For once, agreement
We may be seeing the political right and left coming together right here in Arkansas, among the unlikeliest of places.
Harmony’s historic agent? That would be things called crypto mines.
More to the point, it would be their practice of sneaking their personal legislation through our pliable, unsophisticated Legislature, then barging into our communities, usually small ones, to use most of the local electricity and water to make enough noise running computers day and night to scare children and livestock, all in exchange for delivering to these small communities literally single digits in jobs.
Everybody left and right seems now to want to close the barn door— to now be against these installations and what they do.
That’s except for the lobbyists the crypto mines hire, and any legislators left who are beholden to those lobbyists out of some misguided idea that the lobbyists are their personal friends.
It has been my long observation that, in the Arkansas Legislature, inordinate lobbyist influence is seldom corruption—though the indictments and convictions over the years reveal that it can be—but the pitiable naivete of legislators who think these lobbyists are just the nicest, most generous people, among the best friends they’ve ever had.
By now you know enough about crypto mining to match me in writing this sentence: A crypto mine is a large facility that runs, around the clock, computers programmed to master complex algorithms to arrive at valuations for new alternative currencies. The computers use lots of power and get hot. Large amounts of water are used for cooling. So are large exhaust fans, the sound of which drives nearby homeowners to distraction. These operations don’t need on-site employees once the computers start doing their ciphering.
A bill allowing these facilities without local regulation—of noise, water, electricity, anything—passed the next-to-last day of the regular session during breaks in frantic sessions of passing essential appropriations bills. It was just a little bill to make us competitive in the high-tech world, you see.
When you are ignorant and crave “high-tech,” and something comes along you don’t understand that promises to grace you with some, then you tend to embrace its legitimacy and promise of prosperity for the very reason that you don’t understand the first thing about it. You don’t want to be the one opposing the next big thing.
Then the next best thing turns out to be the loudest thing, the most power-using thing, the least accessible local corporate thing and a thing that only has three or four employees inside that football field-sized facility with all those computers.
So, now, the issue at the state Capitol is whether to extend the fiscal-only session to take up measures applying regulation to these places.
Doing this fix is an issue that—at the risk of over-simplification, but hardly of broad inaccuracy—appeals to city people on the left because of inordinate corporate influence as well as environmental resource conservation, and to country people on the right because they’re the ones who were living a peaceful country life until one of these hideous monstrosities barreled into town and said lend me your ears, your water, your electricity, your quality of life.
A fellow journalist wondered on Twitter the other day why Arkansas Democrats, downcast as they are, didn’t jump on this issue and champion it to improve their electoral chances in the state’s Democrat-distrusting areas. There seldom is one simple answer to such a question.
Part of it is that Arkansas Democrats are inept. Part of it is that Democrats in the nationally defining context seem to care only about like-minded people and to rely on drawing to that inside straight to try to win. Part of it is that you can go into rural Arkansas and do the right thing about crypto mines and lose your political connection the moment abortion gets introduced into the conversation. And maybe it’s in part the fact that all but one member of the Democratic caucus fell as hard as Republicans fell for the hit-and-run sales pitch at the end of the regular session.
Still, yes, it’s fair to think that an alert Democratic Party needing to repair itself in rural Arkansas would have been first to Faulkner County and first to Arkansas County to sound the alarm and call for and design fixes.
Republicans would have appropriated the issue, probably, as soon as they began to figure out what they’re now fully aware of, which is that the word “crypto” means a transcendent Arkansas political issue.