Welcome to Saturday's Potluck - 4-23-2022

“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”
Pablo Picasso

The data centers run 24 hours a day, humming along with power from Bonneville Dam. The systems are kept cool using outdoor air on cold days and nights, when insufficient there is water.

People and communities need to communicate with each other. Large data centers assist in the broad goals of efficiency and monitoring.

Meta seeks ways to boost water reserves in Crook County The Bulletin Dec 10, 2021
Facebook parent company implementing two water projects

Technological developments in the last decade, as well as the use of outside air for cooling, have allowed Meta’s data centers “to operate 80% more water efficiently on average compared to the industry standard,” said Melanie Roe, a spokesperson for Meta.

“We see opportunities for additional gains in the coming years, particularly as our infrastructure grows, and we’ll need to develop water-efficient designs for different climates,” Roe added.

Meta is under a microscope in the places where it operates as its data centers use large amounts of water to cool their servers and maintain optimal humidity levels. In Prineville, data centers source their water from the municipality.

In Prineville last year, Meta used 445,000 cubic meters of water, equivalent to 117.5 million gallons of water — enough water to fill 178 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Meta’s use of water is increasing. The data center, a collection of buildings, is still under construction and when complete will be a 4.6 million square foot campus.

To counter that water use, Meta is helping to fund an aquifer recharge project with the city of Prineville. A second project is restoring the degraded Ingram Meadow in the Ochoco National Forest.

Meta says the aquifer recharge project utilizes the natural storage found underground in the city to store water during cooler, wetter winters. A portion of the water can be recovered during hotter summer periods when water is less available.

The project, which became operational earlier this year, works by conveying a portion of winter stream flows in the Crooked River to the local groundwater supply through injection and extraction wells.

Authorities in Prineville are confident that the work being done won’t leave Prineville high and dry.

Guest column: Prineville, data centers and water: There is a cost The Bulletin

The Bulletin recently reported on an aquifer recharge project by the city of Prineville, which has received funding from Facebook and Apple, which use significant amounts of water to cool servers at their data centers in Prineville.
...
While efficiency is improving, data centers continue to use enormous amounts of water. According to the Oregon Water Resources Department’s Well Report Mapping Tool, the well on Facebook’s data center site has dropped 53 feet between 10/29/2010 and 4/2/2020. Further, Prineville has inadequate water supplies to meet its long-term needs for growth.

Prineville’s Aquifer Storage and Recovery project injects water underground for subsequent use. You can find the details of the project on the OWRD website. In summary, the purpose of the ASR project is to take groundwater from other locations and store it in the highly contained “Upper Aquifer” near the airport. The primary source of recharge water is new wells adjacent to the Crooked River just southeast of Meadow Lakes golf course. This transfer between aquifers will occur from Nov. 1 through March 31, essentially the nonirrigation season.

The Bulletin mistakenly reported that the source of the recharge water is the Crooked River itself. In fact, it is taken from wells recently drilled very close to the river that tap into alluvial deposits that are themselves recharged in the winter. Water is being moved from one aquifer to another. This will benefit Prineville’s municipal water supply and the data centers that use it, but there are associated environmental impacts.

In a healthy riparian ecosystem, wetlands and aquifers absorb water in wet periods that is later released, creating desirable habitat for fish and wildlife year -round. Unfortunately, wetlands have been drained and aquifers widely utilized in the Crooked River Basin for agricultural and municipal use. As a result, the Crooked River has been on life support for decades.

Withdrawing water in the winter from aquifers near the river negatively impacts their natural hydrologic function. The Bulletin’s article credits the ASR with recharging a single aquifer for municipal benefit and states there has been no negative impact on agriculture but does not consider environmental impacts.

In the summer, most of the Crooked River below Prineville is an ecological disaster with low flows, high temperatures and significant levels of pollution. Portions literally went dry last summer as spring chinook attempted to swim upriver to spawn. In the winter, the Deschutes Basin Habitat Conservation Plan requires water to be released into the river from Prineville Reservoir, but at flows lower than necessary for healthy fish habitat according to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and lower than called for in the 2014 Crooked River Act.
...
The bottom line is that data centers have provided economic benefits to Prineville, but they continue to be a drain on our environment.

________

Social media banning has replaced excommunication by religious authorities and physical exile by communities as the modern day method of control to purge infectious ideas from the public arena.

PEPE ESCOBAR – Big Tech’s ‘Cancel Culture’ Love Affair Consortium News April 21, 2022
Cancel culture is inbuilt in the techno-feudalist project: conform to the hegemonic narrative, or else. Journalism that does not conform must be taken down.

This month, several of us – Scott Ritter, myself, ASB Military News, among others – were canceled from Twitter. The – unstated – reason: we were debunking the officially approved narrative of the Russia/NATO/Ukraine war.

As with all things Big Tech, that was predictable. I lasted only seven months on Twitter. And that was long enough. Contacts in California had told me I was on their radar because the account grew too fast, and had enormous reach, especially after the start of Operation Z.

I celebrated the cancelation by experiencing an aesthetic illumination in front of the Aegean Sea, at the home of Herodotus, the Father of History. Additionally, it was heart-warming to be recognized by the great George Galloway in his moving tribute to targets of the new McCarthyism.
...
Cancel culture is inbuilt in the techno-feudalist project: conform to the hegemonic narrative, or else. In my own case regarding Twitter and Facebook – two of the guardians of the internet, alongside Google — I knew a day of reckoning was inevitable, because like other countless users I had previously been dispatched to those notorious “jails”.

On one Facebook occasion, I sent a sharp message highlighting that I was a columnist/analyst for an established Hong Kong-based media company. Some human, not an algorithm, must have read it, because the account was restored in less than 24 hours.

But then the account was simply disabled – with no warning. I requested the proverbial “review”. The response was a demand for proof of ID. Less than 24 hours later, came the verdict: “Your account has been disabled” because it had not followed those notoriously hazy “community standards.” The decision was “reviewed” and “it can’t be reversed”.
...
At the time, I discussed the matter with several Western analysts. As one of them succinctly put it, “You were ridiculing the U.S. president while pointing out the positives of Russia, China and Iran. That’s a deadly combination”.

Others were simply stunned: “I wonder why you were restricted as you work for a reputable publication.” Or made the obvious connections: “Facebook is a censorship machine. I did not know that they do not give reasons for what they do but then they are part of the Deep State.”
...
The “censorship trend” is a fact – for quite a while now. Take this U.S. State Department 2020 report identifying “pillars of Russia’s disinformation and propaganda ecosystem.”

State Dept. Directive

The late Pompeo-era report demonizes “fringe or conspiracy-minded” websites who happen to be extremely critical of U.S. foreign policy. They include Moscow-based Strategic Culture Foundation – where I’m a columnist – and Canada-based Global Research, which republishes most of my columns (but so does Consortium News, ZeroHedge and many other U.S. websites). I’m cited in the report by name, along with quite a few top columnists.
...
Every silicon fragment in the valley connects Facebook as a direct extension of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)’s LifeLog project, a Pentagon attempt to “build a database tracking a person’s entire existence.” Facebook launched its website exactly on the same day – Feb. 4, 2004 – that DARPA and the Pentagon shuttered LifeLog.

No explanation by DARPA was ever provided. The MIT’s David Karger, at the time, remarked, “I am sure that such research will continue to be funded under some other title. I can’t imagine DARPA ‘dropping out’ of such a key research area.”

Of course a smokin’ gun directly connecting Facebook to DARPA will never be allowed to surface. But occasionally some key players speak out, such as Douglas Gage, none other than LifeLog’s conceptualizer: “Facebook is the real face of pseudo-LifeLog at this point (…) We have ended up providing the same kind of detailed personal information to advertisers and data brokers and without arousing the kind of opposition that LifeLog provoked.”

So Facebook has absolutely nothing to do with journalism. Not to mention pontificating over a journalist’s work, or assuming it’s entitled to cancel him or her. Facebook is an “ecosystem” built to sell private data at a huge profit, offering a public service as a private enterprise, but most of all sharing the accumulated data of its billions of users with the U.S. national security state.

________

Which came first chicken or the egg? Does the order really matter? While everyone argues strength of censoring nonconforming voices or exploration of new ideas grows.

Former Intelligence Officials, Citing Russia, Say Big Tech Monopoly Power is Vital to National Security Glenn Greenwald April 20, 2022 (pretty sure my path to this link started with Evening Blues)

A group of former intelligence and national security officials on Monday issued a jointly signed letter warning that pending legislative attempts to restrict or break up the power of Big Tech monopolies — Facebook, Google, and Amazon — would jeopardize national security because, they argue, their centralized censorship power is crucial to advancing U.S. foreign policy. The majority of this letter is devoted to repeatedly invoking the grave threat allegedly posed to the U.S. by Russia as illustrated by the invasion of Ukraine, and it repeatedly points to the dangers of Putin and the Kremlin to justify the need to preserve Big Tech's power in its maximalist form. Any attempts to restrict Big Tech's monopolistic power would therefore undermine the U.S. fight against Moscow.
...
The ostensible purpose of the letter is to warn of the national security dangers from two different bipartisan bills — one pending in the Senate, the other in the House — that would prohibit Big Tech monopolies from using their vertical power to "discriminate” against competitors (the way Google, for instance, uses its search engine business to bury the videos of competitors to its YouTube property, such as Rumble, or the way Google and Apple use their stores and Amazon uses its domination over hosting services to destroy competitors).
...
This letter by former national security officials is, in one sense, an act of desperation. The bills have received the support of the key committees with jurisdiction over antitrust and Big Tech.
...
This is where these former intelligence and national security officials come in. While these former CIA, Homeland Security and Pentagon operatives have little sway in the Senate Judiciary and House Antitrust Committees, they command great loyalty from Congressional national security committees. Those committees, created to exert oversight of the U.S. intelligence and military agencies, are notoriously captive to the U.S. National Security State. The ostensible purpose of this new letter is to insist that Big Tech monopoly power is vital to U.S. national security — because it is necessary for them to censor “disinformation” from the internet, especially now with the grave Russian threat reflected by the war in Ukraine — and they thus demand that the anti-Big-Tech bills first be reviewed not only by the Judiciary and Antitrust Committees, but also the national security committees where they wield power and influence, which have traditionally played no role in regulating the technology sector:
...
It is unsurprising that Silicon Valley monopolies exercise their censorship power in full alignment with the foreign policy interests of the U.S. Government. Many of the key tech monopolies — such as Google and Amazon — routinely seek and obtain highly lucrative contracts with the U.S. security state, including both the CIA and NSA. Their top executives enjoy very close relationships with top Democratic Party officials. And Congressional Democrats have repeatedly hauled tech executives before their various Committees to explicitly threaten them with legal and regulatory reprisals if they do not censor more in accordance with the policy goals and political interests of that party.

Needless to say, the U.S. security state wants to maintain a stranglehold on political discourse in the U.S. and the world more broadly. They want to be able to impose propagandistic narratives without challenge and advocate for militarism without dissent. To accomplish that, they need a small handful of corporations which are subservient to them to hold in their hands as much concentrated power over the internet as possible.
...
Perhaps because of their current desperation about the support these bills have attracted, they are now just nakedly and shamelessly trying to channel the anger and hatred that they have successfully stoked toward Russia to demand that Big Tech not be weakened, regulated or restricted in any way. The cynical exploitation could hardly be more overt: if you hate Putin the way any loyal and patriotic American should, then you must devote yourself to full preservation of the power of Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon.

________

What is on your mind today? (Responses to Covid questions and dialog to be conducted at The Dose diary)

Share
up
15 users have voted.

Comments

Lookout's picture

Unacceptable views will NOT be allowed... we're in a mess. TPTB will decide which messengers are allowed and which must be disappeared. After all we're too stupid to choose to learn from different sources. We've got too many gatekeepers guarding knowledge and determining acceptable narratives. Though RT TV is not happening in the US, there is still https://www.rt.com/

Here's my favorite Ukraine reporter...
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0W9H2aAV_HE]
Kherson Ukraine exit. EU concedes 'gas for rubles' defeat. Alphabet truck troll.

As to cooling with water, I'm wondering if the future crypto mines in El Salvador will use ocean water for cooling. They're using geothermal (volcano) energy for the mining.

Thanks for the OT. I'm off to B'ham today, so see you tomorrow.

up
12 users have voted.

“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

lotlizard's picture

@Lookout  
By E.U. decree, in Germany the “rt.com” domain simply no longer resolves. The servers making up the Internet’s backbone have been jiggered to act as if no website with that domain name or IP address exists.

I don’t think government should have the power to order news and information sites suppressed in that fashion. They’re basically agreeing that, when the chips are down, the CPC in China has had the right idea all along and the “bourgeois” civil liberties I was educated to believe in were always just a sham.

up
10 users have voted.
enhydra lutris's picture

I don't know the terrain and speak from ignorance, but this line

Further, Prineville has inadequate water supplies to meet its long-term needs for growth.

caught my eye. First, let us agree that huge concentrated data centers or most any other industry using scarce non-renewable resources are a bad thing for both the environment and for humanity's future. However, that line is suspiciously invocative of the good old US dogma that growth for its own sake is some inherent good, grow or die, as it were. Growth, endless pointless growth is the root source of all of the other problems at some fundamental level, just saying.

Farmers' market again today, cool and overcast and nothing noteworthy to report here, except maybe that we have miniature baby pears and apricots appearing and have had a lot of spring rain, so perhaps we'll get good harvests this year.

be well and have a good one.

up
6 users have voted.

That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

snoopydawg's picture

@enhydra lutris

I have an electric tongue jack on the trailer and it still worked after the lights went out. Does that help figure things out? The battery was working, but not the lights. And I think they were working on the car, but didn’t notice at the time. The dashboard said they were. I’m just very confused.

up
2 users have voted.

Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

@snoopydawg

One is in the trailer, the other is in the towing vehicle via the plug at the tailgate.
The towing vehicle would power the lights: running lights, turn signals and brakes.
If the lifting mechanism works without being plugged into the towing rig, then it
is using a battery source on board the trailer.

Hope this helps

up
4 users have voted.
snoopydawg's picture

@QMS

I should have mentioned that last night that the battery was working for the tongue jack. The guy checked the vehicle plug from the car with his gadget and it was okay and the plug that connects to the car from the trailer is new. Car lights are working okay too. It’s certainly a conundrum. I’ll hook it up today and see if it was just a fluke but I’m stumped. Or maybe the fuse got bumped and he reset it when he fiddled with it.

Thanks.

A sad note…the Gilroy garlic festival has been canceled indefinitely. I loved going there during my days in the California sun and I always had a blast. Very sad if it’s gone for good.

up
6 users have voted.

Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

earthling1's picture

@snoopydawg
Could be you have an inverter on your trailer that converts your DC 12 volt to AC 110 volts.
I had a power outage on my rv, but the refridgerator still worked off the dual batteries through the inverter.
Hope that helps.

up
2 users have voted.

Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.

snoopydawg's picture

@earthling1

I hooked up and still the running lights didn’t turn on, but the blinkers and hazard lights worked and the backup camera was working even though I had the lights off and was disconnected from the car. I watched as I drove away from the lot and for about 1/2 mile. It’s only supposed to be on when connected and the lights are on. Before I left the trailer place we made sure that everything was working. Something got crossed when they installed the generator I guess, but it should have been immediately noticed not just stop working 10 minutes later.

up
3 users have voted.

Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

@snoopydawg

now you gonna drag a camera into the mix?
The camera must be powered by the trailer
but if you see it in the towing vehicle while it is
unplugged? That is just magic, unless it is WIFI
or something way beyond my ken.

The running lights issue is a cross wiring problem
most probably if you have brake lights and flashers.
It all runs off the same fuse in the car/truck.

Hard to believe these low voltage techs aren't a bit sharper.

Good luck.
My bill is in the mail Wink

up
3 users have voted.
enhydra lutris's picture

@snoopydawg

When you "lost your lights", was it just the running lights? If the tow is disconnected, the on board battery should still run the tongue jack and all of the interior lights. As QMS notes, the running lights, and tail/brake/turn lights should get their power from the tow. The running lights won't come on if the tow 's lights aren't on, but the camera shouldn't either. The genset shouldn't effect the running lights either.

Does your back up camera monitor run from the cig lighter or other auxillary plug-in power in the tow, or is it hardwired? Also, you said connector to tow from trailer is new - if so, it could've been mis-wired, as in the running light circuit was not well crimped in or something and came loose.

As an aside, the tow connectors can get slightly out, mine used to sometimes and I'd have to fiddle with it to get it seated just right or we'd lose brake lights, so that is something to play with. However, I find the camera suspect ===
Your tow provides power to 1) a charging circuit to charge trailer battery whenever engine is running (probably whenever ignition is on) 2) a circuit for the running lights whenever headlights are on 3) a group of/combined circuit for tail/brake/signal lights. 4) circuit for back-up lights if you have them, but this could be part of bundle/harness serving purpose #3. Back-up cams can often be switched from back-up function to rear-view mirror function and should be part of circuit 3 or 4. It sounds like yours is running off of circuit 1, but that shouldn't per se screw up the running lights. I suspect there is an open circuit where the running light circuit enters the new tow connector. Can you get to the inboard side of that thing where the wires go in?

be well and have a good one

up
2 users have voted.

That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

@enhydra lutris

perhaps I was getting confused about the camera
had assumed the camera was on the trailer but on
further thought, it is probably on the towing vehicle
and not related to the trailer
in my nightmare world of DC voltage circuits on the boats
there are cameras monitoring the bow from the mast
astern and engine room which is switchable, then fed to
a monitor at the helm(s)
easily led astray and I'm sure this doesn't help you much
I think EL's assessment is valid
a weak connection in the towing harness would explain
the problem, probably at the plug

up
3 users have voted.
snoopydawg's picture

@QMS

and I didn’t know if it runs on WiFi, but it’s obvious that it does. But it’s only supposed to come on when I’m connected to the car and the headlights are on. Today I wasn’t connected and I turned the lights off, but it was on anyway. I thought they must have futzed with the wiring when they installed the generator. It’s the only thing I could think of for how screwed up it is now. I should have said that I had no picture on the monitor in the car yesterday. Today it shouldn’t have had a picture without the car being connected and the lights off. Or like EL said it’s in the plug which was working until it just didn’t anymore. But that’s what doesn’t make sense. I didn’t know things could just break like that in it’s firm setting.

I’ll let you guys know after they fix it. Thanks though for trying to help. Just remember that I’m a dawg that doesn’t know much about cars and things like that. Smile

up
2 users have voted.

Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

enhydra lutris's picture

@QMS

rear and powered from taillight or running lights (if properly installed) and is WiFi linked to the monitor which normalls just sits on the dash and runs off of the cig lighter or some acc socket. It can usually be configured, sometimes via monitor or sometimes at the cam to run as back-up only or as full time rear view mirror.

be well and have a good one

up
1 user has voted.

That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

snoopydawg's picture

@enhydra lutris

But for some reason the camera is now being powered by the battery which shouldn’t happen because it wasn’t wired that way. With my luck it’s now sucked the battery dry and the jack won’t have any power to lower it on the hitch. The manual crank is damn hard to use and it took me 30 minutes to raise it. But I have a battery power pack that should work. But good grief how can things get so messed up just like that? It’s like some gremlin rewired all the connections while I traveled 10 minutes. I just find this very baffling. And frustrating!

I was going to name the trailer the dawg house, but might change it to the fcking money pit.

up
2 users have voted.

Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

enhydra lutris's picture

@snoopydawg

touching one or more things it shouldn't, like a different bit of bare wire. Generator install, imho, properly done, doesn't go anywhere near battery, but, like shore power, goes to the power center/inverter/fusebox module and connection to battery from the latter is already pre-existing, but who knows. We always just carried our generator in the back of the truck and pulled it out and set it up on the ground when needed, but it was a fairly compact and light weight unit.

be well and have a good one

up
1 user has voted.

That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

@snoopydawg
with a ground wire.

up
1 user has voted.
snoopydawg's picture

@enhydra lutris

Yes I know that the tow lights come on only when connected to the car. Before I left the trailer place I made sure that they were working including flashers and blinkers and it’s only when connected and the car lights are on that the backup camera works. Supposedly. It’s how it’s always worked before. Everything was copacetic until I pulled in to the storage place and started backing up. That’s when I noticed the camera was off, but it had been on minutes later earlier cuz I looked at it as I made the turn into the place. And that was when I noticed that the running lights were off too.

Today the camera shouldn’t have had a signal after I unplugged again and turned the car lights off. It plugs into the cigarette hole and only turns on when it’s connected to the car and the lights are on. Until today. It shouldn’t have been working as I drove off with the car lights off.

Also, you said connector to tow from trailer is new - if so, it could've been mis-wired, as in the running light circuit was not well crimped in or something and came loose.

Newish last year and before a couple of trips. I only mentioned the power to the jack because you guys mentioned the battery last night and I only thought about it this morning.

All I know that is I plug the cable from the trailer into my car and turn on the headlights and both the lights and camera come on. 4 previous trips I had no problem. Everything went south after I had the generator installed. I’m taking it in Monday and they can figure it out.

Anyway thanks for your help!

up
3 users have voted.

Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

to a pleasant evening.
I bought some new clippers, got out into the yard and cut out weeds, and invasive wisteria from a couple of flower beds. My Dear One set out the Blue Tooth speakers on the front porch, and the first round of snipping had the Irish Rovers in the background. The second round featured Commander Cody.
We have abundant water here, so far. I worry about fracking water stations springing up that will drain the aquifer. The no-good bastards. Texas fracking corps. have enormous sway over our state legislators.
Saturday night, in this perfect weather, begs for beef tacos. Gotta eat some, folks. It's Texas, after all.

up
5 users have voted.

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981