Favorites: Data Centers, Democrats, and Disavowals
November 6, 2025 — Abundance earns policy praise, a wild SF cat saga spirals, open-weight TTS turns heads.
Supreme Court saving Trump from himself, as with their weird carve-out protecting the Federal Reserve.
One commenter split up the North vs South in this graph. It seems that both have fallen, but South first, and North only more recently.
As much as the US struggles to build infra, what we’ve accomplished in terms of building new data centers over the last 18 months has been quite impressive (cached)
Longer Reads
• Works in Progress has a long article about why nuclear power plants are expensive. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Reusable rockets like SpaceX’s are cost competitive for getting 50 tons of cargo from one side of the Earth to the other compared to standard Jet aircraft. The key is that the fuel is cheaper, and when done at scale (cached) it could plausibly work. (src)(cached)
– Nvidia passed a $5T valuation, and some were speculating about whether China could stand up a competitor quickly. Lyman Stone points out that while China has been unable to do 7nm chips, TSMC managed to stand up 5nm production in Arizona in less than 4 years. (src)(cached)
– It’s bad that so many positions in cities are elected, accountability just doesn’t work because voters can’t pay attention to so many things. SF has mostly been able to turn around because of a ton of coordinated campaigning. (src)(cached)
– President of Syria is stopping his brother from profiting from his position. We now live in a world where the former al-Qaeda guy running Syria is less corrupt than the American president. (src)(cached)
– You can absolutely use ChatGPT to generate a PDF of math problems for an elementary school student (src)(cached)
– As much as some people said they were mad online about the book Abundance, actual politicians, even on the left, have spoken positively about it, often even on policy specifics. Tim Lee quips (cached) that “When people not in your camp say ‘that is not an ideology. That is common sense,’ it means you are winning the argument” (src)(cached)
– Absolutely incredible new open weight TTS model. You can try it here. (src)(cached)
– If you’re trying to win an election, it’s often a useful strategy to disavow previous unpopular statements you’ve made. But as a voter, if you’re trying to win, it’s better to vote in a primary for politicians who haven’t said toxically unpopular things in the past. (src)(cached)
– Transcript was published of the CBS interview with Trump where they discuss his pardoning of the Binance CEO. When asked if he’s worried that it’ll look like corruption he says he’d just rather they didn’t ask him that question. (src)(cached)
– 10/10 candidates endorsed by the NYC YIMBY group won their elections. Pretty good! (src)(cached)
– A minor item from Philadelphia’s preeminent cocktail bar: when they opened, they invited all the local journalists for opening night. All were served a cocktail they loved but couldn’t quite place. It was a screwdriver, but none of them had had one made with fresh orange juice. (src)(cached)
– Summary of a very SF situation from @kane: “> autonomous vehicle hits cat > progressive try to ban autonomous vehicles by teaming up w Teamsters who have history of running over pedestrians in SF > a shitcoin named after the cat is being pumped” (src)(cached)
– Pretty clear data that Democrats won the races for Governor in New Jersey and Virginia because they managed to persuade something like 7% of Trump voters to vote for a Democrat. Persuasion exists! (src)(cached)
– NYC politicians are saying some crazy things in justifying their new requirement that a licensed plumber install any new gas range. Other states don’t have this policy, and it doesn’t seem to be a problem. It will be an interesting test whether Mamdani puts up with this if he wins the election. (src)(cached)
– The “Traitorous Eight” founders of Fairchild semiconductor recreated their iconic photo many years later, I had never seen that. (src)(cached)
– Online sports betting is still quite rare, in a recent survey only 7% of americans say they’ve done it in the last year. 43% say that widespread availability of sports betting is bad. Restricting it is probably a winning issue. (src)(cached)
– Interesting info from America’s Test Kitchen by way of Josh Barro: when buying sausage, you want 0% calcium, because calcium indicates mechanically separated meat, which in turn is less tasty. (src)(cached)