Bill Fishkin @billfishkin

@Jason9fv6 still can't figure out how to upload a profile pic too

This list should make you angry. Empire State Building: 410 days. The Pentagon: 16 months. Hoover Dam: 5 years, finished 2 years early. Alaska Highway, 1,700 miles through wilderness: 8 months. Liberty Ships: 42 days average. One built in 4 days. That was a country that treated building as a form of national identity. Now look at this week alone: New York signed the first statewide data center moratorium. New Mexico blocked a 2.5-gigawatt data center over 0.6 miles of pipeline. $286 billion in AI data center projects canceled or delayed since 2025. Ninety-eight municipalities in New York have moratoriums on battery storage. California lost a $3.2 billion shipyard to Texas. Companies are planning to build data centers in orbit because it’s easier than building here. We went from the Hoover Dam finishing two years early to not being able to approve half a mile of pipe. This isn’t about one project. It’s about what kind of society we’ve become. The country that built the transcontinental railroad, the electrical grid, the interstate highway system, and the Apollo program did those things because it believed building was how you created prosperity. Infrastructure was the foundation of human flourishing. You built the dam so the valley had power. You built the bridge so a city could grow. You built the ships because there was a war to win. That belief has been replaced by a default posture of suspicion. Every project is a threat. Every proposal gets a moratorium instead of a timeline. The grid is approaching failure. NERC is warning about shortfalls this summer. We need battery storage for renewables. We need data centers for AI. We need pipelines to power them. We need shipyards for defense. And the answer, in state after state: not here, not now, not without another decade of review. The generation that built the Empire State Building in 410 days would not recognize us. I’ve watched this pattern for 12 years in immersive tech. The problem isn’t that we can’t build. It’s that we’ve lost the ability to show people why building matters. Communities fear what they can’t see. And we’ve gotten very good at blocking things and very bad at showing what they make possible. We used to be a pro-building society. A pro-flourishing society. A society that saw a river and thought “dam,” saw a strait and thought “bridge,” saw a continent and thought “railroad.” That instinct isn’t dead. But it’s buried under moratoriums, reviews that outlast construction timelines, and a culture that treats every new project as something to stop. We used to build. We need to remember how.

Zane Hengsperger @zanehengsperger

2 days ago

how long it took America to build things: transcontinental railroad: 6 years (1869) Empire State Building: 410 days (1931) golden gate bridge: 4 years (1937) hoover dam: 5 years, finished 2 years early (1936) the pentagon, largest office building on earth: 16 months (1943)

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Last week I wrote that New York had 98 municipal moratoriums on battery energy storage. The number is now 104. Six new moratoriums in one week. New York accounts for 83% of all BESS moratoriums in the country. But here's the part that should stop you. In Iberville Parish, Louisiana, the council just imposed a two-year moratorium on battery storage. Their own parish president publicly said it could deter billions in investment and job creation. The head of the local government is warning his own council that their decision will cost the community. They passed it anyway. This is the pattern. The people closest to these decisions increasingly understand the cost. They see the tax revenue, the construction jobs, the infrastructure. And the moratoriums pass anyway because the fear is louder than the data. 104 moratoriums. Over 1 GW stalled. $2 billion in ratepayer savings at risk in New York. The grid approaching failure in multiple regions this summer. I've watched this for 12 years in immersive tech. Communities block what they can't see. A parish president can say "this will cost us billions" and it doesn't matter because the residents can't visualize what these facilities actually look like or how they operate. The data isn't winning. The economics aren't winning. Elected officials sounding the alarm aren't winning. 104 and counting.

@Jason9fv6 Maybe focus on Spain.

Completely agree that progress shouldn't cost lives. Good news: it doesn't have to. Worker deaths in construction are down 60% since 1970. Modern sites have wearable sensors, AI drones, and safety tech that didn't exist five years ago. The projects getting blocked today aren't being blocked over safety. They're being blocked by moratoriums, permitting delays, and NIMBYism. Nobody is dying because New Mexico won't approve half a mile of pipeline.

Since we're banning things that use water, here's the full list of things we need to shut down immediately:

Bill Fishkin @billfishkin

4 days ago

"How do we save our farmland and stop all these dumb data centers?" This went viral this morning. 6 million views and climbing. Tens of thousands of likes. I understand the frustration. But nearly everything in that sentence is wrong. Farmland first. The US loses about 2,000

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Respectfully, a few things here that aren't accurate. "They aren't using a closed loop cooling system." Microsoft announced in 2026 that its new data centers in Phoenix and Wisconsin use closed-loop cooling with zero water evaporation. Daily water usage is roughly equivalent to a single restaurant. Oracle is doing the same. Vantage's closed-loop campus in Wisconsin uses 22,000 gallons per day vs 5 million gallons per day for an evaporative system of the same scale. That's a 99.6% reduction. The industry is actively moving away from evaporative cooling. Closed-loop systems reduce water consumption by up to 70% across the board, and the newest facilities are approaching zero. "They sucking a bunch of water away from the population." All data centers in the US combined account for less than 1% of national water consumption. Agriculture uses 73 billion gallons per day. Lawn irrigation uses 9 billion gallons per day. Golf courses use 476 billion gallons per year. Data centers used roughly 17 billion in 2023. Are there local impacts? Yes. Older facilities on municipal systems in places like Northern Virginia use meaningful amounts. That's exactly why new builds are moving to closed-loop and on-site water recycling. "They need to fix the water issue and the power issue before people will be ok with them." They are fixing it. That's the point. The technology is moving faster than the public conversation. The problem is that most people only hear about the old systems, not the new ones. And moratoriums don't distinguish between a 2018 evaporative facility and a 2026 closed-loop zero-water build. Blocking all data centers because some older ones use too much water is like banning all cars because a 1985 Buick gets bad mileage.

"How do we save our farmland and stop all these dumb data centers?" This went viral this morning. 6 million views and climbing. Tens of thousands of likes. I understand the frustration. But nearly everything in that sentence is wrong. Farmland first. The US loses about 2,000 acres of farmland every day to non-agricultural uses. 75 million acres gone between 1997 and 2022. Data centers are a tiny fraction of that. All the land owned by data center companies, projected through 2028, would be 89 times smaller than the acreage we waste just on food that never gets eaten. The farmland concern is real. Data centers are not the driver. Now "dumb." Data centers run the systems that route 911 calls, process Medicare claims, clear financial transactions, manage air traffic control, and power every AI tool you opened on your phone this morning. GPS. Telehealth. Fraud detection. Banking. All of it. Calling them dumb is like calling power plants useless while your lights are on. The economics. Brookings: counties that get their first large data center see private employment rise 4 to 5 percent. Construction jobs jump 11 percent. Wages rise 3 to 4 percent. In Mecklenburg County, Virginia, one Microsoft facility generated enough property tax revenue to fund $134 million in school renovations. Data centers now cover roughly 40 percent of property taxes in parts of the state. An Ohio study found a single project can support 9,700 construction jobs and generate $2.4 billion in economic output. Teachers hired. Roads paved. Property taxes lowered. But here's the real problem. Gallup reported in May that 71 percent of Americans oppose data center construction in their local area. The top concerns: natural resources, water, noise, energy use, quality of life. Those concerns are legitimate. They deserve real answers. The industry has been terrible at providing them. I've watched this pattern for 12 years in immersive tech. When communities can't see what's being built, fear fills the gap. A 90-slide environmental impact deck is not "showing people." It's burying them in data they don't trust from companies they don't know. The solution isn't dismissing the concerns. It's letting communities actually see what these facilities look like. How they operate. Where the water goes. What the noise sounds like at the property line. What the tax revenue means for their specific school district. The data centers aren't dumb. The way we're communicating about them is.

Sophie Cunningham @sophaller

10 years ago

everything happens for a reason is not in the bible but "God promises to work all things to good for those who love him" is. Romans 8:28

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@leaferi if we don't build them here i can promise you they'll be built in space, plan and money are already in place spacex.com/spacexai/starm…

$286 billion in AI data center projects have been canceled or delayed since the start of 2025. Morgan Stanley. And Polymarket is now pricing a 26% chance AI data centers get launched into orbit by the end of next year. We have made it so difficult to build on the ground that the industry is seriously considering building in space. SpaceX is targeting late 2027 for its first orbital data centers. Twenty meters tall, 70-meter wingspan. Google's Project Suncatcher is sending prototype satellites around the same time. A five-month-old startup just asked the FCC for permission to deploy 100,000 data center satellites. This isn't science fiction. This is what happens when you block $286 billion worth of projects on the ground. Meanwhile, the grid: NERC is warning about electricity shortfalls across all three US interconnection regions this summer. New York's grid operator says they're expecting their smallest power surplus ever. PJM projects a 6 GW shortfall by 2027. Texas saw data center interconnection requests quadruple in a year. The grid is buckling under current load. And we're blocking the two things that would fix it. Battery storage stabilizes the grid. 98 municipalities in New York alone have passed moratoriums on it. Data centers power the AI economy. Fourteen states have proposed moratoriums on those too. So we're starving the grid of storage AND blocking the compute infrastructure the country needs to compete. The capital goes to Virginia. Texas. Georgia. Or now, apparently, low Earth orbit. The companies building in space aren't doing it because it's better. They're doing it because we've made it nearly impossible to build here. I've watched this pattern for 12 years in immersive tech. Communities fear what they can't see. Fear doesn't read spec sheets. And no one has figured out how to show these projects to people in a way that actually registers. We have a grid approaching failure, an AI race we can't afford to lose, and we're actively blocking the infrastructure that would solve both. This isn't a technology problem. It's a communication problem. And it's now literally pushing human progress off the planet.

Polymarket @Polymarket

5 days ago

JUST IN: An estimated $286,000,000,000.00 in AI data center projects have been canceled or delayed since the start of 2025 — Morgan Stanley

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@BBitt buddy, spacex already has plans in place for this and will start launching them in 2027

New York is now blocking both the energy infrastructure that AI needs and the energy infrastructure that clean energy needs. The economic cost is staggering. Today Governor Hochul signed the country's first statewide moratorium on hyperscale data centers. Any facility using 50+ megawatts is frozen for up to a year. But New York was already doing this at the local level. 98 municipalities across 37 counties have passed moratoriums on battery energy storage. That's two-thirds of all BESS moratoriums in the entire country. Over 1 GW of projects stalled. Developers eating $2M+ in non-refundable costs every time a project dies. New York's own target: 6 GW of storage by 2030. NYSERDA estimates that would save ratepayers $2 billion in transmission costs. Those savings are now at risk. Now add data centers. Data center construction has been the construction industry's golden goose in 2026. Everything else flatlined. These megaprojects surged. The moratorium ensures that investment, those jobs, and that tax revenue flow to Virginia, Texas, Georgia. Fourteen other states have introduced similar bills. None signed them into law. New York went first. The Pipe Trades Association is worried about construction jobs vanishing. The Data Center Coalition says the moratorium "sends a signal that the state is closed for business." Here's what gets me: New York wants to lead on clean energy. Battery storage is essential to that. New York wants to lead on AI. Data centers are essential to that. The state is now actively blocking both. Not because the technology doesn't work. Not because the engineering is unsafe. Because communities don't understand what these facilities actually are, and the industries building them haven't figured out how to show them. I've spent 12 years in immersive tech watching this same pattern across every industry. Fear doesn't read PDFs. A 90-slide safety deck doesn't win a town hall where parents are scared about fires or utility bills. The developers who let communities see these projects at real scale, in context, are getting through. The ones showing up with data alone are getting moratoriums. New York is leaving billions in investment and thousands of construction jobs on the table. The storytelling problem just got a lot more expensive.

New York just became the first state to freeze data center construction. One year. No new permits for anything over 20 MW. The coverage talks about grid strain and rate impacts. But anyone who's sat in the hearings knows what built the political will: communities being asked to accept infrastructure nobody ever showed them. Every BESS town hall has the same moment. Somebody stands up and asks about fires. Not politely. With the voice of a parent who read one headline and is now certain this thing is going to explode next to a school. The developer pulls up thermal runaway statistics. NFPA 855 compliance. UL 9540A test results. The room doesn't care. The question was never about fire statistics. It was about fear. Fear doesn't process data. It processes images. It remembers the Arizona headline from 2019. It imagines the worst version of the thing it doesn't understand. Then it votes accordingly. And now it legislates accordingly. New York's interconnection queue went from about 1 GW of large-load proposals in 2022 to roughly 12 GW by late 2025, and almost none of those developers ever showed a community what that actually looks like from their street. The result wasn't 48 tough negotiations. It was one statewide moratorium. The same dynamic is playing out for storage in New Jersey, Virginia, and Connecticut. The states that need grid-scale storage the most are blocking it project by project. New York just proved opposition can scale to an entire asset class overnight. What actually changes the room: Let residents stand in a virtual replica of their own neighborhood and see the facility at true scale. The setback distances. The landscaping buffer. The sound wall. From their kitchen window. The fire question still comes up. But now instead of reading a statistic, you show the suppression system. The thermal management. The spacing between units. What "NFPA 855 compliant" actually looks like in three dimensions. The conversation goes from "convince me this is safe" to "oh, that's what it actually is." We've spent 12 years at @Theia3D watching the same pattern: when people can see it, they stop fearing it. The developers who visualize before the first town hall get permitted. The ones with PDFs get moratoriums. New York just made that sentence literal.

We've been building interactive experiences for trade show floors since 2014. Twelve years of watching the same pattern play out. Company spends six figures shipping physical prototypes across the world. Custom displays. Freight. Crates. Setup crew. Lighting rig. Attendee walks up. Glances at it. Grabs a brochure. Moves on. Thirty seconds. The booths that actually hold people are the ones where the attendee can do something. Tear apart an assembly. Swap configurations. Zoom into tolerances that a physical model can't show at any scale. Interact with the product instead of staring at it. One shift I've watched accelerate over the last two years: the best exhibitors are treating their booth less like a display and more like a data collection instrument. Every interaction in a digital experience is trackable. Which configurations get the most attention. Where people spend time. What they skip. You walk out of a show with actual buyer intelligence instead of a fishbowl of business cards. The companies figuring this out are playing a different game than the ones still shipping crates and hoping people stop walking. Trade shows aren't dying. But the static booth is.

our next move will be unexpected

1/7 Anthropic dropped an infographic in February showing how AI eats every job vertical through 2040. What surprised me wasn't the chart. It was the conversations after. Smart people who should know better, still talking like it's 2010. So I walked the next 14 years 🧵

VonDoom ☕️ @CryptoVonDoom

3 months ago

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The "why" behind why I'm launching @KeyWire_io If you're a collector, you'll understand. It's fun, it's an escape, it's joy, it's a part of your life and personality. You find like-minded people and they become your people. It's community. It's life. I've loved comics and cards since I was probably 4 or 5 years old. The only things I love more than collectibles are my family and friends. That's it. It's always been that way. I vividly remember being maybe 5 and being obsessed with Spider-Man, Batman, and Star Wars. As an adopted only child that lived in a rural New England town in the pre-internet stone age, I spent a lot of time by myself. Imagination was my companion. Art and story were my reality escape. Batman, Spider-Man, and the cast of Star Wars were all I could think about. This is deeply ingrained in my DNA. Clearly, that kid never really left. He just got older and the collections got bigger. The feeling when you pull a card, dig a key issue out of a longbox at a show, or close on a grail you've been hunting for years, that feeling is the same at 8 as it is at 38. It doesn't age. It's the closest thing to pure joy I know outside of the people I love. My kids were raised on this. We've waited in line at Target on Thursday mornings for Pokémon. We stood in line seven hours at San Diego Comic-Con just for a shot at buying exclusive Legos. We dig through longboxes together. We'll never stop watching anime. But somewhere along the way, the hobby got noisy. Prices move faster than anyone can track. Hype cycles spin up overnight and vanish by morning. Scalpers pump products and leave real collectors holding the bag. The useful information lives scattered across a hundred Discords, random X threads, private spreadsheets, and group chats you're not in. The actual signal gets buried every day. The fragmentation just seems endless. All of this preprogramming led me to launching KeyWire.io. What started as an idea for a newsletter grew quite a bit as a few friends and my boys got involved. Now we've built the collectibles site I've always looked for. KeyWire is the front page of collectible markets. One surface covering Pokémon, Magic, One Piece, Lorcana, Gundam, comics and soon sports cards, retro games, anything that grades and anything that moves. A Fear & Greed Index for every category. Original research under our Signal desk. Movers, velocity, grading pop deltas, mispriced flags. Giveaways, drops, leaderboards, community. The loud fun that makes collecting what it is. We're opening the KeyWire doors slowly, starting now. I just spent the last 20 minutes clearing a bunch of folks who signed up. If you want full access to the site early, grab a subscription. Subscribers get the most exposure to product giveaways (with tons of extra entries), and our Buyers Club launches very soon. WTF is the Buyers Club? When we get Pokemon ETB's, One Piece cases and other product at or near cost, we turn around and offer it to Buyers Club members for just a bit above our cost plus shipping. You save real money over time and get stuff shipped right to your door. We hate scalpers just as much as you do (and we're not stopping there). We're starting small. Twenty Buyers Club slots to begin with. FCFS at first, then offered to existing Pro subscribers, then Collectors and invite-only based on Quests and community activity. We scale the club alongside our supply. We'll learn as we go. Buyers Club members also get access to cards from the KeyWire packs we rip, priced 20 to 30 percent below FMV. We've come up with a fun way to do this. More on that soon. If any of this hits, go grab your subscription at keywire.io. Signals, not noise. I'm building this for the kid sitting on his bedroom floor in rural New England with a stack of comics and cards and nobody to talk to about them. There are millions of us out there now. We deserve somewhere serious to go.

Blitz S1 wraps tomorrow at 12PM ET. You came, you saw, you shot each other up. Congrats @cmndline for shipping 2 new maps, new features, and rebuilding the social layer from scratch. They listened, kept pushing, and we’re excited to see Blitz come back with even more in store.

If you want an @OthersideMeta experience built hmu. (no shade but it's true that) no one knows the dev kit better than @cmndline (aside from Yuga peeps ofc). We can literally build any game type you can think of. My DM's are open.

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Tax is a theft. Constantly raising tax while increasing borrowing and debasing the currency is abusive.