KAG3-CO

NVDA crashing

"As lifespans increase, people have to prepare, mentally and financially, to work well into their 70s and 80s," per WSJ

Why Nvidia's Nightmare May Be Just Beginning zerohedge.com/markets/why-nv…

Jensen Huang's personal entanglement has raised national-security and regulatory concerns and sent Nvidia shares down 4.3%. When investors buy into a business, they're betting on the judgment of its leaders. A company at the center of America's AI race cannot afford to be careless. wsj.com/opinion/nvidia-gets-…

America's Nuclear Revival Is Running Into A Fuel Supply Wall zerohedge.com/energy/america…

SpaceX is planning to spend a staggering $24 BILLION building its own AI supercomputer and gas-fired power plant in Starbase, Texas. Elon is building the damn power plant that keeps the whole thing alive. Texas just elected Democrat Gina Hinojosa, ending more than three decades of Republican control of the governor's office. One of her campaign promises? Crack down on giant AI data centers that consume enormous amounts of electricity while ordinary Texans worry about their utility bills. And Brownsville recently imposed a 90-day moratorium on new data centers. Unfortunately for Brownsville, the 444-acre site SpaceX wants to develop had already been removed from its jurisdiction and incorporated into Starbase. So while politicians are busy campaigning on who gets to control the AI boom, Elon is busy making sure he controls the land, the servers, and the electricity. SpaceX's existing compute agreements with Google and Anthropic represent roughly $26 BILLION in annualized contract value, although those agreements can be terminated early. Of course, owning a power plant doesn't exempt anyone from environmental regulations. The newly elected governor could still make things considerably more complicated. Still, I bet on Musk's future empire.

BREAKING: Louisiana signs a contract worth up to $6.8 million to support transportation planning for SpaceX’s Starbase Louisiana. The agreement with a New Orleans engineering firm covers: • Road and bridge assessments • Traffic studies and engineering design • Permits, utility coordination and construction oversight It supports SpaceX’s planned $100 billion spaceport in Vermilion Parish, designed to handle thousands of launches annually. The broader project is expected to create 3,000 direct jobs over 10 years, with an average annual salary of $92,600.

Thomas Sowell on school vouchers: Low-income & minority communities have the most at stake. Public schools are a monopoly that treats them with contempt. In 1850, most free blacks were literate despite being barred from public schools—and in parts of the South, forbidden from any school. Private education did the work.

Thomas Sowell: "I'm afraid that I haven't even looked for the causes of poverty. I regard poverty is just simply the absence of wealth. So what I look for are the things that cause wealth to occur."

Politicians promise to protect us from life's risks. But with too much protection, "there is no prosperity. There is no growth," warns economist @AllisonSchrager @ManhattanInst. America’s economy grew faster than Europe’s because some of us embraced risk:

I think we're entering a civilizational rupture that nobody can predict. Not me, not the labs, not governments. I don't know how much people realize how fast we're moving. Look at what Anthropic's new model did during testing. It solved two open problems in theoretical physics, both on black holes. One of the calculations was laid out in 2003 and nobody had ever finished it, because it was too laborious. It formalized the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem in 30 hours, with a thousand agents that organized themselves. The first attempt took 11 days. It wrote an operating system that boots on a laptop, starting from an empty folder, in 8 days. It designed three electronic devices, boards, enclosures and software included. All three worked without a single electrical modification. It found a new method to predict the structure of viral capsids, the shells used to deliver gene therapies. And on robot control, it more than doubled the previous version's score. All of that in a single announcement, on a Monday. I think discoveries are going to stack up so fast that they'll produce an abundance we've never known: energy, health, materials, food. And with it a phase of immense joy, the joy of a civilization realizing that scarcity was never a law of nature. Except that joy is going to land in a world order that's cracking everywhere, and that was designed by Malthusians. People convinced that resources are finite, that there are too many of us, and that the job of an enlightened elite is to manage scarcity on everyone else's behalf. To me, Bill Gates is the most famous face of that worldview: a man nobody elected, who has weighed on the planet's health, agriculture and climate policies for twenty years. The degrowth crowd is the militant version. They don't even want to manage scarcity anymore, they want to organize it. Abundance is the worst possible news for that worldview. If energy becomes nearly free and diseases fall one after another, nobody needs anyone to ration anything for them. So I don't think they'll fight it. I think they'll try to capture it. In the name of safety, climate or public health, we'll be told this power is too dangerous to be left in everyone's hands. We already saw the movie during Covid: the permission slips, the passes, the QR code to go get a coffee. Now imagine the same logic with an AI that can see everything, trace everything and decide everything in real time. Orwell never imagined a tool like that. The technology is winning on its own. The question of the next ten years is who abundance will belong to. We are living through the greatest civilizational revolution in human history. It's happening right now, and most people are looking the other way.

Amy Klobuchar says frontier superintelligence models should be reviewed by the federal government before they are released

Texas turning blue was a shockeroo, but a pause in planned investment doesn’t make the demand for AI compute disappear. That capacity will go somewhere else. People aren’t going to stop using their phones or AI, and the economy keeps digitizing. The demand is insatiable. That’s why I remain optimistic. The signal has been sent. Now we move on.

Woke podcaster Jennifer Welch who laughed about digging up Charlie Kirk to 'do it again' loses an estimated $8m after joke sent sponsors fleeing trib.al/qcEO2Cz

TAXES: Democrats haven't even been sworn in, and they're announcing their plans to raise taxes. Wisconsin Gov-elect David Crowley will raise his state's taxes by $2 billion a year.

“The people I feel sorry for are those who insist on continuing to do what they have always done but want the results to be different from what they have always been.” — Thomas Sowell

UPDATE: Scott Galloway reached out to me earlier today and asked me to call him. I'm glad I did. I've read @profgalloway's books, listened to his podcasts, and appreciated his willingness to confront campus antisemitism and debate people he vigorously disagrees with, including @BenShapiro with comity (and more than a little comedy). That's why his recent comments about Elon Musk surprised and troubled me. My central criticism was that Scott called Musk a "traitor to the West" while invoking Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed for espionage. I think it was a careless statement, but I don't think Scott is calling for Musk's execution. Too many people on this platform are making that accusation, but it's an oversimplification. He told me he explicitly opposes capital punishment. I still believe the analogy was overblown. We also discussed what actually happened with Starlink and Starshield in Ukraine. What was restricted, when, by whom, and under whose authority? I agree with him that we need to know what actually happened for transparency's sake. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Scott acknowledged that if Musk was legitimately enforcing a commercial agreement, not meddling in wartime policies as a private citizen, the accusation of treachery would be unwarranted. I hope that if that occurs, he will retract it publicly. We agree that serious accusations require serious evidence. I raised Scott's role as a UC Regent because I believe those entrusted with governing the best university on the planet deserve particular scrutiny. I never called for his removal, nor do I want him removed. Scott explained why that framing troubled him. I listened, and I understand his concerns better. Despite disagreeing with my criticism, Scott offered to defend my academic freedom and my right to criticize him. As a professor, I teach students to revise their conclusions when confronted with new evidence. Today I was reminded that professors must also reconsider their own approach, too. I stand by the substance of my criticism. But my tone should have been more collegial. Our conversation strengthened my respect for Scott's generosity and commitment to the University of California, a system that transformed both our lives. As a two-time native son of the UC system, I think Scott will play a vital role on that august board. Lastly, and most remarkably, two podcast hosts managed to have a contentious discussion and find common ground without recording another podcast about it. A first in (unrecorded) history.

Today: 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major nation. Meanwhile, Elon Musk owns more wealth than the bottom 53% of households and the 1% have never ever had it so good Not acceptable We need an economy that works for all, not just the few.

WEAPONIZATION: Rep. Gene Wu is making it clear that Texas Democrats will investigate Elon Musk and his companies.