Major power computations I think are harder. I agree the US is falling, but I don’t think I’ve seen a serious analysis claiming that the US will become merely a power amongst a few dozen others anytime in the next few decades? We’re about to become much poorer and less diplomatically influential, but still nukes, still the huge military spending, still capitalists with hands in other economies?

No organization of scale works their finances like a checking account. Businesses spend money on credit, and make back it + a bit off of the results. This lets them leapfrog a business cycle and do more things now. Credit has allowed big organizations to do some really impressive things.

So, lying a little bit, the government can get credit to do stuff now, and promise a chunk of tax revenue to the people who give it money. The US government does this with treasury bonds. Treasury bonds are sold today, with the promise that the government will pay more money later (from taxes and such). The government does stuff with this money, like maintain roads, build bridges, and improve tax collection - some of these things result in more tax money collected, so the treasury bonds were a good deal for the government. More money now has lead to more tax money later. Because the US government has been extremely good about paying back treasury bonds, treasury bonds are sold at nearly the amount they pay out. (Because of bad policy and covid, they are doing a little worse right now.)

Why do we do this? Many alternatives would have very bad consequences. The government does so many things in the US. If they couldn’t get credit, we would get a shutdown every time the government account emptied. Because the people spending the money (executive branch employees) are not the people deciding what to buy (congress), spending and income often do not match up.

It is also certainly more efficient than having huge organizations hoard money until they can pay for things all at once. If everyone in the market did this, we would get wild swings in the amount of dollars available (sometimes several companies would be hoarding at the same time, other times they might be spending out on new buildings all at once).

And I guess I’m specifically reporting on my circle of american’s, who are both aware that we’ve burned a lot of goodwill and trust (though tbh, I’d hoped the trust was lost already after trump 1…).

The checks and balances held for Trump 1 relatively, and held for previous abuses before that (at least, sufficiently that folks would let the US say such things). I don’t think it’s obvious that they are irrepairable/irreplaceable: we could have a revolution and rebuild from scratch, as an extreme example. It is obvious that systems must change to do so; reorganizing the supreme court, changing campaign finance, etc. If they change, and how much, idk what to expect. But I think ~half the country knows it’ll take serious reforms, and it still wont put the US back where it was. Trust != systems.

True of plastic too, no? Yet just by living nearby they break things down.

While I had similar concerns, I do think about this a fair bit now. A nontrivial math problem was proved by Aristotle (in Lean, a proof assistant, so we’re relatively sure it’s correct). Alpha Evolve then generalized. GPT pro did some writing and visualization work.

It’s basically the quality of work I aspire to. Slightly cheaper, and substantially faster. Not the strongest PhD, but a solid graduate student.

I mean, as an analogy think of plastic bottles. Left alone they break into tiny tiny pieces that get everywhere. This is often caused by the sun or abrasion, but underground you’ve got the preparation materials, rotting flesh gasses, and plenty of microbes.

At least in my circles, I think we’re aware? People are looking real hard at ways to leave. We’ve also got a higher than usual chance of reforming/refurbishing some of those broken guard rails. Fingers crossed.

The folks supporting Trump, on the other hand, already believed that these relationships were dead and bad. They’ll scapegoat somebody else for the decay; I do not see the avenue for this to be a learning experience.

It is very interesting to me that we don’t make this requirement for all large power users - factories, big suburbs, etc. Because we give power companies a monopoly (but don’t put them under state control), we often let big building projects force them to expand infrastructure (and then sell access as they do). So this is a whole weird thing with capitalism meeting very regulated monopolies, in a thousand different systems cause every local has different rules.

The thing that’s breaking our systems here isn’t that datacenters are big power users. It is that they can be built so quickly.

I’m surprised we didn’t make ‘bring your own power’ a rule before; I guess it’s infrastructure that generally is useful for many people to timeshare, and often isn’t fully used by just one party? Factories turn off some nights, for eg. And maybe it would be bad to have multiple power providers independently pumping power out?

Interesting source. Lots of relatively short articles on a huge variety of topics, allegedly created by the ‘team’, though I can’t find out who is on the team, and it’s unclear to me what the editorial system is?

Do we have a legally inclined folk with an opinion?

I do have a favorite for video game characters of the other gender. But I didn’t pick it until quite late in life, and I’m not sure it’s a good name for gender-bent me irl.

Parents had a name for a AFAB child iirc; though I’ve forgotten it.

You get a good number of data hoarders after a picture provider goes down/enshittifies. Yes, they’ll lose at least one large collection of photos. But I suspect many folks realize they could be banned, lose their account, etc, and take some effort to save things that matter.

Note that this law was new as of this year, and very poorly received. Quote from article:

He [Jordan Teuscher, the original House sponsor] maintained that it was a “good policy” that has been “overshadowed by misinformation and unnecessary division.”

So watch for this to be proposed in a state house near you.

If you read the article, it’s because power companies are monopolies and so we’ve regulated them rather harshly. They are often compelled to build infrastructure to meet demand, for example. We don’t make the provider of a steel mill, housing builder, etc pay (generally).

And that’s weird, right? It’s one area of the market where we do a planned economy, and all states manage it differently. Now it’s being stress tested in a new way.

Seems plausible this is something to pester instagram support about?

Recovery will likely be invasive, if they provide it at all. But this shouldn’t be an unheard of situation.

Though you might could ask a lawyer to send a threatening letter, since all you want is information deleted.

It’s interesting to me that we don’t do this for all industries. Like, if a big auto manufacturer or textile company sets up shop, the local power company is compelled to build more power plants for them (sometimes the power company eats the cost, sometimes a deal with the provider, etc. See the article). Monopolies are weird.

important repository of similar content here. Thank you University of Utah.

Oh that’s interesting. I hadn’t realized the energy sector saw a C-suite pay spike too. Looking around, it seems like they were at or above pay for CEOs elsewhere. Crazy.

We’ve really seen deregulation under all the administrations, eh?

A funny application of the law. Seems a little silly as an answer here.

(Made my day that somebody read the article! I feel like these technical pieces flounder in obscurity.)

I find the different ways places answer this question really interesting. By this, I mean the systems we’ve had in place, the committees and applications and rules, for power providing the whole time.

It is interesting because power is a privately owned monopoly that we regulate to the extreme; so we get all sorts of weird relationships and arrangements. Now we see them all getting stress tested.