Which makes Arizona an interesting place to place any new builds of any sort of data center. They’ve been talking about the scarcity of resources there for years, and it’s currently in an escalating tailspin of abundance. Power is cheap as hell there, but once the water dries up… things might change quickly.
There's also a power generation water cost though!
Something like 500g/MWh for gas/coal/nuclear (~70% of power in AZ), so a huge xAI datacenter (Colossus 2, ~1 GW/h) would use ~700 MW of this type, or ~350k gallons of water an hour, which would be 0.2% of the Colorado rivers flow rate last year.
Pulling recent data from the EIA, of the roughly 10,000 megawatts of new power capacity installed in Arizona between 2023 and 2025, 50% is batteries, 40% solar, 6.5% wind, and 3.5% gas. Now, most solar and wind plants rarely if ever hit their nameplate capacity, but it’s pretty clear the large majority of new power generation isn’t consuming water.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/eia860/
Does that change the math above if they're tied into the grid?
If they're tied directly to the renewables (Meta is doing this in some places), then true, not a technical increase. But you could still maybe claim they're instead preventing the equivalent reduction on average/grid (and, say, decommission of some of that coal). I suppose that's a separate point.
If it’s truly separated (no interconnect agreement) or generation capacity is below 1 MW, it won’t show up in EIA data, yes. Rooftop solar is also not included in the data for that reason.
It's the type of situation where that amount of water use isn't going to move the needle very much even in the desert, but building thermal power plants there there is still kind of silly because a) deserts are generally well-suited to solar, and b) you could also build thermal power plants in places like the midwest where that amount of water use is totally irrelevant.
Ok, those are truly closed loop. As in, they use ambient cooling or active chillers. I've seen too many cooling tower sites described as closed-loop because the internal system is.
Haha all of those are .today aliases. Not sure the hate over him ddosing the guy doxxing him. .today’s paywall circumvention is also why miscellaneous groups have tried to report him to the FBI over planted CSAM material, among other horrible harassment. I think we should all give him a second chance for the huge amount of time, both before and after the stupid and short lived ddos incident, that he has dedicated to archiving.
His identity must be secretive, as he has already drawn the ire of many powers that be, so… I personally think the ddos incident was justified… and I’m glad my bandwidth helped in any way, frankly. Some people seem to really want to portray him as some shady evil bad guy, and after all the hit jobs against him in the past year or two, I really wonder who these anti-archive.today people actually are and what they’re motivations are (besides money).
I think the fact they are known to have changed the content of archived pages is way worse than the DDoS incident, since it makes them untrustworthy even as a source of information. Wikipedia decided to ban all archive.today (and aliases) links because of that
My house is a ~700 sqft. condominium, gov. subsidized for lower income individuals, and even my mortgage is more than 300k… maybe I’m just basing my info off of coastal city prices, but is it possible to buy a reasonably nice home located in a reasonably nice amerikkkan city… for $300k in 2026?
Can you ground the discussion by mentioning what you think these cities are? Taking Columbus, OH as the most average of American cities and a 20m isochrone map from city center, there are currently 0 parcels for sale with 3+ ("several") acres under $300k. There are a few within 30m drive, one of which even has a possibly habitable structure. The rest are bare agricultural land you'd need additional investment to actually live on.
I'm just looking at Kansas City as an example right now.
Tons in the $200s btw, and this is in the city less than 20 minutes from the Nelson-Atkins Museum, WW I museum, the river, farmers market, KC Chiefs / Royals / Sporting KC / KC Current teams, parks, schools, newly rebuilt international airport, etc.
I picked the convention center as city center (union station would also be a reasonable choice) and I was only able to find 2 improved lots under $300k. Notably, neither is quite 3+ acres or within 20 minutes of the things you listed, and both are on septic. And this is in a metro where home prices are 36% below national median.
First if you us the convention center, you place the housing center off of where most of the housing actually is. Maybe 40% is in Kansas, with another 60% in the metro being on the Missouri side, roughly. The population density of the metro drags further south though if you look at it on a heatmap.
First if you us the convention center, you place the housing center off of where most of the housing actually is.
Convention centers are usually downtown. Mean population centers reflect the surrounding geography and can drift pretty far from an "idealized" circular urban area. My area's is out on an island for example, nowhere near downtown. Jackson county's is east of Raytown. I'm not sure why you'd specifically want to live within 20 minutes of the mean population center, so it wasn't the obvious interpretation of your original statement.
Between $175k and $350k center on KCMO alone there are over 760 results.
No, there are 17 results once you filter for 2+ acres. Most of them are mislabeled or unimproved property. If you filter those out too (because this is a housing discussion), what remains within 20-30ish minutes are the two I linked.
I realize multiple acres of land is a bit of a silly requirement, but you're the one who suggested there are tons of houses with "several acres within 20 minute drive to a lot of US city downtown areas". That's why I was surprised.
> That would buy you thousands of square feet and often several acres within 20 minute drive to a lot of US city downtown areas.
This is my direct quote.
Let me break this down:
1. That would buy you thousands of square feet
True, clearly seen in the search results.
2. and often several acres
True, you just filtered down to several results currently on the market.
> I realize multiple acres of land is a bit of a silly requirement
Why? I live slightly further than 20min outside of town. There are massive, beautiful homes with tons of land out here, and tons have gigabit fiber from GFiber or several of the other providers in the area.
But that's not a requirement if you don't want it to be! There are clearly tons of homes available in the city with 3-4+ bedrooms and 2+ bathrooms in the $200 and $300ks is the point.
Desirable neighborhoods are by definition expensive. The trick is to find a neighborhood you like where your home can just be a home and not a top-heavy investment.
Acknowledging this isn’t always easy or possible, but just pointing out that this is a self reinforcing problem.
> is it possible to buy a reasonably nice home located in a reasonably nice amerikkkan city… for $300k in 2026?
What does "city" mean to you? For some, it's 500 people, or 5,000. For some, it's 5 million. Define that first. The US is a big place, and I know people that don't live within 50 miles of another human.
If the extra $200/month means you can’t afford it, you probably shouldn’t be buying a house…
Yeah that sounds cruel and messed up, because it is. I don’t like how expensive real estate is and I wish we could have another 2008 without a bailout. But the point stands. If you hafta pick between eating and paying your mortgage, you made a bad financial decision. Blame whoever you want, I am of the opinion that people still have agency and are responsible for their decisions, as unpopular as that seems to be these days.
I just bought a Framework Desktop. Would have been nice to get it at the introductory price, or perhaps the new 192gb model refresh they’re now teasing, but I settled and got a 64 gb model. At the time, the 128’s price had already risen again, but the 64’s price was still at a lower price.
64 can still easily do a Qwen 4.8 model, so I’m relatively happy with my purchase… plus, it’s price change has caused it to quickly appreciate in value… so I could sell it if my situation ever turned dire lol
“Old man yells at cloud”
lol, but seriously, you’re definitely correct. Bloated binaries and unnecessary frameworks (electron and soon, tauri). Everything is built for the web, then forced into a broken and bloated mobile app and desktop binary. Zero platform optimization anymore.
I keep my chromium and chromium profile loaded into a ram drive, and it’s still slow and sluggish. Tech debt and a growing monorepo has damaged it beyond recovery. I really hope those two new browser engines reach a usable state soon. Chromium, WebKit, gecko have been doing for too long without a full foundational overhaul.
Yes buuuut…. I do quite a bit of day trading (maybe closer to scalping) for the first few hours the market is open, everyday. Anecdotally: despite everyone knowing its valuation was ridiculous, I rode that SpaceX train pretty hard and made a pretty penny.
I close-out all my positions by end-of-trading everyday… so when the day came when there was a very clear and very scary indicator during early trading hours, quickly followed by SpaceX’s catastrophic fall right after opening bell, that was the end of my involvement….
And I fully expect oAI and anthro to be the same way. They’re being propped up with private loans, subsidies, and other tricky bookkeeping techniques. You would think their CEOs would pivot away from their current public personas. Ironically, they are like a poor man’s Elon Musk… and that doesn’t bode well for their companies
I think its way different in the EU vs the USA. In the United States, the number of people with passports HAS dramatically increased in the past 30 years, going from ~5% to a little more than 50%; but we mainly use them for traveling once or twice / getting into bars when you’re a 22yo with a misplaced driver’s license.
More relevant to the topic at hand, it’s extremely rare to receive an unsolicited call to an American phone number from a number outside the +1 country code. So I’m sure when an immigrant in the US gets an unknown call from their home country code, they can be pretty sure the call’s intentional and worth answering
> it’s extremely rare to receive an unsolicited call to an American phone number from a number outside the +1 country code.
Can't be THAT rare, can it? Isn't 15% of the current population in the US immigrants? Most of us immigrants do receive and make calls to our "mother country" every once in a while, even introverts like me. Or maybe you were excluding immigrants in that as you mention immigrants later?
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