Two more reasons not yet mentioned:

It is close to a population center (Phoenix) keeping latency low to customers. Getting customers off the public Internet quickly and into your private network fast is best for a lot of reasons.

Cheap and abundant solar power. Data centers are extremely power hungry and power lines are expensive so companies like Amazon almost always secure abundant power rights before building. Google built their first data center in The Dalles Oregon because an aluminum smelter had gone belly up and left a bunch of capacity unclaimed in a local hydroelectric dam.

Not the person you’re replying to but:

1. Yes, managing your relationship with your coworkers will be helpful at all stages of your career. You’re not managing them, you’re managing your relationship with them. It helps you listen, ask simple questions about who they are and listen. You don’t have to care, you only have to share a little. You’re not building a friendship unless you want to. You’re cultivating a positive relationship so that they know they can depend on you when they need it.

2. Yes, exhausting. It’s called masking and everybody whether they are neuro divergent or not does it. Some people find it trivial, some find it nearly impossible. My wife can tell the difference between my work voice and my regular voice because at work I’m masking. I’ve been working on bringing the two closer together because I’ve found it is beneficial to my career to be more myself.

Long cat

Long cat

He is long

And is a cat

Long cat

Disclosure: my wife is the singer songwriter in the house so this is technically her’s

Effectuate

I’m going to effectuate this pole right up the ass of the next person to use that word.

The dialog is pretty consistent and certainly gets overwhelming at times. I understand why Erikson started the story where he did but you’re dropped into the story about 100,000 years after it started. I’m 16 books in and just starting to understand the events that kicked everything off.

All that said, best books I’ve ever read without question. %100 with the read. If you want another entry point I might suggest giving Midnight Tides a try. It is the 5th book and takes place on the other side of the world with completely new characters so you don’t need any context from the first 4 books. Midnight Tides also contains my 2 favorite characters in all of fiction, the banter between Tehol and Bugg is immaculate. That dialog is probably a better intro than Krul and Krupe.