Hickory, NC News & Views | Hickory Hound | August 24, 2025

 

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 🧠Opening Reflection:

 Infrastructure of the Mind

There are roads no one warns you about. Not literal ones, but internal corridors—paths you travel when things fall apart, when silence becomes your companion, and when you start building something without knowing whether anyone will ever see it.

What I’ve built here—this platform, this work, this vision—didn’t come from optimism. It came from necessity. Not just the need to speak, but the deeper need to stay upright in a world that punishes clarity and rewards noise. Most people think resilience is about toughness, about pushing through. But real resilience—the kind that lasts—is mental infrastructure. Quiet. Structured. Repetitive. Relentless.

This is what no one tells you: If you want to keep doing meaningful work in a collapsing culture, you can’t rely on adrenaline. You can’t rely on applause. You need something stronger than motivation. You need systems of thought. You need conviction turned into architecture.

That’s what I’ve had to develop. Not just workflows for publishing, or schedules for analysis, but habits of mind that don’t break under pressure. This isn’t about self-help. This is about strategic survival. If the work is going to last, the mind behind it has to be built to endure—not just intellectually, but emotionally. That means knowing how to navigate rejection without folding. It means moving forward when the metrics say it’s not worth it. It means holding your focus when everything around you tries to steal it.

What I see all around me—locally, nationally, everywhere—is collapse without comprehension. People are overwhelmed not just by the facts of decline, but by their inability to process it. They weren’t trained to think structurally. They weren’t taught to sit with ambiguity. And so they either shut down or get lost in reaction. They lack infrastructure of the mind.

But those of us who’ve spent years on the outside—thinking in the margins, connecting threads, working without approval—we’ve had to build this internal scaffolding the hard way. That’s why we’re still here. That’s why we’re still building, even as others burn out.

I’m not here because I’m smarter or braver. I’m here because I built a structure that could carry the weight. A structure made of pattern recognition, disciplined reflection, and deep emotional grounding. And that structure—quiet, often unseen—is what allows the external systems I’ve built to exist at all.

The future we’re trying to shape won’t be carried by slogans or saviors. It will be carried by people who have done the inner work. People who’ve created systems inside themselves that can weather chaos without becoming it.

So yes, I’m still here. Still writing. Still watching. Still laying bricks no one sees. And if I’ve lasted this long, it’s not because I’ve avoided collapse. It’s because I’ve already faced it—and I built something inside that doesn’t.

That’s the real infrastructure. And it’s the only kind that survives.

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 📤This Week:

(Monday) - The Foothills Corridor - Chapters 3&4 - Globalization and Economic Extraction - explores the devastating collapse of the Foothills Corridor. Chapter 3 details the human cost of globalization—factories shuttered, families uprooted, and dignity stripped as $20-an-hour jobs became part-time warehouse shifts. Chapter 4 exposes civic breakdown: disengaged voters, hollowed institutions, media decline, and outside extraction. Together, they reveal how economic betrayal and political apathy fractured a proud region, leaving resilience to those who refused to quit.

(Tuesday) Dear Rachel: Life Is Wonderful – August 19, 2025 – Episode 4 -  features Norman Harcourt in conversation with Rachel. They explore optimism and the power of planning—but also question whether hope alone can sustain a community where inequality, affordability, and civic decay are glaring. The episode balances generational wisdom with present struggles by discussing wealth, privilege, economic upheaval, and the tension between nostalgic progress and current hardship

(Thursday) - Catawba County’s Quiet Mosaic: Citizenship, Language, and the Burden of Belonging - August 21, 2025 - reveals how roughly 6.7% of residents were born abroad—many naturalized, many still navigating visa processes. It shows that around 13% of households speak a non-English language, putting elderly Hmong and Spanish-speaking families at odds with under-resourced services. Communities concentrated in low-cost neighborhoods face deeper vulnerability. The post argues that without targeted, multilingual outreach and translation, these residents remain marginalized despite their economic and civic contributions.

 (Friday) - The Foothills Corridor : Chapter 5 -  The Era of Loss: Jobs, Identity, Youth -  August 22, 2025 - where globalization and automation erased tens of thousands of jobs, dismantled community identity, and drove young people away. Factories once tied to family pride and stability disappeared, leaving economic insecurity, cultural shame, and demographic hollowing. The chapter portrays grief in daily details—empty ballfields, shuttered diners, absent youth—while urging truth-telling as the first step toward renewal and reinvention.

 

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⭐️  Feature Story   ⭐️

Data Centers: Time for Rules That Protect Communities

1) What Should the Development Rules Be?

If data centers are going to keep multiplying across the country, then we need to stop treating them like glamorous “tech investments” and start treating them like what they truly are: utility-scale infrastructure projects. They devour electricity and water, consume hundreds of acres, and leave behind facilities that are difficult to repurpose when companies move on.

That means rules. Strong ones.

First, new facilities should be required to build on brownfields or industrial land, not chew up farmland and forests. Second, they should be barred from using drinking water for cooling. Instead, they must rely on air-based systems, reclaimed wastewater, or other sustainable methods. Third, companies should be forced to offset their power demand with new renewable energy — if they draw the electricity of a small city, they should put equivalent clean power back into the grid.

On top of this, counties should charge impact fees based on megawatts consumed, with the revenue dedicated to schools, water and sewer systems, and broadband. Transparency should be non-negotiable: quarterly public reports on energy, water, and tax payments. And before a shovel hits the ground, companies must post a decommissioning bond to guarantee cleanup when the facility eventually shuts down.

These aren’t obstacles. They’re common-sense protections. And if a company resists them, the question practically answers itself: are they here to be good neighbors, or just to extract our resources on the cheap?

2) Why Counties Chase Data Centers

Local governments, from Hickory to Mooresville to small towns across the Piedmont, chase data centers with the same fervor they once used to court textile mills or furniture plants. The reason is simple: the promise of a big tax base and the prestige of being chosen by “Big Tech.”

A billion-dollar facility looks impressive on a balance sheet. It generates splashy headlines and gives politicians something to boast about at election time. Because these facilities don’t belch smoke or bring a parade of trucks, they’re marketed as “clean” industry — modern replacements for the factories we lost.

But the promise doesn’t match the reality. A single campus costing over a billion dollars may create fewer than 200 permanent jobs. For a county of 150,000 residents, that’s a rounding error. Worse, to land these projects, counties often hand out enormous tax breaks, which gut the actual revenue.

So what’s left? Facilities that strain power and water systems while giving back little in return. In the end, taxpayers end up subsidizing operations that were supposed to bring prosperity.

3) Growing Community Pushback

Across the country, people are beginning to see through the hype. Since 2023, more than $64 billion in data center projects have been delayed or blocked by community opposition. This resistance isn’t partisan. Republicans and Democrats alike are raising alarms about the costs and trade-offs.

In St. Charles, Missouri, residents stopped a secretive AI project after learning about its resource demands. In Indiana, citizens continue to protest a Google facility over water use and electricity consumption. In Mooresville, North Carolina, a project tied to Dale Earnhardt’s widow collapsed under public pressure. And in Virginia, the epicenter of global data center growth, backlash has become so strong that local officials who supported new facilities lost their re-election bids.

This is not an isolated trend. In the Netherlands, nitrogen emissions triggered national limits on new projects. In Chile, communities protested Google’s water use during a drought. These examples all underscore the same point: data centers are no longer seen as unquestioned blessings. They are viewed as extractive operations, and residents are demanding accountability.

4) The Risks of Building in Rural Areas

The reason rural and semi-rural counties are targeted is obvious: they have open land and leaders eager to attract investment. But the risks are far greater here than in urban cores.

• Water strain: Millions of gallons a day may be pulled from local supplies, competing directly with farms and households. In drought-prone areas, this is a recipe for conflict.

• Grid pressure: These facilities draw as much power as a small city, forcing expensive upgrades to substations and transmission lines. The bill for that infrastructure often lands in the laps of everyday ratepayers.

• Locked land use: Once a data center goes up, hundreds of acres are locked away for decades, preventing the land from being used for housing, farming, or other industries that could employ more people.

• End-of-life liability: When the company moves on — and eventually it will — communities are left with hulking, highly specialized shells that are expensive to dismantle and difficult to repurpose.

In short, the costs are local, while the profits are global.

5) The Bottom Line

Data centers are not going away. Demand for them will continue to grow as our world goes digital. But without strong rules, they risk becoming the new version of the old textile mills: facilities that extract value, leave scars, and give back far less than they take.

Counties should stop being dazzled by billion-dollar headlines and start protecting their people. If we insist on smart siting, resource protections, impact fees, and accountability, then data centers can coexist with our communities.

If we don’t, we’re simply trading one cycle of extraction for another.

Article: Data Centers should be regulated like Utilities

 

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My Own Time Ω

The Systems Person versus the Reactionary

We’ve all seen the reactionary, non-systems types. They are the Monday morning quarterbacks with 20/20 hindsight, quick to critique but slow to build. They hold on to grievances and pull them out when they think someone else is vulnerable. They may look busy running around from fire to fire, stamping them out one at a time -- when they usually caused them -- but in the end they waste energy on symptoms, confuse motion with progress, and eventually burn out. Without structure, they collapse. At best, they survive only when someone else bails them out.

A systems person works differently. They carry macro-vision. They are critical thinkers who get to the root cause instead of being distracted by surface noise. They see complexity, design durable solutions, and value structure over chaos. Where the non-systems person reacts to the same problem over and over, the systems person breaks the cycle and begins to rebuild.

But being systems-oriented doesn’t mean being rigid. You can’t build frameworks so tight that they snap under pressure. A true systems person still has to be nimble — able to adjust, adapt, and even call an audible when circumstances demand it. The discipline is in knowing the difference between an audible that responds to new reality and one that simply repeats old mistakes.

In my life, I’ve learned that the first reaction to a problem is natural. But if the same issue surfaces again and again, you must ask whether you have the will to face the structure beneath it. Ignore it, and exhaustion is guaranteed. Address it, and you begin to move forward.

That’s the difference between reaction and renewal. One ends in burnout. The other offers the possibility of rebuilding with purpose. In a community like ours — in Hickory, in Catawba County, across the Foothills Corridor — the choice between those two paths is not abstract. It is the difference between decline and endurance.

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Why I Represent the Systems Person

I represent the systems person because I have built the very infrastructure of systems into my work. My output isn’t random writing; it’s structured through frameworks, methods, and feedback loops that allow me to take complexity and make it usable.

The SIFT System
I didn’t want to get lost in endless notes or scattered facts. So I designed the SIFT System — a protocol for categorizing, filtering, extracting signals, and layering metadata. That turned research from chaos into order. It’s not just a way of organizing; it’s a repeatable engine I can run on any subject.

Compendiums and Deep Research Sequences
I don’t just write articles in isolation. I build Compendiums and series with deliberate sequencing — one part establishes baseline (socioeconomic), another dissects lifelines (access and security), another unpacks demographic realities. Each body of work is interlocked, each laying groundwork for the next. That is a system — a knowledge architecture with forward planning. Two more sections of this thread are soon to follow.

Executive Summary and Cheat Sheet Format
I created Executive Summary and bullet-point cheat sheets for every Deep Research report. That wasn’t just convenience; it was a system for accessibility. A policymaker, journalist, or resident can take the full analysis or the executive-level digest. Same information, two channels. That’s design for durability and reach.

Publishing Calendar as Operating System
My weekly structure — Tuesday and Thursday articles with weekend News and Views — is not a random schedule. It’s an operating system. Each piece feeds the others, allowing for rhythm, redundancy, and audience conditioning. It turns individual articles into a sustained civic intelligence cycle.

Media Infrastructure
Even the platforms themselves — The Hickory Hound, The Hound’s Signal, YouTube — aren’t silos. I set them up as interlinked nodes in a broader Shell Cooperative intelligence framework. Blog → Substack → video → (eventually) zine → public debate. Each part is a system inside a system.

Adaptive Layer
And because no system survives if it’s brittle, I’ve built in the ability to call audibles — to spin off a new weekly themes and creative multimedia productions  (like Dear Rachel), to pivot ideas into articles, videos, or messgaes on the various platforms; being able to adjust scheduling when real-world events demand it. The infrastructure isn’t rigid; it’s disciplined but nimble.

This is why I say I represent the systems person. My infrastructure proves it. I don’t just produce work — I design frameworks that can carry it forward, adapt under pressure, and hold together long after one piece fades. Where others chase output, I build systems that endure.

🕰️ In Closing:

 Haiku:

Silent roads within,
Patterns built to bear the weight—
Order outlasts noise.

Fortune Cookie Message distilled from these News and Views:

“Strength comes not from applause, but from systems built to endure. Protect your community with rules that outlast the hype, and resilience will carry you where promises cannot.”

Catawba County’s Quiet Mosaic: Citizenship, Language, and the Burden of Belonging

Catawba County is home to a diverse but often understated set of communities. About 6.7 percent of residents—slightly more than ten thousand people—were born outside the United States¹. Within this population, many have obtained U.S. citizenship through naturalization, while others remain lawful permanent residents or are here on legal visas such as work or student permits. The precise naturalization rate varies year to year and by source, but the data shows it is significant, not universal, and well below full saturation. This discussion is about citizens and lawful residents. It does not extend to those in temporary or politically manipulated categories such as asylum or TPS, which have been abused under extreme federal policies.

This reality matters for more than legal classification. Citizenship may open doors on paper, but language access often decides whether a resident can walk through them. Approximately 13 percent of Catawba County households speak a language other than English at home². Spanish accounts for about 8.5 percent of households, while Hmong represents roughly 2.4 percent.

These numbers have tangible, daily consequences. Elderly Hmong residents in Hickory and surrounding towns often rely on younger family members to navigate SNAP applications, Medicaid forms, and other services—children who themselves may still be learning English and remain unfamiliar with government processes. In Spanish-speaking households, parents may encounter school enrollment documents with limited translation or medical facilities without bilingual staff. Without adequate language access, public systems risk reinforcing distance rather than bridging it.

Geography compounds the problem. Non-English-speaking households are concentrated in Southeast Hickory, East Newton, and Ridgeview not by chance, but because these neighborhoods offer lower-cost housing, established immigrant networks, and proximity to service-sector and industrial jobs. Yet these same areas already face higher rates of food insecurity, economic strain, and limited transit service³. In these neighborhoods, language barriers do not simply slow access to resources—they intensify existing vulnerabilities.

The question must also be asked: how did these communities arrive here in the first place? This was not accidental migration. It was a combination of federal resettlement programs and local industry recruitment. Poultry plants, furniture factories, and textile mills actively sought out low-wage labor in the 1980s and 1990s, turning to immigrant and refugee populations as a stopgap solution when domestic labor markets tightened. Federal refugee resettlement programs steered impoverished populations — including Hmong families from Southeast Asia — into western North Carolina, with little thought given to long-term integration, economic self-sufficiency, or the strain on public systems.

The most consequential demographic shift in Catawba County has been the rapid growth of the Hispanic population, which has more than doubled over the last twenty-five years. This growth did not occur during a time of expanding prosperity — it occurred as our manufacturing base was shrinking. Poultry processors, furniture subcontractors, and construction firms turned to Hispanic immigrant labor as a way to keep wages suppressed while avoiding the harder work of rebuilding a middle-class workforce. Instead of revitalizing industry or investing in skilled trades, leaders chose the short-term fix of importing impoverished labor. The result was that Catawba County lost its industrial backbone while simultaneously importing a new underclass. That was not a plan for renewal; it was a retreat from responsibility. The people who made those decisions — in Washington and in corporate offices here in the Foothills — shifted the burden onto communities, schools, and taxpayers who are still paying the price today.

Catawba County’s foreign-born residents now come from a range of backgrounds. Nearly two-fifths trace their origins to Mexico, while others hail from Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, and Colombia⁴. Some have become successful business owners and property holders, while many others work in low-wage or unstable jobs that keep families on the edge of poverty. Even when paying taxes or contributing to the economy, they may still face barriers to accessing schools, services, and healthcare because of language. Contribution does not erase vulnerability.

The path forward is clear and evidence-based. Other communities have shown that targeted, multilingual outreach—paired with culturally competent service delivery—can measurably improve health outcomes, educational engagement, and civic participation⁵. For Catawba County, this would mean mapping language data against socioeconomic indicators to identify priority zones, translating vital documents, and ensuring public notices and meetings are accessible in foreign languages.

That said, language access should not mean raising Spanish, Hmong, or any other language to the level of English in civic life. Practical solutions—such as electronic translation systems for vital documents—can ensure comprehension without requiring costly human interpreters or catering to every possible ethnos.

Such actions do not dilute services for English-speaking residents. Instead, they strengthen the county’s social and economic cohesion. A workforce communicates more effectively when all members understand critical information. A public health system functions best when everyone can navigate it. A democracy fulfills its promise when all eligible citizens and lawful residents, regardless of language, can participate fully.

Belonging is not an automatic result of arrival or naturalization. It is built through repeated, everyday interactions in which residents see themselves reflected in the public sphere. Catawba County has the demographic knowledge, the institutional infrastructure, and the civic framework to make belonging real. What remains is the commitment to ensure that language never determines whether a lawful resident or citizen can take part in the life of the community.

But accountability matters. The demographic shifts Catawba County now lives with were not the product of chance. They were the result of conscious decisions — by federal policymakers who expanded immigration pipelines without preparing communities, and by local corporate leaders in poultry, textiles, and furniture who prioritized cheap labor over stability. The costs of those decisions — in education, healthcare, housing, and social cohesion — have been borne not by those who made them, but by taxpayers, neighborhoods, and civic institutions left to absorb the strain.

And let us be honest: there has never been “political will” at the start of such crises. I am getting old, and I have lived through tobacco, opioids, concussions in football, asbestos, lead toxicity, the Ford Pinto gas tank scandal, and more. In every case, the people in charge knew the risks. They suppressed the data, ignored the warnings, and pressed forward for short-term gain. And in every case, political will only came later — after lawsuits, public campaigns, and relentless pressure forced the truth into the open.

So why should this be different? Industries and policymakers that recruited vulnerable populations, suppressed wages, and shifted the burden of their choices onto local communities should face the same principle of responsibility that Big Tobacco, Purdue Pharma, the NFL, and others were forced to accept. Accountability is meaningless if it does not carry consequence.

The people of North Carolina and Catawba County deserve more than recognition — they deserve restitution for the costs imposed upon them. That requires building a model to ensure restitution is actually made, and that we never again allow a “Wild West” form of integration in this country where laws exist but are willfully ignored. After all, what is the point of having immigration statutes if they can be disregarded whenever it suits the political class or corporate bottom line?

 

 Catawba County’s Quiet Mosaic References and Footnotes