I listened to a radio interview with Bernie... apparently he wants this so that "citizens can block harmful policies". So that probably explains the 50% - they want voting shares in order to control the boards.

This is a bit more than just taking a stake in companies in order to give taxpayers an opportunity to share in the gains... this is basically nationalization without taking over the entire company.

So I guess I was wrong about where this was coming from. Too bad, since if the tech bros are right and this leads to the ultimate infinite money glitch, having a resource wealth fund that pays dividends would have been one way of softening the massive dislocation in labor allocation for both white and blue collar work.

Correct. Presumably if your investors don't like the idea of getting diluted by uncle sam, they'll cut off sales once you hit 199M a year.

You'd need to get tangible benefits for letting the government "buy in"... enough that your existing investors and share holding employees would be ok with crossing the 200M cutoff.

Probably a foreign held corporation in Ireland that owns all the IP and gets paid licensing revenue from all the sub 200M companies will serve as the controlling entity.

What's odd is you could accomplish something similar to Bernie's plan by funding AI startups and taking an equity stake. Upon IPO, you sell the stake and then take the money to go incubate more companies. The leftists complain about the massive imbalance of wealth, but are unwilling to go and take the risk that the VC funds are taking by backing a bunch of unproven companies that may never pay off.

Dilution is preferable to paying cash taxes on unrealized gains - the other socialist/progressive "solution" to people being successful. And, one would hope that negotiations would get things closer to a reasonable percentage from 50%, like the 10% the US government took in Intel.

It aligns the interests of the government with the company - you can't pay dividends on a wealth fund based on equity stakes if you take actions (policy or otherwise) that tank the value of the stock.

If anything, having the government as a partner (preferably a silent one) can help boost the stock price. If those shares aren't trading, then they aren't impacting daily price discovery. The only impact is that if the company ever pays dividends, half of the dividends go to uncle sam.

I'm not a proponent of nationalizing companies, but for AI companies to hit max velocity for spend, they need every advantage they can get to clear red tape and public opposition out of the way.

From an October 15th Pew Research report:

https://www.pewresearch.org/gl...

"But many are worried about AIâ(TM)s effects on daily life. A median of 34% of adults say they are more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI, while 42% are equally concerned and excited. A median of 16% are more excited than concerned.

Concerns about AI are especially common in the United States, Italy, Australia, Brazil and Greece, where about half of adults say they are more concerned than excited. But as few as 16% in South Korea are mainly concerned about the prospect of AI in their lives."

Contrast this to Biden era view on AI - which was to legislate regulations and restrictions on development which most likely would have been only to the benefit of the largest players. Open source players in this space would remain unaffected, since the metric is 200M in sales.

That Bernie and Trump are talking similar language (US government taking a stake in AI companies) makes this at least a starting point in discussions. People talking about UBI without proposing a mechanism for financing UBI - this is one possible way of financing things.

Nevermind, I was reading the Ars Technica version of the article that leaves out the part where they take stock instead of cash under the 50% haircut, and are proposing to pay dividends based on that fund.

Strangely enough, I don't have any objections to this plan.

Either:

1. AI is a scam, in which case Bernie is proposing they rob the robbers before the public figures out that they're getting taken. Definitely a heist film.

2. AI is the real deal, in which case Bernie is skimming 50% off the top as part of their deal to let AI have their way with the American economy. Notice he's not promising that he won't came back later to take another 50% haircut.

I'm a little weirded out by the fact that you could also just take an non-voting equity stake in these companies, considering that their spending is powering the US economy. Yes, nationalization is bad, but getting in before the IPO sounds like a really smart idea if your goal is to maximize return the US taxpayer.

IAI hasn't build a fighter since the Dagger/Nesher that Israel sold to Argentina after the IAF was done with them. They tried to build an F-16 competitor, the Lavi, but stopped when the US refused to allow any funding to be used towards its development.

Israel likely has the technical capability to build a modern fighter. Whether it has the money to do so on its own is an entirely other matter.

You got it in one.

Private enterprise wants to come in and upgrade your infrastructure without you having to float bonds, and somehow this is a bad thing.

This reminds me of when the company that built the monorai for Disney offered to put in monorails for the County of Los Angeles at their cost - the funds to be later recouped in fares (five cents per head at the time.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

"In 1963, Alweg submitted a proposal to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors for a privately funded monorail system in the county. The plan included design, construction, and operation of the system at Alweg's financial risk, with construction costs to be recouped through fare revenue. The proposal was ultimately rejected. Some sources attribute the decision to opposition from automotive and petroleum industry interests, including Standard Oil of California and General Motors.[4][5] Author Ray Bradbury, a supporter of the proposal, later criticized the city's decision to develop a subway system instead.[6][7]"

There are legit criticisms, like datacenters not behaving like good baseload consumers (many system designs will to switch to internal power if grid power goes out of spec, causing grid fluctuations to get much worse), but these can be handled by mandating that they build mechanisms (like batteries) to take over base load during situations like that.

You have to wonder who is behind shit like this. Is it organic mass hysteria (possibly driven by algorithmic influence), or is it manufactured outrage in service of some hidden goal (aka some billionare *cough* *cough* *michael bloomberg*, or a state actor)?

They specifically outlined the trojan horse rationale for denying public contributions. Someone plays the long game by submitting patches and gets privileged access to the project and repository, then turns around and backdoors it on the behalf of a state actor.

Example:

https://www.atlanticcouncil.or...

"The XZ saga began when the original maintainer of XZ Utils was pressured by other contributor accounts into adding user JiaT75 as a maintainer of the project. JiaT75 had been contributing to the XZ Utils community since 2022. A group of accounts and JiaT75 questioned the original maintainerâ(TM)s ability to maintain the XZ Utils project and spent years convincing them to bring JiaT75 on board as an additional maintainer. Once JiaT75 was provided maintainer access, they replaced the original maintainerâ(TM)s contact information with their own on oss-fuzz, a project that scans open source projects for vulnerabilities. After further preparation, they issued commits for XZ Utils versions 5.6.0 and 5.6.1, implementing the backdoor into the code. This backdoor had the potential to infect Linux operating systems, but thanks to the keen eye and curiosity of a Microsoft engineer, it was discovered before causing widespread harm. "

"Christopher Robinson (he/him/his), Chairperson, OpenSSF Technical Advisory Council; Director of Security Communications, Intel

âoeThe attack itself is not novel; it strings together a series of social engineering/cyber-bullying tactics, and leverages embedding offline malicious files during the CI/CD stage of publication. What is unique is how well the attacker studied and exploited common community behaviors and norms to penetrate the project and take maintainership that could allow the later actions in secret.â "

So I interpret it as closing off one channel for attack, which isn't taking public pull requests, but shutting off public contributions entirely, and limiting the ecosystem to known, trusted entities only.

I suppose as long as they let you fork, someone can always create a derivative that accepts public contributions, and then they can take the risk of dealing with that particular risk.

I can't find the citation for it, but in at least one case, part of the reported allocation of water for datacenters was due to the water consumed during construction. I would consider this kind of consumption legit if called out as a temporary usage of water, but FUD if just assumed as part of the overall calculation of ongoing water demand.

As for creating/destroying water:

https://www.fwpcoa.org/content...

"Air cooling (water-free): Many smaller or older data centers rely on air conditioning and chilled air circulation to remove heat. These use mechanical chillers or heat exchangers and do not consume water for cooling (aside from minimal water for humidification). Air cooling is common in cooler climates or where water is scarce, but it can require more electricity to run compressors or fans.
Evaporative cooling (open-loop): A majority of large, modern data centers use water-based cooling for better energy efficiency. This often involves cooling towers or evaporative chillers: warm water absorbs heat from servers and is then cooled by evaporation in a tower. As water evaporates into the air, it carries away heat â" dramatically cutting the electrical power needed for cooling. The trade-off is high water consumption. Most big data centers today use some form of evaporative cooling because itâ(TM)s energy-efficient, especially in hot climates, but it directly uses water (often drawn from municipal supply).
Closed-loop water cooling: In closed-loop systems, water circulates in sealed pipes or coils that cool the servers without directly exposing water to air. Because the water isnâ(TM)t evaporated to the environment, losses are minimal â" itâ(TM)s mostly the same water recirculating (with some makeup water added occasionally). These systems can include water-cooled heat exchangers or liquid-to-liquid cooling loops. Closed-loop cooling can reduce freshwater use by up to 70% compared to traditional open evaporative methods. The downside is higher cost and complexity, but they are far more water-efficient since water isnâ(TM)t âoeburned offâ into the air."

"However, a growing number of data centers are now shifting to recycled water. Tech giants have begun partnering with utilities to use treated wastewater (effluent) for cooling instead of fresh drinking water. For instance, Google uses reclaimed or non-potable water at over 25% of its data center campuses (one notable example is its Douglas County, Georgia data center, which runs on recycled municipal wastewater). Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced in 2023 that 20 of its data centers are cooling with purified wastewater instead of potable water. After cycling through the cooling system, this water is sent back to the treatment plant to be cleaned and reused again. These initiatives leave more drinking-quality water for the community and exemplify the industryâ(TM)s trend toward âoestrategic water sourcing.â Still, as of today, reclaimed water use is the exception. Most data centers worldwide are still using fresh water for cooling, although this is slowly changing with new projects and local regulations."

So evaporative cooling "destroys" water. And using treated wastewater (pure enough to use for datacenter usage and probably irrigation, but still too ick for some people to drink directly - aka toilet to tap), if part of their investments were to purify even more water than the municipality was already processing, combined with closed loop usage could be considered "creating" water.

Your guess is as good as mine though, it all sounds like marketing hype in an attempt to combat FUD.

I am reminded of some source code for a company-specific program that I saw in the late 1990s. I don't remember why I was perusing it, as I was in IT and absolutely not a developer. But I remember being tickled at one of the comments before a block of code. It was something like, "I have no idea why or how the following code works. But every time someone tries to change it, everything breaks, so please don't touch it."

Well written code is self-documenting, specifically because once you start putting documentation somewhere else, you start getting a divergence in truth. And I'm not talking about leaving comments in the code - that's also documentation, as anyone who has had to reconcile business processes with code can attest upon discovering that the comments and the code also don't agree with each other. (This is where I try and sell people on having detailed commit messages, and then realize that they're all going to be lost the next time someone advocates for a squash merge...)

Refactoring is how you refresh your knowledge of the code and remove any accumulated cruft. Stuff like "Oh, we meant to do that in the next release, but we've completely removed that functionality, so this stub can go too.", and "Well shit, this algorithm doesn't work the way we thought it did - and the test suite is missing the test that would tell us that it doesn't work for that last 10% of use cases.", and "Uh... this method doesn't only do that one thing anymore, time to refactor and dry things out."

The moment you start relying on "tribal knowledge" to manage your code, you're fucked. Because very soon, as you have turnover (doesn't have to be layoffs - people can get promoted up or sideways, a bunch of people get hired, some people get transferred to special projects and start forgetting the stuff they maintained), the tribal knowledge distills to one thing: "If it isn't broken, don't touch it - you'll break it."

In other words... If your codebase is in decent shape, AI code bots are not a net negative unless people are blindly approving commits. If your codebase is in shitty shape, you're probably already having issues with diverging truth (and inability to scale), and you're fucked either way.

That's not the reason that both bombs were dropped. They were dropped because the military saw them as just another tool in the toolbox, just like the bombs dropped on all the other cities that continued to be dropped on other cities until the surrender. Truman ended the military's control of atomic bombs after Nagasaki, when the USAAF was preparing to use a third bomb, establishing civilian control of atomic weapons. Firebombing continued, though, right up to Kumagaya, Akita, and Osaka getting hit in the 24 hours prior to Hirohito taking to the airwaves.

The agreement expired in 2030. It did not authorize Iran to pursue nuclear weapons at that time. There's a difference.

The agreement was the best available at the time. Diplomacy sometimes requires taking a temporary win, and it usually means that neither side gets everything they want. The hope was that Iran would find that they would not want or need to develop nuclear weapons. If they did go down that path, there were penalties for doing so. Future negotiations were planned to modify or extend the agreement as it got closer to the expiration date.

That's how such agreements work. Every arms treaty signed between the US and USSR had an expiration date. The expiration date was not an agreement that at the end, both sides would immediately rearm. They were meant to establish a new normal and a baseline for future negotiations, and that's what happened. Over time, the arsenals were negotiated down from tens of thousands per side to a few thousand per side, with only a fraction of them deployed or even deployable. The last one expired a few months ago, but neither side is racing to add to their deployed warhead count.

There is no way to outright prevent Iran from developing a nuclear warhead without occupying the country and removing its entire current government. That is hundreds of billions of dollars, tens of thousands of lives, and an even worse look for the US than it has right now. Negotiating a deal like the JCPOA is the best option available. But every time Trump starts to talk about a deal and details start to leak out, they look a lot worse than the JCPOA. Trump is incompetent, he started a war that even Republicans are turning against, and he's arguably left Iran in a better place than it was before. Iran now knows that they can cut off the Strait of Hormuz, and no one can or will do anything about it. Worse, Trump has stated that he would be OK with Iran charging transit fees. If that starts, everyone else who controls a waterway that is otherwise internationally accessible is going to charge them, too. Indonesia and Malaysia would be the top two who could affect global trade, and while both have said that they would not, it's hard to say what future governments would do if they came under budget stress and had a precedent to point to.

Latest top performance is expensive, and electronics in general are more expensive, if you haven't noticed. There are still plenty of Wi-Fi 5 devices, and a lot of networks don't go faster than 1 Gbps anyway. If you need faster, the USB-C port is capable of 5 Gbps Ethernet via USB-CDC NCM, so there's probably enough there to connect a 2.5 Gbps USB NIC.

The whole design is supposed to be open, so maybe you can gather a few friends and figure out how to install faster components that meet your expectations.

This actually has been a problem for utilities for a long while.

https://freemannews.tulane.edu...

"As more and more homeowners install solar panels, they generate their own electricity and buy less from utility companies. While consumer solar adoption is good for the environment, it reduces the revenue that utilities generate from consumers. To make up for the shortfall, utilities raise electricity prices, which in turn pushes more people to switch to solar, further decreasing demand for utility-provided power. This âoeutility death spiralâ can lead to skyrocketing prices for consumers and financial instability for utility companies."

EVs were supposed to be a lifeline, but that whole push has been sidelined.