Their only chance would have been if appliance companies wouldn't be dumb enough to put a simple refrigerator on the public internet in the first place.

Yes there are many examples of worse behavior from them and many other large tech companies.

Among other things, that system is adding a lot of salt to those fields and polluting our water with all the runoff.

Did it allow us to feed more people and grow the population? Yes, no question. But is that going to prove to be sustainable long term? We'll see what happens if and when those inputs are no longer available at scale.

For sure this is being politicized, for example claiming that the area was reduced to sand due to an overheated data center market. But to clear the land before doing legally required environmental impact studies is a pretty obvious mistake, and frankly I'm not sure how you'd even have landed on a plan for land clearing before doing said study if its required. How would you know what areas to clear, for example?

But if the government, which gives us the H1B and similar programs, doesn't like the incentives said programs created, why not get rid of or redefine the laws?

Connect some dots for me here, where is the racism you claim?

Even if they are paying foreign workers less, which isn't substantiated here by data, that is someone willing to do the same job for less money and doesn't clearly have anything to do with race. The job market is a market, markets aren't equal for all participants or its racism.

That may be uncommon but it is not a fiction. I worked as a contract for one of the telco companies for a couple years by choice. My boas would regularly ask about making me full time, I was getting paid a bit more as a contractor, didn't need the benefits, and my work was otherwise identical to what it would be full-time. Why bother?

I can't imagine Canada or Europe could support their current population sizes without HVAC, or refrigeration, or pesticides and herbicides.

The list goes on, but in my opinion and understanding there is too strong of a correlation to ignore between those types of modern inventions and population growth.

All are fully off grid though, to a point that I wouldn't be willing to do without a forcing function.

They all help each other out with various projects and are active in the community, as an example of off grid not being anti-society. All six are active in the local Democratic party, and they may be half our county's active Democrats...this is a very red state.

I live somewhere in the middle. We aren't off grid but we are slowly moving more in that direction with solar and rainwater projects on the list. We raise a good portion of our own food, I'd assume a little over half given that most meat, dairy, and eggs are from our land. I also work in tech though, and regularly go into town for various reasons. I'm not building a doomsday bunker, after having lived in close to a dozen cities and two countries I just find that I disagree with certain aspects of modern infrastructure (mostly related to food production, energy use, and waste).

That doesn't mean those already I'll should just give up, it means those looking to their future should consider whether living 20 more healthy years is better than living 40 more years if 30 of those are increasingly focused on just treating symptoms to wake up tomorrow.

We've populated large portions of the planet that we really have no business living in without climate controlled indoor environments. HVAC is also a huge energy suck with all the externalities that come along with it. If we were to really want to cut energy use, for example, and climate control had to go we almost certainly couldn't continue to sustain as many people as we have today.

That has nothing to do with creativity as its own concept. Its creative to invent flight similar to the Wright brothers. Its also creative to use a stick to get termites from their nest or come up with new techniques for hunting pray.