Don't mistake intelligence or education for wisdom. Certainly, don't mistake the pretense of intellect for wisdom. We have had too many "smartest people in the room" presenting complex technocratic solutions that are ultimately just houses of cards. The fruits born by technocrats are rotten. Latin America is awash in examples of it, as are we. The ACA is a prime example of a technocratic solution that was entirely unwise despite having been created by experts from MIT and Harvard. Extraordinarily complex with a number of shifting parts that break at the slightest touch.

Don't get me wrong - intellect and education are vital. Intellectualism, however, is just pretense and pomposity expressed through academic jargon.

Europe like America gives too much money to its 1%. The only way to maintain their economies is with cheap goods made by slave labor in China. That's the only way to offset increasingly large amounts of money being moved from the bottom to the top.

If you want to fix that you have to cut off the flow of money to the top and we're not going to do that. There's a variety of terrible reasons why that is the case but it just is.

I honestly do not know a solution to prevent human civilization from collapsing. I suspect that within 10 or 20 years we are going to hand nuclear launch codes over to religious lunatics and that's going to be gave over for humanity.

I definitely do not know how we avoid regressing back into feudalism even if we don't destroy our species. People just like worshiping rulers and kings and the ones that don't don't have the tendencies towards violence that the ones that do have. If it's one thing Afghanistan taught us it's that a very small number of idiots willing to use terrible violence can install a very very small number of people as absolute rulers.

We could counter this with education and critical thinking but even among people who should be well educated all I'm hearing is how we should all go into the trades and be plumbers or whatever. Anti-intellectualism and a hatred and disdain for experts dominates discourse now. That overpowering 12-year-old urge to not be told what to do has completely overwhelmed society and I do not know how you push back against that.

Basically don't tell me what to do.

I'm trying to figure out why anyone looks at this as water being used up. The water comes from the municipality's source and runs through pipes to get to your home or place of business. Who cares if some of those pipes are in a datacenter? What could it possibly be picking up from those pipes that would make it unsafe to drink straight from the data center's outflow? Temperature?

Please, someone tell me why the water used by a data center can't go back into the potable water supply.

Are they evaporating it? That would seem to be unnecessarily wasteful. I have a water cooler on my PC, and it just circulates water through a radiator.
No, I'm not saying the centers can use closed loops, but they sure don't need to waste clean water by boiling it off.

Here's where this ceases to make any sense - why does anyone think the water comes out dirty? Clean water goes in, warm clean water comes out. It just went through a bunch of pipes. Just like it does in everyone's house, and the mains, etc. If it's so hot that it evaporates, great! Put a cover over the evaporator and get even cleaner distilled water out (not that it got dirty).

Why are we making this an issue?

When temples (really entire cities) have been overtaken by jungle, it was usually because everyone died or fled due to war, famine or disease. Not because of religious obligations.

I'm not familiar with any historical example that supports this "theocratic sunk cost" argument. I can think of counter-examples, like the 18th Egyptian dynasty, or the bulk of Jewish history, but none where the people allowed a state religion's rituals to consume the economy. That usually brings revolutions, not continued devotion.

You're describing a collapse process with which I am unfamiliar. In what societies has this happened?

Except that story doesn't describe a county-wide water crisis, it describes one household whose well needs to be re-dug, and then says there's a potential problem in the future. That's not much to base conclusions on, let alone public policy.

I still don't see where there's a problem. It's not like a mine or chemical plant. Clean water in, warmer clean water out. Just put it back in the potable water supply.

You say that like it's anything other than warm water. What's dystopian about swimming in comfortably warm water?

Another massive round of layoffs.

I haven't heard of here. Where am I?

I'm thinking about running both. My Visio TV doesn't have Jellyfin support, and that's where we mostly use it so it wouldn't make sense to completely ditch Plex. But Ples already charges for being able to access it from a phone or tablet (total BS), even in my own house, so I'm very open to alternatives.

Have you tried running both? If so, did you run into any issues?

I would be surprised if Black Rock (who really need to be broken up, private equity looks exactly like a 1900's trust) hadn't hedged themselves against a crypto collapse, and if this fund goes bust they'll be fine. Texas won't be. The people in Texas' government who decided to make this investment might cost themselves their pensions, but that little bit of justice will be overwhelmed by the innocents being ruined.

Though I'd say the people ultimately responsible are the ones who invented this garbage in the first place and ultimately control its value by creating artificial scarcity. How much bitcoin does its anonymous inventor hold? Ah, 1.1 million (about 5% of all bitcoin). And look, BlackRock is number 3 on the list of bitcoin hoarders after Coinbase. Any of them could crash the market by selling out, and it would quickly spread to the rest of the trash.

I'm not really familiar with either of those. Are they full shell replacements, or do they just replace certain bits, like Classic Shell replaced 8's giant mistake of a start menu?

Why do you care so much about something you clearly don't watch? Why do you feel the need to build straw men to substitute for the audience?

Oh, and if you look at the ratings, cable news viewers are overwhelmingly outside of the 25-54 demographic. Every network is the same in this regard, with Fox having the highest number of viewers in the 25-54 demographic, but CNN has the largest percentage of 25-54 viewers. Still, across all of the cable news networks, the percent of viewers in the 25-54 demo is in the neighborhood of 8-12%.

It's not healthy to, in your mind, replace half of your fellow citizens with straw men for whom you have imagined the worst of. Please try to make some more friends, without involving politics.

My friend, I'm honestly worried about you. You seem to be blaming everything on politics but weren't any happier when Democrats were in charge. Please just think about that for a bit. You're looking for people to blame (suggesting retirees don't care about their grandkids?!?) for your mood, but that's an internal matter. You create your mood, not people you've never met.

To me, it looks like you're eviscerating yourself for public display and blaming your audience for it. It breaks my heart to see you in so much pain, and you're doing it to yourself.