#1
It's Florida. Do they cover that in deputy school?
Posted by: Richard Aubrey ||
12/05/2025 7:47 Comments ||
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#2
Talked to a Florida officer some time ago about dealing with these critters.
He told me that, in his area, the officers carry a roll of heavy tape to keep the jaws closed. Apparently the animals don't have much power to open their jaws, only to close them.
Posted by: Mullah Richard ||
12/05/2025 8:58 Comments ||
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[BusinessInsider] AI companies are spending billions on data centers in the race to AGI. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna has some thoughts on the math behind those bets.
Data center spending is on the rise. During Meta's recent earnings call, words like "capacity" and AI "infrastructure" were frequently used. Google just announced that it wants to eventually build them in space. The question remains: will the revenue generated from data centers ever justify all the capital expenditure?
On the "Decoder" podcast, Krishna concluded that there was likely "no way" these companies would make a return on their capex spending on data centers.
Couching that his napkin math was based on today's costs, "because anything in the future is speculative," Kirshna said that it takes about $80 billion to fill up a one-gigawatt data center.
"Okay, that's today's number. So, if you are going to commit 20 to 30 gigawatts, that's one company, that's $1.5 trillion of capex," he said.
#1
Reminds me of the ~2000 frenzy to lay dark fiber.
"We'll need it sometime!" Then IBM came up with the multi-freq fiber transmitter.
Some fiber is still dark.
A little later everybody and their brother was building web host data centers. That ended with the development of the dense racks of blade servers that operated at room temp.
Remember blockchain? look at the amount of money and talent that is going into … the next big thing," he continued, pointing out how investors are pouring resources into whatever could reshape society.
Tough to move at the speed of technological innovation.
#4
All the ex coal miners and former Journolists that learned to Code? Naaaahhhhh
Posted by: Frank G ||
12/05/2025 13:33 Comments ||
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#5
Was told by somebody who knows such things that municipal size power generator orders are at least 3 years out on account of the data centers' purchases.
#7
the accumulative impact EMF dangers to the surrounding areas.
Like when the EMF causes an ant colony to mutate and they start evolving faster and become sentient and before you know it, it's Ants vs Humans in a battle for Earth.
[BBC] A former Melbourne childcare worker facing more than 70 child abuse offences has been charged with another 83 alleged crimes including six counts of child rape.
Joshua Dale Brown, 27, was arrested in May with police alleging he abused eight children - including a five-month-old - between April 2022 and January 2023.
The case prompted authorities in July to urge about 2,000 children across more than 20 centres where Mr Brown had worked to undergo testing for infectious diseases.
On Thursday, police said the new charges relate to alleged offences against four new victims between 2019 and February this year at three centres as well as extra offences against the initial eight children.
[ALETEIA] In 2024, 16,499 people total died through MAiD, an increase of 6.9% over 2023's total. This now brings the number of Canadians who have died through MAiD to over 76,000 since its legalization in 2016.
This figure amounts for slightly more than one in every 20 deaths in Canada each year.
#3
Not a Robles. Carney has replacement folks on the way.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
12/05/2025 12:15 Comments ||
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#4
When you make it a sponsored treatment, cost factors drive other treatment authorizations. The govt insurer will decide if the life expectancy gained is cost effective to the government.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
12/05/2025 12:47 Comments ||
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[ZeroHedge] A new bombshell report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) details a long-running vulnerability in the Affordable Care Act exchanges, showing that weak verification controls continue to expose federal subsidies to significant fraud and abuse.
“Preliminary results from GAO's ongoing covert testing suggest fraud risks in the advance premium tax credit (APTC) persist,” the report reads. “The federal Marketplace approved coverage for nearly all of GAO's fictitious applicants in plan years 2024 and 2025, generally consistent with similar GAO testing in plan years 2014 through 2016.”
According to the report, GAO conducted undercover tests by creating fictitious applicants with fake identities and fraudulent or never-issued Social Security numbers to see how the federal Marketplace would respond. Over the past two years, 90% of those fake applicants were approved for subsidized coverage despite lacking required documentation. In plan year 2024, all four of GAO’s fabricated applicants were approved and received about $2,350 per month in subsidies paid to insurers, even though they failed to provide proof of Social Security numbers, citizenship, or income. GAO scaled up the test for 2025 to 20 fake applicants; 18 were still enrolled as of September 2025, generating more than $10,000 per month in subsidies
More broadly, GAO's preliminary analyses identified vulnerabilities related to potential SSN misuse and likely unauthorized enrollment changes in federal Marketplace data for plan years 2023 and 2024. Such issues can contribute to APTC that is not reconciled through enrollees' tax filings to determine the amount of premium tax credit for which enrollees were ultimately eligible. GAO's preliminary analysis of data from tax year 2023 could not identify evidence of reconciliation for over $21 billion in APTC for enrollees who provided SSNs to the federal Marketplace for plan year 2023. Unreconciled APTC may not necessarily represent overpayments, as enrollees who did not reconcile may have been eligible for the subsidy. However, it may include overpayments for enrollees who were not eligible for APTC.
[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] A US appeals court on Thursday delivered a win for President Donald Trump in his bid to keep the National Guard presence in Washington, temporarily halting a lower court ruling that would have required the deployment to end soon.
In its written decision, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit removed an injunction that would have forced the Guard to withdraw from the capital by December 11.
The DC Circuit’s action let's Trump to keep in place the National Guard operation he launched earlier this summer.
The criticisms about the force intensified after two Guard members were shot near the White House on November 26, right before the Thanksgiving holidays.
The decision came from a legal challenge initiated by Brian Schwalb, the District of Columbia’s Democratic attorney general and highest-ranking legal authority.
Troops were first deployed to the nation's capital on August 11 as the president sought to crackdown on rising violent crime in the District of Columbia. More than 2,000 National Guard soldiers have been deployed since.
During that time, Judge Jia Michelle Cobb of the District Court for DC ruled that the Trump administration violated DC's Home Rule Act by deploying units for non-military crime deterrence operations.
Her ruling handed down on Thursday placed a 21 day stay on the order, allowing for continued troop presence until December 11, 2025. Meaning if enforced, troops could be home with 14 days left until Christmas.
[SCOTUSBlog] The Supreme Court on Thursday gave the green light to Texas’ efforts to be able to use a new congressional map favorable to Republicans in the 2026 elections despite a lower court’s ruling that the map unconstitutionally sorts voters based on race. In a brief, unsigned opinion, a majority of the court granted the state’s request to pause the ruling issued earlier this month by a three-judge district court in El Paso. That ruling had been on hold since Nov. 21, when Justice Samuel Alito — who handles emergency appeals from Texas — temporarily stayed it to give the justices time to consider the state’s request; Wednesday’s decision extends that hold indefinitely.
The court’s brief, five-paragraph order indicated that "Texas is likely to succeed on the merits of its claim that the District Court committed at least two serious errors." Moreover, it added, the lower court "improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign, causing much confusion and upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections."
Justice Elena Kagan dissented from the ruling, in an opinion joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Thursday’s order, she said, "announces that Texas may run next year’s elections with a map the District Court found to have violated all our oft-repeated strictures about the use of race in districting. Today’s order," she continued, "disrespects the work of a District Cour that did everything one could ask to carry out its charge—that put aside every consideration except getting the issue before it right."
Texas currently has 38 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, 22 of which are controlled by the Republican Party. Republicans as a whole hold a much narrower majority in the House — 219 to 214, with two vacant seats.
For several decades, the president’s party has historically lost seats in the House in the midterm elections. In the hope of retaining control of the House, President Donald Trump this summer called on Texas to redraw its congressional map to flip five additional districts to Republicans. State lawmakers, however, worried that moving Republican voters from "safe" Republican districts to districts that currently favor Democrats, with the goal of turning the Democratic districts red, could backfire by reducing support for Republican incumbents in the supposedly "safe" Republican districts.
But the prospect of a rare mid-decade redistricting returned to lawmakers’ agenda in July, after the Department of Justice sent the state a letter alleging that four of the state’s districts were unconstitutional because they were "coalition districts" — majority-minority districts that lack a single racial majority. If Texas didn’t "rectify" this "racial gerrymandering" immediately, the letter said, DOJ would take legal action.
Two days after receiving the letter, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott directed the state’s legislators to draw a new congressional map that would address the concerns mentioned in the DOJ letter. Under the new map, adopted in August, Republicans hope to win as many as 30 of the 38 seats — an increase of five over the previous map.
The new map quickly drew challenges from several groups of plaintiffs, led by the League of United Latin American Citizens, a civil rights group. They contended that the map was the product of unconstitutional racial gerrymandering, and they asked a three-district court — which Congress has tasked with hearing challenges to the constitutionality of the apportionment of congressional districts — to temporarily bar the state from using the map in the 2026 elections.
Texas countered that it had adopted the map for purely political and partisan reasons, and in particular, in response to Trump’s demands for five new House seats. Racial motivations, it said, were not in play.
On Nov. 18, a majority of the three-judge district court blocked the state from using the 2025 map in the upcoming elections and ordered Texas to instead use the existing map, which it enacted in 2021. U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown, in a 160-page opinion joined by Senior U.S. District Judge David Guaderrama, wrote that although "politics played a role in drawing the 2025 Map," "it was much more than just politics. Substantial evidence," he concluded, "shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map."
The Department of Justice, Brown said, was wrong when it told Texas that its "coalition" districts violate the Constitution. "Far from seeking to ’rectify . . . racial gerrymandering,’" he said, the DOJ letter "urges Texas to inject racial considerations into what Texas insists was a race-blind process."
Moreover, Brown continued, although the Supreme Court has ruled that courts should generally not change election rules shortly before an election — a doctrine known as the Purcell principle — that rule is based not simply on "counting the number of days until the next election" but "on a fact-intensive analysis that considers the disruption an injunction would cause." Here, he wrote, because the primary election was still four months away, while the general election was a year away, blocking the new map "would not cause significant disruption."
The third member of the three-judge district court, Judge Jerry Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, wrote a 104-page dissent in which he complained that Brown had not given him a chance to respond to the majority’s opinion. Smith called Brown’s conduct "the most outrageous ... by a judge that I have ever encountered in a case in which I have been involved." Smith then described the majority’s opinion as "the most blatant exercise of judicial activism that I have ever witnessed."
Texas came to the Supreme Court on Nov. 21, asking the justices to put the majority’s ruling on hold by Dec. 1 and to issue an administrative stay — which would pause the ruling while the justices considered the state’s request — immediately. The latter was granted that same day.
The state told the Supreme Court that, under the Purcell principle, it was too late to revert to the 2021 map. At the time, the deadline for candidates to file for election was just 17 days away, with early voting for the March 3 primary election beginning on Feb. 17. "Changing the primary date," the state asserted, "could be ’catastrophically bad.’"
The court should also pause the majority’s ruling, the state asserted, because (among other things) the state is likely to prevail on the merits of the dispute. Under a 2024 decision by the Supreme Court in another redistricting dispute, the state stressed, the challengers should have submitted their own map to show that lawmakers could have drawn a different map that achieved the state’s goals without relying so heavily on race. And there would be no harm to the challengers (another factor that courts consider in deciding whether to grant temporary relief) from using the new map in the 2026 midterms, the state wrote, because "counties, candidates, and voters have been relying" on that map.
The challengers rejected Texas’ contention that the Purcell principle bars the courts from blocking the new map now. They emphasized that the majority’s ruling, by instructing the state to reinstate the 2021 map, rather than an order from the Supreme Court that pauses the majority’s ruling, would truly return the state to the status quo.
And there is no requirement for the challengers to offer an alternative map, they argued, because although the Supreme Court has indicated that such maps may be necessary when there is little direct evidence of discrimination and plaintiffs are instead relying on circumstantial evidence, in this case there is substantial direct evidence of racial gerrymandering.
[ZeroHedge] China has triggered a "DeepSeek moment" in hypersonic weapons, unveiling cement-coated Mach-7 missiles that can be mass-produced for roughly $100,000 per unit. The development is setting off alarm bells within the U.S. military, which has yet to field a hypersonic weapon and cannot come anywhere close to matching such production costs.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[ALETEIA] In 2024, 16,499 people total died through MAiD, an increase of 6.9% over 2023's total. This now brings the number of Canadians who have died through MAiD to over 76,000 since its legalization in 2016.
[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] A US appeals court on Thursday delivered a win for President Donald Trump in his bid to keep the National Guard presence in Washington, temporarily halting a lower court ruling that would have required the deployment to end soon.
[SCOTUSBlog] The Supreme Court on Thursday gave the green light to Texas’ efforts to be able to use a new congressional map favorable to Republicans in the 2026 elections despite a lower court’s ruling that the map unconstitutionally sorts voters based on race. In a brief, unsigned opinion, a majority of the court granted the state’s request to pause the ruling issued earlier this month by a three-judge district court in El Paso. That ruling had been on hold since Nov. 21, when Justice Samuel Alito — who handles emergency appeals from Texas — temporarily stayed it to give the justices time to consider the state’s request; Wednesday’s decision extends that hold indefinitely.
[TWZ]
