TMI 1 was finished April 19, 1974, on a Babcock and Wilcox PWR design. It's far past it's life expectancy. Indeed, it got another 20 years in 2009.
1 billion is just for starters.

Unit 2 was gutted and it's the same PWR design from B&W.

In general, I approve of nuclear power generation, but not this particular B&W PWR design, since it's proven to fail.

Add that these systems require huge amounts of cooling water, and that there are competing demands between people, agriculture, other industry, data centers, and power plants on that water. The water is bad enough, but providing power to more AI D.C.s will increase everyone's power bill. Which is, in essence, is exactly what the phrase "Privatizing the profit and socializing the cost" means.

I think the only "government loan" that didn't turn into a handout was for Chrysler, and that only happened because they were building tanks at the time. Certainly most of the Trump COVID loans were forgiven, especially those handed out to politicians (to be fair, of BOTH parties.) Remember how Solyndra controversy went bust and put egg on the faces of the democrats that backed that. And how the Cato institute suddenly stopped comment on it, and later, 45 issues a few pardons to folks that at first blush, don't seem to have ties to that, but a little digging....
Politics is fascinating when one studies the round about way sooner or later everyone winds up in everyone else's bed, but it's you and me that get screwed. I think we can agree that we need to yank all trading rights to politicians while in office, and for 5 years afterward. Might be a good thing too to stop trying to be the bank for some of these loans. A shame that, because there are more than a few that I feel are worth it, but it's the others that are duds that spoil it for everyone.

That's not actually a meaningful difference as far as antitrust law is concerned. With the possible exception of the monopoly being created by doing something illegal (which then becomes a separate violation on its own), it does not matter *how* a monopoly came to be, only that it is, and whether it causes harm to society, to customers, to other companies in the market, etc.

It's actually not. Any jacka** can buy a block of phone numbers and set up a trunk line. That's exactly why we have so much Caller ID fraud these days. I mean yes, ostensibly, but in practice, no.

Ah, but most phone companies these days don't even have a physical presence anywhere.

Entertainment monopolies have *lots* of government restraints. It really doesn't matter whether the company is an entertainment company or a toilet paper manufacturer. A monopoly is a monopoly, and subject to antitrust laws.

Except that email is surprisingly bad as a sharing medium, and 1000x as bad if you want to share large content like photos. But regardless, that's kind of moot.

Sure. None of that changes whether having basically one giant platform that almost everyone is on makes it difficult to impossible for any other company to meaningfully compete, though. And when your own platform buys another platform, that's where governments *do* start to have the right to deny a company from doing as it pleases.

So they fold corporation on paper, walk away from the loan and open up a new corporation that gets to use the facility.

Dude it's 2025, by now you should know how this game is played.

There's something called a natural monopoly. Social media is likely to be a natural monopoly, in much the same way that the phone company was a natural monopoly before it was forcibly broken up and forced to provide interconnections to other phone companies using shared standards, etc. There's not a whole lot of difference other than the phone company having a higher physical infrastructure barrier to entry.

Regardless, Facebook is not blameless. They bought Instagram, effectively consolidating the potential players in that space from two down to one. And antitrust law does sometimes break up natural monopolies. It isn't about fault or blame. It is about actions taken while in that state that harm competition, harm users, etc.

Doesn't matter. Antitrust law isn't just about the users being victims. It is also about other companies being the victims by being unable to compete because of unfair competition, collusion, excessive mergers, etc. User/purchaser harm is only one narrow aspect of a much larger body of law.

When in the history of humanity has there not been a big problem coming? Or occurring, for that matter.

It's actually more than that. For a typical website, you would be right. The problem with social media is that it is inherently social. If your friends aren't on the same site, you can't share things with them. People don't join a site that doesn't already have a lot of users, and therefore, there's an almost insurmountable barrier to entry when you end up with one or two entrenched players, in spite of it theoretically being possible to create another site.

And because Facebook is not federated, hides even public content behind a login wall, and makes sharing with non-users generally impractical, they are directly contributing to a situation where even if another company came along and created something that is better, no one would use it, because their friends and family would not be there, because they are all already on Facebook.

In much the same way that the EU basically forced Apple to open up Messages to support RCS for inter-platform communication, the only way Facebook/Instagram will ever realistically stop being a monopoly is if a government forces them to federate with other social media platforms so that you can share with your friends on other platforms. A strong antitrust judgment against Facebook would be a necessary first step towards that.

Besides, Google+ *was* better than Facebook in a lot of ways, IMO. It wasn't enough, though. I created an account, but nobody I knew was on, so I didn't ever post anything, and because people didn't ever post anything, nobody came to use it, and it ended up being a ghost town. The fact that a head-to-head competitor for Facebook emerged, backed by one of the largest companies on the planet, with a significantly better, more capable product, a more flexible sharing model, etc. and still could not successfully compete with Facebook should tell you that no, building a better product will never work.

The only way other sites "compete" is by being entirely orthogonal to Facebook, targeting largely non-overlapping demographics and largely non-overlapping sets of features. But that's not really competing. That's coexisting. I would argue that Facebook has no actual competition, except perhaps in the vague, wishy-washy "competing for eyeball time" fashion, in which case everything online and offline is a competitor.

The problem in this story is not the wealth, but its form. Cryptocurrency transactions are generally irreversible and not subject to the layers of process and protection that have been built up around large banking transactions. Keep your money in banks and brokerages like a sensible person and you don't have much risk.

I forget which town but one of them immediately removed all the cameras when somebody did a foi request.

You're not going to find out where the billionaires are going because like Steve Jobs used to do they hide their license plates.

But your shitty little Republican mayor who frequents the local gay bar doesn't have the resources to do that. A

I personally know five chiropractors. Four of them are serious about medical science in their practices. The fifth I can't vouch for, she's too creepy to visit professionally. Do you actually know and have experience with even one chiropractor?

Between Oracle and Cisco, both of them are exceptionally awful.

Oracle because they basically bought out open source software (MySQL, Sun/Open/LibreOffice) or acquired (eg Java) technology to try and extinguish competition for it's own products. And then did nothing but let it's own products and the stuff they acquired rot. Like I can name even more products that clients moved away from because Oracle bought them and then tried to shove them down to their own worse proprietary products.

Cisco has done exactly the same thing, acquired Linksys because of the open source routers they were selling, and then let it rot. Cisco has done this hundreds of times.

Look good god, every time I see Oracle show up in news I secretly hope the company is going be broken up or go bankrupt.

Why is the government, at any level, buying where non-indicted, presumed innocent people are traveling, for any reason at all, let alone without a warrant? The "Thrid party rule" of evidence is simply a power grab our founders would be horrified to see happen. It is quite clear they distrusted and despised all forms of government surveillance and believed only in the most restricted circumstance should it be allowed, and only then under the supervision of a judge. Having been given a worm's eye view of some of the less egregious things that pass for "national security", it's quite obvious it's mostly to harass the innocent. Most of the time, in my opinion, that someone is guilty of anything at all, whatever is a simple coincidence. Remember children, National Security Letters come with a built in gag order, you're not allowed to even discuss it with your own attorney.

But also entirely predictable. Anyone paying attention for the last 30 years or so should realize by now that:

1) Data aggregated for any purpose will eventually be abused.

It is probably the only thing as certain as death and taxes... (sorry could not resist)

Of the top of my head...

People trying to mis-characterize leisure/personal travel as business expenses. Claims of S-corp business related deductions and credits are generally cited high audit trigger risks. I assume that is because the IRS at least believes they are widely abused.

Just as a general top line way to flag people who have life styles that don't seem align well to their reported incomes...and by extension are likely not reporting things they are required to do. The US tax codes is very well weird, we should never forget. You are for example required to report income from illegal activities, but the 5th amendment protects you from having to disclose what those activities are. So for an example that might fit here:

let's say fraudulently arranged some business travel for yourself to meet a client that does not exist, because you want to take a free trip to Monnaco on the company dime. That trip is income. As far as the IRS is concerned you need to report those 10k business class tickets and those 4k hotel fees you received. They may be curious if that was really a business and just how someone with AGI of 68,000 with three dependents managed to bank roll such an extravagant trip if it wasn't.

Uh, yes, the 24-hour cancellation option is always the most expensive one for a given room (ignoring paying extra for add-ons like free breakfast or extra points). What other option would be more expensive? The one that gives the consumer the most flexibility is the one with the highest risk to the property, and that's priced in.

Yeah, TFA overstated it. Though if you're not booking through the chain directly, in many cases it is hard to get a 24-hour cancellation policy. Many of the travel aggregator services hide them.

Yep. That's all true even if AI is the most transformative technology ever invented, even if it generates trillions per year in economic output -- it might not do it soon enough to prevent another crash. You don't have to believe that AI is "sand-castle based or vapor based" (which it's really not) to see a big problem coming.