Beer Goggles

“In Mason, just south of Lansing, Paula Caltrider, 53, who voted for Mr. Trump and runs the Michigan for Jesus Facebook page, teamed up with Rita Leolani Vogel, 51, a Never-Trumper … They were never friends, and Ms. Caltrider had even blocked Ms. Vogel on Facebook over what she said was unfair criticism of a Christian friend who had spoken out against a drag brunch at a brewery.” In this age of seemingly insurmountable political divides, what could bring two political opposites together? The same issue that seems to be uniting Americans across the political spectrum all across the country. NYT (Gift Article): ‘The Most Bipartisan Issue Since Beer’: Opposition to Data Centers.

+ Editor’s note: The space it takes to drive computing power constantly shrinks. The phone in your pocket today has the computational power of a late 1990s supercomputer. Maybe we should just hold off building all these data centers until we can fit them into a shoebox? I asked Gemini (the one AI service with “mini” in its name) about this, and it explained that’s not how things will play out: “The ‘efficiency gains’ you’re hoping for are being outpaced by the ‘expansion gains.’ For every 10% an AI model gets more efficient, developers often respond by making the model 100% larger to gain even more intelligence.” (I countered that the more intelligent computer models get, the stupider we seem to behave. We decided to end the conversation there, at least until Gemini has a few more data centers’ worth of computational power to come up with a satisfying answer.)