[m3047]

A decade or so ago I participated in a (data-centric) hackathon having to do with water shortages in California. The acknowledged problem was data, or lack thereof. Most of the groups whistled past the graveyard and presented woulda-coulda "if we had the data / we can get the data by" proposals / findings.

We kept looking for the pony for most of the day. We found some pony exhaust, but we didn't find the pony. The rest of the group presented a plan for future research. I chose to give the minority report: based on the information we were able to obtain, California could solve its water shortage if every household ate 16 less almonds a day; an almond taking roughly one gallon of water to produce.

A couple years later the almond industry ran some ads that the "gallon of water" meme was somehow wrong, because other useful products were produced from almond trees besides almonds... so they said. Of course, it could have been a coincidence.

One of my team members (from Montana) shared a quote from Samuel Clemens: "whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting over". That hasn't changed with data centers.