The best propaganda is always the truth.

When they shut down the RT America studio under the foreign agents law and direct TV intervention, they did interviews with the ex-RT dissident-esq reporters who were working there. I don't remember who, and who was interviewing, so take this with a grain of salt. When they were asked on the lines of how they felt working for Russian propaganda and information campaign. They said along the lines of that of all the networks they had worked on, they were never felt as free as when they worked on RT, and they were quite open that it was all part of bringing up narratives that would disrupt the American mainstream ones and create political disruption and doubt. Their handlers in Moscow knew that the best way to achieve this was just to give them reach and mostly uncensored platform and let them do mostly whatever they want, because they knew that just bringing out the truth was the most damaging thing to American establishment.

Data centers typically use evaporative cooling,

Yeah so do lawns.

Typically? Maybe in some arid climates without humidity but try using evaporative cooling during a thunderstorm and you'll find your data center shutting down from overheating.

~~70%~~ A large part of water usage in industrial nations comes from electricity generation. That's where data centers consume most of their water.

Edit: 70% is only true for Canada, globally agriculture consumes more. The US for example has ~40% each for agriculture and power generation.

I agree about golf courses being a bad metaphor but only because they feed into the same issue. They're something people see and comprehend but which completely fails to capture the scope. It only seems like a bad metaphor if you don't have any context and most people don't.

I'm not doing it to be convincing, but your reaction feeds into my point. It's back to the Hank Green point. To the ley audience it seems like a lot because "number big", but it's utterly meaningless amount, if you have just look at like "one small suburbs worth of front yard".

Ahh yes. Let me just use idioms to explain to a state government how much water is being used in a given sector. SURELY they'll appreciate that I focus my analysis on whatever clearly uninformed talking point has bubbled up through social media.

My point is that a lay understanding won't get you there.