Matt, isn't the problem with AI a lack of consent of the governed? No one ever asked the American people if they buy into the vision of the human future the AI companies are touting. If so, the push against data centers is just the beginning of what could be a broader demand for a serious public discussion about whether we want to go this way.
My favorite podcast, hands down, is "The Seth Myers and Lonely Island Podcast". As a substantially less accomplished creative, it's nice to see that the pros enjoy overanalyzing their own work as much as I do (I just don't have an audience of hundreds of thousands to listen to me do it.)
The whole thing is so seat-of-the-pants, and the hosts are so busy that they barely have time to schedule and zero time whatsoever to prepare. (Although Andy always has time for NYT Spelling Bee.) But all four are such talented, accomplished and relaxed entertainers that it works really well anyway, especially if you are a fanboy.
Pardon my ignorance, but what is chum? Im almost 42 years old, I’ve only encounter this usage of the word in Matt’s writing and now from SB commenters, and I have absolutely no idea what it means. Where did this use of the word come from and when?
Minnesota is doing a good job of making sure new data centers don't disrupt our path to zero-carbon energy, and don't push costs onto other electricity users.
Celtics fans aren't shook up about the trade because we were good last year and will be good again next year (if not better). It's that we won the whole damn thing a few years ago with Jaylen, Jayson, and Derrick White and clearly did not get much of value for next year from the Jaylen trade. I was relieved when we didn't trade him for Giannis (who has been hurt for a few seasons), then stunned when we got George and some meager draft capital. If that was the best return they could get in the moment, I feel like they should have waited.
The new ownership group bought the Celtics for a ton and have only cut costs ever since. Sure they'll be good, but only banners matter in Boston.
"What he says is, basically, that holding political office is not an objectively very desirable job for most broadly capable people, and that’s especially true of lower-ranking offices in state legislatures and so forth. Under the circumstances, the people who want to run are disproportionately kind of extreme ideologues relative to the general population. "
So who are the people who were president of their college class, summa / magna cum laude, editing the law review at Harvard / Yale Law and decide politics is for them? Like they could do just about anything but they go into politics?
Based on knowing people like that I’d wager a large majority would take a position in Congress if it were offered to them even if it meant an enormous pay cut. People spend millions of their own money running for these offices. They’re highly desirable to people who want prestige or power. People not running is probably more about not wanting to put in the effort with a low chance of actually winning.
Thanks for answering my question, and with nuance to boot! I think a different extension on this one (about the trade-offs with nuclear's long-tail risk as solar and batteries get more competitive), which I'm curious for reactions on in the comments: what's an appropriate level of risk tolerance for policymakers?
My personal bias is that meritocratic power systems tend to reward high risk tolerance because the variance there is what leads to concentrated power in the first place, which can be incredibly mismatched to leading a country. So, Elon Musk can make huge gambles in his business life and become the world's richest man, and Donald Trump can roll the dice over and over and end up President - but applying the same approach to leading a country is how we end up with a mix of Venezuela (high risk, unimaginable success by any objective standard) and Iran (high risk, generational disaster). Matt's written about the long tail risk of semi-apocalyptic nuclear war in the past and it terrifies me - and on the other hand, I don't know that we shouldn't oppose a Chinese invasion of Taiwan because of the risk therein.
The data center backlash is not just NIMBYism. People are willing to sacrifice a little if they think there's a benefit in it.
Here in Ohio, we're happily fracking our state parks and injecting brine into the ground, because people know what oil is for. Every old industrial town wears its cancer cluster like a badge of honor.
Here's an idea to make politics more appealing as a job: make most of it a remote job. If a House job was only 4 weeks a year in person in DC and the rest of the votes could be taken remotely, people who don't want to uproot their kids and their spouse's career might want to run. This would also have the benefit of reps being more accessible to their constituents at home. I think it's useful to come together in person for a few weeks a year (maybe the beginning and the ends of the session?), but most of the work can be done remotely.
Dude, I'm speaking from the perspective of a Californian. Why on earth would I want to leave my 70 degree paradise for a place with icky city snow in the winter and muggy, humid summers? It's not like rural people are the only ones who really don't want to move to DC.
> Anyways, this is a complicated question, but I do think the number one answer is to boost the compensation and staff allowances.
(Monetary) compensation is an extrinsic reward. Increasing it will attract people who wouldn't otherwise be intrinsically rewarded enough by the job.
The other option is to make the job more intrinsically rewarding by more clearly defining what it is supposed to do and why those things are good things to do. More precisely, bring back the idea that legislators should tackle specific public problems with targeted legislation, which has been largely lost or forgotten at least on the federal level. (Even when bills are passed, they tend to be massive omnibuses where most effort is spent avoiding poison pill amendments.) That also implies minimizing crappy aspects of the job i.e. campaigning and fundraising. These are all mechanically harder than just raising salaries, but will also make a bigger difference in the long run.
I read somewhere that the hum coming off of a data center was 60db. That's a lot. I don't know how much distance one needs for that to diminish to an acceptable level. Or what the pitch/frequency is (some pitches grate much more than others). But I do know that if I lived near a proposed data center, I would definitely focus on noise rules and the specific consequences if the rules are broken.
Regarding Colorado: I'll second many of the comments here.
Basically, it's a highly-educated, outdoorsy, business-friendly, culturally liberal state, populated by a lot of newcomers who've fled religious-right MAGAland and loud progressive coastal urban Liberalland in equal measure.
I will say this, however: Recent events have complicated that picture.
Jared Polis was one of the key figures in turning the state (back) to blue. He started out as the liberal centimillionaire megadonor who leveraged his tech fortune into bankrolling the Democratic resurgence during the Bush years. Then he became the first openly gay man ever elected in an open election to Congress, and finally, cemented Democratic dominance of the state during his two runs for, and terms as, governor.
Jared Polis is no longer that man.
He has basically renounced the Democratic party, joined forces with the Musk/Bezos/Thiel billionaire class, and has Twitter-brainwashed himself into this "I Have No Party" bullshit, just in time for Trump's second-term demolition of American democracy.
His pardon of Trumpist insurrectionist Tina Peters, purging of the Clemency Advisory Board for speaking out against it, and embracing of RFK Jr. (as the latter politically purges American public health and demolishes its vaccine infrastructure) were not one-offs.
You will almost certainly see Polis on Rogan, Fox News, and other anti-left programs throughout Trump's final two years, denouncing his own (former) party as "extreme". Set your watch to it.
That has had two effects: It has signaled to Polis' old buddies in the tech world that they can start supporting Republicans in Colorado again, or at the very least not supporting Colorado Democrats.
(Worth noting: Colorado Republicans, as in most blue states, are no longer trying to be a competitive, even-somewhat-moderate political party. Their gubernatorial candidate is an obvious wannabe-militia-leader scam artist who brags about having "killed people", and their former state chair is most famous for calling for the burning of pride flags.)
(Basically Colorado Republicans have turned into a cosplay Trumpist militia, dearly hoping the president sends the military to their own state and suppresses the vote in Denver. No lie; that's likely their whole electoral plan.)
The second effect has been re-radicalization of progressive pockets of Colorado.
I think it likely that Polis' pardon of Tina Peters, however marginally, played a role in Senator Hickenlooper's near-defeat in his recent primary, and Rep. Diana DeGette's actual defeat at the hands of an open socialist who believes Israel to be a literally illegitimate state. (Good luck with your new congresswoman, Denver.)
This is not to say the situation in Colorado is turning, exactly. The state still is what it is: A moderate, business-friendly liberal state. That won't change overnight.
Your take on the Jaylen trade is the sorta bog-standard analytic one. But it's sort of entirely orthogonal to the issue? Jaylen Brown is just better than Paul George by a lot? And they make super similar money? So like, you've traded Jaylen Brown on 4 years (you can still trade him lol), for a broken-down wing that can still get hot with his stroke and....two okay picks?
That 28 Clippers pick is pretty valuable, but 31 Sixers? Plus, the George contract is, in my view, negative value. I don't see how they improve. Just as asset management, I think it was a big mistake. They're at 51.5 wins over under for 26/27. I'd take the under today.
"It’s not a good idea to get too invested in energy technology fandoms..."
Great way of describing it. Some people get attached to a particular energy solution like it's the Red Sox v the Yankees.
I lived through the big "batteries v fuel cells" battle of the early 2000s. What a waste of time. They both suck.
Ha kidding but seriously it was weird. It wasn't enough to say you thought one technology made more sense for one application than the other...you had to declare that the other side were bad people.
On Energy & the Solar "Pragmatic Progressive' 'California has built the equivalent of 13 nuclear power plants in just the last 3 years, in the form of solar and batteries" and "vs" nuclear MY correctly puts his finger on intermittancy and equates nuclear to batteries. This is directionally correct but (without wishing to state nuclear is 'The Solution' as such), there are genuine profound constraints on RnEn deployment in terms not only of the well-known
In batteries: in fact we are not yet at equivalency of fully dispatchable baseload covering long-duraction RnEn short-falls (the German term "Dunkelflaute" is used in our industry to reference this), although battery tech and different battery chemistries are advancing as is the industrial deployment mastery to understand better sustained discharge-rechange cycling for lifespan, capacity.
Grid scale-out and Coast-To-Coast power transfers / Wheeling transmission can mitigate this as well but
This is an additional problem to grid balancing that RnEn is not good at (although technology is advancing for cost-effective 'grid forming" we do have issues in unknown-unknowns on the interactions of systems, see Iberian blackout) - whereas nukes and gas do this naturually
From multiple perspectives, having good chunky non-carbon baseload (itself couplable with batteries) is a Good Thing to support, and for me as an industrial scale RnEg financier, I do not in any way want to see simple-minded crunchy-granola thinking inhibit this investment thinking there is only One True Path (usually asserted with great energy-engineering naivité)
MY argument here: " What I am a proponent of is changing the regulatory framework for nuclear power to provide a more balanced assessment of the costs and benefits. I am also a proponent of changing the regulatory framework for solar power to make it cheaper and easier to build utility-scale solar projects. A point that I am always trying to make is that while mainstream environmental groups are definitely less hostile to utility-scale solar than they are to nuclear or fossil fuels, they are not actually in favor of the regulatory changes that would make utility-scale solar easier to build either."
I would say what is missed here is regulatory framework to build more grid, transmission and distribution, and upgrade quickly. the Groups and old fashioined stupid NIMBYism about grid is one of the hugest constraints.
More Generation means fuck-all if we can dispatch and right now one of the main binding constraints to most effective RnEng economics is (a) Connection Queues, (b) Grid Congestion leading to curtailment (i.e. wasted energy = wasted opportunity = higher pricing)
GRID GRID GRID GRID GRID GRID AND MORE DAMN GRID!!!!!!!!!!!
Matt, isn't the problem with AI a lack of consent of the governed? No one ever asked the American people if they buy into the vision of the human future the AI companies are touting. If so, the push against data centers is just the beginning of what could be a broader demand for a serious public discussion about whether we want to go this way.
My favorite podcast, hands down, is "The Seth Myers and Lonely Island Podcast". As a substantially less accomplished creative, it's nice to see that the pros enjoy overanalyzing their own work as much as I do (I just don't have an audience of hundreds of thousands to listen to me do it.)
The whole thing is so seat-of-the-pants, and the hosts are so busy that they barely have time to schedule and zero time whatsoever to prepare. (Although Andy always has time for NYT Spelling Bee.) But all four are such talented, accomplished and relaxed entertainers that it works really well anyway, especially if you are a fanboy.
Quaid Army!
Pardon my ignorance, but what is chum? Im almost 42 years old, I’ve only encounter this usage of the word in Matt’s writing and now from SB commenters, and I have absolutely no idea what it means. Where did this use of the word come from and when?
Minnesota is doing a good job of making sure new data centers don't disrupt our path to zero-carbon energy, and don't push costs onto other electricity users.
https://fresh-energy.org/3-things-to-know-about-data-centers-in-minnesota
> Nothing in life provides genuine 24 / 7 / 365 energy that is on all the ti
Arguably hydropower is the closest to this
Celtics fans aren't shook up about the trade because we were good last year and will be good again next year (if not better). It's that we won the whole damn thing a few years ago with Jaylen, Jayson, and Derrick White and clearly did not get much of value for next year from the Jaylen trade. I was relieved when we didn't trade him for Giannis (who has been hurt for a few seasons), then stunned when we got George and some meager draft capital. If that was the best return they could get in the moment, I feel like they should have waited.
The new ownership group bought the Celtics for a ton and have only cut costs ever since. Sure they'll be good, but only banners matter in Boston.
"What he says is, basically, that holding political office is not an objectively very desirable job for most broadly capable people, and that’s especially true of lower-ranking offices in state legislatures and so forth. Under the circumstances, the people who want to run are disproportionately kind of extreme ideologues relative to the general population. "
So who are the people who were president of their college class, summa / magna cum laude, editing the law review at Harvard / Yale Law and decide politics is for them? Like they could do just about anything but they go into politics?
I would consider doing it for the insider trading opportunities, but too many skeletons in this closet ☹️
Based on knowing people like that I’d wager a large majority would take a position in Congress if it were offered to them even if it meant an enormous pay cut. People spend millions of their own money running for these offices. They’re highly desirable to people who want prestige or power. People not running is probably more about not wanting to put in the effort with a low chance of actually winning.
Thanks for answering my question, and with nuance to boot! I think a different extension on this one (about the trade-offs with nuclear's long-tail risk as solar and batteries get more competitive), which I'm curious for reactions on in the comments: what's an appropriate level of risk tolerance for policymakers?
My personal bias is that meritocratic power systems tend to reward high risk tolerance because the variance there is what leads to concentrated power in the first place, which can be incredibly mismatched to leading a country. So, Elon Musk can make huge gambles in his business life and become the world's richest man, and Donald Trump can roll the dice over and over and end up President - but applying the same approach to leading a country is how we end up with a mix of Venezuela (high risk, unimaginable success by any objective standard) and Iran (high risk, generational disaster). Matt's written about the long tail risk of semi-apocalyptic nuclear war in the past and it terrifies me - and on the other hand, I don't know that we shouldn't oppose a Chinese invasion of Taiwan because of the risk therein.
The data center backlash is not just NIMBYism. People are willing to sacrifice a little if they think there's a benefit in it.
Here in Ohio, we're happily fracking our state parks and injecting brine into the ground, because people know what oil is for. Every old industrial town wears its cancer cluster like a badge of honor.
The solar panel backlash is all astroturf, though.
Here's an idea to make politics more appealing as a job: make most of it a remote job. If a House job was only 4 weeks a year in person in DC and the rest of the votes could be taken remotely, people who don't want to uproot their kids and their spouse's career might want to run. This would also have the benefit of reps being more accessible to their constituents at home. I think it's useful to come together in person for a few weeks a year (maybe the beginning and the ends of the session?), but most of the work can be done remotely.
But Washington DC is a great place. It’s good for these rural legislators to actually live in a city
Dude, I'm speaking from the perspective of a Californian. Why on earth would I want to leave my 70 degree paradise for a place with icky city snow in the winter and muggy, humid summers? It's not like rural people are the only ones who really don't want to move to DC.
Plus the produce isn't nearly as good, and just... a million other things that are better about living in California than DC.
> Anyways, this is a complicated question, but I do think the number one answer is to boost the compensation and staff allowances.
(Monetary) compensation is an extrinsic reward. Increasing it will attract people who wouldn't otherwise be intrinsically rewarded enough by the job.
The other option is to make the job more intrinsically rewarding by more clearly defining what it is supposed to do and why those things are good things to do. More precisely, bring back the idea that legislators should tackle specific public problems with targeted legislation, which has been largely lost or forgotten at least on the federal level. (Even when bills are passed, they tend to be massive omnibuses where most effort is spent avoiding poison pill amendments.) That also implies minimizing crappy aspects of the job i.e. campaigning and fundraising. These are all mechanically harder than just raising salaries, but will also make a bigger difference in the long run.
I read somewhere that the hum coming off of a data center was 60db. That's a lot. I don't know how much distance one needs for that to diminish to an acceptable level. Or what the pitch/frequency is (some pitches grate much more than others). But I do know that if I lived near a proposed data center, I would definitely focus on noise rules and the specific consequences if the rules are broken.
Regarding Colorado: I'll second many of the comments here.
Basically, it's a highly-educated, outdoorsy, business-friendly, culturally liberal state, populated by a lot of newcomers who've fled religious-right MAGAland and loud progressive coastal urban Liberalland in equal measure.
I will say this, however: Recent events have complicated that picture.
Jared Polis was one of the key figures in turning the state (back) to blue. He started out as the liberal centimillionaire megadonor who leveraged his tech fortune into bankrolling the Democratic resurgence during the Bush years. Then he became the first openly gay man ever elected in an open election to Congress, and finally, cemented Democratic dominance of the state during his two runs for, and terms as, governor.
Jared Polis is no longer that man.
He has basically renounced the Democratic party, joined forces with the Musk/Bezos/Thiel billionaire class, and has Twitter-brainwashed himself into this "I Have No Party" bullshit, just in time for Trump's second-term demolition of American democracy.
His pardon of Trumpist insurrectionist Tina Peters, purging of the Clemency Advisory Board for speaking out against it, and embracing of RFK Jr. (as the latter politically purges American public health and demolishes its vaccine infrastructure) were not one-offs.
You will almost certainly see Polis on Rogan, Fox News, and other anti-left programs throughout Trump's final two years, denouncing his own (former) party as "extreme". Set your watch to it.
That has had two effects: It has signaled to Polis' old buddies in the tech world that they can start supporting Republicans in Colorado again, or at the very least not supporting Colorado Democrats.
(Worth noting: Colorado Republicans, as in most blue states, are no longer trying to be a competitive, even-somewhat-moderate political party. Their gubernatorial candidate is an obvious wannabe-militia-leader scam artist who brags about having "killed people", and their former state chair is most famous for calling for the burning of pride flags.)
(Basically Colorado Republicans have turned into a cosplay Trumpist militia, dearly hoping the president sends the military to their own state and suppresses the vote in Denver. No lie; that's likely their whole electoral plan.)
The second effect has been re-radicalization of progressive pockets of Colorado.
I think it likely that Polis' pardon of Tina Peters, however marginally, played a role in Senator Hickenlooper's near-defeat in his recent primary, and Rep. Diana DeGette's actual defeat at the hands of an open socialist who believes Israel to be a literally illegitimate state. (Good luck with your new congresswoman, Denver.)
This is not to say the situation in Colorado is turning, exactly. The state still is what it is: A moderate, business-friendly liberal state. That won't change overnight.
Your take on the Jaylen trade is the sorta bog-standard analytic one. But it's sort of entirely orthogonal to the issue? Jaylen Brown is just better than Paul George by a lot? And they make super similar money? So like, you've traded Jaylen Brown on 4 years (you can still trade him lol), for a broken-down wing that can still get hot with his stroke and....two okay picks?
That 28 Clippers pick is pretty valuable, but 31 Sixers? Plus, the George contract is, in my view, negative value. I don't see how they improve. Just as asset management, I think it was a big mistake. They're at 51.5 wins over under for 26/27. I'd take the under today.
"It’s not a good idea to get too invested in energy technology fandoms..."
Great way of describing it. Some people get attached to a particular energy solution like it's the Red Sox v the Yankees.
I lived through the big "batteries v fuel cells" battle of the early 2000s. What a waste of time. They both suck.
Ha kidding but seriously it was weird. It wasn't enough to say you thought one technology made more sense for one application than the other...you had to declare that the other side were bad people.
I think this logic also applies to American politics writ large.
On Energy & the Solar "Pragmatic Progressive' 'California has built the equivalent of 13 nuclear power plants in just the last 3 years, in the form of solar and batteries" and "vs" nuclear MY correctly puts his finger on intermittancy and equates nuclear to batteries. This is directionally correct but (without wishing to state nuclear is 'The Solution' as such), there are genuine profound constraints on RnEn deployment in terms not only of the well-known
In batteries: in fact we are not yet at equivalency of fully dispatchable baseload covering long-duraction RnEn short-falls (the German term "Dunkelflaute" is used in our industry to reference this), although battery tech and different battery chemistries are advancing as is the industrial deployment mastery to understand better sustained discharge-rechange cycling for lifespan, capacity.
Grid scale-out and Coast-To-Coast power transfers / Wheeling transmission can mitigate this as well but
This is an additional problem to grid balancing that RnEn is not good at (although technology is advancing for cost-effective 'grid forming" we do have issues in unknown-unknowns on the interactions of systems, see Iberian blackout) - whereas nukes and gas do this naturually
From multiple perspectives, having good chunky non-carbon baseload (itself couplable with batteries) is a Good Thing to support, and for me as an industrial scale RnEg financier, I do not in any way want to see simple-minded crunchy-granola thinking inhibit this investment thinking there is only One True Path (usually asserted with great energy-engineering naivité)
MY argument here: " What I am a proponent of is changing the regulatory framework for nuclear power to provide a more balanced assessment of the costs and benefits. I am also a proponent of changing the regulatory framework for solar power to make it cheaper and easier to build utility-scale solar projects. A point that I am always trying to make is that while mainstream environmental groups are definitely less hostile to utility-scale solar than they are to nuclear or fossil fuels, they are not actually in favor of the regulatory changes that would make utility-scale solar easier to build either."
I would say what is missed here is regulatory framework to build more grid, transmission and distribution, and upgrade quickly. the Groups and old fashioined stupid NIMBYism about grid is one of the hugest constraints.
More Generation means fuck-all if we can dispatch and right now one of the main binding constraints to most effective RnEng economics is (a) Connection Queues, (b) Grid Congestion leading to curtailment (i.e. wasted energy = wasted opportunity = higher pricing)
GRID GRID GRID GRID GRID GRID AND MORE DAMN GRID!!!!!!!!!!!