I remember in the late 90's before the dot-com crash, the stock market was wildly over-valued by the same metrics that say it's over-valued now, and people literally said to me, "no, this is just the way the new economy works. Technology has greatly increased the rate of real growth and the market prices are just reflecting that." Then it crashed. Technology did end up causing growth, at about the same rates we'd seen historically over the long periods of time. Don't buy the AI hype. At best it's a marginally better search engine.

Look, I'm left of center, and I'm not even American. But you aren't helping. Did you agree with all of Biden or Obama's policies or everything they said? If you did you'd be very rare indeed. The people on the right have various opinions. Many of the ones who swung the election towards Trump did it because they view one single issue, like affordability or immigration, to be the one thing they're mainly concerned about, and it was more about the democrats having not done enough to address those specific issues over the previous 4 years. You can't paint half the country with that wide of a brush. There are lots of people on the right that aren't very happy about what Trump is saying or doing, but they maybe just don't trust the dems to do the right thing either. I've also heard a lot of people more liberal than me say, "It's not that I even disagree with some of the stuff Trump is doing; it's how he's going about it." Opinions vary widely within both "sides".

If you don't want the left to be judged by the craziest screaming radicals on the left, then don't judge all of the right by the crazy wack-a-doodles on the right. It's just a straw-man argument. Both the dems and the republicans are massive coalitions of many different groups and make up millions of people. If you're a reasonable liberal you almost certainly have more opinions in common with a reasonable conservative than either of you do with the radical elements of your own parties. Though with that comment I'd hardly consider you reasonable.

It's not just news organizations. Trust in all institutions has been falling for a while. That includes things like the CDC, police services, and even global organizations like the WHO, etc. In my opinion the organizations partly brought this on themselves. A good example is that during the pandemic there was a very public discussion that was had about what messaging to give to the public. The idea was that the public isn't smart enough to understand that N95 masks are very good, cloth masks perform quite poorly, and surgical masks are somewhere in between. The confounding factor was that we didn't have enough N95 and even surgical masks. News organizations reported on lists of "42 studies" that showed the effectiveness of masks. Yeah, I actually went and looked at those studies and all the evidence was very weak in terms of supporting *cloth* masks. But here's the thing... they had this discussion about what the tell the public in full view of the public, as if we weren't listening. You can't do that and maintain trust. The only discussion you can have in full view of the public is "what should we tell everyone? THE TRUTH!" Manipulating your message to control behavior instead of just to inform is a really bad idea. We can all see the media and other institutions doing it constantly now and we're sick of it.

Given that the comparison is with a Small Modular Reactor, this isn't really relevant. If we end up with GW data centers then the comparison result may change, since it will be comparing a full-sized reactor against much larger renewable plants. I doubt the results will be much different, but they might be.

This is another great example of "women in STEM". She sets a wonderful example. Put her all over the cover of Time and People Magazine.

I can't believe you're defending a person who fabricated documentation to dupe investors into believing there were over 10 times as many users as there really were. You're just trying to twist this into a populist narrative ("the people vs. the elites"). I know that's fashionable these days, and is what Trump is an expert at selling, and the dems *used)* to be good at selling, but the reality is always more nuanced than this simplistic idea.

I will say... Houston has an Atlas V, which was pretty frickin' cool to see. They also have a shuttle mock-up on the back of a 747 carrier plane, which you can tour inside of. Worth a visit.

No matter who is named in the citation, the entity that holds the license plate shouldn't be able to renew the plate without discharging the outstanding ticket.

Don't put words in my mouth. I didn't suggest holding the engineers or programmers personally liable. I said that the company needs to be issued with some kind of fine or penalty for breaking the law, as an incentive to use care when designing these things.

This is absurd that they just let it drive away without a citation. When they licensed this company to start putting auto drive cars on public roads, did nobody ever ask what would happen if one violated a traffic law? The company needs to be penalized. In fact I'm sure there *is* a mechanism to penalize the company, but the police officer was just ignorant.

I think you're right, but for a slightly different reason. Before COVID we had very low interest rates (practically 0%). And they were low for a long time. This created incentives for Silicon Valley to grow at all costs on borrowed money. As long as they were growing their number of subscribers, investors were OK with no actual profit. Companies were just hiring engineers to fuel growth, even if some of them were doing dubious things. There was also another hiring splurge during COVID when everything went online. But after that, higher interest rates caused a sudden shift in thinking. Now these companies needed to be profitable. That meant monetizing their users and cutting expenses and head count. In fact, Twitter was talking about the necessity of this long before Musk bought it. And the factors that drove low interest rates in the past (basically globalization) are gone and aren't coming back, so this is the new normal. That doesn't mean companies won't hire programmers, but it does mean there's probably a glut for a couple years. Couple this with tariff uncertainty pausing capital spending (aka expansion of businesses) and you've got a double-whammy.

From the summary:

it would cost 43 percent less to power a 120 MW data facility with renewables and a small amount of gas-generated energy

Renewables plus a gas plant are just as reliable as a nuclear plant. This analysis appears to have taken reliability as a pre-requisite, then with that addressed they compared costs.

They really aren't. Their drive is for status and a feeling of accomplishment, not money. Money is just the way they keep score. It's relevant and important to understand that the numbers aren't even real money. It's not cash in the bank, it's the value of their share of the company they oversee. The goal is to increase the value of those operations... and it should be noted that because those companies provide value to consumers and jobs for employees, it's really easy for CEOs to convince themselves that making the number go up increases their own status score and makes humanity better off, which isn't entirely true but also isn't entirely false.

Reducing this complex set of motivations to money misses the mark, badly.

Self-driving cars work about as well as LLM models. That is to say, they do the wrong thing surprisingly often. Waymo regularly uses remote drivers to get their self-driving cars unstuck from weird situations. And I've yet to see self-driving cars demonstrated in a snow storm. Good luck with that.