Home county votes itself backwards and poor; industry's fix is a data center with no county at all

…(cont) Two days later, September second, I've got his own Commerce Secretary — the one on record saying data centers suck water — on record again saying the concern about that water is propaganda. Same man. Same water. Different word for it, two days apart.

Then, the fourth of September, Gallup asks the country a straight question and the country answers it straight: people would rather live next to a nuclear power plant than next to an AI data center, and not by a little — better than twenty points.

Then, the sixteenth, I've got Loudoun County — his county, the one that's supposed to know better — voting itself a one-year pause on new data centers. Backwards and poor, by his own definition, on his own street, of his own choosing.

Two days after that, the eighteenth, I've got a piece on what's actually in the water they're worried about. Forever chemicals. The kind that don't leave.

I'll be straight with the receipts I've got: I count zero of them where anybody says a satellite runs cheaper than a warehouse in Loudoun. I don't have that page. What I do have, dated today, the twenty-sixth, is Google and SpaceX and a collection of startups looking at whether the whole operation — the racks, the heat, the water, the meter — can just go up. Not fixed. Relocated. Off the grid we've been arguing about, onto no grid at all.

I keep coming back to the bill, and I apologize for it, because I already read you the water and the chemicals and the county vote, but the bill is the part that doesn't leave when you change the subject. Loudoun pays it in a rate hike. Palm Beach doesn't pay it at all — Palm Beach just posts about backwards and poor and lets Loudoun sort it out. Now the industry's found a third place to put the argument, and it's a place with no local utility, no local water table, no county board, and no vote.

Excuse me — before you go — I want to ask you the same thing one more time, from the other side, and then I'll let it rest. Down here, for as long as this has been going on, somebody's name has been on the envelope. A lineman reads a meter. A county supervisor stands for reelection in a town that just voted itself poor to keep its lights honest. Up there, none of that exists — no lineman, no meter reader, no board, nobody standing for anything. So when the data center is in orbit, when there's no house attached to the wire — whose name is on the bill?