wild to see new york times doing a piece on central washington https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/25/technology/ai-data-centers-electricians.html?unlocked_article_code=1.kE4.ZTQZ.eXmmXjcNivCI&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
another important piece that they don’t mention is that the profit from all of this electricity usage goes to the Public Utility Districts, nonprofit cooperative entities which were set up because rich people didn’t want to sell farmers power
those utility districts have been spending that money on public infrastructure like fiber, without which none of this would be possible
for a while Ephrata, WA (tiny town in the middle of nowhere) had the fastest internet in the country measured as average speed available to individual households, because Grant County P.U.D. simply gave everyone a publicly owned fiber hookup because what else are they going to spend the money on
(here is a source for that last bit: <https://www.dailydot.com/debug/ephrata-washington-fastest-internet-us/>)
at least aluminum smelters were mentioned
skimmed it for mention of Hanford, upstream
wild not to see that tied into the Three Mile Island reference
@idlestate yeah they try to sell the dams as this thing done for purely economic and business reasons when the real reason was aluminum manufacturing for World War II and other military pursuits
yeah I don't know where the New Deal jobs+"reclamation" left off and the war stuff picked up but I feel like I've come far enough to at least ask those questions
the newest-to-me part is realizing how much more closely (than to now) all that fell on the heels of Manifest Destiny
😟
@idlestate it’s definitely a bit complicated, while also in other ways simple. i grew up in Moses Lake, whose agriculture comes from the Columbia Basin Irrigation Project, which yes was a public works project coming off of the Great Depression which had been planned for a while. but Moses Lake is on the map today largely because it has one of the longest runways in the United States, which was built (as i understand) because they wanted an army air base which was closer to Boeing but far enough inland as to not be a target for Japan. (Boeing still tests and repairs all their planes there once they leave Everett, including experimental military planes.)
ooh that is such a rich set of connections. I really appreciate you passing that along from a personal perspective.
for the record people were flocking there for the cheap electricity prior to A·I, including:
• silicon manufacturing
• carbon fiber plants
• unmanned aerial vehicle testing and manufacturing
• and yes, bitcoin miners