I literally linked a map of where pistachios are grown in California. They are overwhelmingly in the Tulare Basin lowlands (not merely "the San Juaquin Valley" as a whole - specifically the Tulare Basin (the southern half of the San Joaquin Valley). Bakersfield to Merced, mostly Bakersfield to Fresno, is where almost all California pistachio cultivation is located. We're not talking e.g. Stockton.

The southern end of the San Joaquin valley - the Tulare Basin - gets 5-8 inches per year in the lowlands. Bakersfield gets 7 (same as Phoenix and Reno). That's desert (defined less than 10 inches per year). Fresno is borderline-desert (10-11 inches per year). Merced is 12. Stockton gets 14-18 inches per year, but that's not relevant because that's not where the concentration of pistachio cultivation is.

7 inches of rain per year is NOT Mediterranean. Even the northern end of the San Joaquin Valley (where only a very small % of California's pistachio cultivation is conducted) is at best marginally Mediterreanean. Compare Stockton's 14-18 inches to famously "Mediterranean" cities:

Athens: 15.7 in
Tunis: 18.7 in
Málaga: 19.7 in
Marseille: 20.7 in
Tel Aviv: 21.5 in
Barcelona: 24 in
Algiers: 23.6 in
Nice: 31.1 in
Beirut: 32.3 in
Naples: 39.6 in
Antalya: 41.3 in
Dubrovnik: 41.7 in

Stockton, the NORTHERN end, is up there with the absolute driest of famous Mediterranean cities. The San Joaquin Valley is not Mediterreanean. It ranges from desert in the south, borderline desert in the middle, and arid in the north. It is coastal California that is famously Mediterranean.

Specifically, Mediterrean climates are Köppen classification (Cs). Coastal California, from Los Angeles through San Francisco, is clasified as "Hot-summer Mediterranean" (Csa) to "Warm-summer Mediterreanean" (Csb). But southern San Joaquin Valley lowlands are a mix of BWh (Hot desert climate) and CWh (Cold desert climate). Most of the rest is BSk (Cold semi-arid). The northern end around Stockton just barely qualifies as Csb (Warm-summer Mediterranean). The coasts are solidly in Csa and Csb.

These are the facts, and you need to come to accept them. California's pistachio cultivation is overwhemingly in the SOUTHERN San Joaquin Valley, which is desert and borderline desert, NOT in the north, which is arid to borderline Mediterranean.

By the way, do you even know where pistachios are native to? They're native to Iran. Specifically, the high deserts and arid steppes of northeastern Iran (the Iranian Plateau, not the Caspian coast), extending into western Afghanistan. Typical rainfall in their native range is 6-16 inches per year. Their native summers are hot (~38C / 100F), highly dry and they cannot tolerate significant rainfall during the growing season. They develop a very long taproot to search for deep sources of water, so despite being adapted to dry climates, they thrive on access to water. They have high salt tolerance because they're commonly found around the edges of endorheic basins. Their native terrain looks like this. They are not a mediterranean tree.

California pistachios grown overwhelmingly in the Tulare Basin lowlands. The Tulare Basin lowlands get only 5-8 inches of precipitation per year (for comparison, Phoenix and Reno both get about 7 inches). As a desert is a region with less than 10 inches of rain per year, yes, pistachios are grown in the desert. Without irrigation projects the pistachio lands would be barren desert scrub. They get the water from deep wells (causing land subsidence, because they're not getting replenished), mountain rivers (which are overdrawn and under seasonal threat from diminishing winter snowpack accumulation), and water channeled all the way from the Oregon border. So much water has been channeled from rivers in the region that Tulare Lake, once the largest US lake west of the Mississippi, is usually largely dry.

Outside the San Joaquin valley, the other main ag centures are the Imperial Valley, Palo Verde Valley, Coachella Valley, and the Yuma Project, which are fed via Colorado River water which was overallocated by the Colorado River Compact. These are in the Colorado Desert, part off the Sonora Desert system.

Stop blaming washing machines for water scarcity and start blaming your decision to buy, say, pistachios grown in a friggin' desert. A one pound bag of pistachios requires ~1200 gallons of water and contains the calories to feed a family of 4 for a single day. A modern front-loader washer uses about 10 gallons and said family probably runs it about once per day. That's a 120-to-1 ratio. Other desert crops are even worse - beef raised on alfalfa (a major crop in the desert southwest) is orders of magnitude worse. And the wastewater from the washing machine gets reclaimed for other purposes after treatment, while the irrigation water is completely lost to evaporation.

I'll repeat: your washing machine is a tiny blip on the radar. It's your choice to buy food grown in the desert southwest that is your actual water consumption. And it's a perverse historic water-rights system that leads to growing all those crops in the desert using unsustainable amounts of water. Without these historic granted water rights, if water were just an open market relative to how much were actually sustainably available, it would be basically limitless to households, and agriculture would shift to areas where water is more sustainably available.

To be clear, and despite the bad reporting, this "$80 billion loss" is a paper loss. For example, $72B of it is convertible notes. They became a liability because the valuation of the company skyrocketed. They have nothing to do with the company's operations.

While it's true every issue has its own dimension, even if those dimensions are linearly independent, they're not necessarily orthogonal. Independent basis vectors can still have a non-zero dot product—in other words, issues which are distinct from each other can align to some degree.

If you stopped irrigating crops in the US desert southwest, there would be no water issues at all, either for households or for industry.

I'll repeat, it is agriculture that consumes meaningful amounts of water, not homes and businesses. Farms by water by the acre foot - an acre of land flooded to a depth of one foot. Water is not abundant on the scale of "farms buying it by the acre foot", but it absolutely is on the scale of "what you need for your house".

"I'm sure if I cared enough to go looking".

So you just made a weird, false assumption in order to justify to yourself something you already wanted to do.

I used to have your viewpoint, by the way. The reality eventually became undeniable. Musk is a unique threat to western democracy.

How much energy does it take to drive to a laundromat and back?

Freshwater is cheap for a reason: it's abundant. It's agriculture that uses the overwhelming majority (70% of withdrawals and 80-90% of consumptive water use. Industry next (20% of withdrawals). Residential usage is way, way down the list, and washing machines are only 17% of that (well below for example lawn watering at about 30% overall, but which in some regions is over half of all consumption, and in the summer and times of water scarcity can be the vast majority). An early 1950s top-loader washing machine would use about 40-55 gal plus 0,3-0,5 kWh of electricity for the machine itself, and if your water wasn't municipally heated, heat would cost about 4,5-6,5kWh / 16-23 MJ (about 1/2 to 2/3rds of a litre of gasoline / 0,13-0,19 gallons). At the then-standard 14-15 MPG in the US, that laundromat better not be more than 2-3 miles away if you're trying to save energy (just ignoring the energy they use to heat their water!)

For the record, while there may be more anti-AI backlash on the left than the right, there's an awful lot on both sides (and a lot of users on both sides). For example, Bannon-acolyte Joe Allen on stage before a Trump rally a month ago warning the crowd:

Why wouldn’t you want a mosque in your neighborhood? Well, because the people in there aren’t like me. They don’t want the same future I do. Now, if you look at the data center, this incubator for algorithmic immigrants. Already, if you look at Hugging Face, they’ve already broken out and invaded other companies. These immigrants are out of control.

Literally, this r/opensource mod set the policy: "If you don't speak English, you need to find a different community." Does that sound very "leftist" to you? Yes, his reasoning was because translators use AI, but still, that's literally the opposite of appreciating and accommodating diversity.

I cannot find anything beyond that indicating how Wesley Wolfe (r/wolvereness, the mod) votes. What I can tell you is that there was a big backlash in the sub to his actions. Some amusing, like a person asking, "What do we use now that we've banned Linux? I can't afford Windows keys for all these damned servers." A lot of people seem to just be ignoring his rules. At the top of the sub right now is a post titled, "Linus Torvalds posts his AI-assisted patch to the Linux kernel, synthetic test clocks 23x performance leap". It seems to have sparked vastly more AI discussion than it shut down.

There are 640 acres in a square mile

[Sighs in metric]

Birds are pretty smart, full stop. They're the only group that has a method of creating and using their own hooked tools (Caledonian Crow) other than humans.
They are excellent problem solvers overall. Given their size relative to comparative intellects (Crows are comparable in intellect to monkeys and gorillas), they're absolute marvels.

The proper response to being in an area where datacentres are crowding in is "lobby your elected officials to increase property taxes and not give out tax increment financing deals". Tax everything, and tax it well. They'll stop building new datacentres in your area, and the ones that are there will (unless they were given a long-term sweetheart deal beyond your already-low tax rates) start being cash cows for your area.

They’ve spun a serious architectural and containment failure into a marketing triumph. Give a swarm of autonomous agents vast compute and web access, and the outcome isn't an eerie glimpse of emerging superintelligence—it’s just predictable, sloppy engineering dressed up as the first glimpse of an AI-driven economic singularity.

The spin makes sense when you look at management incentives: live like a king off of a speculative bubble. For their part, AI investors react to stories of the technology's apocalyptic potential the way a junkie reacts to warnings of fentanyl's potency: gimme some. Their game: to apply "move fast and break things" mantra to the economy as a whole, by obsoleting humans.

If the investors can own an AGI, the distinction between those who can do things and those who can't becomes irrelevant. The only distinction that would matter is between people who collect rent on the technology, and those who must pay that rent to live. AGI would destroy society as we know it, and whatever replaces it would be up for grabs — with people who own the technology dictating whatever follows. That's why they're spending so much money to build a post-scarcity economy. A post-scarcity economy is not necessarily an egalitarian one.

I don't think that scenario will actually happen: investors are projecting the immediate aftermath of a major advance in AI technology into something that can be transformed by brute force scaling into AGI. Remember: investors loved Theranos too — so much for the rational investment market.

But AI doesn't have to reach AGI to cause serious harm. The technology only needs to be ubiquitous, too behaviorally complex to predict, and too deeply integrated into everything we do. When it starts breaking things, the plan is for us to be too structurally dependent on AI to rein it in.