I think some people look at this arrangement and say “This is unsustainable, the cards have to come down at some point”, because it is a fucking stupid way to run an economy.

But, like… the money keeps flowing. And it keeps flowing because the Fed and the Treasury are implicitly backstopping the malinvestment. And their pockets are functionally endless.

I wish you could just roll your eyes and make these abhorrent economic decisions stop. But I’m afraid these people might legit die trillionaires without a regret in the world (other than failing to solve Immortality Science with an LLM), because we’ve stacked the economic deck so high up in their favor.

Which means now our tax dollars won’t just be used for data centers, they’ll be used for power plants too.

Sure… maybe…

Part of the problem with power plant construction is that our production capacity is largely maxed out. If you want a new gas power plant, you go on a waiting list that’s two years long (conservatively). Wind and Solar production are also at their domestic limit. Nuclear continues to be a pipe dream.

And, again, it cannot be overstressed that turning on a data center means a net-negative cash flow. These facilities cost more to operate than they earn, even under a ludicrously generous state contract. Why would you want to power them on these terms?

You gotta at least give yourself a full Friedman Unit.

We’re still only 3 days into this war.

The second big Iran-Israel conflict in less than a year.

And yet this is already manifesting right now in real life as we debate it on the internet.

Ah yes. A total nosedive of 0.30%.

This is the Uno-Reverse “Why you complaining when the DOW is over 50,000!” line. Any token sell-off gets reported on like it’s Black Friday.

Because Trump does not have control over the interest rates.

He’s lining up his pick to replace Powell as we speak.

Data centers in Silicon Valley stand empty, awaiting power

One of the more curious artifacts of the recent surge in data center construction has been filling these megaliths with hardware and then… not plugging them in. Either because turning them on would flatten the local electrical grid or because they’re loss-leaders for which data cycles only cost the company money.

So you’ve got this multi-billion dollar paper asset that wows investors while it gathers dust. And then you go off to build another one, because people will fling their unlimited borrowing power at you to reap another quarter of double-digit growth in speculative valuation.

the economy and stock market taking a huge hit

Two things that have also failed to manifest, in large part thanks to the prolific state spending following COVID.

Keep in mind, the event that really knocked over the tower of cards in 2008 was Greenspan’s decision to raise interest rates (very sharply) in 2007. Trump’s very obviously not going to do that. If anything, he’s been working overtime to get interest rates lower, because he knows cheap money = high (raw) GDP growth and low unemployment.

What we’re seeing isn’t recessionary. It’s a glacial shift in the economic priorities of the US, from a post-Reagan titanic banking juggernaut to a post-COVID more-WW2-style global arms depot. The US economy increasingly makes cops and bombs and machines that assist cops and bombs. And there’s no recognized upper limit for demand on these goods and services. Not under current geopolitical conditions, anyway.

I’ve had “AI Bubble Burst” on my bingo card since 2023.

Still feels like a hat on a hat. Unless you’re on bleeding edge hardware doing something truly novel with the OS, I’m not sure why a selective opt-in log of various bolt-ons and patches improves your experience.

Computers, at their heart, are still just a place you go to manage spreadsheets, email other people those spreadsheets, and pirate entertainment. So you’re always left asking the burning question “How will this patch improve my experience with spreadsheets?” And 99.5% of the time, the answer is “It won’t”.

“I’m on the bleeding edge of Linux! I get the most advanced features the distro allows! Yeah, it may periodically brick my home system from time to time, but its worth it when I can get…”

reorganizing the symlink layout of the NVIDIA firmware

“… which I literally cannot live without”.

:-/

you are scientifically illiterate

Because I’m not buying an overpriced humidifier?

The scam where I buy a shipping container at some point?

“People should be in the streets to stop the war”

“Will a protest march stop the war?”

“No! But… it’s tradition, you know?”

Hardly a scam. There’s nothing to insert money into.

This is just empty hype

One problem maybe kinda hypothetically down. Ten thousand more to go.

how do you enforce any jurisdiction on a satellite and what it’s doing.

You threaten to disable it, which would be very easy give how fragile it is

Okay, but have you considered how cool it would be to put a data center in space?

What if I told you that we have to BEAT CHINA to space?

our work

Posting

Do you think Harris would have kept us out of Iran?

She’s not Trump. That’s all that matters.

If she hadn’t bombed Iran, it would be because she was kinder and wiser and more serious. If she had bombed Iran, it would have been for better reasons and with more international support.

Many of us are fighting against this regime

There are more employees of ICE than activist opponents of the American regime