I’m back for a couple of weeks in my hometown of Rochester, New York, where everyone is bitching about how much it’s raining. The ground is so wet enormous trees are uprooting themselves. Ponds, creeks and streams are overflowing their banks. Hell, you can’t even mountain bike. Instead of moo n dust, the trails here are like peanut butter. In Rochester, people see rain in the forecast and begin mentally preparing for the second coming of Noah’s Ark. Here, clouds don’t gather to sustain the ecosystem or replenish hidden aquifers. They conspire to thwart outdoor brunches, Little League games and weddings. To ruin new shoes. To cause freshly coiffed hairdos to frizz up to gargantuan proportions. Coming from the drought-stricken West, the amount of water here feels almost obscene. Amid the Great Lakes and the Finger Lakes, it rains about every third or fourth day. That’s about 162 bad hair days a year — even more than Seattle. Whenever I come back, the lushness — the technicolor greenness of it all — hits me right in the face. The scent of lilacs and wisteria perfume the air. Enormous leafy canopies casually throw shade onto the ground like a teenager tossing clothes on the bedroom floor. In Utah, we’re told to take shorter showers, but here in Rochester, by all means, feel free to water your lawn with a fire hose. In the zombie apocalypse, this is where I’ll be coming. Because this is the place where all of us — even the zombies — will have so much water we won’t know what to do with it. And my little hometown city, the one I couldn’t wait to escape, will accidentally become one of the most valuable places on Earth. My brother and I still joke about an old “Underdog” cartoon villain, the megolomaniacal mad scientist Simon Bar Sinister who’d invent crazy technologies like a gun that turned people into snowmen or a tickle-feather machine that forced the entire world to laugh uncontrollably. He’d set massively absurd goals like I’ll steal all the world’s water. I can’t remember what he was going to do with it, but it had something to do with “Money and power and money and power and money and power and money and power!” Today, that cartoon logic doesn’t seem so absurd, what with real-life villains like “Mr. Wonderful” Kevin O’Leary and his unanimouly approved and publicly despised AI data center in Box Elder County. Perched in a director’s chair on Fox News in a blue suit and pink flip flops, he claimed that not only will the data center not use as much water as the rest of us mini-brains think, but it will actually return what little it does use to the Great Salt Lake. And at the same time as O’Leary is lecturing us on environmental issues, Gov. Spencer Cox is chiding Utahns on water conservation with the entire state in severe drought. All while welcoming a data center so vast it will create its own heat island, raising surrounding temperatures by as much as 3% and fundamentally changing the microclimate of the area. How nice of Gov. Cox to reassure us that water is the least of our worries. Nothing sounds real anymore. Not when a drought emergency and a desert data center co-exist in a single press conference. The pile of absurdist claims is getting deeper than a Simon Bar Sinister plot. Though I suspect that Cox and O’Leary will soon be announcing that absurdist claims can actually produce water. That seems about right for the state of America right now. One part of the country is drowning in fresh water, while the other part is drying up. Meanwhile, tech-bro billionaires promise the answers to climate change, world peace and male pattern baldness will come from giant compounds in the desert. Resources be damned. Technology will magically transcend the laws of nature — of humanity itself. Some nod politely while the rest of us rage against the machine. But it’s mostly in vain as even our loudest protests are drowned out by those with money and power and money and power and money and power. I read recently that China is experimenting with underwater AI data centers, an idea that actually sounds much more logical than giant server farms in our drought-stricken desert. Call me crazy, but last time I checked, the ocean had plenty of water. Hey, here’s a thought! If the Chinese can do it, why can’t we? Yeah, let’s try one in the Atlantic Ocean. And since Kevin O’Leary likes data centers so much, why don’t we just put one in the ocean right near his house in Miami Beach! There’s a bunch of other data-centerphiles there who I’m pretty sure would be all over the project. Zuck, Bezos, Thiel — what do you say? I don’t know much about data centers, but I’m pretty sure the idea could hold water. The post Betty Diaries: A data center idea that holds water appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less