Archive - Andy Masley

Toward liberal environmentalism

The underlying normative claim of my environmental writing

Jul 10 • Andy Masley

A conversation with my city planner friend Curtis on a recent data center moratorium in Holyoke MA

I recorded a conversation with my friend Curtis who until a few years ago was a city planner in Holyoke MA and had a lot of thoughts on a recent data…

Jul 7 • Andy Masley

48:11

AI art as curation

Asking whether AI art involves real creativity mostly misses what's interesting about it

Jul 3 • Andy Masley

June 2026

What does it mean for AI to be democratic?

Some pushback on a specific fuzzy idea with some ominous implications

Jun 21 • Andy Masley

A plug for a tool I made to show how little most current AI chatbots add to your emissions and water use, with citations

Take this and share it, you don't need to mention me

Jun 11 • Andy Masley

A simple trick to fix the data center debate

Remove the status quo bias by asking "would we spend this much in tax revenue to avoid the externalities of the data center?"

Jun 6 • Andy Masley

Why I think panic about local impacts of data centers is just a panic

A request for counter examples

Jun 4 • Andy Masley

May 2026

I think I figured out exactly how the “AI uses a bottle of water per prompt” miscalculation happened

Looks like it's roughly 50-250x too high

May 25 • Andy Masley

A history of the data center panic - part 1

Pre-ChatGPT and the creation of common wisdom

May 20 • Andy Masley

A crash course on US air pollution

Data centers and air pollution - part 1

May 19 • Andy Masley

Let's not compare data center heat exhaust to nuclear bombs

Why dropping hundreds of nuclear bombs on Washington DC every day is pretty normal

May 11 • Andy Masley

Data center land use issues are fake

We have plenty of land, data centers provide more revenue per unit area than any other building, and we should have way less farmland

May 2 • Andy Masley

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