[FOX] The White House announced in late July that Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, xAI and more than 200 other players have agreed to pay for 100% of the power infrastructure required by data centers.
The economics are straightforward. In a market economy, prices are determined by supply and demand. When the supply of housing, energy or manufactured goods increases, prices tend to fall. When supply is constrained, prices rise. If policymakers are serious about lowering costs for American families, they should focus on making it easier — not harder — to increase supply.
America does not suffer from a shortage of entrepreneurs willing to invest, workers eager to build or capital ready to finance new projects. But the permitting system fails to produce timely, predictable government decisions.
Today, major housing developments, energy infrastructure and even manufacturing facilities routinely spend years navigating overlapping federal reviews, duplicative agency requirements and prolonged litigation. Time becomes a hidden tax. Every year a project sits in regulatory limbo, financing costs rise, construction expenses increase, investors demand higher returns and uncertainty discourages future investment. Those costs are ultimately paid by consumers through higher rents, home prices, utility bills and costlier goods.
#4
In Ohio, we ended up with a bunch of data centers before we knew we had them. The local and state politicians knew they were being built, but everything was kept quiet. The taxes and employment revenues that you would comprise the benefit for citizens aren’t going to be realized as the politicians granted tax breaks and the data centers employ fewer people than you would think. Why would the politicians have sold us out? Corruption. Now it’s time for some accountability.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
08/17/2026 10:00 Comments ||
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#5
NIMBY at work as well. Follow the money both ways, for and against data centers.
Very long, technical and detailed. I think it’s about computer programming, but I hope those of you who understand it can explain if it should be filed under Science&Technogy instead.
[RoningsGrips] EXECUTIVE SUMMARY DARPA’s In the Moment (ITM) program1 marks a major shift in how the Department of Defense (DoD) evaluates and deploys artificial intelligence. Traditionally, AI is polished using “ground truth”—datasets where every answer is clearly right or wrong. But real-world military crises, like chaotic battlefield triage or rapid-fire cyber attacks, don’t offer that clarity. These “difficult domains” are defined by intense pressure, limited resources, and ethical gray areas where even the most seasoned experts disagree. In these moments, finding a single “correct” mathematical answer isn’t just challenging; it’s often impossible1.
Led by Dr. Matt Turek of DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O), ITM moves away from standard benchmarks toward a “quantitative alignment framework”1. Instead of training AI to hunt for one “perfect” outcome, the program models Key Decision-Maker Attributes (KDMAs)—the underlying values, risk tolerances, and reasoning styles that drive human experts1. By creating algorithms that can adapt to these human traits, ITM aims to build systems that commanders are actually willing to trust with life-and-death decisions4.
This report looks at ITM’s structure, its main players, and its plan for the next few years. We dive into core technologies like Explainable Case-Based Reasoning (ECBR) and Bayesian ethical models5, while considering the broader policy landscape of DoD Directive 3000.098. Crucially, we also examine the “overtrust paradox”—the risk that humans might follow autonomous agents too blindly during the heat of battle11.
#1
Maybe they could start with the unmanageable budget, or the broken TO&E, or the logistics supply train. Maybe, just inventory and allocation.
Nah, too much graft and corruption adaptive business practices at all levels in service and supplier.
Now, PEO soldier is a shiny penny ... In June 1992, the Project Manager for Soldier Systems (PM-Soldier Systems) — shortened as PM Soldier / PM-Soldier / PM, Soldier — was officially chartered
[SDUT] We’re sorry for flogging a dead boondoggle, but can the news about California’s High Speed Rail project get any worse? Apparently, there is no bottom to the negative revelations about this international embarrassment.
For those who have been living on Mars since 2008, we’ll bring you up to speed. What began as a $10 billion bond measure to fund a rail project that would travel from Los Angeles to San Francisco is projected to cost well over ten times the original bond amount. Critics of the project have been vindicated in their predictions of failure starting with the Due Diligence Report from the Reason Foundation and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association issued even before the November 2008 election authorizing the HSR bond. The study concluded that, "The CHSRA [California High-Speed Rail Authority] plans as currently proposed are likely to have very little relationship to what would eventually be built due to questionable ridership projections and cost assumptions ..."
Since then, reports and studies from official California agencies have warned that the project may not be viable at all. These include a 2018 report from the California State Auditor ("Flawed Decision Making and Poor Contract Management Have Contributed to Billions in Cost Overruns and Delays") and a 2025 Legislative Analyst’s Office review of the rail authority’s 2025 Project Update Report.
The latest blow is from the California High Speed Rail Authority’s own Inspector General, Benjamin M. Belnap, in a 25 page report to the governor and the Legislature on HSR’s "progress." The report is damning and reads more like a criminal indictment than some sterile bureaucratic status report.
Among the findings:
"The business plan does not adequately communicate the scope changes and cost increases between past and current Merced-to-Bakersfield (M-B) cost estimates, obscuring the fact that— absent scope reductions—costs have substantially increased on the M-B segment. In so doing, the plan does not comply with legal requirements that cost estimates be comparable across reports."
"The cost estimate for the Authority’s reduced scope M-B segment excludes financing costs (estimated to be between $3.6 and $6.6 billion), a default-level contingency budget ($1.2 billion marginal difference), project construction costs it assumes other entities will pay ($816 million), and the projected additional cost of building infrastructure in accordance with an existing local agreement that it assumes it will be able to modify ($1.7 billion marginal difference)."
"In a plan section devoted to managing risks, as opposed to the plan section describing project costs, the Authority added a cost estimate for what it purports to be a full-scope M-B segment that complies with state law. However, the Authority failed to explain that the much higher estimated cost of the full-scope segment included increased cost assumptions not necessary to make the estimate compliant with state law and may give a false impression of the magnitude of the additional costs to do so."
"Although the business plan disclosed that, between August 2025 and March 2026, the Authority experienced a nine-month slip in the M-B schedule, it offers no explanation of the "optimization and pending policy changes" it indicated were the cause for this schedule slippage."
"The business plan does not disclose that the schedule window for the M-B segment is no longer 2032-2033, but rather its risk-based statistical analysis determined that the appropriate schedule window now extends to September 2034."
"The business plan does not sufficiently emphasize that the Authority will exhaust its current funding resources as soon as December 2027 if it does not secure financing."
An addendum to the report is a response from the Authority ostensibly answering the concerns raised by the inspector general. But the responses are obscure and fail to directly address the points raised by the IG’s report.
From the perspective of taxpayers, a major disappointment has been the lack of media coverage on the failures of the High Speed Rail project and its intentional obfuscation of the legitimate concerns raised by the report and the litany of other reports over the last 25 years. (A notable exception has been KCRA’s Ashley Zavala’s excellent reporting on HSR).
Is the ho-hum response from most media outlets merely willful ignorance or is just because HSR’s failures can simply be classified as "old news"? That thinking would hold more weight if it were not for the tens of billions of taxpayer dollars at risk.
Jon Coupal is president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association.
Posted by: Frank G ||
08/17/2026 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[240 views]
Top|| File under: Tin Hat Dictators, Presidents for Life, & Kleptocrats
#1
issue of the CA- HSR has not been a big factor yet in the election of Governor
Posted by: Lord Garth ||
08/17/2026 8:45 Comments ||
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#2
The only plan of interest should where $Billion went for the last "Plan", and how to recover the $$$$. Then arrest those involved and seizes their assets.
#3
Since then, reports and studies from official California agencies have warned that the project may not be viable at all. These include a 2018 report from the California State Auditor ("Flawed Decision Making and Poor Contract Management Have Contributed to Billions in Cost Overruns and Delays") and a 2025 Legislative Analyst’s Office review of the rail authority’s 2025 Project Update Report.
They can call it flawed decision making and poor contract management all they want but I call that kind of statement a lie. If you call it anything but fraud, corruption and outright theft, you are either lying or hopelessly naive and I can't believe the state auditor is all that naive. In a criminal court, with a jury of reasonably intelligent people, that kind of statement would be found to lack credibility. Criminal intent is far more believable.
And, silly me, I actually voted for this crime. I always thought trains are good. I thought, if they can do this sort of thing in Japan and Europe, we should be able to do it here. Now it's painfully clear that I underestimated the criminal element in California government. In fairness, Jerry Brown may have been loony but I never got the impression he was anywhere near as crooked as Newsom.
Newsom might think he has a chance to be elected POTUS in 2028 but I think that when his opponents start talking about the train to nowhere, Newsom will be toast.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
08/17/2026 13:21 Comments ||
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#4
^ I voted against it, and noted it had NO viable business plan. The passenger $ estimates never made sense. It was all lies.
Posted by: Frank G ||
08/17/2026 13:26 Comments ||
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#5
And, yes, the silence of the media is profound to the point where I'm shocked that Frank G found this article in the San Diego Union Tribune. Congratulations to Frank for having the patience to actually read that rag. I gave up on it years ago.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
08/17/2026 13:29 Comments ||
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#6
California High-Speed train appears to have much in common with the Obama Library.
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.
