.... Their green energy data is flawless, because nobody would ever deliberately lie about that stuff!

Is this
1) (stupid) antivaxxers, as so very many ideologically-motivated comments here have immediately assumed?
Or is it
2) millions of unvaccinated illegals entering the country since 2020? ... Or something else?

I find it curious that so many commenters here are insanely militant and aggressive about vaccination, I didn't recall those same voices ever insisting that the tidal wave of illegals submit to vaccination... Do you?

Which is the bot-driven sales. Followed by commission sales agents enabling the process.

I may never see another major act in person. Just don't want to participate in the fraud.

Lincoln was a Free Soiler. He may have had a moral aversion to slavery, but it was secondary to his economic concerns. He believed that slavery could continue in the South but should not be extended into the western territories, primarily because it limited economic opportunities for white laborers, who would otherwise have to compete with enslaved workers.

From an economic perspective, he was right. The Southern slave system enriched a small aristocratic elite—roughly 5% of whites—while offering poor whites very limited upward mobility.

The politics of the era were far more complicated than the simplified narrative of a uniformly radical abolitionist North confronting a uniformly pro-secession South. This oversimplification is largely an artifact of neo-Confederate historical revisionism. In reality, the North was deeply racist by modern standards, support for Southern secession was far from universal, and many secession conventions were marked by severe democratic irregularities, including voter intimidation.

The current coalescence of anti-science attitudes and neo-Confederate interpretations of the Civil War is not accidental. Both reflect a willingness to supplant scholarship with narratives that are more “correct” ideologically. This tendency is universal—everyone does it to some degree—but in these cases, it is profoundly anti-intellectual: inconvenient evidence is simply ignored or dismissed. As in the antebellum South, this lack of critical thought is being exploited to entrench an economic elite. It keeps people focused on fears over vaccinations or immigrant labor while policies serving elite interests are quietly enacted.

It's different from humans in that human opinions, expertise and intelligence are rooted in their experience. Good or bad, and inconsistent as it is, it is far, far more stable than AI. If you've ever tried to work at a long running task with generative AI, the crash in performance as the context rots is very, very noticeable, and it's intrinsic to the technology. Work with a human long enough, and you will see the faults in his reasoning, sure, but it's just as good or bad as it was at the beginning.

I know a few who would take the extra money and see a quack doctor. I did, for instance. Good enough results to recommend them.

Correct. This is why I don't like the term "hallucinate". AIs don't experience hallucinations, because they don't experience anything. The problem they have would more correctly be called, in psychology terms "confabulation" -- they patch up holes in their knowledge by making up plausible sounding facts.

I have experimented with AI assistance for certain tasks, and find that generative AI absolutely passes the Turing test for short sessions -- if anything it's too good; too fast; too well-informed. But the longer the session goes, the more the illusion of intelligence evaporates.

This is because under the hood, what AI is doing is a bunch of linear algebra. The "model" is a set of matrices, and the "context" is a set of vectors representing your session up to the current point, augmented during each prompt response by results from Internet searches. The problem is, the "context" takes up lots of expensive high performance video RAM, and every user only gets so much of that. When you run out of space for your context, the older stuff drops out of the context. This is why credibility drops the longer a session runs. You start with a nice empty context, and you bring in some internet search results and run them through the model and it all makes sense. When you start throwing out parts of the context, the context turns into inconsistent mush.

Is English not your first language?
The quote - from Epstein's own email - is that Trump was trying to stop it. Don't you know what words mean?

Take a breath.
I don't care about intra Republican politics, I'm glad the files are being released; I want them out unredacted. Isn't this a good thing?

Great example of the comment smegma I was talking about!

My kids were born in the 1990s and my youngest daughter was in her early 20s when she was talking to a cousin 10y younger than she. The cousin had asked about a sweatshirt she was wearing that had cursive text - nothing complicated, probably "dogs are cute" or somesuch - and my daughter AMAZED her by being able to read the script.

Then the cousin asked "It's cool that you can read that, can you speak it, too?"

Yeah, I'm not sure mandatory cursive classes are going to help at this point.

Genuine question.

We hear in semi annual oscillations about the predicted, imminent "death of the PC for gaming" and "death of the console"... When does this non news stop being interesting?

Equating AI with Pac-Man isn't really the intellectual flex you probably think it is.

But in that sense we're getting into semantic hairsplitting. "Annoying" != "dirty"
To your points:
* Noise of generators and cooling systems, the DC being built too close to existing homes, more of a zoning council fail but it happens as DC money can make the council turn a blind eye to the local residents desires.
Zoning issue, as I mentioned.

* Vibration, lots of big engines and such can create vibrations that travel thru the ground (or very low frequency) that can disturb sleep and such even if it doesn't measure on the sound meter.
Zoning issue, as I mentioned.

* Diesel exhaust if that's used for generators.
CLEARLY a Zoning issue, as I mentioned.

* Water supplies can be consumed (& denied to locals) or even "contaminated" (like being warmed too much for the local wildlife), or aquifers can be drained faster than they can replenish.
Not a zoning but pricing issue; I've been involved in commercial/industrial planning, and water consumption is certified; if it exceeds capacity, it shouldn't get a permit (zoning issue, basically) at all. Otherwise, it should be charged for what it takes; if the price is calculated accurately this shouldn't be an issue.
The warming of local aquifers and surface water is 100% a valid point though as I don't know of any regulatory system that comprehends/accommodates/costs this into the factor. Good point.

* Electricity as this article is about
Pricing issue. If it's slated to need X mwh, then it should be charged for it. If the local grid has to build capacity to accomodate, that's a planning issue and likely a surcharge for the major user(s). If this isn't happening, again, local regulatory issue.

* Dropping local property values of existing homes
If a business is properly zoned, compelled(!) to comply with local ordinances about noise, emissions, vibration, traffic, etc there's zero reason this would impact local home values.

* Taxation issues because cities want to bring the DC in and give tax abatements, but there are still local services required so the extra costs get passed on to others
The tax abatement issue is absolutely a genuine one; such arrangements HAVE TO ensure basic services are paid for, and that only the marginal 'profit' from such projects' taxation is in play. Most local councils have some level of corruption, unfortunately, and too few local residents give enough of a shit to make any change.

"The company naturally took a build now/ permit later approach to essentially building their own power plant, as one does."

I live in MN. We were building a coating plant here in the late 1990s and it involved a thermal system to burn away solvents that escaped from our coating process (we're a EU firm, and have been recycling this back into power for our dryers for years reducing solvent emissions to basically 0) so I was heavily involved with the MN PCA and EPA who (surprisingly) had no algorithms to comprehend such a system yet in the US. So I had a year or more of fairly deep engineering discussions with regulators.

TN certainly has its own rules but I don't understand how a company could have a "The company naturally took a build now/ permit later approach to essentially building their own power plant, as one does." Doesn't your example VERY SPECIFICALLY support my point that this isn't so much an issue about the data center but about the lax implementation of basic regulation and zoning limits that the could do so and even survive the regulatory consequence?