Author: nick
[ad_1] Neil Thompson Informed Comment US President Donald Trump startled shipping companies and foreign governments earlier this week by announcing that the US would be charging a 20% toll for passage through the Strait of Hormuz. Trump publicly embraced the idea of a tolled future for the Strait, a proposal he had sought China’s help in preventing during at a bilateral summit in Beijing just two months earlier, when it was Iran pushing it. However, the president ultimately withdrew the toll proposal after emergency talks with Gulf states, instead announcing unspecified trade and investment deals that would finance new jobs, factories and equipment for the benefit of…
[ad_1] AI Workloads Push Data Center Water Use to Nearly One Trillion Liters Annually The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence workloads has driven U.S. data center water consumption to nearly one trillion liters per year, according to industry reports and investigative analyses. The figure marks a significant increase from prior years, with cooling systems accounting for a major portion of the usage, officials said. A report on NaturalNews.com stated that “the artificial intelligence boom has an invisible cost that most Americans have never been warned about — water” [1]. In Central Texas alone, data centers consumed 463 million gallons of water in the…
[ad_1] At Monticello, the central Virginia home of Thomas Jefferson, the phrase Our Guy Wrote It is emblazoned on banners and T-shirts hailing the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson’s estate is also the home to “1776: Road to the Declaration,” a compact new exhibition tracing the Declaration’s origins. The exhibit greets visitors with a 1795 quotation from Jefferson: “This ball of liberty, I believe most piously, is now so well in motion that it will roll around the globe.” A highlight of the exhibition is the commemorative copy of the Declaration owned by Jefferson’s friend, the fourth president of…
[ad_1] Photograph Source: m Spiess – CC BY 3.0 I appended the following paragraph to the incomplete ending of this article. It speaks for itself: I stopped working on this piece at this point when news of the rape allegation broke and Platner suspended his campaign. There’s an abundance of reporting and commentary on this allegation available on the internet, and I will not go into its merits here; my own opinion is that this was the ‘kill shot.’ At that stage, this was still work in progress and – if you have a chance to read it –…
[ad_1] Hong Kong police have recently arrested book sellers for having copies of Emily Feng’s, Let Only Red Flowers Bloom. Freelance journalists and three others have been arrested related to the book and for the act of selling, “seditious material.” Emily Feng has been banned from entering China since 2022 due to her previous reporting and now the banned book. “Seditious Material,” is the title that sounds less than harmful for many Westerners who may view China as a land known of having less freedoms, where independent thinking and writing, are prohibited or heavily guided. The reporter and journalist must…
[ad_1] Image by Alexander Mils. Typically, I kick this column off with troubling news, but let’s begin with a positive for a change. Australia’s solar is booming. A total of 40% of residential homes are equipped with rooftop solar, by far the highest rate in the world. Rooftop generation is the way to go, and accounts for 14% of the country’s total electricity generation. That’s obviously a very good thing, made possible by federal rebate programs and local incentives. The US could learn a lot from how Australia has pulled it off. California was on a similar track with its…
[ad_1] In Albany, Georgia, five police officers were fired after an internal audit found they had used the department’s Flock license plate reader system for personal reasons. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation also arrested all five former officers on charges of misuse of license plate data and violation of oath of office. The Albany Police Department said it will strengthen oversight and training to prevent similar incidents in the future. The post Brickbat: Unlicensed Search appeared first on Reason.com. [ad_2] Source link
[ad_1] Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair When American politicians state that terrorism is a threat, what they need is a mirror and an introductory economics textbook to understand that there are many different ways to destroy a nation. From NAFTA to financialization to crypto grifts, the US has been led from one economic catastrophe to another by people claiming to know what they are doing. While you and I know that AI isn’t going to cause 50% – 60% of the jobs in the US to disappear, what astonishes is that this is considered an acceptable outcome by Donald Trump…
[ad_1] How decades of attacks on Utah’s national monuments culminated in Trump’s latest attempt to erase them. Valley of the Gods. Photo: Erik Molvar. In southern Utah, two crown-jewel landscapes have been the subject of a political tug-of-war spanning the past 25 years. On one end of the rope, Tribes, conservation groups, and the recreating public have sought – and gotten – expanded protections for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments. Pulling the other end, the livestock industry, mining corporations, and Big Oil have joined forces with anti-regulation local governments to push to maximize the lands available for extractive…
[ad_1] DoD photo by: PH2 DON KORALEWSKI Date Shot: 27 Jan 1981 “The United States pledges that it is and from now on will be the policy of the United States not to intervene, directly or indirectly, politically or militarily, in Iran’s internal affairs.” “Iran and the United States … will immediately select a mutually agreeable central bank … to act … as depositary of the escrow and security funds.” “Commencing upon completion of the requisite escrow arrangements with the Central Bank, the United States will bring about the transfer to the Central Bank of all gold bullion which is…