FXBG Advance Wednesday, June 24, 2026
Essential Baseball Equipment Back in the Day. 4 Counties, 20 Million Gallons of Water a Day to Amazon. Recycling Beyond the Bin. Virginia Finally Passes a Budget.
Shovels, Electrical Tape, Cowpies, and Axes: Essential Baseball Equipment Back in the Day
By Donnie Johnston, Advance Columnist
In my neighborhood, we played in a cow pasture at the neighbor’s farm, and in the hayfield next door. Both limited our season. When the bull was in with the cows, the neighbor’s pasture was off limits to 10-12-year-old kids, and the only time we could play in the hayfield next door was during the two weeks after the hay was cut and baled.
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Four Virginia Counties Will Pump Almost 20 Million Gallons of Water a Day to Amazon
By Eric Bonds, Braderick Hatch Jr., and Fiona Steffens, The Virginia Mercury
By scouring available public records, and submitting Freedom of Information Act requests, we learned that local governments in the Commonwealth have allocated at least 19.6 million gallons a day to Amazon.
This, we think, is an underestimate. It doesn’t include at least one large water-cooled data center campus in another nearby county that is currently being constructed by another company but might end up being leased and operated by Amazon. And it doesn’t include other potential Amazon data center campuses that have not yet been approved or are being held up in court.
Even so, 19.6 million gallons a day seems like a good deal of water. It’s enough to fill 980 backyard swimming pools every day. If the average American uses 82 gallons of water a day, it’s enough to sustain 239,000 people.
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Recycling Beyond the Bin: You Might Be Done with It, but That Doesn’t Mean Everybody Is
By Bruce Saller, Advance Contributor
There are a lot of local businesses in our area that recycle items that can’t be put in curbside recycling bins. Rappahannock Goodwill Industries accepts electronic items in any condition: desktops, monitors, laptops, tablets, printers, scanners, keyboards, mice, speakers, cords, cables, webcams, cell phones, internal and external hard drives. They recommend that you delete all personal data yourself, but they’ll check to make sure, and delete it for you if you forget.
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Virginia Legislators Advance $205 Billion Budget Including New Tax on Data Centers
VaNews/Virginia Public Access Project
Virginia Legislators Advance Budget with Tax on Data Centers
By NATHANIEL CLINE, SHANNON HECKT, CHARLOTTE RENE WOODS and SAMANTHA WILLIS, Virginia Mercury
Virginia legislators have approved a two-year, $205 billion budget proposal to fund healthcare and public education, provide 4 percent teacher raises and a 3.5 percent pay bump to state employees, establish a retail weed marketplace and hedge against decreased federal dollars. The spending plan also includes a provision to tax data centers for their energy consumption, which is slated to generate a maximum of $600 million each year but doesn’t include the environmental standards the House of Delegates wanted to impose on the industry or the end of the sales tax exemption that the Senate sought.
Articles from newspapers throughout the Commonwealth and Washington D.C. Firewalls will block you from reading some, but you’ll at least have some idea about what’s going on from the headlines, which, let’s be honest, are all many of us have time to read anyway.
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