Depending on the jurisdiction; it might allow for some dishonest regulatory hackery; which bad people treat as equivalent to a solution.

If you are having trouble getting approval for a big fat grid hookup or rezoning of what was supposed to be a fairly low excitement commercial/industrial plot into a datacenter; you might have less trouble getting some nice, innocuous, residential development with what are totally just the next generation of cable boxes if you don't look too closely in the back yard pushed through; and once you've done that you aren't going to live next to the externalities or deal with the stressed edge of a grid; so not a you problem anymore.

Presumably the developer who gets paid a kickback to add it that they at least hope will be larger than the loss in expected sale price from having it there.

Assuming you can slip the thing, and some sort of cryptic easement or covenant burned into the deed, to at least one sucker it no longer matters whether the 'owner' wants it or not.

The bit about residential development being overprovisioned for its electrical use seems like a classic 'exploit the commons briefly' format scam.

It's not false; a given house is usually hooked up to a big chunky breaker whose capacity it is not expected to exceed, often oversized by a decent margin; but there absolutely isn't that level of overbuild all the way back to the utility. Probably not even back to the substation depending on how optimistically the transformers on the poles were sized.

Exactly the sort of thing that should work just fine if you do it at a small scale, and sounds like a clever discovery if you avoid thinking about it; but would immediately roll over and die if it were actually exploited at scale(while being even more expensive than the alternative; since wiring in one heavy user is a lot less intricate than converting thousands of distributed residential customers into heavy users). Makes one wonder if they are trying to get away with anything else by playing 'residential'; like the power factor. Utilities absolutely do care about that, because reactive power is real movement in the grid; but historically residential customers have often not been deemed worth the trouble to verify specifically for that; which you could absolutely change with a bunch of selfishly designed switchmode PSU load.

So it's alarmingly invasive and ignores established good practice; but in a staggeringly incompetent sort of way. Would it be the 'white house app' any other way?

Let me guess; because vetting its effect on security is hard and not terribly exciting they'll mostly test for 'woke' and then decide on that basis.

The MAGA guys were particularly high on their own supply given that 'the straight of hormuz is exceptionally blockable' is not some kind of weird contrarian theory. The Millennium Challenge 2002 was basically that scenario with some of the names filed off; and the exercise of trying to stop iranian launches is basically the 'scud hunting' phase of the gulf war being replayed.

Hegseth might have been stupid enough to believe that you just needed to be more masculine about it and magically turn 'will' into victory; and Trump might have been dumb enough to believe him or dumb enough to believe that just a modest tap was all that was needed to cause the iranians to fall for his legendary deal-making; but I don't think it was much of a surprise to anybody else.

It's not as though anyone seriously expected an aging and not all that comprehensive air defense system to remain effective in the face of a blank check for expensive stealth gear and standoff munitions; or the more conventional parts of the iranian navy to be particularly survivable; it's just that most people recognized that knocking out the first 90% of most visible or least mobile targets wasn't even close to being 90% of the work; while our glorious new era of competence just stood there blinking and expecting to be handed a trophy for winning with essentially no path to dealing with the much harder problem of actually driving the volume of fire down to levels safe for commercial shipping or economically sustainable to keep running high end interceptor batteries against.

Sure; but the NRA's lobbyists are a bit scarier than the American Chemistry Council's lobbyists; so I think we're going to need to gather more data and teach the controversy in search of Sound Science on this contentious and so far ill-understood issue. I also hear that victim's rights advocates are particularly worried about anything that would further endanger law abiding Americans being menaced by oncology patients brutally doing crimes to afford their next hit of Cisplatin.

It's more likely that 'both' are relevant if you are worried about population level diets or epidemiology; since what people on average are eating is going to depend heavily on what is being grown intensively; but that's quite distinct from the fact that, at lab scales, having multiple test chambers with standardized conditions aside from CO2 concentrations is both relatively obvious and relatively trivial as dealing with potential confounding factors goes.

If you put the trade-off that way you make extinction sound particularly compelling.

Ooh, you are going to love 'qualified immunity'. Invented more or less out of whole cloth to protect our brave boys in blue from the terrors of the (checks notes) civil rights movement.

This guy sounds like an unsympathetic defendant; but "allowed the evidence to be used because the officer who applied for the warrant reasonably believed he was acting properly." is basically a "your rights are whatever the dumbest cop you know has an incentive to guess they are based on convenience and a half-remembered training powerpoint that needn't be correct" standard of evidence; which requires little imagination to see going dubious places fast. Along with some third party doctrine, for flavor.

You'd think a company in the adtech business would be more...polite...about what are basically just banner ads for bots.

There are obviously other reasons why some people want unix or unix-like OSes; and some environments where the benefits can show up on fairly constrained hardware; but it can't have helped that the matchup was against microcomputer OSes on what were still very micro-computers.

A lot of the compromises that put microcomputer OSes on the 'how about you get a real computer?' list just don't hit as hard on very small systems. Oh boy; the multitasking is nonexistent or one of the nasty kludges like TSR or 'cooperative'. And there's no user separation or meaningful filesystem permissions. And the lack of memory protection means anything that goes bad can take the whole system down in a screaming heap. Well. I guess all of those things would be really bad if I could afford enough RAM to actually run multiple programs at once pleasantly. Or if the bulk of the system's state weren't stored on a removable disk whose permissions become irrelevant if you move it to a different system. Or I could afford enough networking hardware for any of this to be dangerous.

In specific environments all that and more would have been true and relevant by 1984; and it's notable how long the microcomputer OSes continued paying for their compromises (ignoring the ones that died; it basically took both MS and Apple 15 years to bolt their respective options onto a real operating system, longer for the result to become the default; and at this rate Windows seems closer to being on track to just ignoring both in favor of 'web' auth flavors than it does to finally shaking all the weird crevices where things depend on NTLM); but in 1984 you could more or less fit an application you might want to use or an OS that didn't suck at it's job onto a computer you could afford; but much less frequently both at the same time.

Obviously we aren't expecting a merit hire from the current administration; but this seems like a weird move even by their low standards of thuggish demands for compliance and sniveling loyalists. Hegseth is having a tantrum over anthropic allegedly getting in the way of the DoD fulfiling his fantasies of masculine adequacy; so you fire the guy who left anthropic to work for you?

Isn't the whole point of treating any differences of opinion as personal insults to be dealt with regardless of their legality, while coddling loyalists regardless of their actions, to encourage people to obey you rather than others? Especially if this guy wasn't in a position to personally change Anthropic's contract with the DoD what lesson are you conveying by punishing him anyway? "We might just fuck you over because we don't like your old boss" seems like an actively counterproductive line because it essentially tells a nontrivial number of people that compliance isn't worth it because they'll be punished anyway; rather than encouraging them to turn on whoever your enemies are in order to be rewarded.

I suspect it's more hubris than outright stupidity: he's capricious; but Trump sometimes permits others to feast on the little people as well, when it suits him. I suspect that our gentleman here had no expectation that the dealings would be honest; but was hoping that they would be partners in crime against people who don't matter.

It will be morbidly interesting to see how his 'attempt to seek justice through the courts against someone whose lawlessness he has bene abetting' plan will work out for him.