I think that you're the one that misunderstands. The AI companies make a lot of money selling adds/subscriptions for these services. The threat to Musk isn't legal. Between his 250 million dollar donation *ahem*payment*ahem *cough*BRIBE*cough to Trump and the army of lawyers he employs, legal accountability doesn't even make his top 10 list of concerns. The threat is to his pocketbook. Anything that chills the AI ecosystem will reduce revenues. Especially the AI ecosystem, which is so overhyped and overleveraged that the butterfly effect controls almost everything. And, you can be 100% sure that he takes revenue seriously. That's his number 1 concern. It's also #2, #3, #4 and #5 on the list of stuff that he thinks about.. .

This will get killed in committee, vetoed in the name of MAGAFFRREEEEDDDUUMMMMMMM, or get diluted into nothingness before passing.

Make it into law, or if it does it’ll be filled with loopholes so big you could drive a Qatar-purchased gold-plated 747 through them.

Remember who is in the oval office. Remember who controls Grok. The law will be swiss cheese, or more likely just die in committee.

You're wrong. Which US state has the most renewable energy? Hint - it's not California.

It's Texas.

The republicans rage on renewable energy, because it plays well on Fox, Rogan and Alex Jones. But that's just a distraction. It's a magician thing. You gotta pay close attention to what BOTH HANDS are doing if you want to know what's actually going on. Republicans hate renewable energy, but red-state businessmen are quietly installing renewable power as fast as they can manage it. It makes the most profit. The solar panels or wind turbines? Sourced from China, because its the cheapest source, but you would never know it by listening to their politics. The installation labor? 90% immigrant, but you'd never suspect it based on what ICE is doing.

datacenter power requests are pie-in-the-sky speculative and not to be taken seriously. Those numbers fall in the same category as OpenAIs stated valuation, which assumes that ChatGPT will make every worker on the planet 100 times more productive, all the profits will flow directly into Altman's pocket, and that nobody else is capable of launching a competing product. Or Facebook's valuation that assumes that every human on the planet will use Facebook for 35 hours per day.

I'm gonna bet that the form for requesting power connections from a regulated utility probably amounts to filling out a 3-page PDF form, and inserting "whatever number you think you might want" in the space for gigawatts requested.

Meanwhile, if power needs change, the company can say "oopsies I don't need that power" at any moment, dial down it's demands, and leave the state on the hook for the suddenly unnecessary 5 trillion dollar buildout.

In other words, the state utilities are right to be extremely skeptical about sinking trillions of dollars into grid infrastructure for a possible future demand that could evaporate entirely if the next generation of efficient AI chips drops power requirements by two orders of magnitude, or if AI doesn't manage to deliver the singularity next month. Slow rolling that sort of thing is the smart move.

Plus, the state needs to prioritize power distribution. If something needs to get throttled during a massive heat wave, it needs to be the data centers, not the daycare AC units.

Although it seems that way, it's not really true. In public, congress is evenly divided - 49% of congress opposes Trump, and 51% are licking his, um, boots. Yeah that's the word I meant.

Given the filibuster, that means that absolutely nothing changes. So, no, Trump does not have control over congress. Neither side has the power to change anything. For better or worse, that's the way it is.

There was one really telling case recently that shows that congresscritters, even the republican ones, still have backbone when it really counts. A few months ago, Trump publicly called for congressional republicans to end the filibuster, so they could give him everything he wants through legislation. With a 51% majority, they could actually do that. That would be a BIG change to the current system. What happened? All those spineless republicans - yeeeaahhh, suddenly they had a LOT of spine, teeth and claws. The day that Trump called to end the filibuster, they said "we'll think about it", and 24 hours later they all got in front of the press, as a group, and said "that's not gonna happen. The filibuster stays". He tried to stomp directly on the core of Congressional power, he was directly told to f&*k off, by a lot of important people in his own party, and he let it drop. He knows very well that the ONLY people who can actually fire him is Congress. He's a master at blathering nonsense on social media in order to keep people entertained, but he's smart enough to recognize a true red line. It was barely covered in the media because it wasn't sensational enough to generate lots of ad sales, but it illustrates where the dividing lines of real power actually are.

It's going to be a crappy 3 years, but our separation of powers is holding up just fine.

Seriously? His legacy won't be Dilbert? It'll be his political opinions? That's a load of steaming grade A horse manure.

It would be better to acknowledge that people who achieve greatness in one thing are usually just normal, flawed humans when it comes to everything else. Nah, that would be way too mature. Unleash the hounds of cancellation!

US society is dumb enough to bring Trump back for a second round. At this point, I think that I approve of just about anything that sucks power away from the executive branch. I’m not sure if that makes me conservative, or liberal, or whatever. Our current admin makes the megacorps look benevolent. Power needs to shift back to the courts and the congress.

When you spend 20 billion dollars of your own USD buying a social media empire - real dollars, not stock equity, not financially engineered investor debt, not crypto - its messaging will be whatever you dictate. Musk doesn’t care that you left. You’re not his target audience.

I’m not justifying this. Just stating reality for news organizations that are owned by individuals or families. Fox says what the Murdochs dictate. X says what Musk dictates. It’s that simple.

They’ll “release” their code in the same way that the US government has “released” the epstein files.

This is probably meant to distract from the grok-porn developments. Any traction on this issue will have to be done outside the US. Musk has purchased absolute immunity from the Trump organization, for basically anything. It’ll last until the current admin is out of office. I have mixed feelings about this. Regarding X, it’s being used for slimy purposes. For SpaceX, he’s using it to neutralize government opposition to Starship, and I’m 110 percent behind that specific effort.

A superstore, in a suburban area, close to a major city center, that sells all sorts of consumer goods.

I just rolled my eyes so hard that I convulsed a bit.

Are you serious? That's completely opposite of my experience. Are you located in the US? Smart people are much more likely to be college educated, and vaccination rates among college educated are WAY higher.

I gotta assume that you're trolling.

At exactly the same time. Vaccines themselves are leaping forward and will protect from all sorts of stuff. Meanwhile, US public health policy has retracted by about a century, and misinformation spreads like hellfire. Thankfully, the doctors won't participate in that bulls^&t. If you listen to the doctors, you'll probably be fine. If you listen to the internet of the government health advice, you're boned.

In the end, this might sort itself out. The smart people will vaccinate, and the dumb people will die more often. If the effect is severe enough, the differential death rates might just offset the idiocracy effect.

During COVID, I knew a family that was 100% covid denier. To them, covid was a liberal conspiracy, the vaccines were mind control, masking was fraudulent and ineffective and social distancing was a form of government control. They went about their lives like everything was normal, right at the start of the pandemic when the virus had just made the species jump and was at peak deadliness. The dad caught covid. Then his son caught covid. Then the dad died. Then the son died. The son was reproductive age. It was really, really sad, but it was like watching a nature special about evolution, complete with Attenborough's narration. Straight-up evolution in action. They made some stupid choices, of their own free will, and now that genetic line is *gone*.

I would argue that I actually care more, because I'm asking the hard questions like "what do they actually need to advance?". Unfortunately, when it comes to Africa, the answers are a lot harder than "drill more wells, throw up a few cheap buildings, deal with a few mosquitos and take a bunch of inspiring pictures for the donor website". Have you seen the conflict map for Africa? The continent is at war from end-to-end. Nearly every single colonial power is STILL meddling in their affairs.

It's really easy to support Gates-style stuff and feel good about yourself. It's also really easy to sit on the couch while all the progress gets burned to the ground because of war. All you have to do is sadly shake your head and click your tongue while doing nothing.

Much, much harder to ask the real question: "what would it take to stabilize Africa?". The answer is to address the wars. That's a VERY DIFFICULT question to answer.

I really hope that this actually happens. This should be the model for what the new class of trillionaires does with their money. Last century, the ultrawealthy would fund universities, libraries, and stuff like that. Those things had a lasting positive effect. This century, the trillionaires have been trying various other forms of charity (Gates foundation, Scot foundation, etc. etc.) but the return to society has been pretty dismal, in my opinion. This is gonna get me downmodded, but the hard truth is that drilling a few dozen wells in Africa doesn't do much good when various armies run through the area every 10 years and ethnically cleanse every moving object larger than a shrew. Same goes for malaria vaccines, unfortunately. The activities are very noble everybody feels good about them, but they completely fail to address the real problems.

Putting a scientific instrument into space that provides 30 years of state-of-the-art data? At the very least, it's worth trying as something that could have a larger, lasting positive effect.

My large ipad pro is something that I use for real work in various ways, almost every day, in addition to the usual web browsing and streaming. You can have my ipad pro when you pry it out of my cold dead fingers. If I was forced to choose between my laptop and my ipad pro, it would genuinely be a hard decision, because sometimes I just hook up my ipad pro up to my large monitor and do actual work.