Zeros

Allegheny County , Pennsylvania , is finding itself at the center of a growing debate over data centers and Bitcoin mining operations, but navigating the approval process depends almost entirely on where you are . With 130 distinct municipalities, including boroughs, townships, and cities, the county has no unified ordinance for high-energy computing uses, creating a patchwork of inconsistent rules that frustrates developers, local officials, and residents alike . In some townships , data centers are permitted by right in industrial or light-manufacturing zones and require only standard land development approval. In others , they fall into a conditional use category that triggers public hearings, traffic studies and noise assessments. Bitcoin mining faces even greater uncertainty. Because many older zoning codes never anticipated cryptocurrency operations , some municipalities classify it as a data center, others as a manufacturing use, and several have no classifica...

Congratulations, You May Have Bought Weed From a Serial Killer There are certain sentences you never expect to hear about your hometown. “Remember that guy who sold weed?” “Yeah.” “Apparently the house where all that weird stuff happened may also be connected to two missing women.” And suddenly every bong in Bucks County becomes a potential crime-scene exhibit. The Olney House scandal has now reached the deeply unpleasant stage where you start mentally reconstructing your own Pennsylvania drug history. Not because you were involved in anything terrible . Quite the opposite . You were probably just some dolt in 2009 looking for a bag of weed and thinking, Wow, $60? What a ripoff ! Congratulations. You may have been supporting a future true-crime documentary. Raymond R.C. Horsch had a long, bizarre history involving drugs, pornography, criminal convictions, and a marijuana-growing operation at his Chalfont home. In 2009, authorities reportedly found 455 marijuana plants...

When the Grid Becomes a Target: Appalachia Rewind When communities feel steamrolled by industrial buildouts they never asked for, what happens next? And could infrastructure incidents near contested development zones be more than coincidence? West Virginia is ground zero for that tension right now. Gov. Patrick Morrisey and the West Virginia DEP have been pushing hard toward a data center buildout, backed by House Bill 2014, passed in April 2025, which prohibits counties and municipalities from enforcing or adopting regulations that limit high-impact data center projects . [ West Virginia Gazette Mail ]  In Tucker County, a Virginia company called Fundamental Data applied for an air quality permit for what it's calling the Ridgeline Facility — a natural gas power plant and data center complex proposed to be built between the tourist towns of Thomas and Davis, covering potentially 10,000 acres . [ West Virginia Watch ]  Residents there created a grassroots coal...

When the Data Center Moves In and the Water Follows Residents along University Lane in Mason County, West Virginia didn't sign up to be a cautionary tale. But that's where they landed on the weekend of May 23rd , when a construction site for the Monarch Compute Campus — a data center initiative between AI company Nscale and energy infrastructure firm Fidelis New Energy [ MSN ] — contributed to severe flooding that damaged their homes. Site manager Jason Bechtle acknowledged that the storm dropped roughly a month's worth of rain in two days, and that while the site's stormwater measures had passed inspection the prior week , a stretch of silt fence gave way under the volume of water. [ The Cool Down ] The company said it would cover cleanup and repair costs. That's something, at least . But one resident noted the damage started earlier than the flood — during tree clearing, he says workers took down 12 to 15 trees on his property . [ WCHS ]  The floo...

Pennsylvania is having one of those moments where you briefly look around and wonder if somebody accidentally changed the channel, to a black-and-white television program from 1962 . Not because anything important happened. Not because aliens landed in Harrisburg . Not because someone outlawed rock music or invented a new sandwich involving canned tuna and green beans . No. We are doing this because David Wecht — son of the legendary Allegheny County coroner and TV personality Cyril Wecht — has ceremoniously switched political parties from Democrat to Republican, and naturally John Fetterman has thoughts. And the overwhelming feeling is not outrage. It’s not excitement. It’s not even confusion. It’s the sensation of getting trapped inside the American Adventure pavilion at EPCOT after two iced teas , and realizing the animatronics are still arguing about Hubert Humphrey. The funniest part is that everyone keeps trying to explain this as if it’s some earth-shattering i...