It’s the size of tiny lake. For context, Lake Meade has about 250 square miles of surface area and an average depth of 180 feet.

The reservoir my city of half a million people gets its water from is 15 square miles and 20 feet deep. 2.5 billion gallons is maybe 5% of our reservoir’s total volume.

This headline is textbook fearmongering. They are intentionally misrepresenting the magnitude of water usage to make you fear data centers. There are plenty of reasons to be wary of them, but water usage is not one of them.

The authors of this article are either assuming you’re to dumb to do simple volume conversions or worse, too stupid to do them themselves. I suspect the latter since they use inconsistent units throughout the article. Liters per kWh, cubic meters, gallons, etc.

You don’t hate journalists enough.

A lot of parents will tell you they’ve potty trained their kids and also tell you their two-year-old wets the bed evey other week.

Solving the technical challenges and using that solution profitably are two completely different things.

In a fiat currency system there is no meaningful constraint on the supply of money. We’re experiencing the effects of that feature of the fiat system currently. Tying the supply of money to a rare commodity like gold may create other problems, but it completely solves the issue of currency devaluation.

For the record, the world was on the gold standard when the agricultural and industrial revolutions occurred. It’s not at all obvious to me that the gold standard prevents productivity growth.

The folks I know who were previously sympathetic the constraints on government overreach watched state and federal governments impose policies that made no sense for their communities and were actively detrimental to their livelihoods and enforce those policies with fines and even jail time in some instances.

These people would have been against the tactics ICE is using in 2019. Today they’re ambivalent. The attitude is “what comes around goes around.”

Following an ethical code in international affairs constrains the nation following it. It provides an asymmetric advantage to others who choose not to follow that code.

This is partly why China has become so powerful over the past three decades. They chose to ignore western ethical codes around intellectual property rights, fair trade, environmental protections, and human rights. They are powerful today in no small part to their willingness to disregard these things.

This is difficult for people to understand because in interpersonal relationships following an ethical code is 100% the path to healthy and meaningful relationships, and most modern history education attempts to anthropomorphize past interactions between nations. But the cold fact is that international politics is nothing like interpersonal relationships.

A nation can encourage other nations to follow their ethical code by threatening to use force if they don't. They can create incentives to encourage nations to change their behavior through trade or treaty. But I can't think of a single time in history when a nation was such a shining star of morality that they inspired other nations to change their ways and adopt their ethics.

You can't expect other nations to respect your nation's moral and ethical values when they don't care about them in the first place and in fact hope that you choose to follow them to the fullest extent so that you're easier to compete against.