SundayX | Coffee All I have to offer this morning is a stout cup of black coffee. The kind that will put hair on your chest as my grandfather always said. There's a lot I could talk about this morning but I'm not sure if it would help or hurt. When it's not clear to me my words will help, I opt to keep them to myself. My opinion is like everyone else's. So, with everything going on in the world around us, this is what's on my mind this morning— In planning and preparing for a garden this year being outsidoors has been profound medicine for me. It always has been. Nature conservation and the health of our local habitats has long been an interest of mine. I'm also a tech enthusiast and have found AI to be a valuable tool. I'm not using it as much these days but it still has a place in my life as a practical tool. I've been closely following data centers in the news. There is a widespread tendency to link their sole purpose to AI and this assumption isn't correct. Though the arrival of AI has brought more data centers. Data centers have been around for a while. Think broader— it's the whole Internet and all of our collective actions online. From this post to your personal business dealings and everything in between. It's the cloud. It's storage. Data centers are infrastructure. Individually, we each generate gigabytes on our phones daily. That's just our phones. How much do our laptops, computers, tablets, smart devices etc. generate. Now add all of our gigabytes up for 8.3 billion users and the picture starts getting clear. I fully understand the concern about data centers, I share this concern. How will this impact our local habitats? Water & energy consumption? Is it valid for the expense of operations to be passed onto the locals? (Short answer, no.) Are these data centers being built on land previously depended on for food production? (Yeah.) There's some ironies here. Personally for me as a nature lover I think it's obvious what the irony is. In a broader sense across society people at times feel justified in railing people who use AI but the irony here is they aren't sans AI themselves. Not if they do anything at all online or use a smart phone. The truth is we all drive the "need" for data centers and feed it every single day to some degree. Use and time online may vary widely from personal to corporate and business purposes but it all adds up. Ironic that we are only able to increase our understanding so quickly by obtaining and sharing information online. Alongside AI. Oversight of new data centers has been insufficient and little to nothing has been done to address community concerns. These concerns are hardly even acknowledged on a national level by representatives on the left or the right and when I have seen concerns addressed it was in city halls to large numbers of extremely concerned citizens. Their concern is understandable. Valid. A little transparency goes a long long way. Can a tech company wanting to build one of these data centers show how they will mitigate these concerns and not endlessly consume precious resources or destroy habitats? If they can, why don't they? Why no public comment period? I hope I've helped increase understanding on data centers and cleared up the misconception that these are because of AI only. I believe them to be part of our infrastructure in the digital age. AI is not our enemy, it's technology guided by user input. Every single user online drives the data center issue & engages AI whether they use Chat bots or not. Bottom line though, water is life. New land is not in production. Acreage is finite. This is the only place we have to call home. Habitats are connected just like we are and their health is our health. There has to be transparency and accountability. I hope you guys have a beautiful Sunday. I'm going outside to dig in the dirt. Thanks for having coffee with me.