You can just not plant anything. It’s not required that every inch of desert is used for irrigated cultivation.
Alfalfa is the cleanest case of a crop that would not be planted nearly as much if western water law (prior appropriation) wasn’t so colossally stupid.
My point was that google generates hundreds of billions of dollars from the same water that $34 million in alfalfa. It’s absurd to complain about their usage.
Water use policy is about agriculture, agriculture, and also agricultural. Everything else is a distraction.
Google’s just-released 2025 sustainability report is an instructive example. The company said it consumed 10.9 billion gallons of water—a 34% increase from 2024—almost all for data-center cooling.
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Google consumes around three times as much water indirectly as directly, according to a paper published earlier this year by Alex de Vries-Gao, a researcher at the Netherlands-based university VU Amsterdam.
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My take: they should report this in acre-feet instead of gallons, and then compare it to a crop, alfalfa for example.
My back of the envelope says even at the larger number Google is using the enough water to grow about 23,000 acres of alfalfa. That would produce about 138,000 tons which would sell for about $34 million.
Yes, that’s where we are today. Colleges definitely can’t avoid fundamentals right now. But at the same time, they should be skating ahead of the puck. Once the calculator has been invented—-even when it’s rare and awkward—-they begin easing off the slide rule reps.
In 2024, we had some coding exams, and AI was explicitly NOT forbidden, which lead to them making the exam more difficult (because with AI, you can solve it so much more quickly, so gotta make it harder), which was really annoying, because it made it practically impossible to solve it yourself because of the time crunch. I hope they realized how wrong that was.
There should be at least one class, probably more, that work exactly like that.
That’s where the industry is moving. Yes, get the fundamentals too, but don’t omit teaching what graduates will actually be doing out of some misplaced sense of purity.
There’s definitely antisemitism out there. Criticizing Israel is not part of it. The people that run to that ever. single. time. ought to be ashamed of themselves for crying wolf. They have no right to abuse the term and rob it of legitimate meaning because they don’t have a good response on the merits.
That’s too high a level of generality. Sure police situations where the branches are at direct loggerheads.
But in this case we have a law passed by congress and signed by the president. There’s no need to step in, the ordinary political processes are more than sufficient. If the new President and congress doesn’t like what the last ones did they have the exact same tools at their disposal to undo it.
No one has ever called me a kike or Christ killer. No one has ever accused me of controlling the media or banks. No one has spray painted a swastika on my house, or my synagogue for that matter.
My nation, the most powerful in the world, puts a menorah in its halls of government every year for Hanukkah. The legislative and judicial branches have Jewish members at the very top level. The head of government has a Jewish son-in-law.
Even online, I see much more pervasive criticism of my nation than yours.
Yet, listen to Zionists and I’m practically living in Weimar Germany. That dog won’t hunt.
People have criticisms of Israel. They may be fair or unfair. Address them on the merits and leave the rest of us out it. It has nothing to do with Jews qua Jews.
I don’t think it does. Discretion is fundamentally case by case. Drawing categorical lines is legislative.
It’s akin to the distinction between law and equity courts at common law.
Stepping back, both doctrines (non delegation, unitary executive) are fundamentally about the courts overstepping. If both houses of Congress pass a law creating an agency with a director that can only be fired for cause and the president signs it, the Supreme Court should stay out of it.
Enacting legislation is very difficult, the presumption of constitutionality should be taken more seriously.
Alfalfa is the cleanest case of a crop that would not be planted nearly as much if western water law (prior appropriation) wasn’t so colossally stupid.