Except that musk didn't buy Twitter for the reason you give.
Just look back at his attempts to get out from buying. He was forced to buy Twitter after Twitter management concluded that the offer was so good for the shareholders that it would be criminal not to accept.
Then things went from bad to worse for him and there was no way Twitter, at that point rebranded as X, could repay the bridge loans, and possible not the interest (floating rates aren't the smartest thing if you are already hovering at 10% rates when the Fed is doing rate repression) on the longer term loans. So he got out of that by buying X again through SpaceX, the only company he had that had could do do an all stock buyout at a fantasy valuation of $45 billion and thus repaying every lender and holder of X stock/bonds.
Which is impressive since the SpaceX division is operating at a loss, the AI division is operating at a bigger loss, the X division is operating at maybe break even but most likely at a loss (especially when that slew of lawsuits that resulted from the "I can cut the costs since I don't have to obey the law"-attitude come home to roost). The only division that seems to be making money is the Starlink division, which is bringing in enough gross that it halves the total loss all the other SpaceX divisions generate.
It is a bit different. The money lenders balked (WSJ through archive) at there only being one tenant for Abilene, Oracle. So the actual developer shopped around for other tenants.
The plans are for 20 buildings, only 8 are being built. Of those 8 only 2 are operational providing about ~200 MW of compute, a third is finished but empty. As pointed out the tenant is Oracle not OpenAI. That means that Oracle is a NeoCloud provider and that OpenAI rents compute from Oracle.
As written the actual developer shopped around for more tenants and managed to sign up Microsoft for 700 MW of compute or 7 extra buildings. Extra buildings, not taking ownership of the remaining 6 buildings being build for the tenant Oracle.
The wrench being that for more compute then what is currently online they need to get the power sorted. And there is some building for this going on but the time frame to get all the power needed is unknown.
Final wrinkle is that according to Oracle, Oracle spends $2 for every $1 it makes on renting out GB200 compute. Abilene contains only GB200 hardware (gross margin: -100%, it is even worse then that when you add in everything else that has to be paid from the margin). That is only for the chips actually online, not the warehouse full of chips to be installed in the other buildings which deprecate just as fast.
The shipping logjam is driving up gas prices and making life difficult for Republicans ahead of the midterms.
I've got some good and bad news. The good news is that there will be more to make life difficult for the current crop of Republicans. The bad news is that the same problems will crater the world economy and spread misery all around.
Opening Hormuz tomorrow, and ship owners and insurers willing to take the transit, will only soften the blow since it will take, if things go perfectly, half a year to normalize. By the time that the Strait of Hormuz is more likely to open again, and the conflicting priorities around the world, that period can easily take one and a half years after reopening.
The not so fun bits of world production passing through Hormuz:
* ~30% of fertilizers or fertilizer precursors. Just start looking around in the US to see the staggering number of farmers (varies in estimates though from 10% to a whopping 25%) not planting all they can due to the rising fertilizer prices before the actual shortage arrives in the US.
* 20% of LNG. Used in the EU for heating/electricity production. Similarly in Asia but it is also a precursor for some forms of plastic & medicine. That is packaging (among the many uses of plastic) and generic medication for the EU and US market. Also cleaner fuel for some forms of transportation.
* 30% of helium. Oh hello very expensive MRI magnet now playing paperweight. Also the electronics industry uses about 1/3 of the total worldwide helium production.
* 45% of sulfur. About half already accounted for in fertilizer production. Other half is for metal extraction from ore, or chemical precursors (China just restricted export of sulfuric acid for this reason).
* 50% Urea. Do note that a significant part of this is already account for since it is a precursor for fertilizer, but there are other significant applications as well. De-icer, plastic production, catalyst for diesel exhaust NOx reduction.
* 20% of oil (closer to 15% with the various bypasses available at the moment). Plastic, fuel, feedstock for more stuff we take for granted then can be easily listed but it includes things like clothing and detergent.
Under the scrapped harm-prevention framework, they said, plans for civilian protection would’ve begun months ago, when orders to draw up a potential Iran campaign likely came down from the White House and Pentagon.
Uh. There is a wrong assumption here. That this attack was planned months ago instead of a week or two at most, which would explain the use of AI to draw up a target list, seeing that Karcher was only booted from his job as director of the JCS on Feb 26.
Doesn't really matter if the ship was unarmed or not.
The question is: "Is the U.S. at war with Iran?", seeing that under certain circumstances even unarmed merchant ships flying an enemy flag can be legally targetted let alone warships.
The problem is that the US is de jure not at war with Iran, de facto they are. And that is going to be a mess for people better educated in this then me to discuss.
Similarly the not rescuing of survivors is not as clear cut as a war crime since the relevant treaty makes it conditional on capability (subs don't have a lot of room and/or life rafts) and enemy threats in the area (2nd Iranian ships now alerted to an enemy sub).
That said this was stupid. They could have tailed the ship back to Iran and torpedoed it close to the war zone. Doing it here the US has annoyed (or worse) India by using their exercise to target Iran. What is also illuminating is to see general public opinion of the US going after the ship, which would be a reflection of the opinion of the US going after Irian, with even a news paper like the Guardian getting an expert on record stating this is illegal.
It is looks like the attack on the school was deliberate.
The compound they hit was initially completely IRGC but over the years parts were split from it for public uses. The IRGC still had about a 1/3 of the location on the other side of the compound in use for military purposes. Israel or US hit that side and the school with precision munitions leaving the rest of the area untouched.
Similar attacks on schools, clinics/hospitals and police stations are being reported all over the area of Iran that stand off munitions can reach.
This kind of attack is SOP for Israel, break the population, get the other side to back down by killing the civilians the other side is supposed to protect, hope that the civilians will revolt.
With regards to the video game footage. Iran specifically designed their transport erector launchers (TEL) to look like normal cargo trucks.
Combine this with, currently, a lead time between detection and interception of 30+ minutes, and that is if a drone is observing the area, while it takes 15 to 20 minutes launch then leave and the number of hits after the first two days of the war on TELs has dropped drastically.
Similarly the Iranian air force is a joke due to sanctions. Heck they tried to intercept a F-35 with a Yak-130 which is normally an unarmed training aircraft. So video of planes being blown up is video of "we need to waste ammunition, time, etc. just to make sure that what is most likely a decoy is gone just in case it isn't but one of the few aircraft capable to take to the air for combat missions".
With regards to Catholics and vaccines.
At the point that vaccines became available for COVID Pope Francis started with declaring taking a vaccines was the right thing to do for Catholics. He eventually escalated that to not taking the vaccine was the equivalent of attempting direct suicide. And for Catholics any attempt at direct suicide that doesn't get absolved by clergy before a person dies is a go straight to hell sin.
You really missed the point.
Worse you just made the argument that there are no journalists when you made that denial of being a shill.
If I have a phone and record what law enforcement (or people pretending to be law enforcement while actually trying to be brown shirts using intimidation tactics in service of their fascist overlord(s) ) then you have to consider me a journalist.
Why? Doing anything else turns the people that do not want to be recorded by journalists, whether professional or amateur, into gatekeepers determining who is allowed to record them.
Further in the USA the right of journalists to observe/record is based on the broader 1st amendment right of freedom of speech, just specifically enunciated. All the attempts at creating restrictions on who, or how someone, is allowed to record law enforcement have been struck down by courts for that reason.
The blame should be directed at EA. BioWare is owned by Electronic Arts and just develops the games. EA determines what happens with a game and in case of a shutdown how it happens (and since making it so that fans can operate it costs time and money, oh and it is EA' intellectual property so EA goes how dare you suggest they sort of put it in the public).
Anthem is just one of three games being shutdown by EA this month.
The reason why we should care is that it doesn't just target the people deciding that their kids don't get vaccinated.
Their kids do not decide to not get the shots.
Then there are the people who for some reason cannot receive vaccines (for example the immune-compromised).
The people who get the shot but where it doesn't take.
The people who the shots worked but are fighting of something else.
Don't forget the babies to young to get vaccinated. First shot for measles for example is 12 months.
And if that isn't enough; Not enough of the unvaccinated die to have it work as natural selection. Ending up with long term effects tends to be more likely (for example the wipe of the immune system long term memory as a result of contracting measles).
Doesn't always work. Just check some of the reactions (including Catholics) to the Pope doing just that when, and after, the COVID19 vaccine became available.
It’s very interesting just how much one god or another enjoys infecting their believers with measles.
I suggest to add "according to those same believers." to the end of that line.
The leaders of (at least the big) religions tend to tell their followers to vaccinate.
If that’s not evidence of a profound cognitive failure that warrants serious discussion about fitness for office, what is?
They had him undergo what sounds like a dementia test (That person, man, woman, camera, TV line by Trump) and found it not a problem that they felt the need to give their candidate a test like that.
The reason that Measles doesn't mutate to bypass vaccines is not that it sticks to the unvaccinated. Since every single time it tries to infect a vaccinated person that is a test to see if that strain of Measles can bypass the vaccination.
Which is why antivaxxers are so dangerous, they not just harm themselves and their kids, they create a larger, for lack of better description, pool of test subjects to see if a vaccination against a disease can be bypassed.
Why in the hell do we have to wait for those horrors to resurface before we put this diseased genie back in the bottle?
That is the "good" news. You don't have to wait. It'll be conspiracy theories and excuses all the way to the intensive care and then denials about reality.
This will take a generation or two, until the point where people surviving vaccine preventable diseases as invalids are a daily encounter on the streets again. And even then the denials will keep coming.
Don't blame the content creators for a possible data winter blame the owners of the various advanced chatbots (and that is what they are even though everyone dresses them up in buzz & hype words as to get money to burn) for that.
It is a combination of
* the crawlers absolutely hammering websites with requests. And don't you dare to impede that in anyway as the result is an even worse flood in an attempt to bypass the restrictions.
* The search engines damaging the content creator income by AI slopping said creators website in a blurb stopping people from actually visiting those sites (even if due to the mixing of multiple sites the chance that what comes out if correct is worse then betting on a coin toss if the subject in question is not settled).
* What is being produced by those bot is slop, it takes at least as long to check what is being produced is usable and fixing what is wrong as doing the work yourself.
In aggregate a data winter would be a boon for content creators. If the bots keel over that means less costs to maintain a server, more income from actual people visiting the website (hopefully doing other actions that boost visibility/income) and about the same time to do the work as before the bots existed.
Those are power games.
Zelensky came to Washington hat in hand to ask for alms. Trumps people told him to come in a suit seeing that Trump earlier commented to them on Zelensky not wearing one (this would have earned him brownie points with Trump and thus would have made it more likely that Trump would listen to his pleas). Zelensky decided that he had enough power that he could ignore that and still get what he wanted.
Oh you mean when Musk used one of his other companies to buy Twitter/X at the $44 billion that Musk offered and had to pay for Twitter/X instead of the 1/4 (or less) that it is/was worth at that point?
Yeah the good news is that thanks to that they could pay the bridge loans in full instead of having to roll them over resulting in Twitter/X only losing about 3 billion a year instead of 4 billion a year.
The only thing it efficiently accomplished was proving that putting conspiracy theorists and tech bros in charge of life-and-death decisions with no oversight, guardrails, or expertise is a recipe for disaster on an unprecedented scale.
Except that musk didn't buy Twitter for the reason you give. Just look back at his attempts to get out from buying. He was forced to buy Twitter after Twitter management concluded that the offer was so good for the shareholders that it would be criminal not to accept. Then things went from bad to worse for him and there was no way Twitter, at that point rebranded as X, could repay the bridge loans, and possible not the interest (floating rates aren't the smartest thing if you are already hovering at 10% rates when the Fed is doing rate repression) on the longer term loans. So he got out of that by buying X again through SpaceX, the only company he had that had could do do an all stock buyout at a fantasy valuation of $45 billion and thus repaying every lender and holder of X stock/bonds. Which is impressive since the SpaceX division is operating at a loss, the AI division is operating at a bigger loss, the X division is operating at maybe break even but most likely at a loss (especially when that slew of lawsuits that resulted from the "I can cut the costs since I don't have to obey the law"-attitude come home to roost). The only division that seems to be making money is the Starlink division, which is bringing in enough gross that it halves the total loss all the other SpaceX divisions generate.
It is a bit different. The money lenders balked (WSJ through archive) at there only being one tenant for Abilene, Oracle. So the actual developer shopped around for other tenants. The plans are for 20 buildings, only 8 are being built. Of those 8 only 2 are operational providing about ~200 MW of compute, a third is finished but empty. As pointed out the tenant is Oracle not OpenAI. That means that Oracle is a NeoCloud provider and that OpenAI rents compute from Oracle. As written the actual developer shopped around for more tenants and managed to sign up Microsoft for 700 MW of compute or 7 extra buildings. Extra buildings, not taking ownership of the remaining 6 buildings being build for the tenant Oracle. The wrench being that for more compute then what is currently online they need to get the power sorted. And there is some building for this going on but the time frame to get all the power needed is unknown. Final wrinkle is that according to Oracle, Oracle spends $2 for every $1 it makes on renting out GB200 compute. Abilene contains only GB200 hardware (gross margin: -100%, it is even worse then that when you add in everything else that has to be paid from the margin). That is only for the chips actually online, not the warehouse full of chips to be installed in the other buildings which deprecate just as fast.
Doesn't really matter if the ship was unarmed or not. The question is: "Is the U.S. at war with Iran?", seeing that under certain circumstances even unarmed merchant ships flying an enemy flag can be legally targetted let alone warships. The problem is that the US is de jure not at war with Iran, de facto they are. And that is going to be a mess for people better educated in this then me to discuss. Similarly the not rescuing of survivors is not as clear cut as a war crime since the relevant treaty makes it conditional on capability (subs don't have a lot of room and/or life rafts) and enemy threats in the area (2nd Iranian ships now alerted to an enemy sub). That said this was stupid. They could have tailed the ship back to Iran and torpedoed it close to the war zone. Doing it here the US has annoyed (or worse) India by using their exercise to target Iran. What is also illuminating is to see general public opinion of the US going after the ship, which would be a reflection of the opinion of the US going after Irian, with even a news paper like the Guardian getting an expert on record stating this is illegal.
It is looks like the attack on the school was deliberate. The compound they hit was initially completely IRGC but over the years parts were split from it for public uses. The IRGC still had about a 1/3 of the location on the other side of the compound in use for military purposes. Israel or US hit that side and the school with precision munitions leaving the rest of the area untouched. Similar attacks on schools, clinics/hospitals and police stations are being reported all over the area of Iran that stand off munitions can reach. This kind of attack is SOP for Israel, break the population, get the other side to back down by killing the civilians the other side is supposed to protect, hope that the civilians will revolt. With regards to the video game footage. Iran specifically designed their transport erector launchers (TEL) to look like normal cargo trucks. Combine this with, currently, a lead time between detection and interception of 30+ minutes, and that is if a drone is observing the area, while it takes 15 to 20 minutes launch then leave and the number of hits after the first two days of the war on TELs has dropped drastically. Similarly the Iranian air force is a joke due to sanctions. Heck they tried to intercept a F-35 with a Yak-130 which is normally an unarmed training aircraft. So video of planes being blown up is video of "we need to waste ammunition, time, etc. just to make sure that what is most likely a decoy is gone just in case it isn't but one of the few aircraft capable to take to the air for combat missions".
With regards to Catholics and vaccines. At the point that vaccines became available for COVID Pope Francis started with declaring taking a vaccines was the right thing to do for Catholics. He eventually escalated that to not taking the vaccine was the equivalent of attempting direct suicide. And for Catholics any attempt at direct suicide that doesn't get absolved by clergy before a person dies is a go straight to hell sin.
You really missed the point. Worse you just made the argument that there are no journalists when you made that denial of being a shill. If I have a phone and record what law enforcement (or people pretending to be law enforcement while actually trying to be brown shirts using intimidation tactics in service of their fascist overlord(s) ) then you have to consider me a journalist. Why? Doing anything else turns the people that do not want to be recorded by journalists, whether professional or amateur, into gatekeepers determining who is allowed to record them. Further in the USA the right of journalists to observe/record is based on the broader 1st amendment right of freedom of speech, just specifically enunciated. All the attempts at creating restrictions on who, or how someone, is allowed to record law enforcement have been struck down by courts for that reason.
The blame should be directed at EA. BioWare is owned by Electronic Arts and just develops the games. EA determines what happens with a game and in case of a shutdown how it happens (and since making it so that fans can operate it costs time and money, oh and it is EA' intellectual property so EA goes how dare you suggest they sort of put it in the public). Anthem is just one of three games being shutdown by EA this month.
The reason why we should care is that it doesn't just target the people deciding that their kids don't get vaccinated. Their kids do not decide to not get the shots. Then there are the people who for some reason cannot receive vaccines (for example the immune-compromised). The people who get the shot but where it doesn't take. The people who the shots worked but are fighting of something else. Don't forget the babies to young to get vaccinated. First shot for measles for example is 12 months. And if that isn't enough; Not enough of the unvaccinated die to have it work as natural selection. Ending up with long term effects tends to be more likely (for example the wipe of the immune system long term memory as a result of contracting measles).
Doesn't always work. Just check some of the reactions (including Catholics) to the Pope doing just that when, and after, the COVID19 vaccine became available.
The reason that Measles doesn't mutate to bypass vaccines is not that it sticks to the unvaccinated. Since every single time it tries to infect a vaccinated person that is a test to see if that strain of Measles can bypass the vaccination. Which is why antivaxxers are so dangerous, they not just harm themselves and their kids, they create a larger, for lack of better description, pool of test subjects to see if a vaccination against a disease can be bypassed.
Don't blame the content creators for a possible data winter blame the owners of the various advanced chatbots (and that is what they are even though everyone dresses them up in buzz & hype words as to get money to burn) for that. It is a combination of * the crawlers absolutely hammering websites with requests. And don't you dare to impede that in anyway as the result is an even worse flood in an attempt to bypass the restrictions. * The search engines damaging the content creator income by AI slopping said creators website in a blurb stopping people from actually visiting those sites (even if due to the mixing of multiple sites the chance that what comes out if correct is worse then betting on a coin toss if the subject in question is not settled). * What is being produced by those bot is slop, it takes at least as long to check what is being produced is usable and fixing what is wrong as doing the work yourself. In aggregate a data winter would be a boon for content creators. If the bots keel over that means less costs to maintain a server, more income from actual people visiting the website (hopefully doing other actions that boost visibility/income) and about the same time to do the work as before the bots existed.
Those are power games. Zelensky came to Washington hat in hand to ask for alms. Trumps people told him to come in a suit seeing that Trump earlier commented to them on Zelensky not wearing one (this would have earned him brownie points with Trump and thus would have made it more likely that Trump would listen to his pleas). Zelensky decided that he had enough power that he could ignore that and still get what he wanted.
Oh you mean when Musk used one of his other companies to buy Twitter/X at the $44 billion that Musk offered and had to pay for Twitter/X instead of the 1/4 (or less) that it is/was worth at that point? Yeah the good news is that thanks to that they could pay the bridge loans in full instead of having to roll them over resulting in Twitter/X only losing about 3 billion a year instead of 4 billion a year.
I think the guy is a conservative and is trying to get this the the supreme court before Trump finishes his term.