It's more that they have seen they can count on protectionism. Which ironically they also hate because it subjects them to dealers

Indeed. Here in California we are the poster children for this, because we have a 55 mph speed limit while towing which is NEVER enforced. We have a requirement that headlights be aimed correctly, same. We have a law saying that if there are five or more people behind you, you must pull over at the first safe opportunity to let them pass, same. Fender flares must project as far as tires, same. (Anyone who's ever had a rock break their windshield understands.)

CHP cares specifically and only about revenue generation, so they do nothing to improve safety except go after speeders. That's not nothing, but it's not enough.

If they weren't they wouldn't buy their shit, so they KNOW they're stupid

First, Iran has never been close to having a weapon

Second, if they do want one, it's because their primary enemies have one, and one of them is the only country to ever nuke another country

That just means our security was good. You little anecdote isn't actual data.

Or the gravel pit

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.

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.

The FCC isn't making these decisions. They are made by the DoD and the DHS, per the initial announcement.

Manual windows don't reduce cost much unless you're going to put them on a lot of vehicles, otherwise it's just more parts you need to design and stock, meanwhile window motors are shared between multiple vehicles. Statistically nobody would rather have manual windows on a vehicle which costs even $40k so it might actually increase costs to offer them.

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)

Not after the bribes are paid.

"Iran have been planning and trying to get nukes forever."

That's what naziyahoo says every time Israel needs money for more bombs, and you internalized it because your mind is weak.

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.

This is a thing that happens, if by aliens you mean foreign weed growers operating unlicensed grows in our country. But it's farmers illegally selling them the water.