Gene Fuss

Look at the image below. That isn’t a "statistical adjustment"—that is the literal disappearance of our water supply. Between 2021 and 2025, Lake Corpus Christi has shriveled to a ghost of itself, currently sitting at a terrifying 8% capacity. We are officially 180 days away from a total water emergency. 🆘 The Harbor Island desalination plant was the only plan on the table to stop this clock. But the Texas Water Development Board just denied the funding, leaving the Coastal Bend to dry up while billions were diverted elsewhere. The state saw these exact maps and still chose to leave us behind. What do you think happens to a region when the state delays until the taps are already failing? #DemsUnited

@StefanBurnsGeo That's one reason they will be able to do inexpensive lithium recovery, from the hot brines already tapped for geothermal recovery.

South of the evaporating Salton Sea is where BIG earthquakes strike California and Mexico simultaneously. Remember the M7.2 that struck April 4th 2010, a solid minute of intense ground shaking. This is definitely an area to watch to better understand North American seismology

BREAKING 🚨🚨 #SaltonSea / #California A magnitude 4.4 Earthquake just struck in the Salton Sea area near Brawley, which seems to be going through its own quake swarm at the moment

@Simi_2210_ 1

If you can solve this in under 10 seconds, you're better at algebra than most what's m?

Hard Rock Hotel Guitar Update

Thailand is one of the first ag countries to enter a planting season since the Iran war. We went to document the impact of supply shocks to fuel/fertilizer — It was worse than I anticipated. Farmers are leaving huge tracts of land barren bc they can’t afford to plant.

@StoriesBySammi The whole Colorado River Basin must consider water recycling to the level of what SNWD (Southern Nevada Water District) has already implemented, 90% recycling.

A historic "megadrought" is draining the San Luis Valley’s aquifer to record lows, but it’s not just the climate—it’s the corporate greed. 💰 While families are watching their water turn into a cocktail of naturally occurring arsenic and uranium, a private company called Renewable Water Resources (RWR) has been fighting to pump 7 billion gallons a year out of this valley to sell to wealthy developers hundreds of miles away. This isn't just a "shortage"—it’s a heist. As the water table is sucked dry, the toxins left behind are becoming dangerously concentrated for 51,000 residents who rely on this ground for survival. Parents are now left hauling heavy crates of bottled water just to keep their children safe. They’re washing faces and cooking meals with plastic jugs because they know that one in four private wells in the valley already exceed EPA safety limits for arsenic. While a private company eyes a massive payout, these families are literally being forced to choose between their health and their home.  Clean water has become a luxury that many in this high-poverty region simply can't afford. Families are being backed into a corner, forced to choose between groceries or dropping $2,000 on filtration systems just to stay "safe" from the water coming out of their own dirt. The system is rigged: big developers get the pipelines, but rural, largely Hispanic communities get the poison and a "good luck" from the regulators. We are watching a community be turned into a sacrifice zone in real-time. How much of our lifeblood are we going to let private companies export before we decide that rural lives are worth more than corporate "water rights"? Who really owns the water under your feet—you, or the highest bidder? 💧 📊 Image Credit: Inside Climate News 📊 Data: Jay Famiglietti et al., Geophysical Research Letters

@HedgieMarkets This trucked in water was for dust control during construction! Not even to commission the data center!

🦔The City of Tucson has revoked a temporary water meter Project Blue's contractor was using to truck Tucson drinking water out to a data center construction site that the City Council had explicitly rejected last August. Beale Infrastructure's contractor Ames Construction obtained the meter on April 24, then transported the water outside Tucson's service area to a project Pima County had separately approved over city objections. City Manager Tim Thomure asked Beale Infrastructure to make the city whole with two acre-feet of water credits. Project Blue says it is procuring construction water from an alternative source going forward. Arizona has been in drought conditions for over thirty years, and the project has faced sustained protests over environmental impact and transparency. My Take Building a hyperscale data center in the Sonoran Desert was already an aggressive choice given the water constraints, but trucking municipal drinking water out of a city that voted unanimously against the project is the kind of behavior that turns local opposition into national news. Beale's contractor obtained a permit through normal channels and used it in a way the city had specifically rejected, which technically followed procedure while completely violating the spirit of the council vote. The fact that a citizen tip triggered the investigation rather than any internal compliance check tells me the developer was banking on nobody noticing. I honestly keep coming back to how predictable this story is. Pima County approved the project over the city's objections, the developer told everyone Project Blue could not be built without Tucson water, and then the moment construction started they found a workaround that involved using Tucson water anyway. That sequence is a useful preview of how the AI infrastructure buildout is going to play out in every drought-stressed jurisdiction with weak coordination between county and municipal authorities. Hyperscale data centers consume water at a scale that does not fit the existing regulatory categories, and developers are exploiting the gaps faster than local governments can close them. Tucson got lucky that someone was paying attention, but most communities in Project Blue's situation will not. Hedgie🤗

@HedgieMarkets They can go closed loop cooling to reduce water usage by up to 70%. Dunno what they'll do for the balance.

@gregkalvass @VitalVegas @ElCortezLV The Triple 777 nickel slots at The Stratosphere during the first week open in '96 were so loose that we were handing buckets of nickels to adjacent players if they ran low. 😅

@VitalVegas @ElCortezLV I remember filling up that bucket with nickels. It was glorious! Also helped build immune system.

A group of drunk Gen Zs accidentally wandered into the coin-operated slot room at El Cortez and it was like watching archeologists discover the Dead Sea Scrolls. @ElCortezLV

@VitalVegas Convert the pool to a pickling vat 😂

Word is The Reserve at Park MGM (formerly NoMad) pool will become pickleball courts after the summer season.

@VitalVegas @MrObviousDude Yours is a good assessment.

@genefuss @MrObviousDude Agree. I went once and haven’t been back. It’s not bad, it’s just not the original Lotus quality.

Lotus is back on Sahara after five years. news3lv.com/news/local/lot…

FIREWORKS IN LAS VEGAS ALL SUMMER 2026.

For decades, data center racks have been powered by three-phase AC, the same kind of power that runs industrial machinery. NVIDIA's next AI rack uses 800-volt DC instead, the same standard NVIDIA itself credits to the electric vehicle and solar industries. The change re-architects how electricity moves from the grid to the GPU, and three things at the silicon level had to happen first. 1️⃣ Doubling the voltage halves the current for the same power delivered, which cuts resistive losses in copper by roughly 75 percent. NVIDIA's design partners estimate copper thickness can drop by up to 45 percent across the rack. A 1MW rack needs up to 200kg of copper busbars at the legacy 54-volt distribution standard. A single 1GW data center built that way would need up to 200,000kg of copper for rack busbars alone, per NVIDIA's own technical blog. 2️⃣ The power semiconductors needed to convert 800 VDC efficiently at the rack level matured only in the last few years. Silicon carbide handles the high-voltage front-end conversion from medium-voltage utility AC down to 800 VDC. Gallium nitride handles the high-frequency stepdown from 800V to intermediate buses (50V, 12V, or 6V) feeding the GPU. Both are wide-bandgap technologies. SiC scaled because of the EV industry, where Porsche, Hyundai, Kia, and BYD have built the 800V powertrain supply chain over the last five years. GaN scaled on the back of consumer fast-charging and is now being adapted for AI infrastructure. 3️⃣ AC-to-DC conversion moves out of the IT rack entirely. In a current GB200 NVL72 or GB300 NVL72, up to eight power shelves sit inside the rack converting AC to DC. At MW scale on the same standard, those shelves would consume up to 64U of rack space, leaving no room for compute. In the 800 VDC architecture, conversion happens once at a dedicated power shelf upstream, and the IT rack receives DC directly. NVIDIA estimates this delivers up to 5 percent end-to-end efficiency improvement and up to 70 percent reduction in PSU-related maintenance costs. Power semiconductor content per rack grows substantially across this transition. SiC and GaN suppliers, high-voltage busbar and connector vendors, and rack-level DC-DC converter makers gain share. The legacy low-voltage and multi-stage AC conversion stack loses share. Most colocation facilities today operate at 10 to 30 kW per rack. The 600kW Rubin Ultra rack is more than an order of magnitude above that. The math operators are working on for 2027 deployments is whether their existing PDUs, busways, and rack power shelves are even compatible with the new spec.

City of LA needs to contract a couple of these Chinooks for both wildfires and entrapment exfil operations during an earthquake when roadways get severed.

🚨🇺🇸 Massive explosion rocked the Chalmette Refinery near New Orleans. 189,000 barrels a day of capacity. Now offline. Add it to the Chevron refinery fire in California earlier this week. U.S. refining capacity is taking hit after hit at the worst possible time. Source: FOX

Les dronistes Ukrainiens 🇺🇦 s'entrainent pour demain 😂

@VitalVegas Bingo is popular in the UK, and Luxor (and Excalibur) are the popular casino/hotels with (the thrifty) UK visitors...

Source says Luxor’s former buffet space will be turned into a bingo hall.