the no data center movement

i think this is a pretty big deal and has a good chance of significantly changing how people vote, especially older people. i also feel like it has a chance of building local radical energy. it has pretty quickly appeared as a powerful venn diagram center of groups with not-completely-congruent values. residents pack town halls, yell and scream, get ignored, the righteous anger builds. many similar stories happening all the time everywhere right now in the u.s.

to start i've got to link this brutal takedown of clown billionaire investor kevin o'leary from two young women in utah regarding the hyperscale stratos data center currently looming over 65 square miles of high desert north of the great salt lake in box elder county.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DYOVaBDzEAN/

The remote chance of getting a data center in my drought-stricken North Central Florida county is currently being used as an excuse to ignore burn bans and water restrictions by chuds.

Map, this is crazeeee..! the most blatantly anti-democratic thing I've seen in ages

Last week, there was a further twist when the developers withdrew their application to divert 1,900 acre-feet of water from ranching to the project. However, Stratos “fully intends to move forward” with a new application set to be lodged with state regulators, according to the developers.

This new process will invalidate the objections already raised by Utahns and require each person to pay $15 to file a new complaint. Opponents claim this move is aimed at skirting public disapproval of the project

what's interesting about it is how political support for data centers is bi-partisan, even though absolutely everyone hates this shit. "political support" as in the elected and unelected officials (often appointed by municipal leaders) who actually vote on these things and "listen" to the public feedback.

it's a wedge issue among the left, i think, and democrats, very different from israel's genocide in gaza, but a similar effect in that if you oppose data centers, you have little representation at a national level. the "we hate data centers" voice is drowned out by neoliberal technocrat bullshit, looking the other way, passing through data centers and failing upward to the next level of life success

That Utah one is fucking insane. This is where it really starts to feel like the tech oligarchs really do run everything, unchecked (bi-partisan support, as z_tbd notes!) and we are all just fodder in the making.

there just seems to be this mass hysteria going on: "We need to do this before they (China) do it!" without really considering if this technology is really going to help the larger public in a big way. It's certainly going to help shareholders and CEOs but I've yet to be convinced, but I am convinced that these data centers are fucked. The Utah thing will use more electricity than the entire state of Utah is currently using

btw fuck Kevin O'Leary and that stupid fucking show that made him a recognizable name

yeah I read the Guardian piece on the Utah center and holy crap the energy and water math on that one is on another plane. O'Leary was quoted in it blahblahing about competing with China, and to state the tediously obvious: why aren't we compelled to compete with China on education funding, transition to renewables, electric vehicles, etc.

Kevin O’Leary had a role in Marty Supreme as well.

cool another reason not to see that shit

>there just seems to be this mass hysteria going on: "We need to do this before they (China) do it!"

An even older stupid bipartisan sport. Fearmongering about Red China might have a bit more polling support than data centers but my impression is that even with a full media and political class onslaught most people don’t care about China at all.

xp yeah he's also doing that 'paid protesters' bs schtick w/o providing a shred of evidence... that's the new line with these fucks, if there's a mass protest they must be on the Soros econazi payroll because who would *not* want this massive destruction of the natural world for a handful of jobs and some tax incentives?

>there just seems to be this mass hysteria going on: "We need to do this before they (China) do it!"

An even older stupid bipartisan sport. Fearmongering about Red China might have a bit more polling support than data centers but my impression is that even with a full media and political class onslaught most people don’t care about China at all.

milo clearly getting paid by the post

Also if we want to do something before China, how about green energy?

And yes, people absolutely hate these data centers, with every good reason imaginable. I agree there's the makings of an anti-billionaire populist political coalition there, if only we had a major party interested in such a thing.

yeah I just said the same thing about China and I mean if we're really worried about them beating us, perhaps we should try communism??? O'Leary can contribute to the glorious cause by digging a lithium mine

in stl, one of the many proposed data centers at "the armory" was approved after a last minute voting session (announced 24 hours before the meeting, the bare minimum required) which was switched to a zoom call rather than their regular meeting spot, and passed unanimously. i saw friends scramble to try to get to the physical meeting spot, get to the meeting (at 2pm or something, during workhours), only to show up at the spot and find that it was on zoom. and then of course, very few of the zoom attendees were allowed to speak.

the mayor, on this same day, meanwhile, no joke, was in england at a small dinner party with the billionaire who proposed the data center. on the same day it was being voted on.

later that day the mayor seemed to realize that some people were disappointed in her, so she released a clip where she defended the data center, and with not a small amount of barely concealed resentment against her own constituency, mentioned the conditions the city had boldly placed on the data center to "address community concerns".

but what are the conditions? on energy use:

The Developer must use reasonable efforts to source at least 50% of
the data center’s energy load from renewable sources (wind, solar,
geothermal, etc.) within five years of commencing operations. If the
renewable goal is not met, the Developer must endeavor to purchase
localized renewable energy credits. The Developer must also recycle
e-waste. The Developer must annually report electricity usage, waste
heat, and water usage, which may be made public.

yeah, GREAT

even better, all those jobs!

The Developer must meet escalating, median-wage "Job" minimums for 20 years (starting at 25 in year 1, 50 in year 2, and 100 thereafter) and pay $2,000 in liquidated damages for each job short of the required total.

something tells me that 100 people are not going to be working at this data center. and what is this incentive? if they don't meet 100 workers, and they're deciding what to do, they can either add another worker (ballpark, paying them $50K), or they can pay a $2K penalty. i wonder what the billionare will do?

the other thing that occurs to me: Iran has shown that data centers (specifically Amazon or AWS sites) are legitimate targets for attack... something to think about, it wouldn't have to be a foreign power, it could be a target for domestic terrorists or space lasers

xp the good news is data centers are not going to be built

I don’t know how reliable Ed Zitron is but he’s penciling out that data centers take forever to build and very few have actually been completed and are up and running

Don’t theae data centers become outdated in a matter of years and need to be completely upgraded?

I don't know about AI specifically but there are plenty of Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers up & running all over the place

New data suggests that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is operating out of more than 900 data centers, far greater than previous estimates.

As reported by SourceMaterial, citing "leaked" data seen by the publication, in 2023, the cloud giant was operating from some 914 data centers in more than 50 countries.

Right, but AI dedicated ones need far more power and water and cooling space so are far bigger than regular ones

i hope ed zitron is right! the part where it gets way over my head is about how the debt holders of the ai data centers are these shitty ai startups built on a bubble that are likely to disappear. i can see how that would be a problem! however, when it comes to billions of dollars, for some reason it always seems like another group of really rich people always manage to step in just in time to make sure that the environmental destruction of our only home in exchange for short-term private gain continues as long as possible

yeah cloud servers and AI computing centers have very different demands xp

ultimately its all just computers in a room thing thats really different about the current ai boom is scale

i do agree that most of them will prob never be built

yeah I don't know the technical requirements but the Guardian article says that the one planned in Utah will be as large as Manhattan if completed, which is fucking nuts

Musk wants to build them in space which is fine I guess but you would have to have staff living up there and what if the AI goes crazy and locks them out

NV Energy, the Nevada utility that has supplied the bulk of Lake Tahoe’s electricity for decades, told Liberty Utilities—the small California company that services the region—that it will stop providing power after May 2027. The reason? NV Energy needs the capacity for data centers. As in: the energy supplier for the Lake Tahoe region is telling the utility company that it has less than a year to find another power source.

https://fortune.com/2026/05/12/lake-tahoe-data-center-49000-residents-power-source/

not sure you could come up with a better bubble indicator than someone trying to build a facility bigger than manhattan

im going to build a tulip greenhouse bigger than manhattan

could be a rad indoor skate part after the bubble bursts

def a cool place for teens to hang out and throw rocks at things

I got into it with a buddy last night who was going on about the rise 'AI consciousness' and that kind of shit and I'm like 'What about when the power goes out? I can still think and dream and design without a wall outlet' and he didn't have a good answer for that, but he's convinced it's like a new species or something

2x the size of Manhattan apparently? Two Manhattans. That's too much even for a single lunch date.

speaking of manhattan one aspect of new york city living that bodes well for the future is that i assume building an AI data center here is cost prohibitive (not that i don't think someone will try)

I got into it with a buddy last night who was going on about the rise 'AI consciousness' and that kind of shit and I'm like 'What about when the power goes out? I can still think and dream and design without a wall outlet' and he didn't have a good answer for that, but he's convinced it's like a new species or something

What can I say, the people yearn for mysticism. Maybe try to get him to just join a nice cult instead? The Jehovah's Witnesses will take anyone.

I've read some of these fools talking about 'Oh yeah, Claude likes to write poetry in his free time' and I'm just thinking 'you fucking suckers really believe this shit don't you?'

a lot of companies that sounds like fly-by-night operators are proposing a lot of stuff right now but I wonder how much is going to make it past the "we rented a building" phase because the hardware to fill all these places is nonexistent or already spoken for

the thing with these giant wealth funds and venture capital expenditures is that they can bet a ton of money every time with the assumption that one of every five, ten, etc. things they throw money at will show a profit after five years because the profits will make up for the rest of them being failures and it's a matter of keeping the money rolling

yeah I guess part of the worry is when they start building the Manhattan-size building and then run out of money and there's just these giant concrete pads in the desert or prairies or whatever... even an unfinished one can still cause a lot of damage, and declaring bankruptcy can help you avoid cleanup and remediation. Look at all the abandoned oil wells all over the place

I have a free Claude account that I've used very rarely, I mainly set it up to poke and prod at it, and I set my username as "Human." So when I log in it says, "Hello Human." I think it's good to keep those boundaries clear.

does he ever write you poems in his spare time?

I’m not going to make myself popular but…

Hi, I’m building a datacentre and they don’t have to be terrible. My one is going to be water positive, they’ll be a net increase in water in the aquifer under us, renewable powered because that’s the cheapest and quickest way to do it. The waste heat is a resource we’re going to use for horticulture and growing algae for fertilizer, animal feed and aviation fuel.

In Europe there’s plenty of DCs heating neighborhoods with district heating, heating greenhouses etc.

Data centres aren’t the problem, it’s how they are built and the insane amount of money sloshing around AI. A DC will pay upwards of US$50,000/MWh for energy for AI. At this moment in Australia the spot price is AUD103 and it’s a still morning and the sun hasn’t come up yet. The ceiling price in the market is AUD26k. So DCs are massive distortions.

Trump fucked the US by putting tariffs in Chinese solar and batteries - that’s the easiest and quickest way to power anything particularly in the American West. Of course by design that pushes everyone to the next cheapest thing gas, which is terrible, and there’s a global shortage of gas turbine components because the latest generation jet engines break all the time and the turbine manufacturers all have uptime contracts with the airlines and so all parts go to planes.

This means that even worse choices get made; and of course like everything that’s gone before DC operators are not being held accountable for their externalities. The Investor owned utility, I.e. one without a market mechanism is a particularly bad fit for this (not that open markets like Texas are much better) - the incentives are there to fuck one’s neighbors as with Lake Tahoe above.

Of course whilst DCs will pay 50k/MWh they don’t want to and energy = water so will do cooling in the worst possible way and just vent heat and vapour to the atmosphere.

TLDR; datacentres are terrible due to lack of regulation, tech bro god delusions about what AI is and will be and capitalism. They deserve to be fought, they are bad news till proven otherwise.

Well right, I mean we've had big data centers for years — it's "the cloud" — and while there were concerns raised about their energy draw even before the big AI boom, they weren't at this monstrous everywhere scale that is being attempted now. I agree that not all of the centers being planned are going to be built, we're obviously in a gold-rush mentality right now and that can't last.

And yeah the problem is regulation, and that the regulation in the U.S. is being done at local and state levels that are just utterly unequipped to deal with any of it. These local mayors and commissions and state legislators get stars in their eyes when these big tech lobbyists show up and do big power point presentations on "the future" and everything, they actually think this is exciting stuff.

I should try and find an actual source for it but a DC nearly blacked out Southern Company and/or Duke last year. That’s most of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas IIRC.

They switched over to their internal diesel gensets without telling the grid and grids don’t do well when 3GW of Load just disappears like that.

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves on XAI's big (polluting) data center in Southaven: "This is the largest economic development project in Mississippi’s history. It sets the pace for continued high-tech investments across our state and strengthens Mississippi’s position as a leader in this exciting tech revolution."

This shit makes me want to go all Ricky Roma — "Who ever told you you could work with men? You fucking child."

THANK YOU ED

"We need to do this before they (China) do it!" without really considering if this technology is really going to help the larger public in a big way.

meanwhile China is so far ahead of us in renewables, the US is gonna be like colonial Williamsburg for fossil fuels (analogy c/o Daniel Bachman)

china selling shovels to the ai gold rush

From what I gather, a lot of the boosters are focusing on the people throwing around a lot of dissent at city council meetings, zoning meetings, etc. and pointing out that people haven’t actually read the plans or what regulations will be enforced, and so on. Which is fair, the number of people raising the noise level in the last decade in local politics has been high and it doesn’t help anyone.

I think what they’re missing is that this is the tip of the iceberg of people who have vague suspicions or are finally noticing that the world has changed in the last few *decades* and there is a lot of vague, in-articulated dissent going on because the public at large has become uncomfortable.

The existing outliers that have been poor stewards of land, energy, and labor are in the spotlight and we’re getting a systematic reevaluation of what exactly we’re doing here.

The counter-example of a good site was provided when I questioned someone boosting expansion was a Colorado Springs industrial site that’s had the sort of incoherent pushback I mentioned. I agree it’d be a good site! Abandoned Intel manufacturing plant that was slated to be a solar cell manufacturing plant until the subsidizes dried up and that company pulled out. The issue there in my eyes is that there’s a pre-existing empty building, there’s no guarantee this will work out any better than the solar cell plant, and even if it does it opens the door to more expansion and industrial park crowding.

Some of the more remote locations that are proposed might be fine from nearly every aspect but again, there’s no guarantee that this is long term and creating another rural or semi-rural vacant building is just more rural blight. There are entire empty small towns that are mostly nuisance properties at this point.

The most significant and gratifying thing to me about the Flock pushback in particular is it’s the first time in ages (ever?) that I’ve seen real agitation from the right against the expansion of the police/surveillance state. Granted, it’s from a self-centered POV like pretty much their entire worldview, but at least they’re grasping that yes these tools can be used against them too. There is room to build there into a broader don’t-step-on-snek movement against militarized policing. Of course one of the biggest obstacles to that is (as mentioned above) Clintonite liberals so beaten down about being “soft on crime” that they’ll be afraid to grab the ring.

Also crime rates overall are historically low right now, which makes it a great time to challenge the idea that we need to be training and equipping cops like they're in Escape From New York.

there are fucktons of technologies that could be helpful for individuals and societies but which are so susceptible to abuse that extreme controls are necessary.

and then there’s some they are just fuckin cancerous and exist for crime, theft, abuse, and victimization, like prediction markets and crypto. bush league is like, fan duel shit.

and tbh i know not enough, because i treat that shit as dangerous.

now i feel like i should figure out the population of “fucktons-land” and man, i dunno. maybe i’m full of shit, nevermind.

dan your problem is that you are surrounded by desperate people and there are more every day and every day things are worse for them. that’s why your friends’ cars keep getting burgled. the same is true in my city and in cities all over our land. my own car had a window smashed the other day, parked behind the same building i’ve been parking behind for decades. what should we do? cameras? what should we do next year? more cameras? what should we do the year after that, when there are enough cameras to abolish invisibility before the state but somehow still not enough to abolish crime? and there are even more desperate people? and you keep seeing scary pictures of them doing crime, taken by your cameras? and it’s even harder for you to imagine their lives than it already is? and there are still valuables in your car? what will be the plan then? what final policy will remain for the besieged bourgeois motorist unafraid of change who regretfully accepts the reports from politics experts that the time remains unripe to let people go to the doctor? where do you think this is going? what will you do when we get there? whom will you blame? republicans?

imo the actions against mass surveillance dovetail well with protests against more data centers because people are starting to question exactly what sort of data is being acquired and used and who benefits.

for most use cases in the previous era, data or media was distributed to be downloaded and used by large swaths of people. now the data flow is going the other direction, and much more data is going in than is coming out, and the primary users of the outputs have an onus to prove they’re serving some sort of public good if they’re using public resources

My own financial predicament is such that I am far closer to burgling a car than going on a vacation

same!

taylor lorenz quoting pro-data center right-wing editorials on her twitter is just the perfect, most predictable thing

She knows her audience over there.

― Elvis Telecom, Sunday, September 6, 2026 3:24 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

she’s nothing more than a hype beast for whatever she feels will get her views

My Progressive South episode this week is relevant to this thread — I talked to Tim Cywinski of the Sierra Club in Virginia, who was fighting data centers for several years before they became a mainstream issue. He has thoughts! Also a roundup of anti-Flock and anti-AI legislation in the South.

https://theprogressivesouth.org/headlights-ep-60-the-big-tech-backlash/

nice

I also think people can take lessons from the pipeline resistance movement, ideas like using drones and USGS maps to ID property lines in question

listening now, stoke is real. thanks tipsy

cool

taylor lorenz's income depends completely on people being reactionary and online all the time so of course she supports massive data center rollout, opposes restrictions on social networks, etc. she used to do some kind of good work but it's a very minor sliver of her professional output at this point. there is a reason she keeps getting fired.

didn't she bail on the nytimes of her own accord? it was very weird when they were letting their tech reporter cover insane right-wing tiktok people who were actually gaining influence when it was obviously a political story and not a tech one. almost as if they felt it was worth covering but not worth assigning it any sort of importance

tipsy that was a great piece. my old roommate was like v v senior for epa water issues and lives in nova, gonna reach out and recommend/inquire.

Thx! Yeah I enjoyed talking to him, he's been in the fight for a while.

Unsurprisingly, Sinclair Broadcasting is pushing the idea that the no data center movement is all paid for by the PRC.

Great episode tipsy. Strongly encourage folks here to listen.

Sinclair is basically the broadcasting affiliate-owner for people who have no joy and grunt at the news. Even their propaganda has no hook, it’s just “this is what they’re doing” without really defining any of that

nice to see the right wing misunderstanding the moment, for a change

dan your problem is that you are surrounded by desperate people and there are more every day and every day things are worse for them. that’s why your friends’ cars keep getting burgled.

― difficult listening hour, Monday, September 7, 2026 12:18 AM (two days ago)

otm

i'm not burgling cars and i don't like it when my cars get burgled and the people who are making things worse for me want me to blame my problems on the people burgling cars instead of them

which doesn't work so good when they then tell other people to blame _their_ problems on _me_

the other thing is that life is wild and people do crazy shit all the time - desperate or not although theft occurs more often if people are desperate and angry, i think that's self-evident - but there is like an industry of reacting to that fact and experience by clinging to and shoring up a shallow edifice of "decency" that is actually just more cruel disconnection. these big generalizations about crime are highly massaged and weaponized from the get-go. the problem of not feeling safe walking around in certain places can be directly addressed. there is no need to run away from the reality and specificity of those situations by believing childish fictions about bogeymen.

this is about my particular city and experience and i don't necessarily mean to apply it to anyone else. salt lake city like any other city in america right now has a lot of people living outside and on the streets. when people who have houses in the suburbs or even condos up by the university come through downtown, their very prevalent reaction to street people is disgust and fear, because street people are a direct threat to the thousand lies that people with money need to tell themselves in order to preserve their innocence. it is very easy for these nice people with jobs and money to justify their feelings by making homeless people out to be criminals. people on the streets, like any other human being, can sense when someone fears and hates them, and they very naturally like any other human being don't react to that positively. this is their life. this is their neighborhood too. you are actually their neighbors. hard as that may be to accept, someone with the most fucked up schizophrenia or drug damaged existence is still living and breathing and calling this place some version of home. someone with a rugged culture that doesn't look like your own is just out there trying to live.

buttoned-up people with money who believe dumb shallow lies so they don't have to be uncomfortable for a second actually make themselves less safe by walking around with those beliefs, that attitude and demeanor. i've found that if i can look at people with clear eyes and a dignified intent and walk around like i'm sharing the neighborhood with them, it goes a long way toward ensuring my safety. also the fact that i'm a big white guy (gay but can very easily pass as straight) probably plays an even bigger role. people who are lower on the identity totem pole in whatever way face different situations.

I was in SLC a couple of years ago and the homeless/druggie scene downtown really is remarkable. It's in-your-face in a way I have never really seen before. My reaction wasn't fear and disgust but a guess a kind of combination of outrage ("how on earth can this city just allow this level of desperation and poverty to persist") and pity for these people without the dignity of even a shelter for their heads. I think there's also something jarring about the stunning natural beauty of SLC, and the prevailing aesthetic of wholesomeness - both crunchy organic and Mormon - with the reality of life for so many people there

i have thoughts on that lol. if you're ever here again hit me up!

I was in SLC a couple of years ago and the homeless/druggie scene downtown really is remarkable. It's in-your-face in a way I have never really seen before. My reaction wasn't fear and disgust but a guess a kind of combination of outrage ("how on earth can this city just allow this level of desperation and poverty to persist") and pity for these people without the dignity of even a shelter

Have you been to Oakland or San Francisco… or Berkeley to a lesser extent?

mmmmmm crunchy organic Mormons

my response on slc is sorta— adjacent by travel. craziest drivers i ever seen btw

map may be willing to correct me, but my experiences there are that if you’re lds you can sorta get away with a LOT. you’ll get at least initial support for yr errors. if you’re not and they know it, NOPE.

one of the highest addiction rates in the country, the home of mlm, and like, all the contradictions of usa bound up super super tight.

with snow and terrain up the canyons to die for.

my life is blowing up/dissolving right now, i’m tempted to go there tbh.

mormons are a cult of patriarchal child sexual abusers who "settled" the area to keep tight control of their flock, killing the natives and much of the delicate high desert ecosystem in the process. that's kind of all you need to know about utah.

slc had a decent punk scene in the 80s. it was very cheap to live here until about 10 years ago. now it's more expensive than philadelphia or baltimore or all the midwest cities including chicago. the air quality sucks. there is no culture or art to speak of. streets and blocks are bizarrely wide and long. everything is cheaply constructed at indecent proportions. it's the ugliest city in the world, i swear to god. public art here is dogshit. look up "point of view" by aaron t stephan. the most soul-sucking cringe piece of public art i've ever seen man. everyone here is shallow and try-hard. aggressively shallow people and culture.

greedy ass human embodiments of a teeth whitening treatment.

and proud of it too! they all laugh about it. to be at home in salt lake city is to be one of those people at heart.

this comes through, but that snow man, i don’t know

jk and stay strong

I think it was Tommy Lee or one of the Crue guys who said the wildest groupies were in SLC. Lots of pent-up everything I guess?

look up "point of view" by aaron t stephan. the most soul-sucking cringe piece of public art i've ever seen man.

lol yeah you weren't kidding

Wow, that art is really terrible. I met the lesbian former mayor of SLC once, she seemed kinda cool. But I don't know what her tenure was like.

I couldn't handle the Utah liquor/beer situation - "Do you sell beer?" - "Yes! it's in that weird room-temperature cubicle in the corner, and nothing is above 5%! Even lower in brewpubs! Have fun!"

the most depressing episode of "drivers dines and dive-ins" was in SLC, this really drab pathetic old restaurant, whose special dish was some "chinese chicken salad" that looked like it was from a 1970s cookbook

xp

i used to call that pissin beer

because dang you're gonna be pissing a lot

streets and blocks are bizarrely wide and long

SLC is still the only city I've ever been to where the streets are so wide they put flags at each side of the crosswalk so that pedestrians can use them to stop traffic if they can't make it across in the designated time.

I met the lesbian former mayor of SLC once, she seemed kinda cool.

biskupski was ok. the current mayor, jenny wilson, is basically leading a developer bonanza. her husband is in real estate and development. it's a self-enriching developer cabal at the moment. utah has always been proud of the high rate at which it pops out babies, and a lot of people are still moving here from out of state, so big swathes of horrible new development are everywhere. the wasatch is crowded, traffic jams up the canyons all the time. park city is ok for what it is, a town of rich transplants - at least it's somewhat liberal. i'm not informed on the alcohol situation because i don't drink but as far as i'm aware it has improved somewhat. you still can't get anything above 5% in grocery stores, have to go to the state-run liquor stores for wine. we do have medical marijuana, which is nice and unexpected. ok done with the utah rant.

xp the apocryphal story about the wide streets in utah is some small dick mormon leader wanted them wide enough that a horse and cart could do a full 360 in the center. so in a way it was kind of designed for cars from the get-go. it makes it so that walking in the city is extremely unpleasant. every block is a vast distance. the space is very poorly used overall.

like, the entire scale of the lived-in environment is hostile to a body existing in it without the use of some transportation machine.

Veering way off-topic (or am I?), these collision videos from Utah have been popping up in my YT feed because I'm a bad person.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_HzbakUiGk

The streets are very wide, and goddam, why can't people make a left turn without killing themselves?

(No actual fatalities in the vid, btw.)

ahaha. the wideness really fucks with perception in my experience! i'm not sure what it is. but for me, driving on narrower streets it's easier to make judgment calls. i think it has something to do with speed - people are driving faster on huge football field wide roads.

Brigham Young planned SLC on a scale more grandiose than Washington, DC. But it was just a psychological ploy to instill optimism in a bunch of farmers and small tradespeople he'd dragged into a howling wilderness on the pretense that this was God's Marvelous Plan for them and their future success was guaranteed.

i feel rather sure 0% of the vid sound is actual which — i dunno? still horrific, less entrancing.

Those cameras don't usually record sound, so yeah.

It kinda sounds like the "American TV" noise you hear in old movies where's someone's watching TV in another room, eating a bowl of popcorn on a Friday night.

(it is very satisfying in its way, which is uh, i’ma dupe haha)

Utah is killing the Great Salt Lake
https://www.hcn.org/articles/utah-is-killing-the-great-salt-lake/