The Reality of Water Use and Grid Strain in the Midwest and HSDCs

 September 8, 2026

This is an ongoing effort to track and attempt to frame in some intelligible way the current state of water  supply and electric grid capacity with the onslaught of giant scale industrial users about to require immense increases in both.  It will be updated as needed.

Currently in the Central Plains - not exactly the Midwest that is an area about 400 miles east of the Central Plains but they share a lot of similarities including large scale agricultural operations operating throughout both regions along with large population centers - there is definitely a limit on available water and on available electricity for everyone and those limits are seemingly being obscured or deliberately misunderstood by proponents of AGI computing complexes.  These HSDCs are about to enormously increase the rate of use of water and electricity and the problem is for water, there is no human available way to increase available water, all the water that will ever be available is either in the Missouri River system or in what is left of the Ogalala Aquifier and that is it.  Rainfall does add millions of gallons to available water in the region but the vast majority of that is absorbed into farm and rangeland, some of it does add into the Missouri River system, but virtually none of it due to current human use makes it down to resupply the Aquifier, so I am not going to reference rainfall as part of the equation.  You can also have severe drought years in the Central States which would zero out literally the addition of rainfall so I am just not going to count it.  For Electricity, humans can make more but there are two challenges, one is what are you using to make electricity with.  Nuclear and Solar are by far the most sustainable long term energy sources and both work very well in the Central Plains.  Natural Gas and Coal work anywhere but I caution against the trend of going all in on Natural Gas because that will cause a bottleneck of demand vs  available supply which still results in costs going much higher.  Per kilowatt hour, solar is now the cheapest way to make large scale electricity and it installs faster than any other type of powerplant.  To be clear Nuclear is NOT the cheapest at all it is the most expensive way to make a kilowatt hour of power, but it is extremely stable and can be built out to make enormous amounts of power that works 24/7.  This is not a deep dive into power generation methods so I'm going to leave that there for now, the focus here is on how to get ahead and stay ahead, if possible, of the impending overuse about to be caused by HSDCs.

So Why Do We Subsidize Sports?

September 8, 2026

This was originally composed 11 years ago and I just did not publish it however now that a solid decade has passed with the Royals doing abysmally, the Chiefs winning more than one Super Bowl but then abandoning KCMO for KCKS and both of them about to cost the public BILLIONS of dollars for the sake of new stadiums and associated public infrastructure improvements as well as dramatically shifted traffic patterns and at times extreme congestion, the basic gist of this post still rings very true and the phenomenon of a grievously miseducated public that views the arts or even reliable access to the arts as some sort of elitist unneeded luxury while access to sports - which by any metric cost at least as much to a huge sum more than the arts for either the patron or the participant - has got to be addressed as it represents a fundamental imbalance with the psyche of society and the ongoing worsening behavior of the public after the pandemic.  This in turn plays right into the sports mindset of victory no matter what even though the things that actually build and maintain a thriving society have nothing to do with "victory" as such and everything to do with finding meaning, finding the 'why', making inferences and being able to grasp the truth of a situation all of which is exactly what the arts are for.  

October 28, 2015

Liberty, Missouri

The Kansas City Royals are in the World Series for the second time in two years which is very remarkable considering how abysmal they were from 1986 until 2014.  So, that's a very neat turn around.  And it is that turnaround that has sparked this question: why do we subsidize sports?  Or perhaps more accurately, why do sports get 100 times the grants of all the arts combined?

Make no mistake, the sports leagues like Baseball (MLB) and Football (NFL) - both of which are non-profits just like American Ballet Theater or your community college - receive hundreds of millions of dollars in support every year from John Q Public (that's you) in the form of immense stadium construction, improvements, and other incentives to keep a sports team franchise in a given city.  That money comes from the public's coffers.  And then there's all the corporate sponsorships given to the teams in exchange for a placing of the company's logo somewhere on the field or associated with the team.  In reality all that works exactly like the grants given to arts organizations like a non profit ballet organization or a local symphony, the only difference is in the enormous scale.  And most people always hesitate to fund arts grants by any sort of minuscule sales tax increase or whatnot, but they never look at the funding given to their local sports teams in the same light even though it is precisely the same thing but done on a massive scale that dwarfs the arts.

In fact, it makes one ask whether or not the arts would be as big a cultural element as sports are if they were given that level of support, at their inception neither the MLB or the NFL were nearly as pop-culture central as they are today, that did not happen until the massive stadiums got built and public resources started being used to promote them started.  Clearly, the MLB and NFL never paid for the super stadiums they play in or other major perks they get, politicians did all that for them because it "promotes public satisfaction" with that city.  Ask for anything like that for the arts and a dismissive, "we don't have the money for that" sort of answer is what you get.  It is a very curious bi-polar sort of arrangement, sports get enormous public support (i.e. grants) but somehow the public and politicians don't consider that a grant, whereas arts organizations get pennies on the dollar in comparison and have to justify every little bit of support because we can't strain public finances or expect the public to want to pay for big grants to arts groups don't you know.

Every study ever done points to the arts providing serious boosts in the economic vibrancy, livability and desirability of an area in which a decent arts scene is happening, but that gets washed away by the perception that sports are the "big time" and so almost any chance that comes by earns serious regard if not large check writing by a municipality.  So let's ask another question then: will any sport or sports team improve your life?  If the Royals take the World Series, no one in any other industry or business will get any raise because of it, no one is going to find happiness in life after game 7 is over no matter who wins.  The only thing that happens is we somehow switch on our "people" mode as opposed to our "person" mode and think that we are in the big time by whisking ourselves along in a temporary media blitz that sort of comes by way of your local team being in the World Series or Super Bowl.  This is eerily similar to the mob mentality that allows large groups of people to suddenly go from law abiding citizens into violent rioters that destroy their own surroundings because they are "celebrating" or "protesting".  One thing that the arts do not seem able to do is cause a person to switch on their "people" mode and become susceptible to mass persuasion or mass behavior like that of a mob, angry or otherwise.  And that makes me for one kind of think better of the arts.

The Conflict of Modern Life and Classical Religion

January 22, 2018

The Conflict of Modern Life and Classical Religion

Abstract:

Modern Life:
Internet
Social Media
Likes
Connections
Image
What must I do?
You must appear to be great!
Automobiles
Highways
Traffic
Navigating Highways
What must I do?
You must come first!

Classical Religion:
Love
Unity
Respect
Honesty
Humility
Compassion
Concern
Charity
What does God want me to do?
Look out for others always, never shove others out of your way.

Summary Explanation:

Modern life now conflicts daily and even hourly with all of the principals of Classical Religion - specifically, all those wonderful life rules all religions present and teach and that practically everyone agrees with and seeks to emulate such as compassion, caring, being other oriented, humility, honesty - because of the design and function of two of the seemingly essential, major elements of modern industrialized civilization: automobiles and social media.  This is not just another finger-waving, shame-on-you attempt by someone seeking to place people on a behavior guilt trip; this is an observation of a deeply rooted problem that needs to be consciously understood and worked against if we want to see the essence, the kernel of Classical Religion survive at all in the modern world. 

Consider driving in traffic: in order to just make it to work or the store on a daily basis it is now necessary for anyone living anywhere near a city to engage in "me first" aggressive driving in order to make the needed lane changes and navigate the various over passes encountered along any urban journey.  This so easily leads to not just "me first" driving but actual aggression carried out by humans in vehicles who decide to swear, gesture, and even physically crash into and fight or shoot at each other.  On any level modern driving forces anyone, devout or atheist, to put away humility, other-oriented thinking and compassion and instead use pride, aggression, and selfish calculation just to get by much less the cascade of truly sinful behavior begun when a road-rage scenario plays out.  Indeed it is very severely challenging to actively change this and attempt to drive in a charitable, compassionate way because you may very well be taking your own life into your hands by doing so on roads so very full of aggressive, self-concerned drivers.

Consider now also social media (Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, et al.) where the goal is seemingly to present or elevate yourself before your friends (real or algorithmic) to create "likes" or "follows" which is your confirmation that you are valuable to them and that you somehow matter.  To do this, you must not only depict your life as it is but attempt to spin it, edit it, enhance it - all of which are synonyms for lying about it - which makes people daily, and usually hourly, commit the deeply sinful act of falsehood, dishonesty, deception, and telling lies.  Now it isn't as bad as the falsehood of say a Bernie Maddoff or a slick horse trader, because at the least it appears no one is being hoodwinked out of their money by way of these lies, but nevertheless giant scale communal lying, misrepresentation and falsehoods are being created and shared about as a means of garnering validation in the way of "likes".  But validation is itself built on validity - which is truth, logical or philosophical - and virtually nothing on social media is built on validity.  This has the effect of bending and warping a communities grasp of what truth is and causes ignorance of the reasons why honesty is so essential and not to be traded away for anything much less for the sake of establishing your worth by way of what other people think of you.  In all religion, the emphasis was and is always on being concerned with what God thinks of you by way of how you fulfill and observe the laws and guidance of His religions, which is much more of a bedrock, solid, distortion-free standard than the whims of fellow human beings who are well proven to be plastic in the extreme.  Without a consistent, distortion free bedrock foundation of good character, there can be no real happiness in life. 

These two elements of modern life, one very much physical and quite dangerous to the body, the other virtual and equally dangerous to the character and the mind, have now made it seem like no where in daily life are the teachings of religion applicable because to use either one - which one must in order to have a job and interact with the digital economy that will soon touch literally everyone's life - places one in an untenable position where one must at some point think and behave in very non-religious ways in order to use the automobile or the social media page as per it's design. The solution for social media is to use it as a platform for real discussion and event sharing rather than "selfie" grandstanding which is now being proven to be deeply psychologically damaging especially to young minds but also detrimental to the sanity of any mind; the solution for automobiles and traffic is much harder because it involves real humans making choices under pressure because they are in speeding metal vehicles while deciding what to do.  Perhaps as autopilot self-driving features become more and more capable and common that will make a dent in the traffic situation.  The real problem is that if you constantly choose to be prideful, selfish and even cause harm or danger to others so that you can be first, you are constantly corrupting your own character and even your own soul - all for the sake of arriving somewhere 20 or 30 seconds quicker than if you backed off and did not think and decide in a selfish "me first" manner.