The Wired Word for 8/23/2026  🔗 **Source:** [The Wired Word for 8/23/2026]() > [!note]+ Document Notes > > [!info] Generated analysis — not the author's words. Sections below are machine-written > > from the captured source. Only text inside `> [!quote]` blocks is verbatim from the author. > > Do not quote or attribute any other line to the named author. > <!-- deep-read:sections start --> ## 🏷️ Title People Weigh Pros, Cons of Data Centers — The Wired Word for the Week of August 23, 2026 ## 🧭 Table of Contents 1. References 2. Summary 3. Main Content 4. Paraphrase 5. Newsletter 6. Action Items 7. Hypotheses 8. Methodology 9. Questions 10. Future Research 11. Implications 12. Learning Styles Assessment 13. Accessibility Assessment 14. DEIB Assessment 15. Logical Validity 16. DARVO Analysis 17. Conclusion 18. Refactor Appendix 19. Template Library ## 🔗 References (in-page) - Fortune — "Meet the 82-year-old Kentucky Grandma Who Turned Down $26 Million to Turn Her Farm Into a Data Center: 'I Don't Need Your Money.'" - The Conversation — "Underground Data Fortresses: the Nuclear Bunkers, Mines and Mountains Being Transformed to Protect Our 'New Gold' From Attack" - Reuters — "U.S. Data Center Protests Go National as Backlash Grows" - Tom's Hardware — "California's Largest AI Data Center Project Suing for Access to 287 Million Gallons of Colorado River Water" - Futurism — "Texas Data Centers Suffer Brutal Collision With Reality" - Forbes (quoted at length in For Further Discussion) - Reuters/Ipsos poll (June 2026) - Scripture: Deuteronomy 5:19,21 & 19:14; 1 Kings 21; Genesis 26:19-22,25 (with 13:5-12, 21:25-31); John 12:4-6; Hebrews 13:5-6,8; Philippians 4:11-13; Psalms 27:1,14 & 56:3-4; 2 Samuel 10:12; Daniel 10:19; 1 John 4:4 - Wo​ody Guthrie, "This Land Is Your Land" (full lyrics); Antônio Bispo dos Santos ## 📝 Summary A weekly adult-education Bible lesson built around the AI data-center land rush — unusually substantive for the devotional genre, and directly relevant to this vault's AI-infrastructure and commons-governance threads. The news hook: Ida Huddleston, 82, turned down roughly $60,000/acre (over $4 million) for her 71-acre Kentucky farm; her daughter Delsia Bare initially agreed to sell 463 acres at $48,000/acre (over $22 million) before withdrawing. Context that makes the numbers land: going rate for farmland in Mason County is about $6,000/acre — so offers ran **8–10x market**. The extended family holds ~1,200 acres; the buyer was unnamed, operating under NDA. The local planning commission has since rezoned 2,000+ acres across ~28 tracts for a data center adjoining the Huddleston farm. Huddleston's stated reason for refusing wasn't valuation — "Money couldn't move what all I've got put in place here" — and she explicitly noted she could afford to refuse while neighbors in worse circumstances might not. TWW team member Mary Sells (who lives near Maysville) supplies the structural pressure: farms that shifted from tobacco to food crops, export income lost to recent tariffs, and a next generation leaving agriculture — against which tax abatements, NDA-shrouded deals, and "free utilities (paid for by area homeowners instead of the data companies)" make selling look like the only option. Bare also initially feared that refusing would just mean worse terms under eminent domain. Public-opinion data: a June Reuters/Ipsos poll found only a third of Americans approve of rapid data-center construction, and **only 14% would welcome one in their own community**. The lesson catalogs opposition concerns (water diversion/depletion/contamination, air pollution, wildlife harm, 24/7 noise and heat, strained grids, higher consumer utility bills, few permanent jobs after construction, lower property values, and lack of transparency/accountability) alongside the industry's economic-development case — then, notably, refuses the easy anti-tech conclusion, acknowledging data centers as "the backbone of the modern digital economy" and framing the real problem as how to keep the benefits while minimizing harms. Joseph Bowring (Monitoring Analytics, independent market monitor for PJM, serving 67 million people across 13 states) supplies the sharpest policy claim: data centers should pay their own power-infrastructure costs rather than externalizing them onto other ratepayers. Scriptural treatment centers on boundary-marker and covetousness commands (Deut. 5/19), Ahab and Naboth's vineyard as the might-makes-right archetype (1 Kings 21 — explicitly linked to "manifest destiny," "eminent domain," and "survival of the fittest"), Isaac's serial displacement over contested wells (Gen. 26), and — the most interesting move — a deliberately charitable rereading of Judas that asks what circumstances might drive someone to a sale they'd otherwise refuse. Bottom line: a genuinely useful lay-audience framing of AI infrastructure as a land, water, and power justice question rather than a purely technical one, with an unusually fair-minded treatment of the tradeoffs. ## 📖 Main Content ### 🗒️ Notes **The core anecdote and its economics.** Ida Huddleston, 82, Maysville KY, 71 acres, offered ~$60,000/acre (over $4M) — against a county farmland going rate of ~$6,000/acre. Her daughter Delsia Bare, 54, had agreed to $48,000/acre for 463 acres (over $22M) before pulling out of the contract. Extended Huddleston family holds ~1,200 acres; buyer wanted roughly half and remained unnamed. Bare's stated reason for withdrawing: "I never wanted to leave my land." Her initial reason for nearly selling: fear that eminent domain would produce worse terms if she refused. The Fortune headline the lesson links calls it "$26 Million" turned down, aggregating the family's exposure. **The structural squeeze (via TWW team member Mary Sells, local to the area).** Farms transitioned from tobacco to food crops over decades; export income (soybeans) hit by recent tariffs; next generation leaving agriculture seeing no future in it. Against that, the inducement package: "tax abatement, secret deals under non-disclosure agreements, free utilities (paid for by area homeowners instead of the data companies)." The lesson's implicit argument: the offer isn't landing on a level playing field, it's landing on an already-destabilized one. **Scale of the local commitment.** Local planning commission approved rezoning of 2,000+ acres of agricultural land across ~28 tracts for a data center directly adjoining the Huddleston farm. County officials cite employment and economic growth. **Public opinion.** June Reuters/Ipsos poll: only ~one-third of Americans approve of rapid data-center construction acceleration; **only 14% would welcome one in their own community** — a striking NIMBY gap, and the single most citable statistic in the piece. **Catalog of stated concerns** (the lesson presents these as critics' claims, not established fact): water diversion, depletion, and groundwater contamination (especially in already-warming regions); air pollution; environmental damage and wildlife harm; public health and quality-of-life impacts; 24/7 noise pollution and heat generation; aging/strained power infrastructure unable to meet round-the-clock demand; higher consumer utility bills; loss of long-term well-paid jobs as land shifts from food production to low-headcount industry; lower property values; and lack of transparency/accountability from government and business leaders, with local voices unheard or dismissed. Representative quote from an Archbald, Pennsylvania protester: "We are essentially being asked to give up all of the land, the energy and water, so that developers can come in here and exploit us and then send their profits someplace else." **The cost-allocation argument.** Joseph Bowring, president of Monitoring Analytics — independent market monitor for grid operator PJM (67 million people, 13 Eastern/Midwestern states) — argues data centers should pay the costs of their own power-infrastructure development and usage rather than imposing them on other customers. This is the piece's most policy-actionable claim and comes from a genuinely independent, technically credible source rather than an advocacy group. **The industry case, presented fairly.** The Data Center Coalition and other lobbyists cite economic development, construction jobs, and higher property/sales tax revenue. Opponents counter that most positions end after construction and few permanent staff are needed to operate a data center. **The refusal to caricature.** The lesson explicitly acknowledges data centers as "the backbone of the modern digital economy," enumerating dependent systems (travel, health care, food safety, national security, business, communication, currency exchange, information/education/entertainment access, art creation, commerce, data preservation, inventory, supply chains). It frames the challenge as keeping benefits while minimizing harms — not as opposition per se. **Scriptural frame.** (1) *Boundary markers and covetousness* — Deuteronomy 5:19,21 (don't steal, don't covet) plus 19:14 ("You must not move your neighbor's boundary marker, set up by former generations"). (2) *Ahab and Naboth* — 1 Kings 21, with Jezebel promoting "might makes right," which the lesson explicitly links to later labels: "manifest destiny," "eminent domain," "survival of the fittest." (3) *Contested water* — Genesis 26:19-22,25: Isaac digs wells at Esek and Sitnah, is driven off each time, finally finds unContested ground at Rehoboth ("Now the LORD has made room for us"); with Abraham/Lot's separation (13:5-12) and Abimelech's servants seizing Abraham's well (21:25-31) as precedent. The lesson's discussion questions here are genuinely sharp: "What happens when people are pushed out of so many places so often, until there are no more safe places left to go?... Does God always 'make room' for God's people?" (4) *Judas, charitably read* — John 12:4-6: rather than treating Judas as flatly greedy, the lesson asks what backstory might exist ("hungry children and a sick wife at home, a pile of bills he couldn't pay, loan sharks"), explicitly tying it back to Huddleston's sympathy for neighbors without her security. (5) *Contentment* — Hebrews 13:5-6,8 and Philippians 4:11-13. **For Further Discussion.** A substantial Forbes quote making the macroeconomic-tradeoff argument: "tech giants... are quietly sparking the most resource-intensive industrial land grab of the post-war era" and "Every megawatt a data center pulls off a constrained grid is a megawatt not available to a new factory, a new housing development, or a hospital expansion." Also a genuinely thoughtful land-ontology prompt contrasting Woody Guthrie's fuller (and more skeptical) "This Land Is Your Land" lyrics with Antônio Bispo dos Santos: "The land did not belong to us; we belonged to the land. We did not say 'this land is mine'; we said 'we are this land.'" ## 📚 References Secondary aggregation of mainstream reporting (Fortune, Reuters, The Conversation, Tom's Hardware, Futurism, Forbes) plus one polling source (Reuters/Ipsos, June 2026), one named independent expert (Bowring/Monitoring Analytics/PJM), and firsthand local context from a TWW team member living near Maysville. Scripture citations are standard and correctly contextualized. Sourcing is notably better than typical devotional-curriculum material. ## 🗣️ Paraphrase The framing that makes this worth keeping isn't the theology — it's the observation that the AI buildout is currently being negotiated one landowner at a time, under NDA, against people whose alternative income streams have already been eroded. Huddleston could say no because she didn't need the money; she said so explicitly and worried about neighbors who couldn't. That's the actual mechanism worth naming: an 8–10x-above-market offer isn't generous when it's aimed at a seller with no other viable path, and it isn't a market transaction in any meaningful sense when the alternative on the table is implied eminent domain. Bowring's point is the structural version of the same thing — if data centers don't pay their own grid-infrastructure costs, the transaction looks profitable only because part of the bill lands on ratepayers who were never at the table. And the 14% who'd welcome one locally, against a third who approve nationally, is the clearest possible measure of a benefit-and-burden mismatch: people can see the value of the digital economy in the abstract while correctly identifying that the local costs won't be offset by local gains. The lesson deserves credit for not resolving this into anti-technology sentiment — it names the dependency honestly and puts the question where it belongs, on who pays and who decides. ## 📰 Newsletter **An 82-year-old Kentucky farmer turned down roughly ten times market value for her land — and then explained why that's not the interesting part.** This week's Wired Word lesson uses the AI data-center land rush as its news hook, and it's unusually well-reported for a Bible-study curriculum. Ida Huddleston was offered ~$60,000/acre against a county going rate of ~$6,000. She refused: "Money couldn't move what all I've got put in place here." But she immediately noted she could afford to refuse, and worried about neighbors who couldn't — which, with tobacco income gone, tariffs hitting soybean exports, and the next generation leaving farming, is most of them. The numbers worth carrying: only 14% of Americans would welcome a data center in their own community (Reuters/Ipsos, June), against a third who approve of the buildout nationally. And the sharpest policy line comes from PJM's independent market monitor: data centers should pay for their own power infrastructure instead of putting it on everyone else's utility bill. ## ✅ Action Items - **The WPOCC / Community:** Directly connects to Michelle Frechette's question to Matt Mullenweg at WordCamp US 2026 (already in this vault) about AI infrastructure's environmental impact on local communities — this lesson supplies the concrete local-community detail his answer largely gestured at. Worth pairing when that thread comes up again. - **Core AI / AI Cost & Tokenomics:** The externalized-infrastructure-cost argument (Bowring) is the physical-world counterpart to the token-cost tracking already in this vault — compute costs that don't appear on the compute bill. - **All WordPress subteams (Core, Performance, Mobile, Playground, Training, Marketing, Support, Design, Documentation, Photos, TV, Polyglots, Accessibility, Meta, CLI, Hosting, Tide, Openverse, Themes, Plugins, FAIR):** Not applicable to this source — general/religious-education content, not WordPress-specific. - **Personal/faith practice:** This is a discussion-ready lesson as-is; the Big Questions and per-passage questions require no adaptation for adult-education use. ## 🧪 Hypotheses 1. The gap between national approval of data-center construction (~33%) and willingness to host one locally (14%) will widen rather than narrow as more communities gain direct experience — i.e. proximity reduces support, meaning early-adopter regions become harder rather than easier to expand within. 2. Offers at 8–10x agricultural market value are calibrated to the seller's lack of alternatives rather than to the land's productive value, which predicts that such premiums appear specifically in regions with recently-eroded farm income (tariff-hit export crops, collapsed tobacco economies) rather than in agriculturally healthy ones. 3. NDA-shrouded acquisition combined with implied eminent-domain pressure systematically suppresses the price landowners could otherwise negotiate collectively — testable by comparing per-acre outcomes where neighbors coordinated versus where they negotiated individually. 4. Bowring's cost-allocation principle (data centers pay their own grid-infrastructure costs) would, if enforced, materially slow buildout in constrained-grid regions — meaning current siting decisions are partly an artifact of who bears infrastructure cost, not of where compute is genuinely best located. ## 📊 Methodology Curriculum material, not research: a curated news summary aggregating mainstream reporting, one poll, one expert citation, and one firsthand local account, assembled to support structured group discussion. Its factual claims are sourced and checkable but not independently verified by the authors. The catalog of environmental and economic concerns is explicitly presented as critics' positions rather than established findings, which is appropriate and correctly signposted. One limitation worth noting: the buyer in the central anecdote is unnamed (per NDA), so the specific project's actual water, power, and employment commitments can't be evaluated — the lesson discusses data centers as a category, using this case as illustration. ## ❓ Questions - What are the actual permanent-employment figures for comparably-sized data centers, versus the construction-phase figures typically cited by county officials? - Does the Kentucky project's rezoning include any binding commitments on water usage, ratepayer cost allocation, or noise mitigation — or only zoning approval? - How common is the implied-eminent-domain pressure Bare described, and is it ever actually exercised for private data-center development, or does its deterrent effect work regardless? - What would the Reuters/Ipsos numbers look like disaggregated by whether the respondent already lives near an operating data center? - Has any jurisdiction implemented Bowring's cost-allocation principle, and what happened to buildout rates there? ## 🔮 Future Research - Comparative study of per-acre outcomes for landowners who negotiated collectively versus individually against data-center acquisition, to test whether NDA-based individual negotiation suppresses price. - Longitudinal tracking of local employment, utility rates, property values, and water table levels in communities 3–5 years post-data-center-construction, against the promises made at approval. - Analysis of whether Reuters/Ipsos-style approval gaps close or widen with proximity and duration of exposure. ## 💡 Implications - **Practice:** Communities facing data-center proposals should treat NDA-based individual negotiation as a structural disadvantage and consider collective response; the lesson's "Responding to the News" link points to a state where communities are working to mitigate consequences and maximize benefits. - **Policy:** Bowring's principle — data centers pay their own power-infrastructure costs — is a concrete, jurisdiction-level policy lever that doesn't require blocking development, only ending its subsidy. - **Security:** Not applicable to this source, though the linked Conversation piece on underground data fortresses touches physical-infrastructure security. - **Education:** Genuinely usable adult-education material connecting a technical-economic story to accessible ethical questions without dumbing either down. - **Funding:** The tax-abatement pattern described (public revenue forgone plus utility costs shifted to residents) is the fiscal core of the issue and is where local advocacy has the most leverage. ## 🧠 Learning Styles Assessment - **Visual:** Weak — text-only lesson format, no charts or images in this capture. - **Aural:** Strong — designed for read-aloud group discussion. - **Verbal:** Strong — quotable figures and passages throughout, structured around discussion prompts. - **Kinesthetic:** Weak — no hands-on component, though the discussion format is participatory. - **Logical:** Strong — clearly staged: news → both cases → scripture → questions → further discussion → prayer. - **Social:** Very strong — the entire format is built for group discussion with explicit prompts at every section. - **Solitary:** Moderate — readable alone, but the question structure assumes conversation partners. - **Naturalistic:** Strong and unusually so — land, water, farming, and wildlife are the substantive content, not metaphor. Estimated reading level: general adult; no specialized technical or theological vocabulary assumed. Site's estimate: 11 minutes. ## 📊 Accessibility Assessment (WCAG 2.2 AA) - **Perceivable:** Plain-text email content; no images to assess in this capture. - **Operable:** Not applicable — static email newsletter. - **Understandable:** Very clear structure with consistent per-passage question formatting; plain language throughout. - **Robust:** Not assessable from this capture. - **Overall:** No accessibility concerns identified; the consistent sectioning is genuinely helpful for group facilitation. ## 🌍 DEIB Assessment - **Cultural breadth:** The Antônio Bispo dos Santos quote contrasting land-ownership with land-belonging introduces a non-Western (Brazilian quilombola) ontology of land explicitly against the Anglo-American property frame — a genuinely substantive inclusion rather than decorative. - **Inclusive language:** No concerns identified. The lesson notably avoids framing the story as rural-vs-tech condescension in either direction. - **Neurodiversity support:** Consistent, predictable per-passage structure (passage → context → questions) supports readers who benefit from repeated format. - **Representation:** The central figures are two older rural women exercising agency — a demographic rarely centered in AI-infrastructure coverage. Huddleston's own acknowledgment of her comparative security relative to neighbors is a class-awareness move the lesson builds on rather than glosses. - **Psychological safety:** The charitable Judas rereading is the lesson's strongest DEIB move — it explicitly resists condemning people who make compromised choices under economic duress, and ties that directly to the neighbors who might sell. That's a meaningful pastoral choice in material that could easily have moralized at people who took the money. ## ✅ Logical Validity **Strong reasoning:** The lesson does something most advocacy-adjacent material doesn't — it states the strongest version of the opposing case (data centers as genuine backbone of the digital economy, with a long concrete dependency list) rather than a strawman, and frames the question as tradeoff management rather than opposition. Sourcing is attributed throughout, and critics' claims are marked as claims. **Fallacies:** None significant. Two soft points worth flagging: (1) the concern catalog is presented as a list without differentiating well-documented harms (water usage, ratepayer cost shifting) from more speculative ones (property values, wildlife) — not fallacious, but it flattens evidentiary quality; (2) the Ahab/Naboth analogy is doing real work but isn't fully earned — Huddleston refused a voluntary offer and kept her land, which is nearly the opposite of Naboth's outcome; the parallel holds for the *pressure* dynamic but not for the *result*, and the lesson doesn't mark that distinction. **Tone of voice:** Measured, pastoral, genuinely curious rather than polemical; the discussion questions are open rather than leading, which is not always true of this genre. ## 🛡️ DARVO Analysis Not applicable to the lesson's own voice. Worth noting one *described* dynamic with a partial structural resemblance: the reported combination of NDA-shrouded offers plus implied eminent-domain pressure functions to reframe a landowner's refusal as unreasonable obstruction rather than a legitimate choice — shifting who is positioned as the difficult party. The lesson reports this (via Bare's account of nearly selling out of fear) without naming it as a tactic, which is a fair reporting choice. ## 🎯 Conclusion Unusually substantive for devotional curriculum, and worth keeping specifically because it supplies the ground-level human and economic detail that AI-infrastructure coverage in this vault otherwise discusses abstractly. The strongest carry-forward is the mechanism: an 8–10x-above-market offer aimed at sellers whose alternatives have already been eroded, negotiated individually under NDA against implied eminent domain, with grid-infrastructure costs externalized onto ratepayers who never sat at the table. Bowring's cost-allocation principle is the cleanest policy handle. The most notable connection for this vault is to Michelle Frechette's WordCamp US question to Mullenweg about AI data centers' community impact — this lesson is effectively the answer that question was reaching for, and pairing them would strengthen both. ## 🧱 Refactor Appendix ### Literature Split Pad (H3) #### Refusing a life-changing offer is a privilege distributed unevenly among neighbors > [!quote] ID:rw_atom1 > "Money couldn't move what all I've got put in place here," said Huddleston, 82. She didn't need the money, but she felt sorry for neighbors whose circumstances might lead them to different decisions. Where/why: the lesson's central ethical observation — the same offer is coercive or not depending entirely on the recipient's alternatives, which reframes "she just said no" as a statement about her position rather than her character. #### Support for data centers collapses when the question becomes local > [!quote] ID:rw_atom2 > According to a June Reuters/Ipsos poll, only a third of Americans approve of the rapid acceleration of data-center construction in the United States, while only 14% would welcome the building of a data center in their own community. Where/why: the clearest quantitative measure of the benefit/burden mismatch — people can affirm the digital economy's value in the abstract while correctly assessing that local costs won't be locally offset. #### Infrastructure costs should sit with the party creating the demand > [!quote] ID:rw_atom3 > Joseph Bowring, president of Monitoring Analytics (MA), an independent market monitor for grid operator PJM, which serves 67 million people in 13 Eastern and Midwestern states, said that data centers should pay for the costs of their own power infrastructure development and usage and not impose those expenses on other customers. Where/why: the most policy-actionable claim in the lesson, from a technically credible independent source rather than an advocacy group — doesn't require blocking development, only ending its cross-subsidy. #### Land as relationship rather than property > [!quote] ID:rw_atom4 > "The land did not belong to us; we belonged to the land. We did not say 'this land is mine'; we said 'we are this land.'" Where/why: Antônio Bispo dos Santos, quoted in the discussion section — offers a genuinely different ontology of land that reframes what Huddleston's refusal was actually protecting, beyond asset value. ### Atomic Split Pad (H4) **An above-market offer is coercive rather than generous when aimed at a party whose alternatives have already been eliminated.** Claim: the fairness of a transaction cannot be assessed from the price alone — an offer far above market value can still be effectively coercive when the seller's other income paths have been foreclosed by unrelated forces, because the premium is calibrated to their lack of options rather than to what is being given up. Evidence: Kentucky data-center offers at 8–10x the ~$6,000/acre county farmland rate, landing on farms that had already lost tobacco income, then soybean export income to tariffs, with the next generation exiting agriculture — with Huddleston explicitly noting she could refuse only because she didn't need the money, unlike neighbors. Scope: applies wherever a buyer with concentrated capital negotiates individually against sellers whose alternative income has independently eroded; breaks down where sellers retain genuinely viable alternatives, in which case a high premium really is just a good price. <!-- atomicity: 1 idea ✓ --> **Externalized infrastructure costs make a siting decision look economically rational when it may not be.** Claim: when the party creating new infrastructure demand does not bear the cost of building for it, the resulting siting and scale decisions reflect who absorbs that cost rather than where the activity genuinely belongs — meaning the apparent economics of a buildout are partly an artifact of the subsidy structure. Evidence: Bowring's argument that data centers should pay their own power-infrastructure development and usage costs instead of imposing them on other PJM customers, alongside the reported pattern of "free utilities (paid for by area homeowners instead of the data companies)" as a standard inducement. Scope: applies to any capital-intensive facility siting where infrastructure costs can be shifted to a captive ratepayer or taxpayer base; the corrective (internalize the cost) is jurisdiction-level and doesn't require prohibiting the activity. <!-- atomicity: 1 idea ✓ --> ### Fleeting Queue - Cross-link to the WordCamp US 2026 fireside chat doc (`01m0fk9689vfd849j1811w1g5n`) where Michelle Frechette asked Mullenweg specifically about AI infrastructure's environmental impact on local communities — this lesson supplies the ground-level detail that exchange lacked. - Consider whether this belongs under the AI Cost & Tokenomics MOC (as the physical-infrastructure counterpart to token costs), the Commons & Community Governance MOC (land/water as commons), or Faith & Theology MOC — arguably all three; flag for the orchestrator's judgment at synthesis. - Look up whether any jurisdiction has implemented Bowring's cost-allocation principle and what happened to buildout rates. <!-- deep-read:sections end --> 📄 **Full text:** [[Full Document Contents/Articles/The Wired Word for 8232026.md|The Wired Word for 8/23/2026 by The Wired Word]] ## Highlights - "Money couldn't move what all I've got put in place here," said Huddleston, 82. She didn't need the money, but she felt sorry for neighbors whose circumstances might lead them to different decisions. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m0gjfzm4m7ve86qxk65g66s3)) - Tags: atom/literature/h1 - Opposition to the explosive growth of data center projects, due to what some are calling an "AI (artificial intelligence) gold rush," is evident in angry town hall meetings throughout the country, as citizens seek to understand the potential benefits and harms of the industry. According to a June Reuters/Ipsos poll, only a third of Americans approve of the rapid acceleration of data-center construction in the United States, while only 14% would welcome the building of a data center in their own community. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m0gjg3z1xbst21v8je1wapty)) - Tags: atom/literature/h2 - Joseph Bowring, president of Monitoring Analytics (MA), an independent market monitor for grid operator PJM, which serves 67 million people in 13 Eastern and Midwestern states, said that data centers should pay for the costs of their own power infrastructure development and usage and not impose those expenses on other customers. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m0gjg7k9gh1jkd5xp3rnxpj1)) - Tags: atom/literature/h3 - We did not say 'this land is mine'; we said 'we are this land.'" What is the difference between the idea that we own land or that land belongs to us, and the idea that the land owns us or that we belong to the land? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m0gjrrjt1ws3aacpjevzk3bc))