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full terms if you've been hoping to
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lie low While artificial intelligence eliminates millions of jobs and transforms the world's economy, then you need to pay very close attention to recent developments out of Lake Tahoe, California.
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Now, in case you're not familiar, Lake Tahoe is home to some of the
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richest people in the United States, on both the California and Nevada sides. It's a premier tourist destination in our most populated state.
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Median property values are north of $700,000.
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People living there, as a general matter, are financially secure and highly educated. Many of them work in tech.
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You had to think of a list
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of people whose lives would be upended by artificial intelligence. They would rank fairly low, you would think.
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And yet, because of AI, 50,000 people
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living on the California side of Lake
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Tahoe have no idea where their power
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supply will come from in a matter of months.
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Some are worried that the lights will
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go out indefinitely, as if they'd been
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hit by a terrorist attack. But what's happened is that the utility realized that it's much more lucrative to power data centers, which are used to
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train artificial intelligence, and which consume near infinite amounts of electricity than it is to power single family homes. After all, by some estimates, depending on the size, a single data center can consume more more power than half a million homes. I'll say that again, a single data center consumes more power than half a million homes. Every utility is rapidly coming to the same conclusion because companies like Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, which collectively own one third of all data center capacity and which build the overwhelming majority of large
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data centers, are willing and able to
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pay enormous premiums for the electricity that they're using.
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When they're able to price you out
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of the market, you're on your own. And when the choice is between a big tech trillion dollar company or you and your single family home, the big tech company is going to win out every single time.
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This is reporting from Fortune. Quote Lake Tahoe doesn't know where its
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power will come from after next ski season. And it's a major problem for the 49,000 residents who call the region home. Nevada Energy, the Nevada utility that has
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supplied the bulk of Lake Tahoe's electricity for decades, told Liberty Utilities, the small
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California company that services the, that it
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will stop providing power after May 2027.
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The reason NV Energy needs the capacity
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for data centers, as in the energy
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supplier for the Lake Tahoe region, is
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telling the utility company that it has less than a year to find another power source. It's like we don't exist, north Lake
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Tahoe resident Danielle Hughes told Fortune.
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Now, you might be thinking, well, okay,
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this is no big deal. The residents can simply find another utility
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to supply their power.
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The government can simply assign some utility
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to pick up the slack.
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I mean, surely we're not just going
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to leave these people without power.
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We're not going to do that. That can't happen.
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The power company can't just come to
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an entire community and say, we're not going to give you power anymore.
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There must be some sort of system in place. Well, it turns out that there is
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no system in place. And, you know, finding replacement power is actually not so easy in this case
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because Liberty, the California utility, is completely
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dependent on the transmission lines from the Nevada utility.
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NV Energy and California regulators have no power in Nevada.
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They can't order NV Energy to forego the profits from these big tech companies and serve these residents. So the residents have two options. Option number one, they can wait several years for someone to spend hundreds of millions of dollars constructing a new transmission line for their benefit. In the meantime, they have no power. They can use, you know, candlelight or something.
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Or option number two, they can buy power on the wholesale market, which means
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their electricity bill will increase dramatically. Some residents, even in Lake Tahoe, may
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not be able to afford the new bill.
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The electricity will still flow through NV Energy's transmission lines, but because it's coming
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from other suppliers in the west, suppliers
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who know these residents are desperate, it'll
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probably cost two, three times as much
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at a minimum, could be much more than that.
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So right now, that's the plan.
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It's a disastrous situation. It's affecting people who never saw it coming. And really, the ultimate message to these
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people is, well, you're screwed.
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You're on your own. Too bad the data centers are more important
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now. At the same time, as insane as this story is, I need to make it clear that the point of this
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monologue is not to indulge in any of the fear mongering about AI data centers that's all over the Internet.
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You know, I don't want to imply
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that residents of Lake Tahoe are going to resort to cannibalism or anything like that. Tourists who visit Lake Tahoe in a
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year in all likelihood will not encounter
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bombed out ski lodges full of zombies. You know, there's enough hysteria already out
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there without me adding to it.
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I've seen people posting videos of lights in the sky claiming the data centers are permanently changing the clouds, even though it's just normal lighting from an active construction project.
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I've also seen videos like this one
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from a council meeting in New Jersey. This is a woman who's opposed to Data Centers. Watch.
Local Activist
3 counties. 3 counties in Indiana have put a moratorium on building data centers. So several in Georgia, Missouri, Illinois, Arizona, across the country, communities are protecting themselves from this poison. Are we going to allow it? In Cumberland County? I want to ask the council, where will you go when the water stops flowing out of your faucets? Where will you go? Where will you go when the air smells like gas and makes you sick? Will you look around for a community whose leaders had the spine to say no to these billionaires?
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Or.
Local Activist
Or will you stay in Cumberland county and offer your children what is left of it to inherit? Thank you.
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Now, even if you're opposed to AI data centers, if you agree with this woman on the issue, which I mostly
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do, she's speaking in sort of apocalyptic
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terms about the whole county getting wiped out, air is poisonous, the water is depleted, and on and on. You know, there's some class resentment going on. It's reminiscent of the women like Ben Affleck's daughter who would berate the city council over so called long Covid. We can't ignore the fact that whenever there's a contentious issue like this, people who are neurotic tend to panic and they start making wild claims in a hysterical manner and therefore they are unpersuasive.
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That's the problem.
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It ends up being counterproductive.
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Now, it's counterproductive because fear mongering is
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the single fastest way to discredit legitimate concerns. And there are many legitimate concerns with these data centers as we will discuss
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in a moment, including, yes, concerns about the water supply. It's probably not going to be that
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you build a data center and then nobody has water anymore and the air is poisonous.
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It's not quite that, but there are legitimate concerns. Notice that in her entire diatribe, the
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woman actually doesn't Talk about what these data centers are being used for. She doesn't mention mass surveillance or how these companies are programming robots to take human jobs. She also doesn't talk about how the
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land is being obtained.
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Instead she's sort of yelling and the people are plotting in the background.
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Now, if you remember from a few
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weeks ago, we talked about those high level scientists who were strangely disappearing.
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And while some of those cases obviously merit more investigation, some of them clearly don't.
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And so this is a kind of a similar thing.
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When people pretend, and in that case, people pretend otherwise, when their only motivation
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is to string together some kind of elaborate conspiracy that doesn't withstand scrutiny and they throw all kinds of dubious claims into the mix, then they end up undermining all reasonable discussion about a particular topic.
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And in the case of data centers, that outcome works for the benefit of Big tech. What big tech wants. If you're a skeptic of these data
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centers or concerned about them, they want
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you to, to be as hysterical and hyperbolic as possible in your, in your,
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your protest of the data centers. Because then they can point to that
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and say, well look, these people are
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totally unreasonable and they have no idea what's going on. You know, some have pointed out that you could go back and recall the, the panic in the early 20th century over power lines. Anytime somebody died as a result of a power line, it made national news for a while. Cartoons went out of their way to terrify people. You're seeing one right there. There's a skull on the power line. Everyone's running for their life. Someone got tangled in the power line somehow. Not sure how that would happen.
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I mean, if you're walking on the
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sidewalk, there's no reason why you should end up tangled.
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And I don't know what you were
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doing to end up.
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How did that, what was that guy
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doing to end up in that position? Was he, was he like a parachuting, Skydiving right into the. But it, you know, it looks like something out of a horror movie.
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And during the so called war of
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the currents between Thomas Edison on the one side and George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla on the other, Edison's backers would publicly electrocute animals in order to demonstrate how dangerous alternating current supposedly was. Of course, today alternating current powers pretty much every grid in, in the world. More recently, people who opposed fracking claimed that it would cause flaming tap water.
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All this to say, you have to
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understand that some hysteria is going to result whenever there's new technology.
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The question you have to answer is
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Whether there's an actual, whether there's an
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actual problem underlying all of this and
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what to do about it, and the case of data centers and AI generally,
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there are certainly without a doubt, actual problems underlying it. We want, we want to get to
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those problems and discuss them in a, in an honest and objective way.
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Summer has a way of reminding you what actually matters.
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The family vacations, road trips, your kids are outside, your family's together, life feels full. These are the moments where you can start to think, I'm actually protecting this or just enjoying it because. Because it's easy to assume everything will be fine.
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how much you could save. That's policygenius.com Walsh so probably the single biggest red flag, even for people who
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believe AI is a net positive, has
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been the very abrupt 180 by people like Microsoft co founder Bill Gates, who
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retains an ownership stake in the company.
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Now, as you may remember, for many years Bill Gates was basically Greta Thunberg. And now, seemingly out of nowhere, he's declaring that climate change actually isn't that big of a deal. Human welfare, he says, is more important. So here's a side by side that
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was put together by Maisie Moore.
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The first clip is Gates from 2019.
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And the second clip is from last year.
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It's only a six year difference.
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Watch was how great a problem bovine flatulence is.
Bill Gates (clip)
Nobody knows how to get rid of
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how to get cows to stop farting.
Bill Gates (clip)
Exactly. Or burping. And so there is artificial meat. But that's at a very early stage. If it was a 50% reduction, then you could ignore, okay, leave the cows alone. But because we're trying to avoid the temperature continuing to go up, you do need to go to zero. Not just everything should be solely for climate. Wasn't the goal here to improve human lives? Climate is super important, but has to be considered in terms of overall human welfare.
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Now, a few years ago, we were
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so desperate that we needed to find a way to stop the cows from farting. No sacrifice is too small.
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And now, you know, climate change, it's important, but it's not a big deal. Now, what makes this even weirder is
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that Gates is denying that he's changed
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his position, but he clearly has. That clip was not a one off. In a speech at Harvard University four
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years ago, Gates said that climate change
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would make like life, quote, essentially unlivable
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at the equator by the end of
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the century, leading to the instability of
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hundreds of millions of people trying to get out of those regions where a
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lot of the world's population is and particularly the poorest in the world. Avoiding a climate disaster will be one
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of the greatest challenges humans have ever taken on, he said.
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Meanwhile, current Bill Gates talks like this, quote, there's a doomsday view of climate change that goes like this.
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In a few decades, cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization.
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Fortunately for all of us, this view is wrong.
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Although climate change will have serious consequences, particularly for people in the poorest countries,
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it will not lead to humanity's demise. Our climate strategies need to prioritize human welfare.
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This may seem obvious who could be
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against improving people's lives? But sometimes human welfare takes a backseat
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to lowering emissions with bad consequences.
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We should measure success by our impact on human welfare more than our impact on the global temperature. Wow. It's like he's a completely different person. Think about how important the climate change
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agenda used to be.
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Like, till 10 seconds ago, it was
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the central plank of the WEF globalist utopia in which the peasants don't own any property and we have to rent everything from blackrock.
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He told us again and again that
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our most important overriding objective as a
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species was to reduce carbon emissions. And now one of the W. WEF's most prominent ambassadors has issued brand new marching orders. We're suddenly obligated to pursue human welfare. And even things like reducing carbon emissions shouldn't happen if it, if it's, you know, has a negative impact on human welfare. I mean, this version of Bill Gates, if he was around in like 2012,
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he would have been, he would have
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been stoned to death as a, as a climate denier. And by the way, you'll often hear
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people say that if you criticize AI data centers, then you're falling for a Chinese psyop. You know, the idea is that China wants the United States to sabotage its progress with artificial intelligence, so they're encouraging useful idiots to attack data centers.
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But if that were the case, it
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wouldn't explain why Bill Gates, who's been a useful idiot for China his entire
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life, is supporting an approach that will lead to more data centers in the United States. It seems more likely that Big Tech and China are both aligned on this point.
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They all want an AI driven surveillance state in the United States. And coincidentally enough, they also want mass migration and more foreign workers to take American jobs, particularly the kinds of remote jobs that data centers will enable.
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So indeed, a shift towards human welfare instead of climate change, which is taken
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on surface face value, taken surface level, that's the right answer. We should be focused on human welfare.
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We should be focused on climate change at all, because it's made up. But that's, that's not what's actually motivating this sudden shift. Because actually, this shift is good news for companies like Microsoft, which don't want
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environmentalists and climate change activists to stand in the way of their data centers. And ordinarily, I'd say it's good news for humanity as well. After all, anything that upsets climate change activists is by definition a good thing. You would think these are insane people who stand in the way of human progress at every opportunity.
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But in this case, it's unfortunately not that simple. It's worth paying close attention to the
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specific words that Bill Gates used to.
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So what's the significance of this pivot to human welfare?
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What could he possibly be trying to do?
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Well, as it turns out, human welfare or the public good is essentially standard
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for, for eminent domain.
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Okay, that's the prog. That's the process that the government uses in order to seize private property, including lands and homes.
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If the government can demonstrate that your
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home stands in the way of the public good, then the government can seize your home by force, as long as
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they pay you a fair market value, as defined by a government employee who's
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going to lowball you because you have
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no leverage in the situation at all because it's going to take your home anyway. One of the classic uses of eminent domain involves public infrastructure projects relating to utilities, specifically transmission lines.
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And this is an aspect of the data center story that most people are not talking about, but already people are losing their homes as a result. This is a woman from Georgia, for example.
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Watch.
Ansley (Georgia Resident)
Hey, you guys. My Name's Ansley. I live in Coweta County, Georgia. I wanted to come out here and show you guys firsthand what is happening to our county. So, as you can see behind me we have these power lines. Georgia Power is going to expand these lines to support power to the data center. What they're doing to homeowners is they're taking their homes. This is my childhood home behind me. It is being taken by force by Georgia Power. Homeowners in this county do not have a choice. It is called eminent domain, and they will take it.
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Well, this is one way to ensure
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that people own nothing, as the WEF has long desired. It used to be climate change would bring about that result. Climate change, but we don't need that anymore. When you've got AI and you've got
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data centers, politicians could just take your home from you.
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That's exactly what's happening.
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It's not just one case in Georgia.
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More than a dozen farmers in Kentucky recently received threats that eminent domain will be used to seize their land for
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a data center, according to the Guardian.
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Meanwhile, as the ABC affiliate in Virginia
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reports, quote, a Charlotte county farmer is
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frustrated after he said Dominion Energy is threatening to invoke eminent domain on his land.
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He said the company is pushing for
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him to accept an offer to make way for a transmission line. Todd Lacks has a farm in Randolph
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with over 200 acres of land.
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Lacks, a Dominion, offered about 1500 dollars per acre and money to cover the cost of timber. In his case, that adds up to
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about $13,000 total, but he would like $11,000 per acre.
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Lack said that his own legal counsel advised him not to take the lower offer. Generally speaking, they said eminent domain cases
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are settled three to five times the initial offer.
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But in this area, because of the high solar stakes with data centers, that could easily be 10 to 15 times what they offered, according to LAX. Now, what this farmer doesn't realize is that he's actually pretty fortunate in this scenario. He knows the identity of the organization. In this case, an energy company that's trying to seize his property. That's a major advantage because very often large corporations will use shell companies in order to trick landowners into selling their
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property at bargain rates.
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Disney pioneered this tactic in the 1960s. They realized that, you know, they wanted a lot of land in central Florida,
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south of Orlando to create a new
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mini city, which ultimately became Walt Disney World Resort.
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But if the landowners knew that Disney was the buyer, they'd immediately raise their prices. So Disney established shell companies with names
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like Mount Lot Real Estate Investments, empty lot, get it? They hired fake executives and lawyers, and
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as a result, they were able to
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get some of the land for as
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low as 100 bucks an acre.
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And by the time Disney was revealed as the buyer, the price went as high as 80,000 an acre.
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But it was too late at that point for most of the sellers. Now today, big tech is running a very similar strategy.
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This is from an investigative report that Business Insider recently posted.
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Watch.
Investigative Reporter
Giant warehouses are popping up across the US More than two every week. They feed AI algorithms, store photos, and answer our questions. Hey Google, a data center compass like this can consume as much power and water as an entire city. And many of the biggest server farms are emerging from the desert. But there's no official record of how many of these are being built, where they are, or even who owns them.
Investigative Reporter/Assistant
To be honest, I've never really run into so much resistance for records than this project.
Investigative Reporter
Big tech companies often go to great lengths to hide the details.
Investigative Reporter/Assistant
So, you know, it's been really tricky to kind of get these records because the companies don't want to disclose all of that information.
Investigative Reporter
By tricky, we mean redacted records and requests denied on the grounds of trade secrets. It turns out there is one thing that most data centers need. Backup generators in case the grid fails. And anyone who wants to install a generator needs needs to apply for an air quality permit.
Investigative Reporter/Assistant
So what we set out to do was request all of the permits that are issued to data centers for those backup generators.
Investigative Reporter
That meant filing public record requests for air permits in every state. They list the capacity of the generator so we can extrapolate the power needs of the data center. They also provide clues about who owns it. Take this hotspot, rapidly expanding close to Columbus, Ohio.
Investigative Reporter/Assistant
There are at least 164 emergency generators permitted here. This is a data center where the air permit was applied for by an LLC called Magellan Enterprises llc. But the company has applied for a trade secrets exemption. So they were actually able to redact pretty much all the information that we wanted.
Investigative Reporter
But all of the big tech giants must disclose any companies like LLCs that they own. And by digging into their official records, we managed to pull back the mask. And it turns out that the data center in Ohio, it's not Magellan Enterprises
Investigative Reporter/Assistant
llc, that's actually owned by Google.
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Okay, so you've got these big creepy warehouses propping up like weeds all over the country, two a week, we're being told, and they use up more power and water than a small city. But nobody knows who's building the warehouses or what they're really using them for. That's a great situation.
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Now, there are several reasons why Google
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might want to hide the fact that they're building a data center near your house. It's bad pr, for one thing. They also might want to hide their expansion from competitors.
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But on several occasions, the motivation appears
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to be getting land for cheap.
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The Washington Post reports that Google set
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up shell companies for negotiations in at least five cities, where they ultimately built data centers. In one case, Google established a Delaware
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company called Jetstream LLC to, quote, negotiate the land purchase with a private owner.
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No word on how that land purchase went exactly, but we can assume it
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was very favorable for Google. Now, it's hard to know how many
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of these transactions occur. Shell companies by their nature, are difficult
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to track, but it's a good bet
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that farmers in Louisiana can expect to hear from a few shell companies in the near future. That's because they're getting a massive new metadata center in the next couple of years. And already, according to local tax assessor,
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rents have increased from $650 a month to 2,000.
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And of course, property values have gone up, meaning residents owe much more in property taxes.
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Watch.
Local Reporter (Louisiana)
Billions of dollars are moving through a tiny town in Louisiana. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram is building what some predict will be the biggest data center in the world.
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Han Trong traveled to Richland Parish, where he found a community experiencing rapid growth and the pains that come with that.
Local Resident
Many people born and raised in Richland Parish are used to a slower pace of life.
I'm not for change. I don't change my furniture around or nothing. I stay just like it is.
We've been a simple farming community. It's a great place to raise your kids. It's quiet.
You won't find much quiet in certain parts of the parish anymore. Entergy Louisiana is now speeding toward a deadline.
Entergy Louisiana VP Troy Hytens
The power plant will be online at the end of 2028.
Local Resident
But Troy Hytens is Entergy Louisiana's vice president of hyperscale execution. That title requires him to oversee massive jobs. Hyten says this one dwarfs any he's ever seen.
Entergy Louisiana VP Troy Hytens
This is the biggest customer project that Entergy Louisiana has ever undertaken. The only thing that is a similar scale that we've done in the past is building brand new nuclear power plants.
Local Resident
All of this is to support what's happening just down the road on Highway 183 where Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, says it's building a $27 billion data center to advance its ambitions in artificial intelligence. In a parish of about 20,000, Brown says there are now at least 4,000 extra people living and working here. That kind of growth can come with pains, like rising rents.
There's bumps and bruises and we're failing them. You know, a rental that might have been 6, 700amonth is now 2,500amonth. So it's not affordable for the people that were here. And I hate that. It hurts my heart.
When Meta come in, they moved some of the folks out and put in the trailer park. Well, they had to find a place to go and some of them couldn't afford that. So I don't know what happened to them.
81 year old Joyce Piercey feels the changes are coming too fast.
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Now, normally I don't have any issue with tax credits that encourage massive new businesses to come into town. Taxes in general are bad. The government takes your money and wastes it very often.
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Therefore, tax credits are good.
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Problem is that if you're going to offer tax credits to major corporations, the community needs, community needs to benefit in some way. If you simply give the corporation a discount that it doesn't need, and in turn you disrupt the lives of innocent people without benefiting anybody in any way outside of that corporation, then the tax credit has backfired. It is not advancing, what was Bill Gates's phrase?
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Human welfare. And that appears to be what's happening
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with these data centers. Yes, they create construction jobs, but once those jobs are gone, which doesn't take long, you've mostly got an empty warehouse
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with a couple of security guards.
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The data center churns along without many employees. This is from the Wall Street Journal quote.
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In abilene, Texas, some 1500 people are
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building the first data center for the Stargate artificial intelligence venture led by OpenAI.
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Once it's completed, a lot fewer people will work there.
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The facility will have about 100 full time employees. According to the city's economic development agency. That totals a fraction of the number of people who might work on the same 1 million square feet if it were an office park or a factory or warehouse. A 286,500 square foot cheese packaging plant that broke around in Abilene in 2021 was projected to employ 500 people. The reality is data centers can employ more than a thousand people in the several months or years it takes to
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build them, but rarely need more than
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1 or 200 once they open. And that's another thing with these tax credits and tax breaks and things for corporations generally, the Idea is, well, it's good to have big corporations move into
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your town because they're going to bring jobs with them.
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That's the idea. The problem with the data centers as we just went over is they don't
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bring very many jobs once they're built. So if the data centers aren't creating jobs, then how are the residents getting any benefit?
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Exactly.
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If the answer is that the town
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has a lot more tax revenue, well
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then great, pass it along to the people living there.
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Give those same massive tax credits to
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the people who actually need them. Send them a tax refund to cover
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their rent increase or the electricity bill, something.
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If the local government is swimming in
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cash from all the new tax revenue,
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then they should be able to afford that easily. But at the moment none of that is happening. Instead, residents are being told to deal
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with all the downsides of these data centers without any upside whatsoever. And, and as many residents are discovering, the downsides are, are significant.
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You know, even if you don't lose
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your home in the process of the, of the thing moving into town, which
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you might, your quality of life will go down.
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The downside involved things like loud noises at strange hours.
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These next three clips are all from Virginia.
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The first one is at midnight. List.
Virginia Resident
The proximity of the houses. To this noise and as of right now, I don't see the black smoke. But often there are multiple black particles blowing in the air along with this sound. Why is this allowed right next to single family homes? Right next to other townhomes and other townhomes. Here,
Investigative Reporter
listen to this. The ambient sound of Dulles town centre in Northern Virginia recorded on a phone. Three Amazon data centers sit roughly 200 meters away. I ran the audio through noise reduction software. Only then do you realize that hidden behind the drone of the data centers there is birdsong.
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Well, it's hard to imagine something more dystopian than that. You've got this big creepy empty warehouse box like massive building towering over these single family homes and this creepy buzz heist, like high pitch buzz sound just emanating from it. It's like, it's like something out of a dystopian fiction.
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But it's real.
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Here's another one. This is time from Minnesota.
Minnesota Resident
So this is comparable to the data center that is going to be built
Local Activist
over
Minnesota Resident
in, in the Bertram chain of lakes. The guy from Scannel Properties told me to come and check out this data center. I'm hoping that my phone is capturing that noise. It is actually significantly loud.
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Now in fairness, as we said, we're trying to analyze this issue objectively with no hysteria.
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In some of these videos, they're recording
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the sound of the on site generators, which, as you might imagine, are very loud. And those generators don't run all the time, but all the same, they're obviously very annoying, to put them, put it
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mildly for anybody who lives nearby. And that's not a small thing.
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You know, having a massive building that's
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by the way, also just ugly to look ugly.
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Look at it. Makes an ugly sound and actually reduces your quality of life in measurable and significant ways. It's not a small thing.
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And they also lower property values. More serious problems like the ones that
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woman mentioned in the city council meeting are generally related to the construction of the data centers. This is one of the prominent case, one of the more prominent cases from Georgia. Watch.
Georgia Resident
This is on a cold water pressure in the kitchen. This is where I fill up water for storage. Those are the things we have to fill up to flush the toilets.
So you can see the sediment from the data center.
Wow.
And that's just from the water coming out of your faucet?
Yeah. And this is what's in all the pipes.
Just the well itself is probably 20,000. And that's not counting any of the.
All the replacement fixtures and faucets and toilets and the lines that come underneath the house. It's overwhelming because you really feel like you are up against this huge wall that you can't penetrate. There's nothing that you can do and they don't care. The light pollution is.
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You don't have to have a night
Georgia Resident
light in the house. You can walk around the house at night, see everything. It's that pride.
This is a video of the dust from Facebook where the construction was. That's what it looks like right now out my front door. The wind blowing in all of this stuff from across the construction across the road.
This is all from Meta.
Yeah, I was standing on my front porch. I think eventually that affected our well water. We're on a well here and we started having issues with our well in 2018. I have to replace the hot water heater. I've replaced two washing machines and a dishwasher because of the sediment that's coming in.
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Now, to be clear about this, these people were using a separate well, and during construction, they said that their well was affected. Meta claims they did a groundwater study, and that's not true.
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Whatever the case, this is a.
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This is not a situation where the data center itself caused the problem. Building any large structure could have caused the same problem. And this is not a case where the entire town lost water pressure or ran out of water or anything like that. It's obviously a sympathetic story, but it doesn't connect to a larger problem with AI data centers in particular.
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Necessarily.
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What is a sign of a larger problem potentially is, is how much water these data centers are consuming. Many of them use a technique called evaporative cooling, where they pull in hot
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air, the air hits the wet cooling
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pads and then the heat dissipates. These are often closed loop systems so the water isn't being wasted, but it's still putting a strain on many communities.
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This from the New York Times reporting out of Georgia.
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Quote, Newton county is on track to be in a water deficit by 2030. If the local water authority cannot upgrade
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its facilities, residents could be forced to ration water.
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Meta's data center uses about 10% of
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the county's total water use daily, said
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Mike Hopkins, the executive director of the Newton County Water and Sewage Authority, which is the county's water authority. In recent months, Mr. Hopkins said that nine companies had applied to build data centers in Newton county, some asking for as much as 6 million gallons of
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water a day, more than the county's entire daily use.
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Some applicants are tech companies as large as Amazon, according to the water permits, while other companies used aliases to hide their identities.
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Now, if you zoom out, the water
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consumption for these data centers isn't crisis level. On a national level, all the water withdrawals made by these data centers combined account for about 5% of the water
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usage of golf courses. But at the local level, if politicians aren't careful with the permits they're using, then they could indeed run out of water and power. But here's the point.
Podcast Host
If you're spending all your time worrying about whether a local county will issue an ill advised permit that leads to water rationing in three years, then although that is a concern, you're missing the
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greater threat that's posed by these data centers. They're a direct threat not only to your job, but also to your and to your home. Also to your personal privacy.
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Now this is an argument that very few people are making, aside from Mike Cernovich on X, who's making this point, and a few others.
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A well trained AI is designed to draw accurate inferences about human behavior based
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on a near infinite data set.
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If you use the Internet, then it's all but guaranteed that Google and Meta
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have an enormous amount of data about your political opinions, your hobbies, your location, even when you're not at home.
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And if they wanted to. These companies could tell the authorities precisely
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what you're doing, who you're with at any given second. They could provide a complete breakdown of
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your health issues, your mood, your goals
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in life, your fears and anxieties.
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And they could predict with a high degree of certainty what you're going to do next. How much are life, liberty and the
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Now, right now.
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According to the latest polling, the Democrats leading candidate for president in two years is not Gavin Newsom.
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It's aoc, the socialist from New York. You think she'd hesitate even for a
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second to use this data to harass and imprison her political enemies? You think for a second that Big Tech would hesitate to share all this information with her administration?
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That's not fear mongering. Democrats have already done this without the benefit of AI. They already rounded up conservatives and thrown them in jail.
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They did it to the President, United States.
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The last thing we need to hand these people is a powerful AI to
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do that for them.
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Now does that mean that we should never build any data centers?
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Does it mean that we should abandon AI entirely? That AI has no useful applications at all? Of course it doesn't mean that.
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But we should also be very careful to avoid racing forward with AI with no guardrails, no caution whatsoever.
Podcast Host
All based on some vague notion that we need to get there first and beat China.
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Get where exactly? If we impoverish millions of people and
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empower bureaucrats and big tech oligarchs with surveillance tools beyond their wildest imagination, then
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what good is it to win the race? What's the reward for winning? I mean, if we're actually concerned about
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human welfare, and we should be, then
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how is human welfare secured or advanced?
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By creating a society where we are tracked and surveilled every hour of the day. At the same time, millions of jobs
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become obsolete all at once. AI is already in the process of
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taking away not just individual jobs, but
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entire categories of jobs, entire industries. How does that advance human welfare?
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I can see how it advances the welfare of Big Tech executives who are all about to become trillionaires, or already are trillionaires.
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But if you lose your job to AI and then your house to an
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AI data center, I'm not sure you'll
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have as many reasons to celebrate. To me, the most terrifying thing about
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the current moment is, is that we are not.
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It's not that we're simply moving forward with a revolutionary new technology. We are sprinting with it. It is a mad Dash into the unknown. There has not been any real discussion about the downsides. Nobody has really explained how our society is going to absorb the inevitable job losses or what those people are supposed to do. We don't know how many of these data centers will be needed or how many people will be displaced. Nobody's told us what the limiting principles are. I mean, we don't even know who's. Who are. How many of these things are they going to put up and who's. We don't even know who's putting them up in the first place. There have been no national referendums or
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votes on any of this.
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And those of us who try to simply have this conversation are shouted down as being anti progress or somehow being tools. For the Chinese, this seems to be the answer from those leading the charge.
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Their answer is that they have no answer.
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And we must simply accept that.
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And we must simply accept that, you know, big tech companies are going to do whatever they want with AI because China.
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Which is to say that all the questions remain.
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The corporations that are using shell companies to buy farmland in Iowa aren't going to answer the questions. Neither will hysterical women screaming, you know, about entire counties being wiped off the face of the earth.
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But before we proceed any further with
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this expansion, hundreds of data centers are under construction as we speak.
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Someone in a position of power needs to do so.
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We need some actual answers.
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The AI data centers themselves are a
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very legitimate concern, yet still far less of a threat than the AI itself.
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And anyone who says otherwise, whether they
Podcast Host
realize it or not, is guaranteeing that big tech will get exactly what they want. That'll do it for the show today and this week. Talk to you on Monday of a great weekend. Godspeed.
Podcast Co-host
Martin Luther King Jr. Is an American icon widely considered one of the greatest
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Americans who ever lived. A man who had a vision for
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a colorblind society in post racial America. He had a dream. It's just not the dream you thought it was. Were his true aims a colorblind society or something far more radical? Who bankrolled him? What unfolded behind the scenes in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 was civil disobedience actually peaceful. We wanted to show you a clip, clip of the I have a dream speech. But according to our lawyers, we can't.
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In fact, King's family has made a
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lot of money suing media outlets. They want to silence critics like us. What they're doing makes it very difficult to judge Martin Luther King Jr. Not by the color of his skin, but
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by the content of his character.
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Is America today stronger, more unified and racially equal than before King's rise? These questions demand answers, and as Americans, we are entitled to a full accounting
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of the Civil Rights movement and its consequences.
Podcast Co-host
King's movement fundamentally transformed our country and our system of government.
Martin Luther King Jr. (clip)
I speak as a citizen of the world. Each day the war goes on. The hatred increases, though the cause of evil prospers.
Podcast Co-host
First part of our two part special on the civil Rights movement, a new Constitution, available now on Daily Wire. Plus.
Episode 1780 – Here’s What Nobody’s Telling You About AI Data Centers
Date: May 14, 2026
Host: Matt Walsh, The Daily Wire
This episode delivers a frank, critical examination of the rapid proliferation of AI data centers across the United States. Matt Walsh addresses overlooked consequences of their expansion, such as strain on local infrastructure, rising rents, the use of eminent domain, community displacement, water scarcity, and privacy risks. He warns against both uncritical embrace of “progress” and hyperbolic panic, calling instead for measured skepticism and a demand for answers from those in power.
On Data Center Prioritization:
“When the choice is between a big tech trillion dollar company or you and your single family home, the big tech company is going to win out every single time.” (02:17)
On Fear-Mongering:
“Fear mongering is the single fastest way to discredit legitimate concerns. And there are many legitimate concerns with these data centers.” (07:30)
On Shell Companies and Transparency:
“There’s no official record of how many of these are being built, where they are, or even who owns them.” – Investigative Reporter (21:05)
On the Loss of Community:
“Makes an ugly sound and actually reduces your quality of life in measurable and significant ways. It’s not a small thing.” (33:17)
On National Strategy:
“The AI data centers themselves are a very legitimate concern—yet still far less of a threat than the AI itself.” (44:51)
Matt Walsh argues the debate over AI data centers is being purposely derailed. Hysteria and denial detract from honest scrutiny of their real impacts: property seizures, displacement, rising costs, privacy loss, and the hollowing of local economies. The true threat is not just the data centers, but the unchecked expansion of AI-driven surveillance and control. He calls for transparency, public debate, and actual answers before further building.
Quote: “We need some actual answers. The AI data centers themselves are a very legitimate concern—yet still far less of a threat than the AI itself... Anyone who says otherwise, whether they realize it or not, is guaranteeing that big tech will get exactly what they want.” (44:44–45:00)
End of Summary