You didn’t “raise concerns.” You ran the full fossil-fuel-shill playbook: swap global system-level data for isolated anecdotes, misstate the claims in the articles, throw in some turbine panic, and hope nobody notices the pivot. Nobody compresses this many logical fallacies and misdirections into one post by accident.

Not knowing a research group is not a rebuttal. Ember is literally one of the main global electricity-market data aggregators used by IEA, IRENA, and multiple national regulators. If your argument starts with “I’ve never heard of them,” it’s already off the rails.

A captive industrial PPA for a hyperscaler is not a global trend. It’s a hyper-specific procurement project servicing one load spike. Pointing at a single dedicated 1.2 GW plant to disprove global generation trends is statistical malpractice — the equivalent of claiming one guy buying a Hummer disproves EV adoption.

Yes — that’s the annual output of one privately contracted facility. The articles are discussing net global generation and net additions, measured in hundreds of TWh and hundreds of GW. Your “math” here isn’t wrong; it’s irrelevant to the claim -- typical smokescreen from a typical shill.

Temporary gensets at data centers prove exactly one thing: data-center load is growing faster than local grid interconnects. This is just more misdirection and obfuscation. You are talking about planning lag and hyperscaler impatience, not about worldwide fossil demand. Hospitals have backup generators too; that doesn’t mean the grid doesn’t exist.

Yes — because AI load is exploding faster than turbine manufacturing capacity. That’s not “renewables aren’t growing,” it’s “the fossil sector can’t scale production fast enough even with unlimited demand.” You’ve taken evidence of strain and tried to reframe it as evidence of resurgence.

Your anecdotes describe a single industrial sector’s procurement scramble, not global electricity generation trends. You are trying to change the subject, like the obedient fossil fuel industry shill that you are. The graphs are accurate; they’re just describing the system as a whole, not the narrow slice you want to talk about. This is called "cherry picking" by the way; if there was any doubt about your fossil fuel industry bias, you just put it to rest right here.

Then widen your sources. FERC, EIA, MISO, SPP, PJM, ERCOT, and multiple state regulators have published retirement schedules and net declines in fossil capacity. Coal is retiring fastest; gas is flattening. Your “not hearing” is a function of selective inputs, not empirical data.

Show the filings. A handful of emergency restarts or industrial-PPA one-offs does not constitute a “coal comeback.” Net coal capacity has declined every year for a decade, and FERC projects further contraction. A few noisy exceptions do not overturn the aggregate. The real story is solar and wind are rolling out grid scale installations faster than the fossil fuel industry can roll out peaker plants, and doing it more cheaply as well -- even when demand is through the roof and cost is not an issue. The writing is on the wall for fossil fuel peakers.

In a bucket: Solar + wind added more new electricity than global demand growth in 2025. Fossil stayed flat. Coal fell below total renewables for the first time.
Your post swaps out global system-level data for hyperscaler procurement anecdotes and tries to pass it off as contradiction. The only thing you successfully disproved is your own objectivity.

Because the civil side of RICO, the CFAA, and the Lanham Act give Google standing even without direct monetary loss. Lighthouse’s phishing kits impersonate Google, misuse its trademarks, spoof its services, and target its users at scale—that’s textbook Lanham Act territory, and it's exactly the kind of systemic harm that the civil provisions in RICO and the CFAA were designed to combat. Google isn’t doing this out of charity; it’s defending its brand, its infrastructure, and the long-term viability of its messaging platforms. And thanks to the civil provisions in those laws, Google doesn’t have to wait around for the DOJ to get involved.

If Google's lawsuit moves forward, Lighthouse’s lawyers are going to have a very uncomfortable conversation with their clients. Civil RICO and CFAA both allow judges to issue ex parte asset-freeze orders, seize domains, force registrars and hosting providers to shut down infrastructure, and compel U.S. (and EU) intermediaries to turn over logs and identity records. Once the court grants early discovery, anyone even loosely involved—from resellers to developers to “affiliates”—can be subpoenaed, deposed, and pulled into joint-and-several liability. In practical terms, Lighthouse’s Western-reachable assets get seized, their infrastructure goes dark, their payment processors and crypto off-ramps get locked, and every employee or contractor who ever touched the operation suddenly needs their own lawyer. That’s the quiet part Google is saying out loud: this lawsuit isn’t symbolic—it’s a legal kill-switch.

It absolutely does say that—just not in the way you apparently think. RICO and the CFAA aren’t purely criminal statutes. Both include civil causes of action that private entities can invoke. That’s exactly what Google is doing here: filing a civil RICO and civil CFAA suit to go after Lighthouse’s infrastructure and operators.

No, Google isn’t pressing criminal charges. Yes, Google is using the civil provisions of those laws to bring enormous legal pressure to bear—completely in line with how those statutes were written.

This isn’t ambiguity, or spin, or Google LARPing as the DOJ. It’s just basic statutory reality.

Drive-by dismissals are fine, if you actually RTFA. Since you obviously didn't, take your drive-by snark and go pollute some other thread.

I hear you, man. Under normal circumstances “pressing charges” is absolutely the government’s job. But in this case the article is (for once) not playing fast and loose with the terminology -- RICO and the CFAA both have civil provisions explicitly allowing private plaintiffs to sue.

That means Google doesn’t have to wait around for the DOJ. They can file a civil RICO action, drag Lighthouse into federal court, freeze infrastructure, claw back damages, and generally make life miserable for everyone involved. And Google has the pockets to hire more lawyers than Lighthouse has people.

So yeah—no criminal indictment here, but Google does have some very long levers to pull.
In this particular case? Yay Google.

Fall behind in what? The race to the bottom of the ethical barrel? Apologies to Gary Larsen for borrowing a couple of his characters to illustrate my point. Thag was an optimist; Thog was a pragmatist. Thag sharpened the first stick to bring down dinner. Thog used the same stick to bring down Thag and take his cave. Both sets of genes made it through natural selection because competition works in a world with limited calories and no Geneva Conventions.

The problem is, that’s not the world we live in anymore. "Falling behind" isn’t measured in spears per capita. It’s measured in how well we can keep the Thogs of our species from turning every new tool into a weapon. Ethics are not a luxury; they’re a competitive strategy in a civilization that no longer gets a do-over.

Every generation of humans has stood around its campfire debating whether the new tool -- fire, bronze, dynamite, fission, AI -- will make us gods or ghosts. We’ve survived this long precisely because enough of us insisted that how we use the tool matters as much as whether we can.

The choice you present is pretty clear to me: If it is falling behind to build a world where Thog doesn't get to rewrite your neural firmware while you sleep, I'll take the slower race every time. Progress without guardrails isn't progress; it's just entropy with better marketing.

Interesting. I was 15 when the Holmes Basic Set hit shelves -- and I've rolled plenty of dice since. I guess if you are talking Social Security full retirement age sure -- that's 67 for my cohort. I was a teen in the mid-70s -- but I've "retired" twice, and I'm still several years shy of 67. In the real world, people's retirement rolls have as much variation as their character sheets; retirement age is a pretty elastic notion. Retiring at 67 is a bureaucratic artifact, not a biological or financial necessity. I retired after twenty years in the military, and retired again after fifteen years in cubicle land at a large defense contractor. That last "retirement" was in 2013 at the ripe old age of 51. I've been soaking up the sun in southern AZ ever since. I figure I spent half of my allotted three-score-and-ten working; I've earned the right to spend the other half playing. :)

Hmmm. I empathize with a lot of your points, especially that $80 game point the industry is creeping towards, but you do seem to be making a fundamental error in a key part of your post, and you are (pretty obviously) letting your concerns over AIs taking jobs away from humans inordinately bias your comments.

You’re mistaking rendering with content creation. This is the fundamental error you are making. The hardware bottleneck you’re describing — frame rate, shader throughput, rasterization limits — happens after the art pipeline. Generative AI has more to contribute to AAA games than pushing more polygons into a 4K framebuffer on your 5090; it also makes the creation of assets faster, more flexible, and less soul-crushing, which is what this entire article is about. Artists today already work at resolutions and levels of detail far beyond what ends up on-screen. They do it because the high-fidelity source allows lighting models, LODs, and texture compression to downsample cleanly. Generative tools just accelerate that process — they help the artist reach the starting line faster, not the finish line worse. Let me be clear, here: Frame rate limits belong to the GPU; content limits belong to the imagination. Generative AI only fixes one of those — and it’s not the one measured in hertz. I think that if you were to take a couple classes in digital art, followed by a couple classes in gpu architecture, you'll see what I mean.

Just...no. You are rehashing arguments made by coders who know they can be easily replaced by an LLM and feel powerless to stop it. If this is you, I sympathize with your plight, but I question your tactics. You should be joining a union to make sure that when your job is transitioned to an LLM, you are part of the process, not a victim of it. But honestly, if AI were actually a silver bullet for cost reduction, every AAA studio would already be profitable. The truth is uglier and simpler: crunch, debt, and risk are baked into the industry's AAA game model. Generative AI won’t fix that overnight, but it can make iteration cycles less brutal for the people who actually build the worlds we play in. It’s not about greed, it’s about giving overworked artists (and journeyman coders) a few more hours of their lives back — and maybe, just maybe, letting them spend it making better games.

If EA joining forces with Stable Diffusion sounds like “AI replacing humans,” you’re missing the point. Every creative leap in this industry — from the first digital paintbrushes to procedural generation to motion capture — has been met with the same fear, often from the artists themselves. Yet each wave expanded what creators could achieve.

Generative AI is just the next evolution of that continuum. A piano doesn't write the concerto; the composer does. A chisel doesn't discover the statue in the marble; the sculptor does. Generative AI is a collaborator, not a competitor. It’s a "smarter paintbrush," as EA says, that still requires a creative mind to wield it.

What I find interesting is that EA isn’t outsourcing creativity — it’s instrumenting it. If this partnership succeeds, the line between imagination and implementation gets thinner, not erased. Calling this “cost-cutting” misses the point. The real constraint in AAA development isn’t payroll, it’s iteration velocity — the ability to test, tweak, and polish before launch. Generative AI could shatter that barrier in spectacular fashion — turning crunch time, AAA’s most dreaded ritual, into a relic of the past.

If this is what “smarter paintbrushes” look like, I’m all in.

And you've fundamentally misunderstood the comment I was replying to. The post I replied to didn’t mention wet deposition or pollutant washout — it claimed “bursts of abnormally acidic rain,” which implies a chemical process caused by the seeding itself. That’s the claim I addressed.

What you’re actually doing here is a straw-man rescue: steelmanning the GP’s point into something more defensible (rain pulling pollution down) and then wasting bandwidth arguing that instead. If you wanted to talk about wet deposition and the local politics of emissions controls, that’s a worthwhile discussion -- but you should have started a new thread instead of attempting to hijack this one.

To restate the chemistry clearly: acid rain arises when SO2 and NOx gases oxidize into sulfuric and nitric acids. Cloud seeding uses silver iodide or salt, not sulfur or nitrogen oxides, and doesn’t change that chemistry. Rain -- natural or seeded -- will of course wash out particulates and slightly lower pH locally, but that’s not the same as true acid rain. The “tradeoff” isn’t clean lungs versus burning trees; it’s dirty air versus a brief pH dip in runoff. Still worth doing while working on the “pollute less” part.

Acid rain from cloud seeding? Just...no. The article didn't mention it because that risk doesn't exist. You (and the mods that modded you up) need to brush up on chemistry and atmospheric physics.

Cloud seeding uses silver iodide, sodium chloride, and (occasionally) dry ice to encourage condensation, because their crystal structure looks like ice nuclei to the H20 that is already bouncing around in the clouds. None of those reagents create acids in water. What produces acid rain is sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides reacting with that H2O to form sulfuric and nitric acids. That's the chemistry you seem to be missing. Unless the seeding aircraft are dumping tons of sulfur compounds—which they aren’t—the process doesn’t generate new acids.

What it does do is hasten the removal of what’s already there. If the air column is saturated with industrial SOs and NOs, a seeded rainstorm could bring that down faster, leading to a (very) brief spike in local acidity. But that’s a temporary redistribution, not a new chemical source, and it’s already happening every time Delhi gets a natural monsoon downpour. This is atmospheric physics 101 -- you seem to have missed a few chapters.

The real limitation is that cloud seeding only works when there’s sufficient moisture and the right cloud microphysics—it’s not a magic pollution scrubber, so your SoCal analogy is (way) off. Los Angeles photochemical smog is mostly ozone, peroxyacyl nitrates, and particulates, not the sulfur compounds that drove the 1970s acid-rain panic in the U.S. Northeast. You are mixing apples and turpentine; at least oranges are a fruit.

In short: seeding might wash out particulates and existing acidic aerosols more quickly, but it doesn’t create acid rain. You did get one thing right, though. The “better option is pollute less” is absolutely true—but you really need to work on your chemistry.

Well said. Huxley, Orwell, and Bradbury salute you. Solzhenitsyn would’ve smiled — quiet dissent is still dissent. We welcome you to the Gulag. :)

You’re right that I should’ve written “with only money and some technology” — I thought the "only" was implicitly obvious, but I am happy to spell it out for you. To address your hypothetical, I'll provide one of my own: If an engineer really could build a self-sustaining photochemical CO cracker that turned greenhouse gas into profit, they’d already be running the table on carbon markets and Nobel nominations alike. The fact that nobody has done so isn’t because the idea lacks imagination — it’s because the physics and materials science don’t pencil out past the TED-talk stage. By all means, show us working data, pilot results, or even a peer-reviewed prototype. Otherwise, this kind of “what if” speculation just burns oxygen better spent on solutions that actually exist. Instead of lobbing hypotheticals at each other, we could, like, you know, do something in the real world. Like enforce existing emissions caps, stop subsidizing fossil fuels, invest in grid-scale storage, incentivize green tech, and maybe even carpool once in a while. The unglamorous stuff that works when everyone — not just a hypothetical engineer with sunlight and a dream — pulls in the same direction.

Or do you have some issue with collective action and personal responsibility?

Fair point — optimism is a tough sell in this atmosphere (pun also intended). But climates do change — that’s the whole problem and the whole opportunity. Political ones can shift faster than planetary ones if enough of us keep turning up the heat where it counts: at the polls, in the markets, and in our own habits.

If we can engineer the weather with aerosol jets, surely we can engineer a little political will. The trick is to start the feedback loop in the right direction this time.

Easy there, Ted Faro. :) Join us in the real world. The "clawback" that worked in Horizon: Zero Dawn isn't going to work in real life. You can't fix a planetary crisis with money and some technology. The idea that one nation or tech mogul can single-handedly geoengineer us out of this mess is just hubris of the tech-bro variety. Stratospheric aerosol injection might look like salvation, but it’s just as likely to wreck monsoons, acidify oceans, and torch what’s left of our climate stability. If we want to keep Earth from turning into Arrakis (to borrow from another excellent fictional world) it won’t be through a billionaire’s good intentions -- it’ll be through collective effort, shared sacrifice, and the will to change before the biosphere collapses.

“Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.”

— Andrew S. Tanenbaum, 1981

There’s a convergence of cultural, technical, and trust factors that make the “return of the Blu-ray” make sense right now, especially among technically literate users who understand both the fragility of cloud promises and the hunger of AI data-collection pipelines.

Japan’s media culture amplifies this trend. Japan has always favored physical ownership: CDs and Blu-rays still outsell streaming in most demographics. Fujitsu, Dynabook, and NEC are catering to domestic demand from people who want to own their media and archives, not rent them. Western markets dumped ODDs; Japan never stopped making them.

I think what's really pushing this is archival paranoia and AI distrust. It isn't just the tin-foil hats that are worried about hungry bots sniffing through cloud data. Professionals in medicine, law, R&D, and creative fields are increasingly moving sensitive or original work to offline media to avoid involuntary ingestion into training corpora. Blu-ray, especially BDXL (100–128 GB discs), offers a long-term cold-storage medium immune to ransomware and metadata harvesting. It’s slow, yes—but trustworthy in a way that nothing cloud-based can match.

As cloud platforms blur the line between storage and training data, more and more consumers are realizing that the cloud is just someone else’s computer with a data-mining clause buried deep in the EULA. These users are rediscovering that a $40 external ODD is the cheapest privacy policy money can buy. It's an easily accessible, low-tech firewall against Sam Altman's or Mark Zuckerberg's bots crawling through personal files in the name of innovation. A $40 external ODD can’t phone home, can’t be hacked from the cloud, and won’t volunteer your data to the next training corpus.