Most likely scenario is a janitor who installed an app (I'm guessing it was called LegitWorldCupWatch420696969) on his phone (which might be connecting to the wifi network from whatever locker he leaves it in while he's on the clock, the WH is not a giant SCIF). Or any number of other mundane, easy to overlook employees who work outside of the actual secured areas of the building.
> Any new datacenters being built cannot raise utility rates
DCs do not raise utility rates, utility companies raise rates in response to demand, but aside from that nitpick there is a bigger problem here. If the DC is not connected to the grid then the DC is going to generate power on its own, using inefficient (due to the small scale) and polluting systems (e.g. turbine generators).
If you actually want to address the utility bill impacts of DCs, you should require them to pay the local community. We have a similar arrangement for oil drilling -- to avoid a situation where companies pile onto oil fields and put derricks up on every property, we instead have the companies pay people who own the land above the oil being extracted and that is why Beverly Hills is such a wealthy neighborhood. Give money to the local community in proportion to the electricity consumed by the data center.
Frankly we should require DCs to pay even more when they are not attached to the grid to discourage pollution.
> Datacenters must not touch our waterways at all
...at all? Not even with a connection to the local water utility? That would mean there cannot even be a toilet in the building.
Data centers are industrial operations and should be treated as such -- I do not know of any other industry where this kind of absolute isolation from the local community is being called for, and there are plenty of concerns about industrial water use beyond data centers.
This is like saying "tech employees don't raise rents, landlords raise rents in response to tech employees offering their fat salaries" - it's a distinction without a difference and the end result is what people object to.
OK, let's take that example. It is true -- landlords are responsible for raising rents, and they do so in response to demand for housing. In some places, landlords are not allowed to arbitrarily raise rents -- for example, by limiting rent increases to follow the CPI. In theory you could regulate utility rates to insulate communities from the impact of DCs and other industrial operations.
Like I said, it is a nitpick and there are bigger problems here.
Right, but the point is not that it is possible, it is that there are other, more important issues here. Let's say we regulate the utilities so that residential customers will not be impacted by industrial users (or by DC operators specifically). The result would be higher utility bills for those industrial users, which would encourage the use of things like turbine generators -- which I would say is a negative outcome we should avoid.
It needs to be carefully thought out (Congress does not have the best record on this -- see e.g. the ban on onion futures). As I suggested elsewhere, a better idea would be to require DCs to pay the local community in proportion to the electricity consumed by the DC, and an even larger payment to the local community if the DC does not get its power from the grid (to discourage less efficient/more polluting power generation). Yes, rates would be higher, but people would be compensated with cash and it would be a big incentive for industrial users to be more energy efficient and a small nudge for residential users.
This reminds me of the short-form video (Daily Show?) I saw recently of a man in a red hat insisting that the government should facilitate union workers increasingly gaining ownership of the companies and corporations they work for.
You know, like workers seizing the means of production.
But then in the next breath condemning the concept of socialism. But probably because JD Vance himself has redefined socialism to mean forcing girls to play with boys in sports.
Rents rise in proportion to the rest of the market, you look at comparables. The market is a function of supply and demand. When my city passed a bunch of tenant laws ~16k units left the market and rents went up proportionally.
> utility companies raise rates in response to demand,
That's less than a half truth.
Here's the full version:
Utility companies raise rates in order to build new power plants for the sole use and benefit of a single big biz customer who demands that all pay for the new plants his big biz needs.
The farm might not have made food and it might not have made food for human consumption, and even if it did make food it might not be the kind we need to survive. Remember that there are plenty of farms that exist to produce ethanol, HFCS, or inputs for beer/whiskey/etc. makers (which we do not actually need -- drinking is fun but hardly necessary for survival).
...so building that nuclear reactor would be a good thing since it will emit far less carbon than those natural gas generators (not to mention all the other pollution that nuclear plants do not emit). Hook the DC up to the grid and expand nuclear power to simultaneously accommodate the load and decommission fossil fuel plants. Wins all around.
Slow to build, capital intensive. I would have loved a large build out of nuclear 30 years ago. Even now if you get one online more power to you. I just don't see it ever being a major part of the solution now. It's time came and went.
1) Years. I would say reducing carbon emissions is a higher priority for humanity than building more DCs, so building the nuclear plant should be a prerequisite for building the DC.
2) Dry cask storage. It works and it is extremely safe, you can leave the casks on site or bury them wherever you want. The most significant concern with nuclear waste is not the radiation, it is the possibility of radioactive materials leaking into the environment and that is exactly the problem dry casks solve.
2.1) Reprocessing, you can reduce the volume of nuclear waste by recycling fissile uranium and plutonium from spent fuel into new fuel pellets. The remaining waste is typically embedded in glass, which can be placed in dry cask storage (see above).
Nuclear waste is not the problem people think it is. We know how to deal with it and we have been dealing with it for a long time now. For comparison, solar panels do break down over time and solar panel waste includes several toxic heavy metals that can leak into the local environment. Nobody objects to solar power by pointing to the waste stream (let alone the waste created by all those batteries that you need to make solar power useful for industrial operations like DCs).
Shockingly...yes, and in some cases that is being done intentionally e.g. solar/battery systems require communication within the grid and the Internet is being used as the network.
What makes this particularly embarrassing is that power companies literally run thousands of miles of cables and could easily build a private network instead of using the Internet. The regulations should be amended to require it.
Private networks are not that much of a savior... It is incredibly easy to bridge networks intentionally or unintentionally. Stuxnet is just one example. Even private networks have to be as completely secure as a public one. Worse because it's 'private' people think it needs less internal security because "Why secure it, no one can get to it".
The military's approach to that problem is to use color-coded cables and ports, and we already use things like 802.1x to prevent unauthorized devices from being attached to corporate networks. This is not a novel or unsolvable problem.
Again, STUXNET shows that bugs get into authorized devices really easily. One of the biggest issues is you have power guys that don't know dick about computer security using fleets of laptops that will need a huge amount of training to bring them up to the needed high levels of security.
More so there are thousands of these devices out in the field in power company trucks. All it takes is someone picking one of these up and infecting it for the problems to spread.
It is an insanely hard problem to solve. Breaches happen in military networks pretty often. As a measure of secrecy, they never tell you about it.
I would not call STUXNET proof that this can be done "easily" -- that was joint work by the NSA and Israeli intelligence, who are among the best hackers in the world, and it used 4 separate 0days simultaneously.
While you certainly make a good point about the difficulties that come with securing the laptops and other equipment, the military has the same problem. Most of the users of classified military systems are not themselves experts in computer security. The necessary training is not a graduate level course in security; it is training people to always match cable colors to port colors, to only use laptops provisioned by the organization, etc. The military disables, sometimes by physical means, USB ports on laptops that are used on classified networks to close one of the key security holes Stuxnet took advantage of.
Sure, it is challenging, but this is not impossible to solve. Utilities would have to be forced to do it and they would need time to overhaul their operations, but they certainly can do it, and there is an argument that the NSA's IA division should help (as the electrical grid is a critical for national security). It can be done, we just have to be willing to do it (and pay the cost of doing it).
If Kalshi is not a gambling operation then it is an unregulated futures market, which is still illegal. There are perverse incentives in futures markets too, which is why they are regulated.
Also speculators serve an important purpose: hedging strategies require speculators on the other side. It is not just a "certain clientele," there are people who run profitable businesses on speculation (it amounts to collecting insurance premiums from people who want hedges).
> Kalshi is very clearly a licensed futures market regulated by the CFTC
As an excluded commodity. Based on the CFTC's own rule making. Based on this logic the SEC can go back to deciding it gets to regulate anything as securities fraud.
Describing an organization with a license from the CFTC as an "unregulated futures market" is just flat wrong, I'm not really sure why you're motte-baileying here.
They offer contracts that are almost certainly outside the scope of regulation, an appeals court has already ruled that some of their contracts are indeed subject to state laws and not CFTC regulation, and they are continuing to push the envelope. How is it wrong to call them an unregulated market under the circumstances?
Bernie Madoff's operation was also subject to a regulator and was properly registered as a broker-dealer; that did not somehow make it a regulated operation, at least not in the sense of actually complying with the regulations. Boiler rooms are also subject to a regulator (the SEC) and obviously are not regulated brokerages.
Really it sounds like this is a disagreement about what it means for a market to be "regulated" -- I draw the line at compliance, you seem to draw the line elsewhere.
Not to go prescriptivist, but yes I think your "line" for regulated is just semantically incorrect, a non-compliant organization can still be regulated.
The CFTC was created to hedge real risk. Onions iirc?
Kalshi creates risk where there was none before. The 'future' on the 'commodity' of 'number of dunks by an aging shaq at a halftime show'.
Courts have taken the dimmest possible view of this legal fabrication and I expect their losses in courts to continue without direct intervention by the Trump scions.
People will say (including in this thread) that it allows them to hedge against negative outcomes. What negative outcomes are experienced by someone hedging against whether LeBron flies his helicopter to practice or not?
If it is not gambling then it amounts to an unregulated futures market, which is also illegal. There is no way around this for Kalshi/Polymarket, they have broken the law and the only question is which law was broken.
Right, but the point is that we don't just go from popular outrage about a shady business model to "straight to prison". The courts have to untangle the legalities of the shady business model before we can even determine what the charges would be. And that's what they're doing.
People who believe in justice and democracy, or what? We need to hold people accountable for their crimes. Fines and other slaps on the wrist let big tobacco, big ultraprocessed food, and now big gambling to take advantage. What would you do? Wait for the courts? Wait for the corrupt legislature?
Read about the "rule of law," one of the foundational concepts of the US and basically any democracy, as well as most successful monarchies and other forms of government.
Yes, we wait for the courts or the legislature rather than resorting to mob justice. There are good reasons for it. The most obvious is to ensure that the corrupt politicians do not use the power of the state to arbitrarily oppress and persecute people. Another is to ensure that there is no doubt about guilt when we convict someone, and to avoid arguments about the penalties being arbitrary and unfair.
Really though, establishing courts to deal with accusations of people breaking the law is something most societies converge on at some point. "Joe was only ordered to spend 5 years working the fields, so why should Jim be executed for doing the same thing????" amounts to a rudimentary form of judicial law -- pointing to a precedent from a previous case to argue the current case.
I would rather we have plain language legislation than playing this dumb waiting game of "well, I felt like interpreting these 20 laws and 16 cases this way today, and my successors will overturn this with the flick of a pen". It doesnt help that our legislature, and even many of our jurists, are bought out ever since the Citizens United decision.
> I would rather we have plain language legislation
I doubt that you would be happy with the outcome, certainly not if you had to actual deal with such a legal system. Plain language laws sound great in theory, but in practice the result is a rigid system that is easily manipulated by bad actors and which becomes oppressive to honest people.
"No, I am not marketing a tobacco product, I am marketing a product that produces nicotine from other chemicals, then vaporizes it to be inhaled!"
"If I had not done it, my children would have been seriously injured, are you really going to imprison me for protecting them?"
In general, whenever a society tries to apply its legal code, it will begin to develop judicial law by necessity -- at some point you will have to deal with borderline cases where it is not clear if the law was broken, no matter how clear the language of the law might appear. Here is an ancient example taken from the bible: the death penalty shall only be imposed on the basis of testimony from two witnesses. OK, seems pretty clear, but we know from the Talmud that questions arose when the law was applied -- who counts as a witness, what counts as testimony from a witness, etc.
Also keep in mind that no matter how plainly laws are written down, over time you will wind up with a large number of laws as society deals with changing conditions and unforeseen circumstances. Inevitably you wind up with contradictory laws and you do need some process for resolving the contradiction and determining which law should be applied.
I don't understand how we can all look at a clear cut case of violation of the principles of our existing laws and act like, yeah guys, judicial review will just fix this over time, rather than compounding the problems.
The rigidity concept you talk about effectively exists in our current system, too, it's just a matter of perspective. If the law is written in such a poor way so as to need review, and the legislators and executives in on the bill know where the jurists who will review it stand, theyve effectively got the different, rigid law they wanted until someone decides to review again. Review, with no particular cadence, or urgency, etc. I actually do think review is good, but it shouldn't stand in for actual legislation (which since about the 80s it has, largely due to Reagan era deregulation)
Maybe the breakage is somewhere else -- I talked about Citizens United elsewhere, which effectively lets corporations buy votes from legislators, and we know at least 2 of the current justices are flat-out corrupt, getting gifts and financial help from millionaire and billionaire friends.
That is the federal government asserting that Kalshi is subject to federal regulation by the CFTC and not state regulation. It is not an assertion that Kalshi is actually in compliance with futures market regulations, nor is it an assertion that the contracts offered by Kalshi are actually legal (there are explicitly illegal futures contracts).
You still have to double check the Agent's grading as they still make frequent minor mistakes, that while they don't really impact coding as much or can be caught with tests, that is not the case here.
The actual question to ask is if the agent makes more mistakes than a human being. Grading homework involves reading over similar/identical answers to the same questions over and over, and it is easy for human beings to make mistakes while doing that.
(That is basically the argument for OCR in the postal system -- it does make mistakes but it makes fewer mistakes than human beings.)
Have you ever graded tests for an entire class? I did so for two years when I was a PhD student and had to work as a TA. It does not matter if you are an expert in the subject because the problem has nothing to do with expertise, it has to do with how our brains work. The worst case is when most of the class answers the question correctly, and you don't encounter a mistake until you have finished grading most of the tests -- your brain really wants to just keep repeating the same motion (e.g. writing a check mark) and even if you spot the error you might accidentally mark it correct anyway.
Really though, this is missing the point. Yes, grading tests and homework is different from sorting mail, but both are tedious tasks that involve a lot of repetitive actions -- hard for the human brain, but easy for software. Software does not get tired or distracted by other responsibilities (or non-responsibilities). We have already been using software to grade tests for a long time now, but mostly for multiple choice questions; AI will expand the scope of that.
Nuclear strike orders do not require high bandwidth. The orders contain targeting information and arming codes, all of which is pre-programmed on the missiles (the target package is specified with a "pointer" -- the computers on the missiles already have all the details, the order simply identifies which set of details should be used). For ICBM crews it is conceivable that orders could be transmitted on high-bandwidth systems, but for submarines that is not even possible (ELF bands have to be used because of the physical properties of ocean water).
The basic launch sequence is this: a missile crew receives a series of characters and both missileers write the characters down. They check against a codebook and verify that they both heard the same message and that it is a valid launch order. If the message is valid, they unlock the launch keys (from a box secured by two combination locks, each missileer knows the combination for one lock), insert the keys, enter the missile launch unlock code, enter the warhead arming code, turn the keys, and then that's that.
(There are several other steps -- go watch a video of a test launch and listen to the operators read off the checklist, there are quite a few steps. If you are wondering why such information is public, it is meant to reassure the other side that there is no possibility of unauthorized or unintentional launches -- we want our adversaries to know how we control our nuclear forces so they don't panic and preemptively attack us)
> we want our adversaries to know how we control our nuclear forces so they don't panic and preemptively attack us
The Russian’s dead man switch is the exact opposite. I wonder if it’s still in place.
Quick question though - are their fake launches to see if crew would actually send the nukes? I’m picturing like a firing squad where nobody knows who has the real bullet
> Quick question though - are their fake launches to see if crew would actually send the nukes? I’m picturing like a firing squad where nobody knows who has the real bullet
That's exactly what we were told when I toured a Titan II launch facility [0], but I have no idea if that still applies to the modern Minuteman III facilities that this article is about.
> The Russian’s dead man switch is the exact opposite. I wonder if it’s still in place.
Perimetr? That's misunderstood. The idea behind Perimetr was that the Premier of the USSR did not have first-strike authority. Only the Politburo did.
After they got rid of Stalin, the later governments of the USSR were very wary of a leader with too much power. Further down, control was divided between the KGB, which controlled the warheads, and the Strategic Rocket Forces, which controlled the launchers.
The most the Premier could do on his own was enable Perimetr. If it detected actual nuclear explosions and could not communicate with any of the top command bunkers, it would, after a delay of hours, release the arming codes for ICBMs to lower levels of authority.
So it only worked for a second strike where a first strike had taken out most of the leadership. That was more restrictive than the US system.
Today, both Putin and Trump have first strike authority. Sleep well.
Yes. But you have to go beyond page one of Google results because there is so much slop, human and otherwise. See [1] for a technical overview. See page 14 of [2]
for the strategic and political aspects of who controlled what in a crisis.
"Cheget No. 1 (the Soviet premier's portable terminal) had
priority status: its owner could enact heightened level of
alert and, after the early warning system registered the
launch of U.S. nuclear weapons, give launch order (transmit
codes unblocking the launch command)." That's the key point. The premier of the USSR did not have personal first strike authority.
Putin, however, has said that he now does. Trump has first-strike authority too.
The definitive book on this seems to be "Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces"[3], an English translation from MIT Press of a Soviet-era document. That's what the good sources cite.
It's more that fallout shelters are basically useless even if you manage to get yourself inside before the detonation.
Basically, you would run out of water, and even if you have clean water you would still run out of food, even if you survived the strike and the fallout. We cannot actually live without major transportation hubs to deliver food etc., which by necessity are located in or near the major urban areas that would be destroyed in a nuclear war. That, more than anything else, is why the US and USSR ultimately abandoned "civil defense" and focused on "deterrence."
If this were true, then without constant resupply, space travel would be impossible. Yes the ISS crew get resupply, but if you’ve got a big enough bunker, you should still be able to feed a skeleton crew of a functioning government etc
Eh, you can store literally years of food and water in a shelter. The worst of the fallout burns off in weeks, and the rest is usually gone in a month or two except for some hot spots.
It’s why Hiroshima and Nagasaki were repopulated so quickly.
But yes, good point regarding the rest of the infrastructure.
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