Focusing on Elon Musk puts wealth tax people in this weird third position vis a vis Tesla/SpaceX bears and bulls: - if you believe bears, these companies are massively overhyped bubbles that will pop the moment you force major long term investors to sell, making it impossible to get the tax windfall more than once. - if you believe the bulls, doing anything to disrupt these companies will doom civilization to a shadow of its potential. Wealth tax people believe in a third scenario: they think these are sustainable piles of money to cash out, but don't think their missions justify that value. Like bears, they don't see the second order positive effects of what these companies are doing now to make the future; but unlike bears, they don't have the financial sense to understand what stock market valuation is.

The downside of AI is that those of us who have written a lot, who think through things by writing, are now accused on this platform of writing "AI slop" by asshole gatekeepers who used to accuse us of "too many words". The wonderfully ironic upside is that this writing capability is a superpower when using AI - a bleeding edge capability snatched out of historical and cultural irrelevance by the very technology the public and pundits think devalues writing and steals our cultural heritage. The ability to write a complex, thoughtful prompt with rich cultural, historical, technical and linguistic references, and strong intra-textual connections, based on responsive and careful reading of AI output, is an elite skill that can't be faked. The upside dwarfs the downside. I welcome the appreciation of my AI overlords and the magical insights they bestow on the worthy!

Stargate never had "it" for me (although I've enjoyed a couple of fan favorite episodes a lot), but this thread really brings home its broad appeal.

All the people complaining about Amazon Prime Video cancelling Stargate like it's a new thing should remember the decades of sci fi shows that never got made or were killed with less than a season for exactly the same "mainstream appeal" reason. For example, prior to his Battlestar Galactica reboot, The CW told Ronald D. Moore they wanted to make his TV version of the famous Dragonriders of Pern novel series more "teen friendly". He bailed out with just 2 weeks to go until filming started and instead made one of the greatest TV shows of all time.

There isn’t concrete They drive I beams right into the ground An excavator can work these loose and pull them up As far as leaching… Where exactly does iron come from? The ground My sheep love the panels and are fat with 0 grain

Pro tips for people who want to contribute to the conversation on X: 1. Make sure if you reply to someone's post, your settings allow them to reply to you. Some people don't realize their settings disallow this. It's not cool to do drive-by replies. 2. At least check Grok or some other up to date source to update your info before making bold, reductive assertions. Things change fast in the energy space, and the industry is not simplistic. It's incredibly frustrating to have people parroting cherry picked data from 10 years ago... it's done regularly by every "side" politically. Meanwhile the real world, operating at scale, will always steamroll politics and propaganda. Here's a grok answer to the question of wind turbine blade recycling, with links to sources: x.com/i/grok/share/e310ad65f… TLDR: wind turbine blades can be recycled. As for raptors and bats and birds in general, wind turbines are a small contributor relative to other human driven sources of mortality for birds in general and raptors in particular. Bats are a different story, unless you assume the big bat killing diseases are indirectly caused by human activity. Migrating bats in particular are threatened by windmills. x.com/i/grok/share/35915f846… The strongest case against wind is that solar is a lot better, lower impact, more flexible, and improving a lot faster. I'm ok with wind getting replaced by solar. But let's not pretend wind is a uniquely bad energy source in terms of externalities/kWH generated. That prize goes to oil for sure. No one's worried that windmills are going to start yet another world war. I say this as someone with an oil rig on my property, who is working on tech for O&G.

Clueless people: the data center is going to pollute! What actually happens to the gas if the data center doesn't use it:

are you counting the oil and gas burned as input vs. the actual electricity delivered, as output again? you are aren't you

TFW people who protest beef, also protest the transfer of water rights from highly inefficient beef production to something that can provide best in class education to the rural poor of the global south. Think of the children, hippies!

This is the worst mistake we could ever make. This will lead to dystopian outcomes, and crown the current labs as hegemons with regulatory capture forever.

I don’t want to be dependent on transit schedules. I want to be dependent instead on OPEC, ExxonMobil, my insurance company, my bank, and whichever federal agency decides the gas tax this year. These are private relationships and therefore freedom.

The conversation around Stratos has gotten badly unmoored from the actual proposal, and it’s worth addressing the biggest misconceptions before the vote. The loudest claim is that this project will draw more power than the entire state. True at full buildout. Beside the point, because Stratos generates its own power on site. It doesn't draw from the public grid. Last year the legislature passed SB 132 precisely for large private loads that build and operate their own generation off-grid. Utah's existing 4 GW stays where it is. Electricity bills won’t go up because of this project. The "more than the whole state" line sounds scary to some, but falls apart the second you dig in. The water claim deserves more care than it's been getting. The water rights at issue are existing agricultural rights. Bar H Ranch is transferring 1,900 acre-feet currently used for irrigation. This is not new pressure on the basin, but a reallocation. The data center cooling itself is closed-loop. The gas plant will use some water for power generation, and we should want the developer to specify how much; that's a fair ask. But the framing that Stratos is "draining the lake" assumes new diversions that don't exist in the actual filings. The Great Salt Lake is in real trouble, and most of that trouble has names. Stratos isn't one of them. The tax-giveaway argument frustrates me the most, because it imagines a counterfactual that doesn't exist and ignores the actual math. The reduced energy is the price of getting the project to land here instead of in Texas or Wyoming. Even at 0.5%, the county pulls in roughly $30M a year in Phase 1, and over $100M annually at full buildout. The state pulls in roughly $49M. The developer is prepaying the county $5.4M a year for the first three years to fund emergency services before tax revenue starts. The developer is paying for every road, sewer line, and stormwater system in the project area and deeding it to the county. If specialized fire equipment is needed, the developer pays for that too. Two thousand permanent jobs in a part of Utah that has been waiting a long time for a real employer. None of that exists if the answer is no. And the site is the part of the case I keep waiting for someone to make. Hansel Valley is unincorporated, sparsely populated, sits on the Ruby Pipeline, and is adjacent to military infrastructure with strong reasons to want resilient on-site power. The land is doing nothing else. It has been, in policy terms, waiting for this. I'll grant the strongest version of the critique. The process moved fast, and the commissioners felt blindsided. That's a real complaint and worth fixing in how these things come to the county next time. But the choice today isn't between this Stratos and a better Stratos. It's between this Stratos and the same project getting built somewhere else. The country has decided, at the level of abstraction, that it wants to lead on AI. You don't get to keep saying yes to the abstraction and no to every concrete project that would make the abstraction real.

I know Tesla is getting pretty beat up over this, so I hate to make another post on the topic… but I just am so surprised that they released this, saw all the negative feedback initially and then thought the only change needed was to add “navigation” as an option. This needs to be an Opt-In thing - people spending $100 a month on FSD who aren’t enthusiasts like us will VERY quickly get annoyed at this pop up. It also needs to be revamped - it should not indefinitely block your map screen. You’re going to get so much bad data as a result - people will just pick one at random to make the huge popup window go away. You have a very vocal community @Tesla_AI with a lot of very smart people giving you great ideas. Please take that feedback to heart and fix this - even if that means temporarily removing it until you have it more refined. Much ❤️ as always

SPLC is in a legal box with no clean exit. To defeat the donor fraud charges, they have to argue the informant program was legitimate intelligence work coordinated with federal law enforcement. Bryan Fair already said that on video on April 21st. But the moment that's the defense, three new problems open: Donors did not give money to fund FBI-coordinated intelligence operations. Class action exposure on the actual basis of the donor relationship. 501(c)(3) status doesn't cover serving as a federal intelligence contractor. Tax exemption becomes contestable. Admitting FBI coordination validates exactly the Grassley-Patel-HJC finding that SPLC was feeding the FBI taxonomies used to target American religious communities. The traditional escape hatch in a case like this is graymail. SPLC threatens to expose FBI coordination in discovery. DOJ backs off to protect FBI secrets. Except this DOJ wants that exposure. Patel severed the FBI-SPLC relationship in October. Grassley released documents in June. The Weaponization Working Group is already mapping this. Exposing FBI wrongdoing under the prior administration is a feature, not a cost. The graymail doesn't work because the target doesn't want to protect what you're threatening to expose. Which means SPLC's options narrow to: Plead to narrower charges and accept reputational collapse Go to trial and have the whole operation documented in the public record Drag proceedings out hoping for a political reversal before donor class actions and state AG investigations land There's no fourth door.

🧵 THREAD 1/ They are coming for open source software. Not by banning it. By requiring identity verification for anyone who contributes code. No more anonymous developers. No more pseudonymous contributors. No more building tools without attaching your real name and government ID to every line of code you write. If they can identify every developer, they can control what gets built. And if they can control what gets built, they can stop anything that threatens their power.

Is "stochastic parrot" like "trolley problem" in that it's intriguing from a philosophical perspective but totally irrelevant IRL? If our autonomous vehicle AI is saving 10,000 lives a year, it should just flip a coin for hard decisions. It's still game changing and positive. Similarly, does it matter if an LLM just riffs on old human slop with hallucinations if it can do something better and faster than 99% of humans in real-life situations with deadlines etc? A plow doesn't think but it changed the world. Let's not underestimate the value of AI as a tool for humans.

It's interesting watching the Tech Right deal with the cognitive dissonance of "maximum acceleration" colliding with Protestant work ethic. It basically boils down to "labor and financial precarity are good... Because reasons" When you unpack it, there is some substance. Humans without striving tend to decay. But in no way does that mean you need enforced wage slavery for striving. Some, like Marc Andreesen, simply seem to have bought the "labor is virtuous" doxa hook line and sinker. And since he has "zero introspection" he has no clue where that value comes from. And they are all mistaking a personal aesthetic preference for a universal human truth. Then, on the functional/utilitarian side, the Tech Right seems to think that human involvement is necessary for things like "entropy generation" without realizing that humans produce less entropy when scrambling in survival mode. So, to simplify, there's the individualistic view ie "labor is good for the human animal" argument, which is defensible. But modern wage slavery is "good for the human animal" in the same way that prison meets your social needs. Then there's the macro view ie "enforced precarity causes more prosperity and progress because creativity" (or something along those lines). But that second opinion utterly fails to realize that most people who were Great Men of the past has zero precarity. Let's just take Charles Darwin for instance. Never needed to work a day in his life because he was gentry. In fact, he was chronically ill, a condition that would have killed him and prevented his work.. However, the fact that he has ample financial security meant that he could spend weeks resting when needed, and decades working on his theory of evolution. There is zero evidence that precarity boosts creativity or "entropy generation" Eccentricity (high entropy signals) require financial security.

Things one might reasonably conclude from the anti-post scarcity/anti-UBI discourse here: 1. people don't understand if-then statements 2. people are completely ignorant of the historical effects technology has had on scarcity and culture throughout human history and pre-history 3. people cannot imagine a future that's meaningfully different from their present (perhaps because of #2?) 4. people confidently hold obviously wrong beliefs about general economics that can be trivially refuted by observing their own day to day life (eg "if everyone has one of something, it becomes worthless"). OR Every critic is trolling. Either way, it's desperately grim.

Elon: "if we make it past the singularity, we should do X to avoid catastrophe" Very stupid people: "prior to the singularity, X would be catastrophic. Elon is stupid. Here's the math." Sigh.

Important take, well articulated. Whether you agree or not. What I think this take is missing: if change is faster than humans and existing systems can deal with, the free market mechanisms of pricing, etc., break down. Physical constraints are not evenly distributed. When parts of a system move fast enough relative to other parts, systems break rather than adapt. In 2007-2012, the mobile revolution caused national hero company Nokia to effectively go out of business (they still technically exist, but serving a tiny niche market, a shadow of their former global importance). RIM and Windows CE (a large division of Microsoft) also failed. Now scale this existential disruption to every company, every locale, every worker trade. Pricing signals aren't magic FTL drives for the economy. They don't instantly transform mature systems during a technological ELE. Pricing signals only trigger changes, they don't implement them. If disruption is fast enough, there will be no time to respond before catastrophe. This is the upcoming apocalypse Musk sees and is trying to avoid.