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Friday’s Forum
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18 responses to “Friday’s Forum”
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Playing games with the dead.
Pentagon list of service members killed in Iran war removes most recent four
The Pentagon’s official online list of service members killed in the ongoing Iran war does not include the four soldiers who died during renewed fighting over the weekend, despite the fact that their names were included in a Pentagon press release on the formal transfer of their remains back to the United States on Wednesday.
A review of the current list on the Pentagon’s Defense Casualty Analysis System website shows that, despite having been last updated on Wednesday, the number of US military personnel killed during Operation Epic Fury, the Pentagon’s name for the US-Israeli war on Iran that Donald Trump launched on 28 February, remains at 14.
Apparently, being dead after a declared ceasefire doesn’t count.
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Trump is handling his illegal, economy-wrecking war the same way he handles everything else: as something to sell or brand via repetitive bullshitting with no regard to the real life consequences. “We cannot allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon” is more ludicrous now than ever, and is just as jaw droppingly stupid as someone standing in the ashes of their house saying, “We had to burn down the house because we couldn’t allow termites to live there.”
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Data Centers in Texas have now become politically enmeshed in this fall’s elections.
James Talarico rolls out plan to rein in data centers. It’s a lot like Greg Abbott’s.
Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico on Wednesday rolled out a plan to address the growing backlash to data centers – and it sounded a lot like the one pushed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.
Opposition to the centers has galvanized voters, especially in deep-red rural parts of the state, and has led to calls for a moratorium from several Democrats on the ticket in November.
Talarico’s proposals include:
• Setting minimum federal requirements to protect the grid, environment, jobs and transparency related to new data center development, “preventing a race to the bottom for communities competing to recruit data centers;”
• Ending “sweetheart tax deals for big tech companies” by repealing the state’s data center sales tax exemption;
• Ensuring large energy users pay for their own infrastructure and grid interconnection costs;
• Requiring data centers use closed-loop water systems that reuse a fixed amount of water;
• Granting local communities the authority to approve and reject data center development in their towns;
• Releasing government records detailing individual tax break data for data center facilities in Texas.
I think this pushback is happening all over the country because people see little benefit to themselves and a great downside to their communities, including electricity and water costs.
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Scrolling down, the next article at the data center link, Texas leads nation in proposed power plants for data centers, has some sobering information on the electrical power to be consumed by AI data centers, and where that power will come from.
Texas is poised to lead the nation in power plants built to fuel data centers, according to a new report from an environmental watchdog group that warns the plants plan to emit tons of greenhouse gases and air pollution…
EIP found that of the 74 planned [natural gas-fired power plants nationwide], 71 would be newly-built while three would be expansions. They would collectively generate about 143 gigawatts of electricity — enough to power California nearly three times over…
Nationally, the proposed plants could emit nearly 662 million tons of greenhouse gases annually, an amount EIP says would have roughly the same climate impact as more than 140 million cars and trucks…or the annual greenhouse gas emissions of Australia.
“The biggest impact will depend on where they are located,” said Neil Carman, an air quality expert with decades of Texas knowledge. “It’s a very hot button issue, because there’s already so many air quality problems in Texas.”
An increasing number of developers are proposing to build on-site natural gas plants to power their data centers rather than relying solely on the state grid.
I’ve seen it proposed elsewhere that data centers should make their own power in order to reduce demands on the grid, but this creates a host of problems such as high carbon emissions, and local noise and pollution, as reported in This permit, common for dry cleaners, is now being used to build AI power plants. Long story short — onsite power generation may be brought on line quickly, but it’s inefficient and emits a lot of noise and pollution 24/7.
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The piece of this I find stunning is that Talarico, one assumes, thinks this can be weaponized against Ken Paxton. Meaning that even though Abbot supports it, Paxton doesn’t.
Wow, that kind of adds “fool” to the list of invective I might invoke to describe Ken Paxton. I don’t like Abbot’s policies, but I consider him a highly skilled politician. Ken Paxton is an fool if he thinks he can swim upstream against something Abbot supports.
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Rebecca Watson on what kind of people end up staffing ICE and other repressive agencies.
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Over at TPM, they are giving Justice Kagan grief, calling this comment of hers naive:
You just have to deal with the fact that there’s a conservative court doing things that conservative jurists have long thought it appropriate to do, and I can really dislike that. But it has nothing to do, I think, with becoming the arm of this current administration.”
But I suspect this is accurate and, more than that, gets to the heart of what’s going on. The billionaires who fund the Federalist Society and therefore have been appointing judges during Republican administrations have been working on this for 30-40 years, long before Trump came on the scene. Trump simply gives them an opportunity to advance their causes faster than they otherwise would.
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Speaking of LLMs, I’ve been using Gemini to develop a plot for a novel. It helps not so much for what it says*, but because it helps me focus on the matter. Sometimes it asks questions or misinterprets matters in a way that helps me hone some plot points.
I can then copy and paste my part of the chat, and bits of tis responses, and use that as a guide later.
There are two big drawbacks. One is that it constantly wants to write things for me. At first in the suggestions after its response, later it just makes up dialogue or descriptions in its responses. I get it, because this is what it’s designed to do.
The second is that it judges every idea I have as good, brilliant, one time even poetic (suuure!). When i suggest what the protagonist, Nareed, will do in a given situation, it invariably responds with extravagant praise, such as calling an action “a master class in leadership.”
I want to try later to suggest something completely and utterly stupid and ridiculous, like maybe Nareed should appoint a dog to her cabinet as minister of the interior, and see what it says to that.
Problem is that it’s hard to ignore all this praise. of course I think the premise, the theme, and the plot are good. Who thinks “This idea stinks. I’ll make it a novel.” So being called, brilliant and poetic feels good, but how real is it, and how much it’s just a way to masturbate one’s ego?
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Remember Deep Seek, the Chinese AI model that equaled the leading US AI models at a fraction of the cost?
Now there’s another one, called Kimi K3.
It seems most useful applications of LLMs are in writing computer code, and maybe in use for weapons systems. It’s all rather murky. I haven’t seen any use I’d pay for, and certainly not for my work.
Then, too, science and tech reporting in the media is often wrong, misleading, or plain incomplete.
So take the report along with some grains of salt.
On related matters, I wouldn’t eat raw produce until further notice. Usually washing produce is enough. I do wash such things, but then I cook them. Lately the only thing I eat raw is the ends of green onions, which I use as a crunchy garnish. I’m switching back to regular onions for a while, no garnish.
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Does Mexico also have the Cyclospora outbreak?
I did see people referencing this article a few times recently, which suggests it’s a US thing.
https://www.newsweek.com/mexico-warns-of-diarrhea-risk-when-visiting-us-12208368
(The US is a shithole country)
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The outbreak is a US thing, but it’s possible the culprit is lettuce from Mexico. After all, the Newsweek article did say that Taylor Farms said all iceberg lettuce sourced from Central Mexico would be removed from the U.S. market. And this jives with something I heard a couple of days ago…in an interview, former FDA chief Dr. Scott Gottlieb said,
“So if you want to be safe, buy a whole head of lettuce and buy a head of lettuce that’s sourced from the United States. Right now, the only region, large region, that’s harvesting lettuce is Mexico. There’s some being harvested in Arizona, but California is not harvesting this time of year. But you can get locally sourced lettuce in your community at a grocer or at a farmers market.”Please do not tell trump about this, lest he threaten new tariffs on Mexican products. This outbreak may pass under his radar since cyclospora, unlike wildfire smoke, is not visible to the naked eye.
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There are too many lies and idiocies in this statement by El Taco to be worth reading.
I’ll just say, if Iran could destroy Israel with a nuclear weapon when they don’t have a nuclear weapon, it would be worth paying Iran a trillion dollars to share that capability with the US.
Oh, and he certified Iran’s compliance with the JCPOA during his first usurpation. He probably doesn’t remember that.
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