[emushack]

My personal experience with suffering from water scarcity: Taking a loss on a crop of corn because the farm at the front of the ditch took more water than they were supposed to take. That same year, a ditch rider was threatened at gunpoint.

When your own personal livelihood depends on another business playing fair with water, these kinds of stories hit different.

It absolutely is a resource issue. It is also very much also a political issue.

[awongh]

Ag water rights is a really f'ed up issue in the US. It's very tangentially connected to whether there's a data center using up water though.

Besides which there are so many other f'ed up dynamics in the profitability of a commodity crop like corn- Gov't subsidies, gmo/pesticides, ethanol, factory animal farming, etc.

[emushack]

What I'm struggling to understand is why so many are working so hard to let big tech off the hook when it comes to developing better technology for power and cooling systems.

You're right that it is tangentially connected. But that doesn't mean we should let them off the hook.