These days, it’s about who writes the checks.

The Guardian headline mixes a queue/capacity metric with a real load metric.

Ofgem’s figures:
https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/sites...
- 45 GW = actual GB peak load (real demand snapshot)
- 125 GW = demand connection queue (requested/contracted connection capacity)
~50 GW = datacenters within that queue
~20 GW = datacenters financially committed

So this is not like-for-like (it compares requested connection capacity to simultaneous usage).

The real story is:
- real datacentre boom (possibly bubble-like),
- very noisy/overloaded connection queue,
- large non-datacentre block (~75 GW) that is not clearly broken down in the paper.

If the premise is "resource use is the problem" and “humans use the most resources," then the implied fix isn’t optimizing AI... it’s reducing humans.

That "people-as-the-problem" frame has been operationalized before (not saying this is the same thing, just naming the logic): Nazi Germany, Stalin's USSR, Mao's China, the Khmer Rouge. Different ideologies, same move: treat human lives as variables to optimize.

That’s why this framing lands like dystopia.

Looks like the plaintiff's lawyer needed a clean, jury-friendly admission that Instagram use can cross a "not normal / not safe" line while the Instagram CEO needed to keep the headline sentence "Instagram is addictive" out of the record.

So the lawyer ran a classic anchor: lead with "addiction" then cite an extreme data point (max 16 hours in one day) that’s hard to wave away. The CEO takes the least-bad exit: "problematic use" not "clinical addiction" responsible-sounding aimed at blocking the soundbite / policy frame.

The lawyer still wins in-court: "problematic" is enough to pivot to the real questions: what guardrails existed, what did you know, and what did you do when they failed, without ever getting the CEO to say "addiction"

And the twist is the CEO may lose anyway outside court: the nuance won't stick; the public will remember "16 hours" next to "not addictive" which reads like minimization.

... No regulators, no chargebacks, no frozen accounts, just you, your keys, and a crowbar between you and irreversible settlement. They spent a decade tearing down those boring institutional layers that used to absorb fraud and violence risk, and now they’re doing workshops on how to gnaw through zip-ties. When you exit institutions but not society, you don’t get less coercion you just move the attack surface from the server rack to your ribs...

The Reuters piece mixes two unrelated FCC actions:
- mass removals of unlicensed devices lacking FCC ID (routine compliance) +
- bans on “Covered List” firms like Huawei / Hikvision (national-security).
The “millions” come from the first, not the second.
https://www.reuters.com/techno...
https://www.fcc.gov/laboratory...

Enshittification fits dominant, ad-funded, high-lock-in platforms (subsidize -> lock-in -> extract). Generalizing to "tech is getting worse" or "Everything Suddenly Got Worse" is selection bias: declinism.

Indeed, a class action against Booking.com is ongoing, and the CJEU’s 2024 preliminary ruling confirmed that both wide and narrow MFN clauses restrict competition and cannot be justified as “ancillary restraints.” https://www.traverssmith.com/k...

However, Booking.com successively dropped its wide and narrow MFN clauses between 2015 and 2018, following enforcement actions and national bans in several EU countries, so the class action concerns past practices.

Interesting piece, but worth noting: most of the practices Doctorow cites (MFN clauses, FBA tying, self-preferencing) have already been banned or constrained in the EU for years. Amazon dropped its price-parity (MFN) clauses EU-wide in 2013 after German/UK antitrust probes, and later accepted EU commitments on data use and Buy Box transparency. Under the DMA, gatekeepers can’t use parity clauses (incl. “equivalent measures”).

https://www.alixpartners.com/i...
https://ec.europa.eu/commissio...

Meta may have dodged the bullet on its AI-training fair-use defense (for now and only as to these 13 authors) but the battle isn’t over. On July 11, Judge Chhabria will take up the authors’ separate claim that Meta’s torrent-style downloading and distribution of their books infringed copyright. https://www.courthousenews.com... That distribution suit survived the ruling and could still affect how tech giants acquire training data.

Cracks -> water -> salt dissolves -> collapse -> toxic waste leaks -> aquifer poisoned !

Salt mines look perfect for waste storage, dry, impermeable, ancient...
But extracting potash weakens the structure. Water finds its way in. Salt vanishes. Tunnels deform. Containers rupture.

Stocamine (France): 42,000 tons of chemical waste, now sealed under concrete and... under pressure... literally.
Asse II (Germany): same idea, but with nuclear waste. It’s collapsing. Radioactive brine is rising.

Salt lasts forever, until disturbed. Then it flows.

You're right about the arrogance and the missed turn in the 2010s.
In 2014, Europe locked in Ariane 6 as a 100% expendable rocket just as SpaceX was betting on reusability.
Bruno Le Maire, Economy Minister since 2017 under Macron, admitted in 2020 that they took the wrong path back then https://www.politico.eu/articl.... That was five years ago.
Now it’s 2025. Macron’s still in charge, preaching “strategic autonomy” like it’s a revelation.
The scandal isn’t 2014. It’s everything they didn’t fix after.

Throwing nine figures at individuals because you can’t compete on output isn’t strategy, it’s panic.
If Meta needs $100M per hire to stay in the game, maybe it’s not the right game.
Or maybe it’s time to return some capital to shareholders.

In software, a broken feature spawns an update. Under 400 bar, a broken hull kills you instantly.

If 20% fail completely, the remaining 80% need to return 1.25× on average just to break even:

        0.8 × R = 1 R = 1.25

That’s +25%, not +20%.