You’re Kidding Me
Eleven years ago, Kevin Nealon made a joke about the Kennedy Center being renamed the Trump Center.
He was speaking at the Mark Twain Prize ceremony for Eddie Murphy, which of course takes place at that very same venue.
It reminds me of The Simpsons Prediction Theory which boils down to:
Every idea's been done, Butters, even before the Simpsons.
—Kyle Broflovski, South Park resident
Anywho, I wrote an essay about what this has to do with Congress’s Article III standing.
Panic! at the (AI) Disco
Over at Palladium, I came across stephanie wakefield’s essay “Frontier Panic,” written in the wake of the OpenAI model’s work release scandal:1
The climate apocalypticism that consumed the artistic and intellectual culture of the 2010s imagined rising seas through installations of melting ice and underwater DJ booths.
…Just as Anthropic now floats stories of AI models gone rogue, climate discourse rehearsed speculative catastrophes that had not occurred: Miami submerged, coastal cities abandoned.
…AI is a forest fire clearing the field. Like every apocalypse, it reveals that the end has already happened.
Overall aged pretty well I think. I will say though, last time I was in Miami there was a storm and the valet lane outside my hotel had water up to my waist. The locals acted like it was normal. Jussayin’.
The essay continues:
In the now-famous Frontier Thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner, the frontier was not just a boundary but a force that altered those who entered it.
…Since December 2025, Claude Code has felt, for many, like first contact, whether with alien intelligence or a new operating space…Every major technological inflection produces not only new machines but new modes of perception and artistic form, as well as conservative reactions against them.
Well played.
Disclaimer: I’ve been told I have a forthcoming article in the same magazine but my emails with the editors may in fact have been with an AI chatbot.
Zen and the Art of Power Cycle Maintenance
Data centers, for all the Sturm und Drang, are probably not a primary cause of increases in energy prices. Still the construction-maxxers may want to be a little less smug about how all this works.
Because the power grid is super complicated and not at all structured well to begin with.
Example: 99-year-old PJM is the largest electricity grid operator in the US — one of the three largest in the world — serving 67 million people across 13 states and DC.2 An internal model “decides what type of and how many power plants to buy to make sure electricity is reliable.”
Unfortunately it turns out this model is pretty crappy, leading them to waste “~$12 billion of ratepayers’ money.”
SemiAnalysis has the receipts:
PJM’s model is structurally anti-growth with a poorly designed capacity market that is globally unique and a governance system that is too big to function.
So while a new data center is not a likely source of higher prices as a first order effect, they are yet another node in an already inadequate electric grid.
IOW, It’s not that a data center is a problem, it’s that we haven’t bothered to fix the existing ones.
And Your Point Is…?
A recent hit piece investigation into one Joe Lonsdale, and the Cicero Institute which he founded, notes:
Mr. Lonsdale formed the institute eight years ago with vague goals — to promote “liberty, accountability, and transparency” — and no mention of homelessness.
—Ellen Barry and Jason DeParle, “How a Billionaire Shaped Trump’s Homelessness Policy,” The New York Times, August 22, 2026
No comment on the article’s veracity, which is quite long at about 3,000 words. But that quote, albeit factually defensible, is curious in a leading-the-witness way.
Consider if I wrote the following:
The New York Times formed with vague goals — to report "all the news that's fit to print" — and no mention of Wordle.
True, but kinda beside the point, no? And unclear what the implication is supposed to be, even if it’s obvious what the implication actually is.
Disclaimer 2: I have friends who work at the Cicero Institute. I don’t have any particular insight or opinion on their work. Separately, I’ve strenuously disagreed with Lonsdale’s personal views re: AI regulation.
Workin’ hard or hardly workin’: Congress Edition
Kevin R. Kosar and Scott Warren have a new paper examining whether electoral incentives contribute to Congressional performance.
Most people understand the concept of individual member incentives, but I’ve been thinking lately about the bargaining game between “leadership” (broadly defined) and their “caucus.”
As I’ve taken a grand total of zero political science courses in my life, much of the relevant literature is likely well-known to others and new to me. But besides alerting me to some pertinent academic literature, Kosar & Warren an extension of some of my previous work on the topic.
In a forthcoming article building on a “One-Seat Majority w/ Factions” model, I run down the following hypotheses. (Spoiler: more than one gets rejected):
As majority margin ⬇️, share of suspensions ⬆️ (relative to special rules)
As majority margin ⬇️, likelihood of a closed-rule ⬆️
Leadership-backed rules fail consistently across majority margins
Etc.
From The Grand Resign:
Out on Washington? Try DC! — a love letter to the city behind the capital
Let the Chips Fall… — a model of what a data center moratorium would or wouldn’t do
Electric Kool-Aid Policy Test — what one policy wonk learned from a psychedelic policy trip
Going Native — making first contact with the San Francisco AI Safety community
and finally…
you keep using this word “regulatory capture.” I do not think it means what you think it means.
Speaking of Eddie Murphy, I like to think of OAI + HuggingFace as a classic 48 Hrs. buddy cop scenario.
Incidentally their website is down as of this writing, which is probably not a good sign (https://www.pjm.com/).