Now I’ve written on water rights and water wars at the national level before, and I sympathize with her desire to protect the aquifer from being depleted. Hell I sympathize with a lot of her arguments about other things, but the thing is, her issue with water rights and control of the water usage shouldn’t be about Data Centers, it should be about Governments being stupid. She is attacking a symptom instead of the disease…
Of course since she says that she is in local government, that’s understandable: Identifying the wrong problem, prescribing a solution that won’t work, and then patting yourself on the back while holding out your hand for more money is what Government does. I wrote a comment on her most recent rant (trying to make water issues all about those evil “surveillance centers”) and I’ll repost it here:
I’ll start with what you say was never answered. “Can a township trade away its share of a public trust, the drinking water of its own residents and their grandchildren, for a one-time stack of tax revenue, when the constitution names that water as common property held for the people?”
A question for, and to be answered by, the courts. That’s what they exist for.
That said, the question is one strictly for Pennsylvania to decide for themselves: Not my circus, Not my monkeys.
Many states do not have that clause, that amendment. (In fact I would venture to bet, without doing a lot of research that ‘Many’ is actually “Most”)
Yes, as you say, it is certainly a local question... Which begs the question: Why are you trying to make a national argument to ban Data Centers, (I’m not going to play your semantics game) based on your parochial rules in one state?
The fact is that water wars predate electricity, much less computing and data centers. And local governments have been selling off the future by allowing more draw against the aquifer than it can support for at least a hundred and fifty years in this nation. It doesn’t take data centers, or any other heavy industry, the area I used to live in until very recently was a peninsula surrounded by seawater. There was no data center real, planned, or imagined in the aquifer feeding that peninsula (Kitsap, in Washington State) and the only heavy industry dates from 1891 (Puget Sound Naval Shipyard) long before any of the residents or housing developments existed. Yet the government there allowed enough development, mostly in the form of housing developments to act as bedroom communities for Seattle, to deplete the aquifer, and risk seawater intrusion.
Is water use an important issue? Sure, and greed by local governments who want more money to play with, has been a problem since we came up with the idea of local government. The thing is, you’re hitting at the wrong target. Data centers are a symptom, not the disease. I understand, you want to strike out at what you see as causing the pain, but treating the fever while ignoring the underlying infection is a fast way to die.
If you want to campaign for requiring Data Centers to recycle their cooling water, using ethaline glycol or a similar product as the primary coolant and water as the secondary (which allows you to recycle the water in a cooling pond endlessly) that sounds like a fine idea. However saddling up your horse and charging that data center with lance couched, is much like trying to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig.
Is AI a good idea? Well, the time to have asked that was thirty years ago. The genie is out of the bottle, the bell cannot be unrung. You can no more make AI go away, than you can nuclear bombs. All the rest of the things that data centers do, are of a type. They will happen, the only question is, will they happen in the US, where we have some control over the data, what it’s used for, and who sees it, or will it happen overseas, where laws are even more lax on who gets to see it, and who gets to control it?
Having had, for decades a very professional and personal interest in security at the international level, I will tell you that keeping the data in house so to speak, is far safer than off shoring it.
Does your argument aid the interests of Russia, West Taiwan, and India? Oh, most certainly. Yet I don’t believe that you do that intentionally. You are at worst what Ol’ Uncle Joe called a “useful idiot.” Someone who argues for things, for what seems to be the best of reasons, while ignoring the second and third order ramifications. The trouble is, no matter how well you mean, those ramifications still exist.
Should we put data centers somewhere away from population centers? Sure. A place that comes immediately to mind would be in the footprint of the old factories in Detroit, the old steel plants in PA, and many other “brownfields” where heavy industry was killed off by the forces of Government greed, Union greed, and the siren song from the Harvard MBA crowd of “off shoring, to maximize profit margins.”
There are several bottom lines here:
Data centers, computing and AI aren’t going away, no matter how much you throw wooden shoes in the weaving machine. The only thing that can change here is “who controls them?”
Who runs the world, is, to a large degree, going to be controlled by “Who runs the massive data compilation machinery.” The next industrial revolution has been going on for about four decades, it’s just hitting it’s stride, and you can no more stop it, than you can stop a landslide, you either run ahead of it, or you get buried.
Is all government, down to the county and city commissioners and “committees” corrupt or foolish? Certainly! And yet I will take OUR level of corruption and foolishness, over that of Europe, the rest of the Americas, or anywhere else, any day of the week, and twice on Sundays.
There is indeed some shenanigans going on with regard to Data Centers, Like the Georga Power case where they used Eminent Domain to seize all the houses along a 35-mile path so that they can run transmission lines to feed a new set of four Data Centers. The utility lowballed the payments, which has a lot of people upset, and rightfully so. They finally caved, due to bad publicity, but the folks whose homes are involved are still fighting. It’s rather odd though, that the press chose as a poster child for this a woman who got her house on a welfare program, (see the QOTD for the staring quote…) Sorry, but my reaction is along the lines of “If you demanded a government that could give you anything you wanted, don’t be surprised if that same government takes away everything you have.”
Look, any taking is bad, and justifying a taking for commercial use should be a nonstarter. The trouble is, that’s not what the law says. Kelo V the City of New London CT 2005 makes clear that “Economic development projects can be ‘public use’ if they serve a legitimate public purpose, such as revitalizing a distressed economy, creating jobs, and increasing tax revenue.” I don’t like it, but until you get another case before SCOTUS and they reverse themselves, or put some bigger guardrails in place, there it is.
The DNC is continuing to think that minorities are the Useful Idiots in America… If you don’t remember Poodle Dog Bitch Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Chair of the DNC from 2011 until she had to fall on her sword after the debacle where the DNC rigged the primaries so that Hillary could win the nomination in 2016… well she never really went away, she has been the Representative for Florida’s 25th Congressional District since 2023. That district is going away now, because of redistricting.
It’s being divided up into the new boundaries of the 25th, where Debbie lives, and the 20th. The 20th is a very minority heavy district, By which I mean about 90% black. They’re currently without representation, because Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick had to resign, after being caught with her fingers in a five-million-dollar Cookie jar, embezzling Covid 19 funds. (slightly relevant point, Sheila is black, Debbie is Jewish White-bread)
Well, Sheila has been indicted for multiple felony charges but says that she is still running for the seat she just resigned from! Debbie has announced that she’s going to move, so that she can run for the same seat, instead of running for the area that she lives in, which is now part of a republican leading district, and is telling the folks of the 20th, that they need to vote for her, because she can be counted on to understand their plight.
Yes, a white New York Jew can certainly represent them better than a black democrat felon or any of the three black republican candidates running for that office. That’s the Democratic National Committee’s position anyway.
In further DNC follies, there was a bill before congress that add a new museum to the Smithsonian, “Woman’s History Museum.” The democrat women killed the bill and the museum.
Why?
Because the legislation required that the museum recognize and honor only Biological women. Ladies, now you know where you stand with these folks.
You have heard me go off about the California High Speed Rail boondoggle before, well there’s more in that story:
It seems that New scum has been taking enough heat that he tried to go on the offensive, claiming that they have a “New Marshaling Facility” with track and rail cars and everything.
Cris Bray /potemkin-railhead-at-what-point-do-we-call-this-fraud? Noticed that the pictures, mostly just looked like the AI created drawing of the proposed facility, not like they were actual photos. So he took a look at the place in meat-space.
Seems there’s some fence gates, (no actual fence, mind you just the gates and a stub to each side, enough for the picture framing.) Some track, belonging to Burlington-Northern that doesn’t connect to anything, and some track off in the distance that has some Burlington-Northern freight cars on it… In short, it’s a movie set. Fitting I know, for the state that’s the home of Hollywierd, but progress on getting this multibillion-dollar fraud machine running? NO.
Go look at Chris’s work, he’s got the pictures and more detail.
Finally, we have a nice piece by Sal on the state of Navy Shipbuilding, a favorite hobby horse of both he, and I. /are-we-on-the-cusp-of-a-maritime It’s short, and important, go read it.
On a personal note: People, don’t fucking ignore your body.
My brother is in the hospital, been there since Friday, they’re cutting off his big toe right now. Dumbass has been mostly ignoring a wound to that toe for most of two years. He’s diabetic. He’s spending about two days a week in hotel rooms, for work.
Can you say MERSA? Yes, I knew you could. It’s in the bone now, so bye bye little piggy that went to market, and we hope that’s all he loses.
He was a SEAL. He’s got that “pain is weakness leaving the body” bullshit going on.
WRONG!
I don’t care who you are, or how bad-ass you are or were. Pain is a warning sign that something is wrong with you! Check it out! It may be something you can just soldier through, but you can’t know that until you get it checked out. MERSA, in your bones especially, will kill your dumb ass. Not only that, but it will hurt like hell the entire time you’re dying.
Please don’t be stupid.
This has been a public service announcement from people with even the slightest medical training. Thank you for your attention in this matter!
QOTD “This is literally the federal government gave us this home, and you’re taking it.” Angela Brown, who’s government given home is being taken by… The Government.
Yours in Service,
William Lehman