At least my provider, when they need to build a new plant or do capacity upgrades, they get the PSC to give them blanket increases in service charge or kWh-rate, on the basis that everybody contributes to the higher demand. Now we’ve got single customers claiming they want the full output of two or three power plants, and why should I pay the mortgage on those plants for 20 years? When the data center will be gone in 5?

It’s way more complicated to build a GW-scale power plant than a GW-scale data center, mostly because the power plant is subject to environmental studies, fuel supply, etc, so a DC looking for investors that can just say they’re going to build a big warehouse, fill it with computers, and get electricity, magically, from the local utility, gets to outsource the hardest problem, and stands a better chance of getting their funding (regardless of whether they actually build anything).

I forget where I keep seeing that some huge fraction of proposed DCs will/are never built, suggesting that many of them are just investor scams. Showing their work on power supply would (presumably) make the scam harder to run.

You might think that ordering cases of canned tomatoes, or a 10-year supply of rubber gloves are poor management decisions, but that’s because this AI is playing seven dimensional chess against your tic-tac-toe. Just wait until it’s cornered the tomato market, and then you’ll see.

What I don’t get is: why? I mean, this independent is clearly going to caucus with the Dems in Washington, so he’ll “count” as a Democrat. He’s clearly got the support of the Democratic party leadership. He appears to be a Democrat in all but name, and the only thing I can think is it’s to avoid reflexive hatred of the (D) in deep red Nebraska. Run a democrat as an independent, in the same way the GOP tried to run a candidate as a Dem.

I’d think it would be obvious as a general principle, and I’m kind of surprised that AOC’s position is more strict: Don’t trust MTG on Gaza or Israel.

Maybe they do commercial customers different, but I’m about 30 miles north of the site in question, and my water use is reported in real time. I can even get a daily report from their web site. It’s hard to believe they’d be less interested in the usage of their 1e6-gallon-per-year commercial customers than their 1e4-gallon-per-year residential customers.

Water company can measure the water that leaves their pumping station(s) - just put a flow meter on the one big pipe. If that doesn’t match the sum of all their customer meters, then water is going somewhere else - broken pipe, illegal connection, meter fraud, whatever.

I would guess that most jurisdictions already have that one big flow meter, because they have to comply with water rights agreements, have to know how much chlorine & fluoride to inject, etc.

Kind of fascinating that they don’t do any kind of reconciliation of water delivered against water billed. You’d think that would be an easy thing to do and a good way to discover leaks (or theft). I mean, there would definitely be ‘missing’ water due to leaks, fire department, etc, but one imagines that would have some kind of normal/tolerable range, and that 30 million missing gallons would trigger some kind of investigation prior to customer complaints.

Right: SSA buys a treasury bill, and congress gets to treat that as income for the general budget. For a long time, SSA was the largest holder of US debt. Their surplus has been falling, while the Federal Reserve has bought up tons of Treasuries every time there’s an economic crisis and have now eclipsed SSA. Fed holds about $4.5T, while Japan holds barely $1.2T

Whether you think of these inter-governmental loans as “investments,” is probably a matter of where you fall on pedantry. If I take a loan from my 401k for down payment on a house, I don’t think of that as “investing” my 401k in the house.

Social security is not an investment at all. It’s young people giving money to old people.

For a while, the country didn’t have very many old people, so some of the young-people tax went into the general budget (through purchase of US Treasury bills). Now there’s too many old people, and you can bet that the general budget won’t be giving them anything.

News loves to talk about Trump’s 33% approval rating, but that is 66% of the GOP. Add on some people leaving the GOP over the pedo-issue, the war-issue, or the grift-issue, and Trump should do well in primaries. Terrible in the general, but good in primary.

Just gotta watch out for 2020 republicans running as 2026 democrats.