Joe Thompson

Seems like I recall a famous novel in which the former UK is now known as Airstrip One...

That last pic, though. "Yes, since you asked, everything here is mine. However, when I am done I may, in my majestic benevolence, leave a few morsels for the birds."

So many people forget that "you get what you measure" is not just an observation, but can be a call to action!

Remember when the universally-accepted answer to "but what about credit card fraud in e-commerce?" was "we'll all have card readers attached to our computers over this new 'USB' thing"?

It often is. I should dip into one of my bottles from a local distillery.

When I heard he'd died in 2003 it felt like a punch in the gut.

Also Mr. Rogers was a kindly uncle on TV but he was a pit bull where doing right by kids was concerned. His testimony before the Senate in favor of PBS funding in 1969 is a six-minute masterclass in arguing persuasively without being rude or aggressive but also without giving an inch.

When I think back and realize that we had Reading Rainbow, Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, Joy of Painting, *and* Sesame Street all on PBS together from 1983 to 1994... well quite frankly I mourn for what we have lost. The Oregon Trail Generation didn't know how good we had it.

(The report suggested the reason for seasonality is not known with certainty though.)

And the winter spraying on fields with no food crops is even worse in that respect -- which may tie into something I saw in a local news station video, that some of the monitoring wells display seasonality in the levels of nitrates, with levels highest in the spring.

i.e. the crops are already taking up everything they can, any additional levels of nitrates in the sprayed wastewater are just additional excess.

(Or somebody is doing something even worse that isn't yet known, like disposing of nitrate-laden wastewater in an injection well that's discharging into the aquifer instead of below it.)

Because of the uptake of nitrates by crops, presumably? It's a thought, but the fact that *any* nitrates are making it down to the aquifer suggests there is already excess from e.g. the direct application of fertilizer.

If you see this, repost with your model of positive masculinity.

(My Fantastic Four of positive male role models are Mr. Rogers, Bob Ross, @levarburton.bsky.social, and Gordon from Sesame Street.)

(Random info-morsel -- while checking the Wikipedia article for Costco I ran across the phrase "forced monkey labor" which I think is the first time I've heard of such a thing.)

So we've now ended up in a timeline where Costco, the third-largest retailer in the world, is suing a Republican administration for its business-harming actions.

But when the culture-warriors became ascendant and made their agenda the dominant one, the business and rule-of-law Republicans were shunted aside and their concerns given lip service or none at all as policies actively harmful to business interests were implemented.

They were happy to travel in the same direction as the culture warriors as long as what was done at least didn't damage their own pro-business agenda. Mostly it didn't, or at least what damage it did was offset by tax breaks and the like.

To my recollection a large part of the pre-2016 never-Trump Republicans were old-school Eisenhower and Reagan types: "the business of America is business" and such.

My own vote goes to good old stone engravings. There are petroglyphs and stone inscriptions tens of thousands of years old at sites all over the world that are still legible today.

Data nerds, let's start a fight: what medium of written data storage do you think has historically pulled off the best combination of data density and durability? Say, from the beginning of humanity up to computer punched cards.

The point is that *wherever* it ends up, if it's not appropriately treated beforehand it's going to exacerbate water quality issues at the point of return.

Look at the keywords in your own text: "extracting... concentrating... returning". If I extract ten gallons of contaminated water from the ground, evaporate 5 gallons of pure water from it, and pour the remaining 5 gallons back into the ground, I've raised the concentration of the contaminant.

Data Drain: The Land and Water Impacts of the AI Boom - Lincoln Institute of Land Policy Communities across the US are wooing data centers with tax breaks and other incentives. But data centers are resource-ravenous, creating demands for land, water, and power that many host communities are not prepared to meet.

Even in a relatively humid area like Northern Virginia, evaporative datacenter cooling has raised concerns about wastewater: www.lincolninst.edu/publications...

"Evaporative cooling also leaves behind high concentrations of salts and other contaminants, she adds, creating water quality issues."

(Or at least, I'd want to see data before just assuming that balance is maintained.)

That's only true if the exact same amount (or more) of water goes back into the aquifer as is pulled out. It doesn't seem likely that in a semi-arid environment like eastern Oregon, there is no net loss of water after being processed through an evaporative cooling loop (and then sprayed on fields).

Anniversary of halifax explosion so obligatory

"Hold up the train. Ammunition ship afire in harbour making for Pier 6 and will explode. Guess this will be my last message. Good-bye boys."
- Vincent Coleman

saved like 300 people on a train, and started the emergency response. Died for it

Maybe the illnesses were there all along too, just not quantified. Or maybe there was some sort of tipping-point reached. Maybe something else entirely, not yet discovered, is going on. But I would say the correlation in time on its face is not easily just dismissed out of hand.

The lines aren't drawn as clearly there, but the proposition is that this is a problem that was growing slowly since monitoring started in 1991, then suddenly in the last few years became much worse very quickly. The ag businesses have been there quite awhile but Amazon is a more recent arrival.

(And what they plan to do about their part in the results, however indirect those results were from their own actions.)