Pete's not gonna pay his employees.
Donald Trump’s war on Iran has driven the US military into a severe financial crisis, with the US navy forced to transfer money from its payroll and other sources to cover the costs of combat, according to documents seen by the Guardian, and interviews with navy officials, contractors and defense analysts.
No worries. I'm sure there will be an emergency supplemental. For the troops. Can't abandon the troops, Democrats!
There is regularly a lot of talk about people existing in discourse bubbles - you exist in one, of course, I do not - such that alternative viewpoints are never heard. This is usually aimed at lefties! As if most media isn't blaring a combination of Washington Consensus/Right Wing views 24/7, and left wing views are, as I said, only presented as caricatures.
Left wing views are only ever discussed by people who don't share them!
No one in the New York Times (for example) is ever presenting, as their the own, the hegemonic Woke Viewpoint that half their columnists are arguing with most of the time.
One real reason to be opposed to data centers is everyone can see big tech is just stomping on the law (remember that quaint concept) and nobody stops them.
The largest planned AI data center in New Jersey is being accused of violating federal law after a Floodlight visual investigation found the site running dozens of unpermitted gas-powered generators.
Thermal drone footage we captured last week showed the partly completed DataOne facility in Vineland was operating at least 45 of the site's 62 generators at the time.
DataOne has stirred controversy since breaking ground in 2025 due to persistent noise complaints, unpermitted construction and a contentious zoning process. It's located about 40 miles outside Philadelphia and slated to provide AI computing power to Microsoft as part of a $17-billion deal with Nebius, a Dutch AI infrastructure giant.
Located roughly a mile from two schools, the tractor-trailer-size generators emit substantial amounts of health-harming air pollution linked to asthma, heart attacks and even premature death.
It probably takes 2 years to get a permit to open a food truck (yes I made that up for rhetorical effect), the type of thing the Abundance crew were supposed to be spending their time on.
Thompson: I want to re-circle something that you said because I think it’s so important. When I’m on social media, on Twitter, following the arguments among people who are building AI, I’ll often see them make this fact check where they’ll say, “There’s this popular claim about data centers using all of this water, but in fact, data centers use much less water than is commonly assumed.” But that fact check is often assumed to do the job of proving that anti–data center politics is based on a myth. And what your reporting, I think, does so well is it shows that the actual on-the-ground opposition to data centers is so much more complicated than just a single factoid about water use.This still caricatures the water issue even as it acknowledges there are other complaints.
European football's governing body UEFA is preparing to bring criminal proceedings against FIFA President Gianni Infantino over the attempt to sell shares in the World Cup to private investors.Sounds a bit weird, but other countries have somewhat different legal systems and ways of talking about them!
The revelation is contained in legal documents, with UEFA subpoenaing FIFA and the financial institutions involved in the US to obtain documents related to the scheme.
But the planned legal action would be launched in Switzerland, where FIFA has its main headquarters.
Inspiring choice, Jeffries.“As long as you're an ally of ours, I'm not for conditioning weapons to Israel.”
— Prem Thakker (@prem_thakker) August 26, 2026
Jared Moskowitz — who leadership just tapped to lead the Middle East & North Africa subcommittee — said in April he doesn’t support conditioning arms to Israel, even if it breaks international law: pic.twitter.com/r7P4yaDxm8
I'm curious which goods they have in mind:
(Bloomberg) -- The Trump administration's top trade negotiator suggested the US ought to consider banning some Canadian goods, injecting another threat into a trade dispute between Washington and Ottawa.
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"Canada has banned the sale of liquor and spirits. We haven't banned anything from Canada. You know, they've capped the type of autos we can bring in, they've banned certain goods and services from procurement in the provinces," US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said in an interview with Canadian Broadcasting Corp. on Wednesday.
"Canada" hasn't banned the sales. Most of the provinces did.
The funny thing is that I bet they haven't thought about it. I'm sure the Canadians have had the "break glass in case of Donald" binders prepared for various contingencies for awhile. That's why they can quickly figure out how to cause the maximum pain (hitting important employers in swing states and small but critical supplies). I bet the Trumpers didn't make a plan.
"Infant" almost certainly means before they would've been given a measles vaccine, which would mean they are the victim of other people not being vaccinated and the general decline of population immunity.
One of the two people who recently died of measles in Pennsylvania was an infant, the state Health Department said Wednesday.
The department announced Tuesday that two unvaccinated residents had died of measles, the first measles-related deaths in the U.S. this year and the first in Pennsylvania in 35 years.
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Both were residents of Lancaster County, where the share of kids who have gotten the MMR vaccine fell from 95.5% in 2017 to 87.6% last year.
Yah Bill Gates just needed some additional funds.
Bill Gates tells Axios his association with Jeffrey Epstein was a "huge mistake" but hopes it won't prevent him from influencing debates over artificial intelligence and global health.
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"What I did do, in some ways, was very limited, and it was motivated by my desire to raise money," Gates said. "But … it was a huge mistake."
Darline Graham: Government run health care…. bad idea after bad idea. Annie Andrews backs it all. I have a different background. My parents worked long, hard hours. If that were sick, they had to get up and go to work. My mother passed away when I was 11 and my father just over… pic.twitter.com/fvFCrmudhi
— Acyn (@Acyn) August 26, 2026
Just amazing stuff here, about a young guy whose hedge fund just tanked.
For the past few years, at happy hours and dinner parties in San Francisco, Leopold Aschenbrenner kept confusing people by sharing his favorite outlandish idea.
He wanted to buy galaxies.
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His idea was that advances in artificial intelligence would soon unlock resources on a cosmic scale, enabling humans to colonize faraway planets. He planned to save money now so he could spend on galaxies, he told them, and make his mark across the universe.
Who do you buy them from? What, exactly, does ownership even give you in this scifi presumably post-scarcity civilization?
Two years ago, he made bold predictions about the impending arrival of superintelligence, writing in a 165-page manifesto called “Situational Awareness” that AI would lead to one of the “most intense and volatile moments of human history.” He quickly turned that interest into money for a hedge fund that eventually managed $45 billion in assets, backed by investors who believed in his prophecy—or his ability to profit from it.
He was barely of drinking age and had no prior investing experience, but his cozy relationships inside the industry fed into his reputation as an oracle of AI—someone who knew more about where the elusive technology was headed than legacy money managers living in New York. He mixed the personal and professional in a city where the two are rarely kept apart.
“There are perhaps a few hundred people, most of them in San Francisco and the AI labs, that have situational awareness,” he wrote in his viral essay. “Through whatever peculiar forces of fate, I have found myself amongst them.”
There are very few people with superpower-tinged genius. It seems I am one of them?
As the big day approached, Aschenbrenner’s friends, former colleagues and fellow members of the Silicon Valley intelligentsia filtered into the wedding hotel. There were more than a dozen Anthropic employees on the guest list, as well as MacAskill and others from the FTX Future Fund, plus effective altruists and the billionaires who had put their money into Situational Awareness.
The wedding was officiated by Ross Douthat, the former New York Times columnist who recently joined “60 Minutes.” He had reached out to Aschenbrenner after reading his manifesto, and they met last year when his family was on a California road trip. Aschenbrenner and Balwit hosted them for dinner, Douthat said, soliciting marriage advice from him and his wife and shocking their children with predictions about AI.
Ah the EA/longtermist con artist freaks of course.
But Trump himself has rejected that approach. House and Senate Democrats, the president noted during the meeting, will make their fall campaigns a referendum on him. His advisers told him that the poor polling reflects the fact that the voting public still does not know about many of his accomplishments—the dozens of new stock-market highs, a decline in fentanyl deaths, the “sealed” southern border, the increase in domestic-manufacturing production.The solution Trump settled on, according to three people familiar with the meeting, was to lean into the Democratic strategy of focusing on himself. The president ordered a series of television advertisements about his own record that will serve as a backdrop to the hundreds of individual House and Senate contests. Trump wanted what one person described to us as “environmental lift” ads—commercials that would focus on nationalizing the midterms broadly around his victories—and he suggested that the ad makers mine his own on-camera statements as building blocks. “Go look at the clips,” the president told his team, according to this person. “I cite accomplishments all the time.”
It is smarter than "we know we're shit but vote for us anyway."