If you're not watching his channel you probably should be.

So the CEO of GameStop gets a huge payout if he can make the company worth $100 billion dollars on paper. The debt is completely irrelevant it just has to be a market cap of $100 billion dollars.

Being the oh so clever boy he is he decided to try and achieve that by using a leveraged buyout to purchase a much larger company and call it GameStop so that on paper he would go from a 11 billion dollar company to a 66 billion dollar company. Basically getting him halfway to his goal and then all he has to do is find a couple more oversized companies to buy with their own debt and blam he gets a multi-billion dollar payout.

Of course all the companies involved here would collapse under the debt load and all the employees would lose their jobs and the community loses the services from those companies but that's a you problem not a him problem.

We put grifters, crooks and pirates in charge of basically everything. And every time anyone suggests taking away their power everyone screams socialism and government bad and blah blah blah until we all have to go back to our jobs.

You can't give this much power to this few people and have a functioning system or society but about 45% of the world wants it this way and then about 6% don't get to say in anything because of voter suppression and the remaining 49% don't matter because of winner take off first past the post voting.

It's a little better if you are in a parliamentary system but most of them at the end of the day have some form of winner take all voting which is prone to the same problems. And the few small countries that don't have that are prone to systemic attacks from the billionaires in the larger countries that do have exploitable voting systems.

I honestly don't know solution to any of this. I really do think we're going to collapse the economy and eventually hand the nuclear launch codes to a bunch of religious lunatics and then it's going to be game over for all of us. It's possible a few billionaires will survive an island bunkers but it's also possible that their air filtration systems won't work and they will die down there. I won't be around to find out though. I'm not smart enough to be one of the handful of engineers they keep around and I'm not sexy enough to be one of their sex slaves and I'm not violent enough to be one of the thugs to keep the other two groups in line for the billionaires. So there really isn't a place for me in the society that they want to create.

And again I don't see how we stop it because well, people are just so fucking stupid...

Assuming that no plant ever goes offline for any reason and that there will be no other growth in Kenya ever.

This is dumping it on the next administration. If that happens to be a trump administration that's fine because Trump can get more bribes. It's not going to be a Vance administration since well, there is no way in hell anyone but Trump is going to get a republican elected in 2028. Nobody else has his cult of personality that can give people to forget that they can't afford to drive to work this week...

There is a shitload of extraordinarily nasty things in the big beautiful bill that are going to hit like a truck after the midterms. Hundreds of billions of dollars of cuts to Medicare and medicaid. I want to be clear that's both Medicare and Medicaid. The Medicare cuts are trickier and nastier because they need to be round about so that people can pretend they aren't happening but they are still there. And the Medicaid cuts are going to basically devastate rural hospitals. There's a slew of other cuts and problems that were done to make room for billionaire tax cuts.

All of this is scheduled to hit after the midterms because that way you've already voted Republican by then like the sucker you are.

There's an old saying, what the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public. Low information voters who have no idea they are about to lose their health care or that their grandparents or parents are about to lose Health Care are in for a world of hurt but right now they're cheerfully humming along telling pollsters that they approve of the job Donald Trump is doing.

Oh and Donald Trump and Republican party are once again mobilizing poll watchers and voter suppressors in Mass. There is a little article about it over on MSNBC but they're not exactly spending a lot of time talking about it. For some reason the Democrats can't seem to understand that voter suppression at the county level is a huge problem... Meanwhile the Republican party can easily use it to stop 5 to 7% of Democrats from voting. And that's before the racist gerrymandering that just got legalized

For every Republican yucking it up because this sounds great remember the less Democrat voting power there is the less they need you to vote for them. As always it's a big club and you ain't in it.

That costs money. They were hoping the locals would foot that bill for them.

How many data centers in your immediate area? Are they the modern high density data centers with thousands of GPU units per rack or the old school 4U's in a rack supporting a few websites kind of data center?

As for employment, when is the last time you saw a data center that was bustling with human activity once construction and move-in was finished?

Given that big companies have already made it clear that they think AI will let them do the same work with fewer people, and given that using AI costs the company a lot in terms of compute resources, it seems intuitively obvious that the only reason execs would want to encourage more AI use is to find out what jobs can easily have their headcount reduced by more use of AI.

The people using the most tokens are the ones for whom more of their jobs can be most easily automated. This is not, IMO, a positive sign for the long-term survival of that particular job role. The only rational response is to use AI just enough to show a speed-up, assuming the speed-up actually happens at all, but not enough to be high up on the chart of AI users. Using it way more than that seems self-defeating.

That was a joke! backhoes breaking fiber is part of the natural order.

That's why you should always carry a length of fiber with you. If you ever get stranded with no cell service, you can just bury the length of fiber in the dirt. When the backhoe guy comes along to break it, ask him for a lift.

Typically when using those tools, not every "issue" found is actually an issue.

It does nicely illustrate that AI may do a deeper scan, but not necessarily a better one.

There are existing rules based scanners for websites. Running one on any typical site will easily spit out more than 100 flagged issues. Some "consultants" will dutifully hand that report over and call it a day, but if you actually go through them, most if not all aren't even actual security flaws. Yes, if I POST data that includes the correct username and password, it will grant me access just as if I had filled in the login form. So what? Yes, if I give an invalid account number, it returns a page with (non-)error code 200. The page says "Access denied".

That isn't to say the AI tool is bad, just that it represents an EVOlution, not a REVOlution.

Yeah, that was confusing. But Kenya's president is almost certainly wrong. Here's why:

1. It is not numerically correct, assuming the numbers in the summary are accurate. The country has a surplus adequate to power the data center at somewhere around half to three-quarters capacity even at peak power use, and probably at full capacity for 99 days out of 100. So even if they built it at full capacity right off the bat and did nothing else, you'd still only lose power to a small fraction of Kenya occasionally.

2. They're not building it at full capacity. They're building a small data center at first, then building it up over time as more generating capacity comes online.

3. They're a reliable customer of power. That means that they will alway pay the bill, even if it is high. The grid operators and generation plant operators can charge them a huge premium for bulk power, then use that extra revenue to build more power plants. By the time the data center is running at full capacity, they could have more than enough power to power it.

4. Even if that extra investment in production doesn't happen, they can just refuse to provide the additional power from the grid. I'm sure Microsoft knows how to do solar + storage by now, and if not, they can pay someone to do it for them who does. Or they can build their own geothermal plant right next to the existing one. Or they can do any number of other things to produce power, like installing an SMR.

5. Nothing inherently prevents them from reducing power usage during peak load periods. Service will get slower, but should gracefully degrade, assuming they're doing it right. Nobody will lose power, realistically speaking.

It is unfortunate that so many people look at these data centers and the current worst-case state of resource availability and conclude wrongly that they are infeasible, but this is a common mistake made by planners, legislators, and members of the general public. They fail to account for how the existence of the data center with its need for resources will trigger the production of facilities to exploit previously unusable resources and make them available, and they fail to recognize that in a true power emergency, they can just turn 90% of it off and shift the load to other data centers.

But the reality of the matter is that nobody is going to build a gigawatt of additional power capacity in Kenya unless the government or some private company that needs power pays them to do it. They already have a 23 to 30% surplus compared with their worst-case power consumption. That means that adding more production will just drive power prices down, so they'll get less money for the power they produce.

But as soon as someone like Microsoft starts needing enough power to pull those margins down, suddenly additional capacity becomes economically feasible, and you'll see either existing power companies expanding or new power companies entering the market. And the existence of an all-but-guaranteed higher future demand is the key to making that happen. Without the data center being approved, that motive to expand does not exist, and the grid will likely stay at or near its currently levels unless the government forces the hand of the market by paying someone to build more generating capacity.

How will the automated ditch digger be sure to find and break the fiber cable?

Also, anything sounds big when you put it in gallons. Doesn't sound so big when you mention that's 92 acre feet, the amount used by less than 20 acres / 8 hectares of alfalfa per year. Or when you mention that a typical *closed loop* 1GW nuclear reactor uses 6-20 billion gallons of cooling water per year (once-through uses 200-500 billion gallons, though most of that is returned, whereas closed loop evaporates it)

I don't think it has anything to do with that. As soon as I saw the headline, my mind went "cohort study". And sure enough, yeah, it's a cohort study. Remember that big thing about how wine improves your health, and then it turned out to just be that people who drink wine tend to be wealthier and thus have better health outcomes? And also, the "sick quitter" effect, where people who are in worse health would tend to stop drinking, so you ended up with extra sick people in the non-wine group? Same sort of thing. This study says they're controlling for a wide range of factors, but I'd put money on it just being the same sort of spurious correlations.

It means you have a much less stressful job.

We know what ages people. It's over work. And it appears that once you get past 32 hours that's qualifies as over work, let alone the 50 or 60 the average American is doing right now. Just a reminder that Americans now work more hours than the Japanese...

Somebody that is putting in 50 or 60 hours a week on top of kids or something isn't going to a museum or even the library. They are lying on the couch exhausted maybe watching TV or maybe even too exhausted to do that.

Incidentally this is why actors tend to age so well. Less stress and more sleep and rest mean you age less. It's also why being president of the United States tends to age people. Because the job involves constant work and long hours and enormous stress. I mean unless you're the current guy. The job doesn't seem to be aging him in the slightest. I mean not anymore than he already is...

At least some of this will be stress. If you're enjoying something, then you won't be stressed. If you're feeling positive and delighting in what you do, then you won't be stressed in unhealthy ways. This looks similar to the Mozart Effect, which turned out to be that if you liked something, your brain functioned better.

Yes, charging around the stage playing rock music isn't exactly gentle, but it IS extremely good exercise for the heart and the rest of the body. Again, that's going to have positive effects.

(We can ignore Keith Richards in this model, as he's older than the universe and only created it as a place to store his guitars.)