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Tuesday’s Forum
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43 responses to “Tuesday’s Forum”
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I wonder when Trump’s corruption and kleptocratic behaviors will break through to the general public:
President Trump made 94 different trades of “Magnificent Seven” stocks in the first quarter of 2026, a new ethics disclosure shows, executing millions of dollars in transactions even as he was meeting with and often promoting these top tech companies.
The trades were valued at between $50 million and $70 million across 64 buy orders and 30 stock sales.
Because Congress will remain silent until the public clamors.
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The chairman of the Weld County GOP was arrested Thursday on suspicion of soliciting a child prostitute, internet luring of a child and attempted child sex assault, all felony charges.
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Texas has a free market electricity market. Here in Houston there are three kinds of players that impact how we get electricity and how we pay for it. There are the power producers (power plants, solar and wind farms), the distributors (responsible for the power lines to the house), and the power brokers (who compete for your business by offering a variety of plans (cost per kwh, time of day pricing, percentage of renewables, etc)). It is a confusing, wild west of shopping.
Anyway, it is dawning on a lot of everyday consumers that data centers are competing for electricity and driving up costs for everyday retail consumers. As so there is pushback on location of data centers, their noise, their need for scarce water and so forth. The tech industry has spent a lot of money buying politicians but now they are feeling some of the heat from their voters.
Texas saddles up for data center clash
The data center boom is hitting Texas. Data center politics haven’t been far behind.
The tech companies and electricity giants gathered here in the second-biggest state have heaped praise on the boom in construction of new data centers they see as the cure to everything from soaring power prices to sluggish economic growth.
But the pushback in communities that began in states like Virginia, home to the nation’s densest fleet of data centers, has spread to states like Texas, where it’s been taken up by lawmakers responding to a chorus of complaints that the giant facilities will drive up energy costs once they come online, consume water supplies and blight the landscape.
Texas Republicans have a data center problem
The Republican Party has felt like home to Rena Schroeder since her teenage years when she joined a high school club for conservative Latinos. She cast her first presidential vote for Ronald Reagan. And she’s lost friends over her ardent posts on social media, some touting her anti-abortion views.
“I’ve always been committed,” said Schroeder, 62, of her allegiance to the GOP. That is, until she learned about a massive data center, part of OpenAI’s $500 billion Stargate project, going up south of her property.
The project has been championed by her party’s standard-bearers, President Donald Trump and Gov. Greg Abbott. But the more Schroeder learned about data centers popping up across the state, the more she became convinced her party was corrupted by industry lobbyists, seemingly brushing off what she saw as an existential threat to rural Texans like her.
Texans are demanding their local governments push pause on data centers. Can they?
From Amarillo to Waco, College Station to Harlingen, Texans are raising concerns over the proliferation of data centers — and the tremendous amounts of water and energy they are poised to suck up.
Seemingly overnight, these sprawling campuses of computer servers meant to store information from websites and power artificial intelligence are popping up all over the state.
Most of rebellion is in the rural areas. It is tempting to remind them that they get what they voted for.
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@Scott: And then there is the whiff of hypocrisy:
Most Houston-area residents use AI — but oppose data centers being built near them, UH study finds
Most Houston-area residents report using artificial intelligence — but oppose the construction of data centers near their homes, according to a new study from the University of Houston.
It’s a paradox that reflects the widespread push in workplaces to adopt AI, as well as fierce resident backlash against the rapid buildout of data centers needed to train and run AI models.
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I used AI for the first time yesterday. Last Monday, I got a colonoscopy and yesterday I received the pathology report. Pretty dense medical language but I understood it pretty well. But I could see that a lot of people would go “Huh?”. So I took the pdf, pressed the CoPilot button (I was using the Edge browser) and asked for a plain language version of the doc. Took just seconds to crank one out. Then I asked for a doc that had the medical jargon and plain language jargon side by side for comparison. That was pretty quick also. In that limited case, I could see AI utility and was impressed.
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@Kingdaddy: You read these things all the time now. I now wonder if this kind of deviancy has always been going on throughout the ages or has something societally changed to encourage this behavior?
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All militaries that are not organized around drones are obsolete.
Drone warfare has been a fascination of mine for a very long time. When I read Daphne du Maurier’s “The Birds” as a kid, I imagined what would happen if the attacking swarms were mechanical birds, controlled with AI. When I read about Japanese kamikazes in WW2, I reasoned that someday we’d have drones do the same. In 2013, I wrote a post about the advent of drone warfare that’s still probably the most prophetic thing I’ve ever written. It simply made sense that if we could create AI-controlled swarms of exploding artificial insects, then as long as they had enough battery power to sustain themselves over long flights, they’d be an unstoppable weapon.
Thirteen years later, my imagination has mostly become reality. Batteries have gotten good and cheap enough to sustain long drone flights, and AI has gotten good enough to guide drones to their targets (and, often, to select the targets in the first place). All we need now to fulfill my vision is for AI to start autonomously directing large numbers of drones in concert. That’s coming very soon.
The Ukraine War isn’t the first war in which drones are proving decisive — that would be the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020 — but it’s the war in which drones have truly come into their own. Ukraine’s intensive use of drones has allowed them to inflict casualty rates as high as 5 to 1 on the Russian army in recent months, while giving up little or no territory. Around 96% of those casualties are estimated to be caused by drones. In just the past year, Ukraine went from using just a few thousand FPV drones per day to using around 60,000.
You can read lots of stories about how drones represent a revolution in military affairs; the recent Carnegie Endowment piece is a good one, as is the slightly older one by the Army University Press. But to really viscerally understand how deeply things have changed, you have to watch videos from the war. Here is a montage of drone strikes in Ukraine, including a terrifying final sequence where a drone flies into a Russian barracks and destroys it. It’s difficult stuff to watch, but if you want to understand the changes that have come to modern warfare, you have to see it.
The age of the human infantryman is rapidly drawing to a close. Simply surviving an FPV drone attack has become an almost impossible task for soldiers on the battlefield. The drone cordon has not yet become so airtight that territory can be held without humans, but these humans’ job is to hide out in dugouts for months at a time alone or in tiny groups, terrified of emerging above ground lest they be instantly droned. And ground robots are developing very quickly, to the point where assaults can sometimes be conducted without humans on the front line at all.
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Brad DeLong cross-posted the Noahpinion piece linked above, with the following as his added introduction:
I think this from Noah Smith is broadly right: To understand how the balance of military power has shifted under our feet—not in some misty sci‑fi future, but it already has—you should stop reading retired admirals’ op‑eds about aircraft carriers and start paying very close attention to drones.
Starting with—I guess it was at Bussaco, on September 27, 1810—infantry and cavalry in mass ceased to be queens of the battlefield, and especially after the coming of first the cheap rifle and then the machine gun offensive success depended on very expensive, technologically hypersophisticated forces like battleships and carriers, heavy bomber fleets, armored divisions, manned fighter squadrons. Those imposed a particular social technology on successful militaries: general staffs, procurement bureaucracies, alliance doctrines, officer corps career ladders.
In the past four and a half years we have seen Ukraine ‘Rus’s successful defense against Putin’s Moskva ‘Rus, and the—perhaps— transformation into soft targers of the U.S. forward deployments in the Persian Gulf at Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, U.S. Central Command forward headquarters in Qatar, Al Dhafra in UAE, the Camp Arifan logistical hub and the rest of the string of bases in Kuwait, and Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. Now things are very different: FPV drones do precision strikes for hundreds of dollars a shot, guided by off‑the‑shelf batteries, motors, and machine vision. They dominate missiles and artillery shells that cost a hundred or ten times as much and require vulnerable, slow‑to‑replace tubes and crews, as drone swarms make battlefields radically transparent, turning movement into an invitation to be killed from above.
ETA: There is much more at the Noahpinion piece I linked than what I excerpted.
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@Scott: I think that a political movement that celebrates lawless, predatory, deviant behavior attracts lawless, predatory deviants.
It’s the same pattern seen in other fascist movements: the people on the fringe, for a variety of reasons, find a common alliance within the fascist tent. It’s the alliance of misfits, creeps, and lunatics, from J6er recidivists to a billionaire who wants to tell you all about the Anti-Christ, from the Christian Dominionists to the neo-Nazis, from the grifters to the people willing to be grifted because fascism is their lifestyle choice, from the millenarians who want to give Israel carte blanche because of its supposed role in Armageddon to the naked anti-Semites, from the anti-vaxxer in chief to the D-list celebrity doing workout videos together…It’s a big tent full of people desperate to be taken seriously, regardless of whom they need to stand next to during their moment in the sun.
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@charontwo: A couple days ago you quoted Wajeeh Lion predicting a U. S. attack on Iran in a few days. Yesterday Trump said he called off an attack planned for today.
Of course taking Trump’s statement as confirmation of Wajeeh Lion‘s prediction requires ceding some credibility to something Trump said, but that’s the world we live in. What he says is random, not consistently false.
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@Scott: “And then there is the whiff of hypocrisy:”
I guess you could see it that way, but I even though I use my share of electricity I’d be opposed to the construction of a coal-fired power plant in my neighborhood.
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@gVOR10:
There was supporting evidence for the prediction, troop movements, heavy transport aircraft flights and positioning etc., and I also posted a different source, Trita Parsi, with the same prediction.
Trump’s behavior is what it is.
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@Kingdaddy: I think that sort of person has always been with us, but the internet has given them new scope and new opportunities – as well as new ways to spot them and catch them. I would not care to think of this as an exclusively Republican thing, but yes, it is correlated with authoritarianism, and has been for a long time.
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Del Monte foods is going chapter 11, and I think you’ve all read that canned peaches may go the way of the dinosaurs. It makes me wonder if other mundane agricultural products are headed the same way. Beef and tomatoes are clearly more expensive. https://www.the-independent.com/us/money/beef-tomato-prices-inflation-b2978867.html What next? Any measures available to the government to ameliorate these problems?
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Anyone else get the feeling this was meant to be kept secret?
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@charontwo: The first Season of Black Mirror had an episode whose plot revolved around swarms of mechanized bees – drones. It was terrifying.
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On my last day on vacation, I decided to make mole enchiladas with cottage cheese (trust me). I went with ready to serve mole, and miscalculated how much I needed. I had a choice between fewer enchiladas, or insufficiently covered ones. I went with the second.
I also made a side of refried beans with turkey chorizo and onions. And chocolate mint ice cream for desert.
I messed a bit more with Copilot. I showed it a photo of a VHS tape that dates from, if memory serves, early 1980. It came with the very first VCR we ever had, and could record up to three hours. It was a sample tape of sorts, so you could try out your VCR right away.
It recognized what it was, but really got excited when I told it what was on the tape. A movie called Un Día con el Diablo (A Day with the Devil), starring Cantinflas (aka Mario Moreno) and Andrés Soler. it urged me several times to get the tape digitized, and persisted even when I told it I have the movie on DVD. It also generated a lot of cliche copy about the golden age of Mexican cinema.
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LOL! Cornyn just spent many millions of dollars and his integrity groveling to Trump only to have Trump endorse the indicted felon, corrupt, adulterous AG Paxton. So on brand.
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@charontwo: I read last week that IDF infantry forces in southern Lebanon are being seriously harmed by drones flown by Hezbollah particularly those using fiberoptic cable.. It really is all changing.
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@CSK:
Been there, done that and failed miserably. A few days later they were filleting me and replacing the plumbing.
Here’s hoping you pass.
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@CSK: Went through that earlier this year. Just went through an CT angiogram in April. Have some partial blockage. Next up is a catherization with a possibility of a stent. It’s a bitch getting old.
Stay well and happy for all of us.
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@Sleeping Dog: @Scott:
Thank you both very much, although I don’t know why you needed to be told three times.
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@Scott:..It’s a bitch getting old.
It beats the alternative.
My brother
Peter David Brown
August 1953-November 2025
RIP -
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@Sleeping Dog and CSK: I suspect Trump’s pollsters have told him Paxton will win. Trump is just trying to take credit.
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A Ukrainian ground robot defended a position from Russian assault for six weeks
UGVs are beginning to replace infantry on Ukraine’s front lines.
A single remote-controlled Ukrainian ground combat vehicle defended a “key intersection under constant adversary attack” for 45 days last summer, according to a 3rd Army Corps spokesperson who called it “Ukraine’s first fully robotic defensive operation of a position.” It likely won’t be the last.
The robot—a Droid TW 12.7 armed with a machine gun—and its operator, some 10 kilometers away, “disrupted every attempted breakthrough and prevented enemy infiltration,” with no loss of Ukrainian life, the spokesperson said in a recent interview.
As the United States and other militaries work to catch up, Ukraine is putting remote-controlled air and ground systems to uses the world has never seen.
“Drones in the air provided continuous surveillance” for the operation, the officials said. “They detected enemy movement and transmitted information in real time. Once a threat was confirmed, the operator received the signal and engaged the target with the machine gun.”
Olena Kryzhanivska, a defense analyst who was first to report on the operation, writes that Ukrainian ground robots now perform 80 percent of logistics tasks on the front lines— from carrying explosives into enemy positions to evacuating the wounded. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense hopes to bring that up to 100 percent.
Kryzhanivska writes that unmanned ground vehicles, which can cost $10,000 to $30,000, will soon take a much larger role in combat.
“There is an expectation that we might see the first encounter between Ukrainian ground drones and Russian ground drones.
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@CSK: Yes, agree. Paxton might be the darling of the loose screws club in TX, but it will be tougher for him in the general than Cornyn. And sitting Republican senators are not happy (NYT gift link).
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@Jen: Like Cassidy, Cornyn could wreck havoc. But he won’t. Nor will any other Senator.
A bank shot possibility is this: Paxton and Cornyn are in a primary runoff (early voting started yesterday). Paxton was (and is) expected to win partially due to the fact that only the hardcore shows up in to vote the runoffs (about 8% participation). Will this encourage the “normal” voters to come out? We shall see.
Anyway, I just shot off an angry letter to Cornyn about the $1.8T slush fund created by Todd Blanche. It is over the top for me but I can’t care anymore.
Senator Cornyn,
So now that all your bowing and knee bending was ignored and Trump has finally fucked and humiliated you, are you ready to be a Senator and exercise your powers and authority? Here is where you can start. Kill, by any means necessary, the utterly corrupt $1.8 billion slush fund that Todd Blanche put together. Zero out the Justice Dept appropriations until they come to heel. Zero out Blanches salary and any of the goons around him. I don’t want my tax dollars going to pardoned domestic terrorists, several of whom went on to commit sexual crimes on children.
As a taxpayer, I object to those expenditures. Do your job. Kill those items now.
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@charontwo: Pentagon Pizza Index never exceeded Doughcon 3 through the weekend, extending into Monday, which is were it’s at today. Every other indicator has been that the attack was a “go” on Tuesday. However, there was a massive spike in the Dominos tracking this evening.
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So. In other news, Google has switched their AI response on search queries to opt-in.
The bare search results I was seeing were quite unbalancing for me.
And by the way, the answers they gave to technical questions, while not always correct, were often pretty useful. Sometimes what you need is to be pointed in a better direction, and the AI can do that, from looking at the source code or from forum postings.
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Senate bill aimed at stopping the Iran war advances after Cassidy reverses his vote.
Actions, consequences, etc…
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On the other hand, there’s this
AI Agents! Integration across apps! More data mining! More AI slop!
Some of it seems intriguing, though I’d like to see what the tech websites say, and none of it seems ready given the current state of LLM capabilities.
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@Kathy:
Regarding the old VHS tape you may want to check if the is a difference with the DVD (checking runtime easiest). Several DVDs I’ve bought are missing scenes (strange example, American Flyers about bicycle racing, DVD about 10 minutes shorter – DVD bought in bargain bin at Walmart).
A friend recently bought over 1000 laser disks at an estate auction and for some movies these are the best quality available, never issued on DVD. Watching the auction some of the highest bids were on lots of Star Wars (Extras that were only on the laser disk), soft porn (Penthouse) and rock music (music videos) – as the picture is digital but the audio is apparently analogue so the music ones are in demand. He’ll be selling all the duplicates (lots) and some of the high value items so that he’ll at least break even on his roughly $1-2/disk expense. He bought maybe a third of what was offered and didn’t bid on the Star Wars and porn. He’s paying a neighborhood kid to inventory/catalogue. This is a rabbit hole he knew about and I learned a little (I own zero laser disks and they were expensive in the day, like US$50+ in today’s money – but I gave him the heads-up on the auction as I know he likes old formats, next thing I know he is bidding).
Looking at your comment, I’ll suggest he run the list through AI for rare or valuable ones – I don’t expect perfection but it can’t hurt.I have some ancient Iceland tourism videos (1960-70s) that I digitized from VHS long ago (2005? – but where?). That could be a fun YouTube upload. Like old farming techniques with horses under the Oraefi glacier.
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