Retrospect
Retrospect
Data Centers And Drinking Water | Retrospect Ep.220
In this week’s episode we discussed the growing concerns around Amazon’s data centers and their potential impact on local water systems. We explore community allegations, environmental reports, and what scientists say about water contamination and long-term health risks, including cancer.
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Keywords
Amazon data centers, environmental impact, nitrate contamination, groundwater usage, cancer risk, reproductive harm, AI race, power consumption, water scarcity, economic development, health concerns, regulatory responsibility, infrastructure, digital economy, public health.
Jason
Amazon's data centers are often described as invisible infrastructure, quiet buildings that power the internet, the cloud and modern life itself. But for some communities, they don't feel invisible at all. In places like rural Oregon, massive server farms now sit next to family homes, farms and private wells, and alongside their arrival, residents are raising an uncomfortable question. Are rising cancer rates and health problems connected to the environmental strain of these data centers place on local water systems? Here's what we know, data centers use enormous amounts of groundwater for cooling in regions already burdened by nitrate contamination from decades of agriculture, scientists have documented dangerously high nitrate levels in drinking water, in some cases, several times above Federal safety limits. Long term exposure to elevated nitrates have been associated in multiple studies with increased risk of certain cancers and reproductive harm. What we don't yet have is a smoking gun. No peer reviewed study has proven that Amazon data centers directly cause cancer. The evidence lies in a more uncomfortable space, correlation plausible mechanisms in real communities reporting real illnesses while regulators and corporations argue over responsibility. This episode isn't about panic or conspiracy. It's about power infrastructure and the human cost of a digital economy that rarely asks who absorbs the risk? As we unpack this, we'll separate documented risk from speculation, evidence from assertion, and ultimately try to answer a question we all want clarity on, is our digital future costing us our health? Welcome to the
Ian
retrospect podcast, a show where people come together from different walks of life and discuss a topic from the generations perspective. My name is Ian, and as always, I'm joined by Stoney, hello and Jason.
Jason
Hello everyone. How's it going? Oh well, Christmas week. Oh yeah, we in the we are in the we're in the last push. I've got to get one more little item, okay, and, and that should be it for me. And I just got to get everything kind of put together. The main thing is, I've already wrapped the gifts for that's under the tree, yeah? But everybody else, I usually put gift cards, right?
Ian
I've done the same sort of thing. There's a couple people. I've gotten some nice gift cards for that I think they're gonna appreciate. I got some nice bottles of whiskey for speed people. And I saved up a lot of my pennies for we already have. So I got my a nice, big present. So, oh yeah. So she's the one I spent all my, all my dollars on. And I think, I think that's, I think that's what it should be.
Jason
Everyone else, whatever you feel is appropriate. Everybody's kind of got their own way of kind of doing Christmas. I know on Tracy's side of the family, they draw names, right?
Ian
So this year I drew her brother nice
Jason
so buying got something for him.
Ian
And my family's in a bit of a financial situation right now because of some business changes that are taking place. And so my mom was like, I don't think I can get all you boys stuff like I normally would do. And I was like, that's not a big deal. So now I kind of picked up that torch. So now I kind of bought things for for everyone, so that way everyone has at least something to open on Christmas Day. Whenever they're all here, we're all hanging out so and then, of course, was, you know, my gets special preference in my personal opinion, so as well, she should, all right, right, but, yeah, so, well, it's,
Jason
I'm spent a lot of money, and I'm fixing to
Ian
spend a lot of, Oh, of course it does,
Jason
you know, I mean, it's just crazy, how much it
Ian
how fast it goes. That number ticks up.
Jason
And you know, right now we're dealing with, dealing with our honeymoon issue right now. Well, it's, you know, American Airlines decided to make a change on our flight, I think lunches, yeah, and they have canceled our last leg of our flight from Charlotte back home, yeah, and they didn't really tell us about it, and they've just kind of like left us on our own to kind of figure this out. And so we've been literally, I spent yesterday Tracy and I just trying to figure out what we're going to do here, you know, contacting a resort, see if we can change days, you know, maybe match, get something. So think we're going to make a final decision tonight, and then either we're going to just push the days of the honeymoon a day forward and then stay a day later, okay? Or we're just gonna cancel this flight and probably book with Delta. That's kind of where we're at right now with that. But it's just kind of rapping trying to
Ian
get I just want to say we're not sponsored by delta. No, we're not. We're not. But if you want to, every time, every time I've ever had a problem with other flights, Delta has always fixed the problem for me and given me free stuff for it. I have
Jason
airline miles through I mean, I've got airline miles through southwest also, but I don't the problem with Southwest, it only flies out of one airport, and it kind of limits you on what you can do and and all that. So yeah, but I do have the miles to actually cover this flight, but Oh, there you go. I'm kind of worried about this issue down in Venezuela right now with with the potential war that might be starting down there, I'm wondering if they're gonna shut down all commercial flights going into Aruba.
Stoney
It's funny you said that, and I know we're gonna be talking about data centers now, but I have really wanted to go back to work. Okay? I have worked all my life, and I really wish I could go back to work right now. Yeah, did you see what was announced today on the news? No, what's that? What's that? That the US government will be offering letters of Mark,
Jason
letters of Mark.
Stoney
Yes, please. Ian, you are our great question guy, the federal government will now be issuing letters of Mark. War may not be necessary like and since I cannot be black beard, I would be gray beard.
Ian
Okay, it says that a letter of mark or or reprisal, or mark and reprisal, whatever it is, is a historical government license authorizing private citizens to arm their ships and attack capture or destroy enemy vessels and seize their cargo during wartime, essentially legalizing privateering for profit and national gain, differentiating them from pirates by their official commission. These commissions allow individuals to act as auxiliary naval forces.
Stoney
They're gonna legalize piracy,
Ian
keeping a share of the sky.
Jason
Are we back during like Queen Elizabeth era, when they were the Queen was tacitly allowing her privateers to rage Spanish galleons coming from the New
Ian
World, it says, keeping a share of the spoils while officially actively under state authority against a declared enemy.
Stoney
So instead of America attacking all these drug ships, citizens can do it and get paid for paid
Ian
for it, or keep spoils from there. That's great, unbelievable. So is this like your, is this your
Stoney
gray beard? Yeah, is gray beard? Okay, I would let my I'm just being, can't be black beard anymore, but I would be gray beard.
Ian
I was gonna say, is this your? What do you call it? Your application? Is this your Are you submitting an application? Because I
Stoney
can't work no more, and I'd be crappy on a boat, wow, fall off more than I'd do any good. But it's okay. Can you imagine that?
Ian
That's fun. That's wild, too. They still do that. They still would be able to do something like that. But I guess what we
Stoney
started to guess, well, we started this country on tariffs. Yep, we had, we had letters of Mark back then against the British and everybody. Hey, let's do it again. Let's bring back the tariffs, and let's bring back the letters of Mark.
Jason
Wow, that's fun. Yeah, the longer you hang around this, things just come circle right back to the way things used to be. It's amazing how history repeats. History repeats itself. But, but,
Stoney
yeah, that would be the true well, what would happen? Would right?
Jason
Yeah, we're living in interesting times, definitely. Well, I. Brought this topic up because I thought it was pretty interesting, simply because of the amount of these centers that are popping up around the country. I mean, we, even in our own state, they're, they're going to be constructing these. I don't know if y'all saw on the news, I believe in the northern part of state, ones being built. And I think someone further south, near the Baton Rouge area, I believe there's going to be one North that's being built. So I thought it was, I was it was kind of caught me when I saw this article and about these potentially health issues that some of the areas are experiencing, where these items are, these these places, and my understanding, a very they are very power hungry, yeah, and they require a lot of water to cool them. And, of course, you know what's driving all this? It's the AI, yeah, the AI rule war.
Stoney
I mean, we're that's all it is. It's all for AI. What it is about, we
Jason
are in a cold war now with China. Yeah, over AI and, and, matter of fact, I was listening to an interview today, uh, regarding that. And they say, right now, China is winning the AI war, and how future wars are going to look, and it's going to be robots and drones, and who's got the best drones, and who can, who can do more with that is kind of the future. So whoever kind of gets ahead in the AI race is going to be the, you know, the new winner first, you know, like in the old days, was with nukes, when the United States and Soviet Union were going back and forth. And I, you know, I got 20,000 you got 30,000 or whatever the case may be,
Ian
yeah, flexing on the other one, you know.
Stoney
Well, you have to think about it like this. What are they doing? They are going to be one cluster. One AI cluster can do a quintillion operations per second. That's 10 to the 18th that is in one second. That is more than all of the power available to NASA during the entire Apollo program and every desktop computer on Earth combined in the 1990s Yikes. Think about you know, wow. So you're talking trillions of quintillions every minute, every half minute, every you know, wow,
Ian
is the data centers that. So these are specifically for Amazon. I didn't realize that Amazon, oh yeah, I knew that they were doing, I don't know. I know that, like, what? What what do they need the data for? Do they say that, or is that?
Jason
I mean, did Jake use the power like, what are they for? I guess I'm saying. I mean, it's cloud computing math.
Stoney
Think about it like this. What was the movie, war games? Oh, yeah, okay. And there was a computer that was AI that had to learn, and that's their ultimate goal, is to get it to learn and become conscious. Because we think in those type of situations, that's how fast we think. And what they want to do is get a computer fast enough to do it for us and learn.
Jason
Well, right now I'm gonna just give just, just let people know. I mean, what's going on? Amazon is huge investments right now. They're fixing to build their biggest one in Indiana, $15 billion Wow. North Carolina, 10 billion. Mississippi, 3 billion. I just saw Louisiana that that's going to be, I think, in the realm of $10 billion Wow. You know, these things are, I mean, this is the new, I mean, this is the new thing now. And everything is just, you know, we're, we're driving in this direction. And these are the warnings that certain people have made regarding AI and but you know, you have to have it because other countries are doing it, which I knew was going to happen once you let the genie out of the bottle. I mean, it's too late. You can't put it back in, because if another country can get ahead, an advantage on you it, then you're gonna have to do this. I mean, I don't know how else to get around it, right? And unfortunately, it they come with some consequences, it seems, with what I've been reading, with these, these, these nitrites, you. That's really going on with this. So I don't know how you're going to kind of manage both at the same time. Yeah, I don't know, guys, I mean, this is a matter of fact, I've got some stuff here that I pulled up. They said, right now in in Oregon, where a lot of this kind of kind of Ground Zero, they say there are some studies associated with nitrates, and they say some cohort studies with measurable associations, say in a Danish population level study of 2.7 million adults with over two decades of follow up, researchers saw that people exposed to higher Nitrite levels in drinking water, but still often below US standards, had about a 16% higher risk of colorectal cancer compared to those with lower exposure. That's a hazard ratio of point of 1.16 for the highest versus lowest nitrate category. They said, another US cohort found that detection of nitrate and drinking water was was associated with a 73% higher cancer mortality rate and a 69% increase in cancer mortality rate per tenfold increase in nitrate levels, even when levels were below EPA legal limits.
Stoney
And this is coming from the same people who said there's not enough water to go around. There you go. Yeah.
Jason
I mean, tell you the people in Oregon, they got some groups fighting this right now. I think that's kind of unfortunate. And what I worry about is the area where they're building this center in that's north of Baton Rouge. We're already dealing with, from what I've read in in in Baton Rouge, dealing with the drinking water.
Stoney
Well, they're just gonna pull the water off of the Mississippi. They're not going to go for our drinking water. They're going to pull it off the Mississippi, pump it back into the Mississippi, hot which is what they were worried about with the nuclear power plant in st Francisville, pulling off hot water, or pulling off cold water, putting hot back in. What does that do to algae and everything else? Now, what are we going to do at two of those facilities?
Jason
Well, they're going to, well, I'm hearing that a lot of those plants that were pulling ground water,
Stoney
the one in Baton Rouge, I believe they're looking at just taking it out of the missile
Jason
well, they want them to take it out of the river. Because the problem is, what's happening is, at least from the stuff I've read, that what's happening is because the the the intake of groundwater, it's lowering that that water table, and you're getting salt water intrusion, yes, that's which is is going to prompt, it's going to prompt that community to eventually have to pull water out of The Mississippi River to drink. And I'm telling you you don't want to do that because I've had water pulled out of rivers that they use for their drinking water. And it's it's not the same. It's just not
Stoney
I want to give everybody kind of an example of what a single stack rack on a data center would be, yeah, and that's going to hold between eight and 64 GPUs. So the data center will have 10s of 1000s of GPUs. That's like having a whole football stadium full of calculators that are rocket engines. How much power is that going to be? How much power are they going to take now they're thinking about doing this in California. Oh, they don't have enough power to power their electric vehicles, but now they want to put these data centers and pull it more. They want to put one in Nevada. They want to put some in Louisiana, where we're already having problems with power. They want to put them in all these states that are having problems with power. Why? See, I think that's intentional. Yeah, I think that's intentional. And I'd like to know what the answer to that is,
Jason
if it's anything like, how much power, just, just, I know, kind of on a very, very small scale. In my computer, I have the most powerful, yeah, you know, consumer GPU in it. And I know much power it just takes. I can only imagine you have one GPU Exactly. That's what I'm saying. Just got idea of how much wattage it takes to do that. Can imagine when you're you're stacking 1000s of them together.
Stoney
Okay, well, I'm putting you all in perspective that we can understand. 50 million watt data center is going to use 4% of New Orleans peak power. So whatever. New Orleans uses at its peak that would take 4% 150 data center would take 12% and a 300 would take 25% of New Orleans peak power. Yeah, okay. I mean, come on.
Jason
I'm gonna tell you when it starts, when it gets hot and people are cranking up them AC,
Stoney
and they are considering a 2500 monster in Baton Rouge, Louisiana,
Jason
like I have a feeling you start dealing with brown outs.
Stoney
That would be two times New Orleans peak power.
Ian
I think there's got to be
Jason
they got to build another power plant, and I think that was one of the issues,
Stoney
yeah, but who's going to do that? See, the taxpayers are going to have to pay that and put that in so that, oh, so we can bring the data center to us. Screw the data center. How about we take care of the Louisiana people first? Because we don't need to give away our power. We don't need to give away our water. It does not benefit Louisiana to have a data center here,
Jason
no, because they really don't. They really don't do there's not like, there's a lot of people attached to them, but, I mean, you got a handful of people that monitor them, but they're not huge job creators. Now, there could be some spin offs from it, I don't know. And maybe, as time goes on, other industries, you know, form that service these kind of centers. But, I mean, who knows?
Ian
It looks like, I looked it up and it was saying that Amazon data centers do a bunch of different things. It delivers cloud services like streaming AI apps and online shopping by storing and processing data for individuals and businesses worldwide. So this is where my mind goes, if you want, if you don't, I don't know. I just feel like you should get away from Amazon altogether. I got away from Amazon a long time ago. My life has been great, and I feel like the more and more I'm seeing these Amazon trucks around here, I'm like, Man, I don't like this. I don't like that. Amazon is taking over everything, and it's things like this, like we're going to get a data center probably in our state, or it sounds like numerous ones, and it's only going to get worse. Two of them, if we're going to, if you're going to
Jason
keep things, I think meta is doing the other one in North Louisiana. I'm not mistaken.
Ian
I don't know. I just I want to get away from all of it.
Jason
Well, as long as people want to consume then I think you have what you have, because no one wants to physically go to stores anymore, because everybody's terrified of something happening to them when they go out. So I'd say it, but we're these, these entities are filling the void.
Ian
I get it, but I still, I don't know, still doesn't make it right? I feel like, Yeah, I do. I do shop online every now and then, but I go, like, to places directly. I tried to buy things on Amazon, because it's all just,
Jason
I don't like it. I mean, it make it convenient,
Ian
I know. But that's, that's, that's the thing is, I don't know
Jason
well right now, I'm looking to hear some more of these studies regarding the health issues on some of this stuff. They said, in Morrow County, they say drinking water isn't regulated the way city water is. These are people that draw their water from well. So this is more in the rural areas. He says, Oregon Health and Planning data from recent sampling shows over 1800 domestic wells tested in Morro plus neighboring Umatilla counties. Of those, nearly 22% of Wells had nitrate levels above EPA safe drinking limit of 10 milligrams per liter in Morrow County, specifically, about 1/3 of the wells tested high meaning residents are consuming water that exceeds safety standards. Some wells were measured above 25 milligrams per liter. And earlier, localized testing found individual wells with nitrate concentrations of over 55 times the federal limit. So they said federal agencies like the EPA set 10 as the safe maximum for nitrate in drinking water above that up in trying to say this word. I've I've tried to practice it, and I still can't say it. Epidemiological. Research and Health Agency reviews connect chronic exposure to increased risk of stomach and bladder cancers, thyroid dysfunction and other issues when ingested over. Over years. Wow, they say the same contaminants were also linked to adverse reproductive outcomes, including miscarriages. They said that the US National Cancer Institute and other public health bodies note that nitrate itself isn't a direct toxin at low levels, but over decades of consumption above the thresholds like the 10 milligrams per liter, the formation of cancer promoting compounds in the body, in nitroso compounds, is a documented concern. They said, independent meta analysis find associations with some gastrointestinal cancers in populations with long term exposure. That's interesting. So, you know, I don't, you know, you know, as I said, a kind of in the in the opening, there's no published, peer reviewed, right? You know, on this. So this is
Ian
one of those situations, you know, go ahead, I'm sorry. This is No, this is one of the situations where we're not gonna, they're just gonna, they're just pile driving through it, and then we will find out the table afterwards,
Jason
exactly, retroactively, yeah, I mean, then you'll try to regulate it. And yeah,
Stoney
whatever, I just find one interesting number here. What would the daily water use be? 1.5 to 3.5 million gallons per day, to an annual of 550 million to 1.3 billion gallons? Wow. That's enough water for 8000 to 20,000 households, which will just often drawn from municipal or aquifer sources.
Jason
Yeah, to me, another one. Instead of going here, they better use the river and not try to pull from the ground. But then what?
Stoney
What would the what would be the well? What's negatives of pulling it from the river?
Jason
Well, well, I mean, the reality is really no other but you shouldn't be pulling it from the ground.
Stoney
No, I 100% agree, right? But, I mean, okay, just because that's the answer doesn't necessarily mean we should do that.
Jason
Doesn't fix the problem. I mean, it's just like anything the problem is, is, you know, these, these data centers, you know, based upon this, it's not the they're kind of already exacerbating a problem that exists with agricultural runoff from fertilizers for just umpteen me years. And you can imagine the Mississippi River is probably full of it because of all of that being drained in from the Ohio River and all that, yeah, all that farmland, at all drains of the Mississippi River. So you're at now, you're just adding to it, and I think that's what's jacking up the levels. That's kind of what's going on in Oregon right now. It's you already have high nitrate levels because of runoff with fertilizers from agriculture. Now you're adding this and just jacking those levels up to a to a pull to a point that's causing these concerns now.
Ian
So how does the Do we know how the data centers are processing nitrate into the water? Do they say that? Like, I'm curious as to how that, or, like, what, what is, is it just them cooling it, that's just doing that? Is, it process.
Jason
It's, yeah, it's, it's, I think I had it that's okay in here, that what the actual process is of what's causing, what's causing the this rise in the nitrates. It's the way the water is used, it evaporates quite rapidly. What's left behind are these nitrates.
Stoney
Well, they have to put these chemical additives in the water. Okay, there's chemical additives in the water. They do that at river bend, and now they're going to have to do that here. They're going to put biocides, anti scaling agents. They're going to have to put corrosion inhibitors in it. They're gonna have to put all kind of these things in here. They're gonna have put things to stop the plankton. They're gonna have to because you don't want, there's just so much that's gonna go into it, and so it's gonna come back five to 15 degrees higher, yeah, on the other end. So, and to me, that's significant, because that's going to kill your fish. We are a seafood industry in Louisiana. We're at the very bottom, basically, you know, close to the bottom of the Mississippi, that water is not going to cool off by the time it gets to the Gulf of Mexico. So how is that going to affect our fishing and our shrimping and our crabbing and everything else that we love in Louisiana. How is that going to affect that?
Jason
Yeah, I think the big report here is reading a report here in Rolling Stone. Now there's been some criticism that they've kind of exaggerated the the nitrate issue, and I'm not saying that's not. True. I mean, as there is no direct evidence that this stuff is causing that, but if anything, it's adding to already an existing problem that you're still trying to figure out how to deal with. And I don't really know how to you know, how do you mitigate this? I mean, I
Stoney
Well, we don't know how to mitigate this, because we don't know what the decade long damage, or two decade long damage is going to be, then there's no way to even consider that. I mean, what? Where are you going to you're going to use AI to come up with the model to figure out what the long term damage is going to be. Okay, we're going to need the data center to figure out what the damage is going to be well.
Jason
They say that aquifer underneath Morrow County, known as the Lower umtala Basin, is the only source of water for as many 45,000 residents. So that's where all these people are getting their water from. They say many of these people rely on private wells that draw upon that base. And they said, since 1991 the regulators at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality have been collecting samples and have shown a slow and steady increase in chemical toxins in the water, which, as I said, goes back to all this agricultural runoff and stuff like that. I don't think there's really a, you know, we have fertilizers because we want to try to increase the food yield, but the fertilizers, yeah, are contaminating the water. And, you know, I just, you know, you do one thing, and you got problems here, and it's just,
Stoney
well, but you see to me, and I hate to be the conspiracy theorist person on the show, but the same people that are pushing this are the same people that want to depopulate the planet. Okay, so I have a list of 52 things that has been said since the 1960s that are promises of what global warming and all this stuff is going to do, and none of it is real. So we're going to do our global warming on purpose. Yeah, okay, so you can, if you just have a sustained two to three degree increase, you reduce the dissolved oxygen by five to 10% you stress all your fish out, and then your shift goes to species dominant, favoring evasive and heat tolerant species. We are doing this to ourself. Okay, we couldn't just let you know, let enough alone and prove the climate people wrong and and stupid. So now we're going to allow them the very same people that want to depopulate the planet and are causing us to be sick, we're going to allow them to come in here and put this crap in our backyard and heat the planet up since, since, since it's been proven that what we're doing isn't doing it, we're going to let them come in and do it Now on purpose, right? Okay. Because what have they been bitching since the 60s? Two degrees is enough. It'll, it'll melt all of the ice. And so we're going to let them come in and we're going to start, how many, how many of these are they talking about putting up 1520, of these across America?
Jason
They're going to be putting a lot of them, I think. Because, I mean, okay, all you have to do
Stoney
go drive by Exxon refinery. When a storm starts, you can there's so much heat coming off. And this is not a slam against Exxon. This is just a a fact of life. You can actually watch the clouds part coming up to Exxon sometimes, because there's so much heat rising from the plant that it'll part the clouds. And now we want to do this. And I'm not trying to sound like, you know, I'm anti data center. I am anti data center because I don't think we need this much processing power. I think this is another form of control.
Jason
But well, then what do you what do you do? Then, I
Stoney
mean, what do I do? I don't have them now, and I'm doing just
Jason
it's not that. It's not that what you or I have the question is, if other countries that are hostile to the United States become the dominant powers when it comes to AI and the advantages that gives them. How does that affect us?
Stoney
So I want to make our kids sick. I want to kill our people and destroy our land because I'm scared somebody else is going to do it. There's other options.
Jason
Yeah, no, I get it. I don't think there's one easy answer to this, because, yeah, we can say we're not building them and Okay, we just seed that to China. Because I'm gonna tell you they're throwing them up a dime a dozen, and they, they don't have to worry about permits and anything like that. That's right. Build one, and they build a power plant right next to it, you know. So I. You know, I don't know what the answer is, but I really don't. We're, we're being forced into this, in this, in this war, you know, this Cold War
Stoney
best, Ian has been against this from the beginning, and now we're getting ready to see the true negatives of AI, right? Because this is real. You were talking about killing off everything, yeah. And I'm not trying to sound like I'm crazy or nothing, but think about just the statistics of going up two to three to 15 degrees 30 times across America, yep. And then you take the water away from the people that need it. What is California right now, the Hoover Dam in Nevada is almost dry, right? Yeah, because they're having to use all of that to send power to California. And now you're going to have all the oil and gasoline shortages in California, because I think the third and fourth companies have decided to leave California, so they're estimating a minimum of $12. A gallon for gasoline.
Ian
Yeah, and I hate to be that guy, but I'll say it be it you just said Amazon makes it awfully convenient. And people would probably, I think, more often than not. Yes, they want clean drinking water. Yes, they want, probably, the environment to be okay. But more than anything else, they want their convenience. They want their convenient. They want to be able to click a button and something to magically appear on that doorstep within 15 minutes. And people would pay what their lives for that because to fight for clean drinking.
Stoney
You know what it sounds like to me, we're fixing to pay with our lives for something we don't want, right?
Ian
And then people will go all the way, probably to the grave, being like, no, but I got to have my Amazon Prime. No, you don't. You don't have to have that. It goes,
Jason
it goes back to the changes in human behavior, right? How we have, we have become, I don't want to leave my house, yep, I don't want to go to a mall. I don't want to be around people all the things that we did as I remember as a kid growing up that just that world doesn't exist anymore. Yes, they're shopping, but all I hear about is, I don't want to get out because I'm afraid of crime and I'm gonna get shot or or, you know, I don't do this, or I don't do that. It's just like because we're terrified, so we want it where I don't have to deal with fight traffic, I don't have to deal with all that stuff, right? I understand all that, but it that's the world we live in now, and unless something radically changes, which I don't see happening anytime soon. Yeah, we're locked into this paradigm that we're in right now, and it's just going to keep going. You have,
Ian
you have established a very comfortable and frictionless life for yourself where you don't have to that's the thing is. And now you know, you have, at every step of the way, you have made it easier for yourself to not go out, to not do those things, to not have any kind of uncomfortability in your life at all. And sometimes it's okay have a little have a little friction, have a little bit of, I don't know that's just me. Obviously, if you live in a place that you know you're scared for your life. I understand that that's probably different, but I
Jason
don't know you need to read this at this Rolling Stone article. It's called the President is Flint. How Oregon's data center boom is super charging a water crisis. So yeah, and it really just goes into this guy who, at first was he wanted these things, and it was economic development. I get it. You're trying to provide jobs. You're trying to, you know, do all these things. And unfortunately, it comes with a price. And but, you know, he mentions here, it says water hadn't been a really been a political priority for Doherty. He's a Republican, and he focused most on economic development and transportation projects, until a couple of years in his second term, when the uptick of stories he heard about young women enduring miscarriages and middle aged men with organ failure started making him uneasy. Yep, and they're saying, they said, the excess consumption of even small amount of nitrates can do significant harm to the human body. So this is what we're you know, I kind of mentioned earlier about some of these, these health certificate statistics and but, you know, it's like anything he goes and it never occurred to Doherty that his effort to fix the water problem would provoke the ire of a group of local officials who resented scrutiny of their role in the pollution sounds to me. I know in this state we dealt with back in the 70s, dealing with illegal dumping and politicians turning a blind eye and a. Allowing other states to come dump their hazardous waste in our state on a regular basis, because they're getting paid off to do so. It's terrible, oh yeah, it's it's the amount of of stuff that we've allowed to be dumped into our environment, and because certain people were getting paid off to do it, you know. And you know, these you go into these communities that are poor, they have no infrastructure, you have a company that comes in that going to give you some tax dollars, you know, who wouldn't jump on that? I mean, if you're an elected official, you know, you're trying to figure out, how can I get this county, or, in cases, in Louisiana, a parish, yeah, economic development. How can I get businesses in here? How can I raise the tax revenue? What else do you do? I don't know,
Stoney
but you're not going to tax the data. Oh, are they now? Oh, great. Let's tax data. Let's tax everything you do. Because what are the top benefits of having a data center in your area? You're going to make more taxes. Oh, they're going to pay for your schools. They're going to pay for your police departments. Really, how, what benefit are they bringing? Oh, as far as I can see, it's all control. Faster banking really me driving to the bank and getting out of my car and going into the bank and waiting behind three people in the teller line, then getting to the cashier, having to sign my check or do whatever I'm doing and then leave how is that going to help me faster? Is it going to make it go into my bank account any faster? No, it's not. Is it going to help me get it out faster? No, it's not. But they're going to be able to control faster what I put in and take out. Oh, GPS. It's going to help you with your GPS. Really, GPS is satellites. Got nothing to do with a data center. Okay, what's that going to help telemedicine? Oh, great. Me going to my doctor. How? Oh, now we're going to make all the phone calls to your doctor so we can monitor and the insurance companies can now buy the information that's on AI and decline you, because now it'll be faster to go before the death boards, yep. Okay, see, we're not really tell emergency services, so now we're gonna put all the 99119, 11, 911, out of business, because now you're just going to need AI. No, that's what they're saying. The result of having this in your area, faster, banking, streaming, GPS, telemedicine and emergency services, that's the top five things it can think of that's going to benefit Baton Rouge by having it in our area
Ian
that I don't know nothing. I don't know where that's coming from, because if it's an Amazon data center, it's going to be, it's going to be all Amazon specific stuff. I don't think it's going to be anything to do with GPS or banking, but, I mean, I could be wrong, but if it's an Amazon data center, then it's going to be all a streaming service. It's going to be a bunch of personal profiles, wish lists, all that kind of stuff, all the different you know, it's, it's all just data from Amazon. Yeah, all your personal credit card information is going to be stored there.
Jason
Probably, yes, Amazon opened Morrow county's first hyper scale data center in 2011 It was nearly 10,000 square feet of warehouse space filled with rows of computer servers, and it hosted most its most profitable division. It's cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services. So they said, Amazon has generated commercial taxes for the county worth more than 100 million over the course of a decade. Tell me how, I guess they they tax on certain how that works. I guess, I guess they tax on the power that they use, right? They do something. They said, uh, say, eager to compete with other rural communities looking to host data center campuses, local officials offered Amazon a 15 year tax abatement for, there you go, for each hyper scale data center it built, which would be worth billions to the company. They said, Amazon has since constructed seven such facilities in the area, with agreements for five more underway, they said there was a good reason. Amazon had set itself up in places like Morrow county with 107 billion in cloud computing cells in 2024 Amazon Web Services, web surfaces, has dominant position with 30% of the market, so but they have some stiff opposition from
Ian
I wonder, and I wonder, I wonder as well, like what Amazon, what meta like has on your personal profile. It's probably stored on that data center. So. Like, again, your algorithms, who, what you like? What the all the ad stuff? I mean, obviously your data is sold online. I it should get catered ads for you. That happens already, so I wouldn't be surprised if I think they share that information with the government as well.
Stoney
So I got curious. I got curious, how is a data center taxed? Data centers are property tax. There you go. Really, one time that's going to do us a lot of good land, buildings, servers, racks, cooling systems, generators, often classified as business, personal property. Okay? Really, I so that's, that's the big deal. You're going to come in and you're going to you're going to destroy our land, and then we're going to tax you because you own some property, but then we're going to defer that because we want you to come in, because now we're not going to make taxes off of the very things that we can tax you on.
Jason
I know the one that's being built just north of Baton Rouge. I believe it's kind of what happened when they brought in river bend, the nuclear plant up there. It was a at the time when it was built, it was like a 10 year tax deferment. So in essence, they had 10 years operate without being taxed. Now they're being taxed, and the parish up there is collecting quite a bit, so this is now going to add to that. So it's probably going to be the similar, a similar type of situation.
Stoney
Here's what we're saying, okay, servers, networking gear and generators are all taxable. Okay? When they go out and purchase them, right? Okay, so they go purchase them and tax them somewhere and don't pay taxes somewhere else, then we're going to give them a deferment so the exemptions can cover hundreds of millions of dollars of taxable hardware, because we give them the so we're actually cutting our nose off, despite our face, just to get them here so that we can not tax them on stuff, and they can destroy our land, people and property.
Ian
I've also seen here that they're also earning taxes on utilities such as electricity, so that, yep, they earn taxes, but we
Stoney
just had to spend $2 billion to build them the fucking plant. But so how is that going to
Ian
help so? And this is what is going back to what I said before, income taxes. They also get taxed on the data centers, like collection of data, right, federal, state and local levels. So again, so this is what I was saying before, all of your data is being collected whenever you peruse online, whenever you shop, all your algorithms, all this stuff, and all that data is being sold to advertisers, and that money is obviously going to Amazon, going to meta, going to whoever has data. And of course, in that transaction, somehow the government also gets taxes on that as well.
Jason
I mean, the big four, Amazon, Google, meta and Microsoft. Oh yeah. Well, I hate Sally. Hate to tell y'all the SNP predicts that demand for new construction is expected to double by 2030 most of it in rural counties like Morro that are otherwise reliant on agriculture. That's where these places set up. There's really nothing else in that county that is there other than farmland. Yeah, that's it, they said. A recent Goldman Sachs analysis found AI technology could unlock, could unlock as much as 5 trillion to 19 trillion for the American economy.
Stoney
Wow, it's not. It's no, see, this is stupid stuff people are putting out there. Your data is valuable. I spend a lot of money, but that doesn't benefit us. No, that is valuable. That has been the way since the very first commercials with what was that? What was the thing they used to send you? Okay, you what. You had three channels to watch, and they would send you something in the mail, and you would write down or check off, what was that report, the early TV crap shoot. You filled out something, and it told the advertisers what you were watching. There's a name for it. It came in the mail, and that's all it is. They're selling information. It's not benefiting us anyway, no.
Ian
But as I'm saying, all that revenue is not going to people like us. It's all going to shareholders to write
Jason
exact companies people have stocks, yeah, in these companies, right? So if you're, you're, if you have stocks in these companies, hey, yeah, I'm gonna get a bigger dividend check, you know. But they say data centers. They said the volume of water needed to cool servers, most of which need to be kept at 70 to 80 degrees to run effectively, have become a nationwide water resource issue, particularly in areas face. Some water scarcity across the West, they say. Bloomberg News analysis found that roughly two thirds of new data centers built are in development since 2022 are in places already gripped by high levels of water stress. Droughts have plagued Morrow County, occurring annually since 2020, earlier this year, the International Energy Agency reported that data centers could consume 1000 200 billion liters of water by 2030, worldwide crazy, nearly double the five 60 billion liters of water they used currently?
Stoney
Excuse me, it was called the Nielsen TV ratings diary.
Ian
Okay, never heard of it. That's interesting. It was mailed to
Stoney
you, yeah, or, I think some newspapers even put it out there, and then you mailed it in, and they took that information and so and used it for their advertisers. Wow. So that's been going on since early radio and TV. It's just, you know? Now they want to be able to control it and make a profit off of it. Even more, yep.
Ian
Now if you hover over the Checkout button for just long enough, they're like, oh, we'll send you, yeah, information on that. Oh, you like that, don't you? You like you like these kind of things.
Stoney
Well, now they can do it with what you're looking at on they have the little retina scanners on the some of the computers and laptops and stuff that watch what you're looking at and your phone too. A lot of people don't realize this retina stuff on your phone when you can move the pages and everything else with your phone, they're watching how long you're looking at anything, and that information is sold.
Jason
Crazy. Yeah, I mean, this is, I feel we are in the beginning stages of their building out Skynet. Yeah. Not, not, not to be cliche, but I think we're starting to build the infrastructure that's going to change the world. I really do we talk about the fourth turning and how we're kind of going through these convulsions. I think we're now getting to that point. I mean, I believe in an episode, one or two episodes back, we talked about, you know, the computer game, and the computer predicted the end of the world. And they say the seeds of that we would see would be in the 2020s and I believe that that we'll start to see some, really, a lot of changes in the 2040s I think that's when it's really going to hit. But, yeah, I mean it's, it's, that is the future. I mean that nothing's going to change, that governments, especially poor governments and local governments are going to pursue these things with a vengeance. Because if I can get some tax revenue into our parish, that we can build roads, that we can do all the infrastructure, things that we can't do now, then I think it's going to happen. I just do. I mean, I, you know, I wish there was a way that we could develop our economy be, yet be environmentally neutral. I don't know how to do that. I don't know if we even have the tech to do that.
Stoney
Well, well, you know, the bottom line to it is, is they're not gonna they don't care about watching us. No, the Nielsen report, that was very simple. What do people watch? Data centers with their computing power are not going to care what you're doing right now. They want to predict what you're going to do next. And they're going to do that across the board. What are you going to do next? What was that movie where they they predicted whether you were going to Minority Report, whether you were going to commit a crime. Oh, yeah. You know, that's exactly what this is to me. This is the early stages of Skynet slash Minority Report, yeah. Oh, you were going to commit a crime. Next week, you're going to jail.
Jason
Well, they talked about this, you know, five to $19 trillion in additional revenue. So, yeah, be very curious how all this kind of, how all this works out. But they said the, you know, back, you know, this, this area around in Oregon, say, in 1992 DEQ measured an average night, take nitrate concentration of 9.2 parts per million across a cluster of wells pulled in from the basin by 2015 that average had written risen to 46% to 15.3 parts per million. And they for some wells, DEQ found nitrate levels nearly as high as in 73 Be parts per million, more than 10 times the state limit of seven. And it kind of goes into how this process works, of how they pull water. I mean, it's a really good article, yeah, of what you know how this is happening, yeah. I mean, it's, I encourage people to read this Rolling Stones article, and of course, it's got us detractors, and I'm not saying they could. They have kind of exacerbated and exaggerated some things. It's all in how you read data. Yeah, you know, as I said, there's no clear scientific evidence that these things are caused that. But I'm kind of the any all this artificial stuff. It's not good, no, for us, it's just not.
Stoney
I mean, think about it. Think about this. Now 15 years, yeah, in the future, okay, we've been living with these data centers and all of this stuff for 15 years and 15 years and a day they shut down, or you can pay extra money to keep them going, or whatever reason a comet flies by the planet and magically shuts them all off. What is life going to be 15 years in the future and a day when they stop, right? Well, all your audiences are going to lose from all your past that. What about all your electronic records? What about all the property you know, records? Because we're not going to keep them in City Hall anymore. Now we're going to keep them in the data centers. Now, your marriage certificate. Now all of this, all of this information is gone. Now, what do we do? Because we don't have a backup to the backup?
Jason
Yeah, well, this is,
Stoney
you know, then all of a sudden, now you got there, they're saying it's going to help your GPS and your cell phones. Really, how's, how does a data center help my cell phone? So we're going to lose our cell phones, we're going to lose our computers, we're going to lose the internet, because all of the internet is going to be tied into the local data center. Yep. So now what happens now we're back in the Middle Ages, maybe all credit card and cards transaction stop, because it all got funneled through the data center. All your banking information, every dollar your own now, is gone because it's not in your bank. It's in the data center. Not to say, you know, since we had all the the the air traffic control issues a couple weeks ago during the shutdown. Now, what happens when AI is running traffic control, and we got nobody trained 15 years from now to be able to do air traffic control?
Ian
I don't know. I feel like there are some regulations in place to make sure that doesn't happen.
Stoney
But and not 15 years from now, though, it may not be there, and I agree with you today, there is. But how about 15 years from now, right, when we're completely reliant on black street Vanguard, or what's the name of, Is it black street Vanguard and whatever the hell the other damn company is, because they're the ones pushing this, because they want control. Yeah, they want control of everything about us, and just for the record, I am not suicidal. If you hear that I have committed suicide, please contact any of what law enforcement friends I have left and let them know that I did not kill myself, right? You know, think about what happened during covid. Okay? Grocery stores are going to go empty, not necessarily from panic, but from the logistics failure of all of the self driven trucks now that are being done by AI and the data centers can't get to their stops that they're supposed to go to.
Ian
Right? They have something coming out in a lot of majors, like a lot of big cities, called Waymo, and it's like, I've heard of that fresh my memory. It's just self driving cars. It's like an Uber service, okay, yeah, yeah, that's yeah. But the big thing is, is that it's all about convenience. You can call an Uber, but it's cheaper to call or to get a Waymo. If you're at like, the airport, there's already a station right there, and the car is right there, so you can just get yourself a Waymo.
Stoney
And it used to be you could just go out and get the taxi who was sitting there, right?
Ian
So anyways, that's a whole thing, not good enough for us, a next level of convenience where you're just going to be putting yourself at risk in a self driving car, a self driving taxi. Sorry, yeah, that's
Jason
what it is. Tell our, you know, local listeners, to pay attention to this, these developments here in Louisiana with this same thing that, unfortunately, I think what's going on in Oregon, you're going to be hearing about that here. And you know, as I said, it's all touted as. Economic wins. And I can understand the allure that we're finally getting something that, you know, we can kind of get some taxes off of to try to, you know, improve, you know, have a funded government that can actually build roads and do some of the things that residents want right to have done so, yeah, I highly recommend the the article, this article to read, because it really gives a good breakdown of what's going on in this can this article can be probably drop it in any other community that these data centers exist. Who's the kind of the guy from Shark Tank that it really touts these centers? He's obviously a big investor into these was it Kevin Leary? Kevin O'Leary, yeah, he's a big, big I've heard him talk about data centers. He mentioned this is the up and coming thing. So when you have people like that that are saying this is the up and coming thing, you know it's coming, yeah, because those kind of people are not putting their money in the stuff that's going away, this is something they're looking at over the next 25 years, right? That are, it makes sense, because our society has increasingly become more integrated online, and everything is going to be powered online, fast food. I mean, we've talked about it on this podcast on other issues, when it's come to this, this topic of AI and and the consequences of this, it's coming, how this is going to be managed, and in a case here, I think you just have to be really you have to stress that water has to be completely filtered out before it's put back Right and that's cooled off, that's going to be that's going to require, probably additional expense for the proper filters and stuff like that to be able to get the water clean enough to do it, yeah,
Stoney
but I got a question, do we have any politicians left with enough balls to make that happen? Because right now in Louisiana, we sure don't. And I'll say it and don't give a shit.
Jason
Well, unfortunately, I think it's not just Louisiana. I think it's
Stoney
and hello politicians. You heard me say it grow some balls.
Jason
I think, Well, the problem is, it's like these. You know, it's
Stoney
time to do what's best for the American public and the citizens of Louisiana, not what's best necessarily for the pocketbook. We've already been poisoning our children as it is, and now we want to do it on a massive scale, not only with the poisons in the water, but now the poisons in the electronics, right, and their brain power and everything else. It's time that we started doing what was right for the American citizen. Yeah, and I hate to say this. I'm going to say it on the air. We used to pick on Ian. And Ian, I want to apologize to you on the air, we used to pick on you about getting kind of huffy about the AI thing. You were right. I 100% agree with you. You were right. Here we go. The Boomer is agreeing with the millennial. You were right. Because everything I learned more about these data centers, it's unbelievable to me that we are even considering this scary story. And I understand China's doing it, Russia is doing it. Everybody's doing it, right? We need to do it smarter. Okay, I had a conversation with somebody today, actually on the phone, about what our purpose is, and our purpose is to love. If you start everything out with love, everything works itself out. If you start out putting the American citizen first, guess what? Everything else can work itself out because you put the American citizen first. That's what a constitutional republic is. This is not a democracy. Democracy. This has never been a democracy. Stop saying it, live tards and put the American citizen first in everything that you do. And all of this will work out if you wake up every morning as a politician. You are not our leaders. You are our representatives, and you need to learn that, put the American citizen first and get it figured out, if not resign your position and let somebody else in who wants to do it. Yeah, as this conversation is getting old, not our conversation, right? The conversation about the politicians not doing
Ian
you want to end the episode. I get it.
Jason
I think we're, I think, unfortunately, it seemed like kind of still going through this article, this poor guy, him and the other person who was trying to, you know, wash. This stuff. Guess what happened? They got removed, of course, really from public shocking. Yeah. You know, if this happens, these big companies come in, they give money, they give money to schools. They do all this, yep. And these, comp, these, these, these poor areas gobble that up because they don't have anything, and you're always looking for something and and unfortunately, when it comes to that, it's we put our health second. Yep, we do, especially
Ian
when it comes to convenience, you know, it's,
Jason
I don't know guys, just kind of, you know, I was be honest with you before we even thought about this issue. I mean, I've been hearing about the, you know, the economic, you know, victories with with these data centers being built. Now I'm a bit, I have to pause a little bit that
Stoney
everything starts off sounding good. Everything starts off sounding like there's victories, until you look at it 1520, years from now, and what we've done to ourselves. You know, hydrated oils were great when it first started. They were the greatest thing since sliced bread and peanut butter, until the peanut peanut butter turned into petroleum products, till the bread turned into petroleum products. And your jellies petroleum products. It all sounds good at first, until the, you know, ultra elite decide they want us fat and slaves and not able to revolt.
Jason
Well, as I said, the more infrastructure we build to automate. Yeah, this is where you're going to start, Skynet. This is when you're going to start saying, Okay, what you know, jobs are going to be now handled by by machines. And as I'm saying, we're now building we're, in essence, we're building the interstate for, yes, we are the transformation of our society. It's being built for one thing, but eventually it's going to get co opted into something.
Stoney
And remember, this is being built by the very same people that want to depopulate the planet, through vaccinations, through hunger, through whatever else you wanted, chemical poisons. Yeah, it's the same people,
Ian
yeah. And with that being said, we want to hear
Stoney
what you have to say. Speaking of that being said, I was thinking about some chocolate chip cookies. Oh, maybe, yeah, maybe just checking throwing that out there, right? I haven't
Ian
had the time, but I think I will in the next week or so, hopefully. So I'll definitely, I want
Stoney
to throw something at y'all, okay, Miranda and I had to get something from Walmart, and we did an episode on food the other day. Yeah, and when we put something in our refrigerator today, Miranda noticed something, and it really caught her eye. And this is a product that she buys normally. It's the strawberry lemonade from Walmart, okay? And it's a great value product. Yeah, they raised the price eight cents, okay? And they went from 59 to 52 ounces. Really, the whole carton is different. Wow. Whole carton is smaller. And that's what we were talking about in one of our last episodes. Yeah, yeah. Is that not crazy? We noticed just right there we were like, wow, she's a baby. Come see this. Yeah? Like, what she said, you see a difference? I went, Holy crap. Yeah, it's smaller. It's smaller and more expensive. Yep, that's how they get you. Is that crazy? Exactly? All about profit, intentional, that's it intentional. Yeah, hoping you don't notice, but because Miranda so Boogie, we have to have six of them. We have to have five backups for my baby. There you go. And when you slide one of them in there, right? Wow, you can't help but notice they expect you to go in there and buy one, maybe two, of course. Well, you stick that one with four other ones, you notice, of course, wow, it's crazy.
Ian
That's great. That's funny, and it definitely does tie into that sort of situation. Well, any Anyways, if any of the listeners at home have anything they want to tell us about, or as far as this topic, or if you've noticed anything about I recently inflation, yes, I recently went to a fast food restaurant, and I got the sign that says that there's no more new pennies. So, like, I got the whole sign that was like, we may not have a new new pennies, but we can accept them, but we're not going to give any anyway. So I was like, oh, so I was like, Oh my gosh. So if you have any of those experiences, we have comment sections on Spotify and YouTube where you can tell us your experiences. Or we also have the email address get offended together@gmail.com, where you can
Stoney
leave long form response, of which I'm sure I offended a few people today.
Ian
There you go. Maybe that's okay, and until next week, thank you so much for listening.
Jason
Bye, bye, goodbye everyone and God bless.
Stoney
Imagine 15 years of perfect uptime, then one day, one bad day, everything stops, no banking, no logistics, no Emergency Coordination, no GPS timing and no cloud memory to tell us what we used to know. That's not a movie plot. That's what happens when a civilization builds itself on uninterrupted computation. The uncomfortable truth is resilience used to be cultural, now it's technical. If we don't design for failure, failure will design the lesson for all of us. Thanks for joining us today. You're the best. Peace.