It's been a while since I've visited (and now paid) for this. You're welcome ;-/
I don't really see the "end" of the populist style and I certainly do not see a waning of the neo-fascist style that Trump and pretty much the entire Republican party are about. I see (or hope to see) what seems to be both bug and feature of Americans' voting and belief systems: a wearying even from the "believers" when they realize --consciously or not-- that they followed another false prophet. Just like religion, you have to ignore reality or dive into an alternate reality in order to feel good or righteous: WE ARE AMERICANS AND THE GREATEST COUNTRY ON EARTH.
When enough Americans come to realize the Populist/Fascist/Fake Economic Ideology is NOT really improving their lives, once again they slink off, hide who they became, what they believed and how nothing improved.
I'm sure I'll incur a great deal of opprobium for this remark, but what the heck: AMERICANS ARE THE DIMMEST POLITICAL ANIMALS in the Western World in that they are so easily manipulated into voting against their own welfare and well-being.
Even the NPR staff seems to have been finally beaten down. They used to sound the alarm with every report as if some imaginary HR department was going to rescue them from Trump. Now they are like the last page of 1984, where Winston concedes that he loves Big Brother.
NPR is pretty much thriving and without the subsidies they got and deserved. Even, strangely, in some red states and red areas where the locals needed the many services only NPR could provide:
This will sound simplistic, but it’s something I’m seeing on the ground, personally and professionally. There’s a saying that 90% of life is showing up. There’s a lot of folks with work, with personal lives, with communities, that have largely tuned out or are distracted with the many avenues that take one’s time. The new constructivism will come from those that show up. This can be good and it can be bad. You mentioned examples in the influencer area, which has gone off the rails. There’s an example of people who show up that can lead to bad. Perhaps, as you allude to toward the end of the essay, the successful constructive good will come from folks who handle personal relationships, or human-social activities, well. It might be that aspect where there’s the most fertile ground, particularly in-person opportunities.
There are great opportunities to build. The human-social aspect, along with Big Tech issues and emerging demographic trends are the challenges for constructivism.
Metaphorically speaking, average citizens are the children who have sat through a long Pentecostal church service—tired of the noise, tears, falling out, long speeches, testimonials, calls to give money and volunteer, the pageantry and restriction of it all, the same old people telling their rambling old people stories.
Thoughts have turned to much more tangible and future-oriented questions like:
“What are we going to eat?”;“When are we going home?”; “What’s the plan for later?”
There seems to be a bystander problem on the right that prevents them from capitalizing on victories the populist right has achieved. As always, the conquest is a lot more fun and sexy then having to rule afterwards. As a people become more wealthy they tend to become more risk adverse, given that the vast majority of Americans who could build and shape institutions in their spare time, but don't because the opportunity cost is so high. So many fun things you could do in those evenings, or more profitable things, and it can be spun as "focusing on my family". Truth is doing those other things produces much tangible results instead of the slow societal change a lifetime of dedication to an institution. I think perhaps there is a great mistrust of conservatives in future generations to lead anything they build, like they don't want to create any worthwhile institution because it will just be taken over by the left in a generation or two.
I'm not familiar with "Big Eva", but I'm no stranger to seeing my fellow Indy Baptists refuse to leave their comfortable spot in the pew to be the salt and light Christ commands us to be. So many rather virtue signal by talking about the need for revival and change instead of being the change. God reward us all the fruits of our labors?
What made you foresee the rise of the manosphere? In 2013 I was a freshman college, and me and friends would often complain about what women claim they want and their actions did were wildly different, but we were scared to be bold because of hyper consent culture on campuses at the time. Maybe we noticing something legitimate after all...
I'm sure this will be ignored, but what the hell...
The "manosphere" is something completely bizarre to many of us baby boomers (I'm mid-century). Sure, we went through much more change and conflict. For most of us, that grew us. Growing up with Viet Nam and our draft cards and drugs and early death of our friends and family members. But the fall of the "Communist" world and the rise of more rights for those denied them and better and freer lives for all was the continuous feature, foundation, and oxygen to us and certainly NOT figuring out what "being a man" meant.
We did, however, have to figure it out and, yes, some number of us didn't make it, including a cohort of my friends. But, paradoxically, we were more concerned with actually being in and improving the world and that was our "being a man" and "being a woman".
And now a big deal is the navel-gazing of the "manosphere" and religion? Whodda thunk.
We made good-to-great changes even if at the expense of many lives. And then Reagan started turning America inward and morally downward. Sure, there were still "commies" to fight. I was living in Germany when he made the "Mr. Gorbachev..." speech. As odd as it seems, that seemed to be the turning point toward America's inwardness. Sure, we went on to try to change everywhere to modern liberal democracies. But as good of an impulse that was, America and, most of all, Americans were not up to the task because Americans were still the provincial hicks of the world.
Leaving aside the soldiers stationed abroad, only a tiny number of Americans lived abroad and even fewer in the civilian cultures and an even tinier number spoke another language or bothered to even try.
I read the stuff that gets published and commented on here and it truly strikes me as wholly foreign. I understand the pull of religion. I grew up a Jew and son of a career military officer (WW2, Korea, Viet Nam) on 6 military bases around the USA. My perspective is very different from what I read here: the number of times I was shunned, insulted and beaten was what I took away from America. Or, at least, until my father retired and we moved to New York. Then in the '70s I spent 9 months on a kibbutz and then 9 months at the first Ba'al Tsuvah yeshiva in Jerusalem Aish haTorah. It didn't change anything. Just another interesting life experience. And Israel under first Sharon and then later Netanyahu showed me that religion and tribe were truly the worst pestilences and worst than that, the pestilence of prescribing what "being a man is": Even with Golda Meir and Tzipi Livni and women in the army, there was always a "manosphere" and a sphere was still a closed object. It was there to assert "dominion".
And the accusations that "women claim they want and their actions were wildly different" is a stunning and frightening self-serving justification of men entitling themselves to whatever they want from women. Shocking. And the real essence of the manosphere.
Well that was a very Boomer-esque speech for sure lol.
The millennial and gen z challenges are certainly more spiritual then physical, and yeah some of them are probably overblown, but idol hands do indeed to the devils work. For all our relative peace and prosperity, people aren't getting married, having kids, and even friendships are way down, suicide is up. Clearly this material abundance isn't a substitute for the much closer and homogeneous culture most baby boomers got to grow up in, but so few of them will bother to entertain that perspective.
It was always hilarious to me how so many people pearl clutch when I point out most women want to have their cake and eat it too, cause women are indeed human and that's just human nature. Many, heck I'd say most women want to benefits of traditional man while still having all the privileges of the modern, equitable marriage. Men in turn want the benefits of a traditional woman but the responsibilities of modern equitable marriage, and when they do it the hypocrisy is rightly called out. Can't say I've seen the case with women across any sphere of society, I came to know Aaron's work from his piece on the issues of servant leadership.
"The End of History" in the 1990s was a materially easy time for many boys to grow up but a hard one spiritually. Boys were not taught to have goals at school, other than college for all. Girls heard girl power and matching or exceeding boys as the goal.
Then, few adults realized how effective the campaign against teenage pregnancy would be. The main take away was that a baby will ruin your life.
Looking back, I think if good Christians were honest that they would have done something. Adults were fooled to an extent. Adults heard that kids were being taught to do the right thing, but kids were hammered at school that babies were worse than many diseases.
As for women, the exception proves the rule. Women have been called out for staggering amounts of college debt without a commensurate degree. It's rare enough to be interesting when it happens.
I would like to learn what makes a "boomeresque speech.
I suppose the only thing to point out here is this remark:
"...women want to have their cake and eat it too". Pretty one-sided when men don't just want, but rather just take and eat it and assume that's the order of things.
Maybe I need to know with some examples what "servant leadership is". It sounds on the face of it a perfect oxymoron.
What made it boomeresque was all the "what me and my generation went through" framework in an attempt to give your argument some moral authority.
I said men want to have their cake and eat it too, its just socially acceptable to call men out.
It can be an oxymoron. Leaders can and should be sacrificial and work for the best interests of those under them, but not at the expense of the mission they were appointed to accomplish. Aaron has a great article on it, this what made me subscribe: https://www.aaronrenn.com/p/servant-leadership
I can't decipher why you sent me over to that link. It's all about (to my mind) this elaborate male conservative Christian wish list about how the sexes must behave.
As a short comment, I met my wife at work. We were instant peers since we were both consultants building Wall Street trading systems. She was also a fairly recent immigrant from the Soviet Union and unhappily married with an 8 year old son and was supporting her husband through pharmacy school. We fell instantly in love, she divorced her husband and we married on the way to work. The husband apparently had the hots for my wife's then best friend and they ended up almost in the same time period as us marrying.
This prescriptive view of the sexes and marriage, etc. is so bizarre to me. Human beings and their relations are hugely complex. Some manage them well and probably somewhat more don't. All I can say is that will never change.
Agreed, I'm coming at it as Christian and God's design for the marriage and home. You aren't, so we're at an impasse so it's not worth our time to engage further.
Have fun telling the kids how bad nam was and what not.
Nothing moral at all about "what my generation went through". Simply statement of fact and cause and effect analysis. I mean, the Viet Nam war providing "moral authority"? Is that what you think? That is pretty weird given the enormous literature that followed properly characterizing it as the worst and likely most immoral example of American power projection. It was abject on every level. I can tell some pretty harrowing tales of friends of mine who served there.
I couldn't agree more about men wanting to have their cake and eat it too. I'll read the article and perhaps comment there or come back here. Thanks.
I'm saddened by the new populism against Data Centers. I think the MAGA side is being co-opted by the environmentalists, who want to stop anything that uses energy so they can drive down our energy use. All technologies are disruptive: printing press, steam engines, cars, planes, computers, the internet and now AI. It's not going to destroy the world. It will disrupt things and we will end up at a new normal. Data Centers are just a piece of infrastructure. As long as we don't strip property rights (eminent domain) or allow stupid environmental crap we will be just fine. Put them out in the boonies and the will help raise the tide to raise all boats.
For one, I can only believe you are someone who has not worked in the majority of companies (as I have) that want these. They are and always have been in a race for faster computing. As things went from seconds, to milliseconds and now to micro seconds to nanoseconds... it was always about making more money and not about making anything better.
Even materials scientists and drug designers wanting to do molecular folding can/will quickly get where they need to with other technologies. Even the increasing strides made by hybrid quantum computing has so progressed that anything USEFUL you might want to do with these giant investments and impositions on communities will be relatively soon obsolete.
The real reason these things are so desired by their constituency is what they have not much hidden: obtaining, storing, processing and misuse of human data (race, social-standing, wealth, education level, car choices, travel preferences, buying behavior of all sorts and.... POLITICAL choices, etc.) at scale. And they can test manipulating these to control or influence behavior with near perfect success.
It's not MAGA being "co-opted". MAGA (for once) shares the same concerns listed above and, certainly more so, not wanting these things to be anywhere near where they live. The hogging of the available electrical infrastructure to keep them humming and requiring more infrastructure to be bought and paid for by communities to keep their power bills low is shattered.
I just hope one (or more) comes to your community. I'm betting you'll be just another nimby.
I have worked and currently work in the electrical utility space, so I get really keyed off when I hear the electricity arguments. Utilities are supposed to be cost-causer--cost-payer. There is some limited circumstance where rates could rise, but in my neck of the woods it would only help rate-payers as the corps would share the fixed costs of operation and pay their own variable costs.
Not that it matters too much, I began my tech career at ConEd NYC modeling and building software for the distribution of electricity, outage or slowdowns in service and operations of a oil/gas generating plants. Whatever.
You're part right, but only if most or any of our privatized infrastructure uniformly worked as cost-causer/cost-payer. It doesn't in law YET. And it's going fast the opposite way. See Trump's ceasing to allow payments to FEMA, NWS, etc.
But I suppose the apposite question would be: so do you have any reliable evidence that the giant data centers are going to be mandated to be cost-cause/cost-payer? I know there is some push for this, but....
1. While major tech companies signed a voluntary Ratepayer Protection Pledge to cover their own power infrastructure, traditional utility cost-sharing rules still routinely shift billions in regional grid upgrade expenses onto everyday residential ratepayers.
2. Despite this emerging consensus among industry and policymakers, public opposition to data centers remains high and is driven more by concerns over resource use, quality of life, and AI itself than by electricity costs alone.
3. Turning the pledge into enforceable protections now depends on state legislatures, utility commissions, and governors translating broad commitments into detailed tariff and cost-allocation rules. WATCH THE MONEY IN THIS SPACE.
I'm sure some of that is valid in the Lower 48 and needs to be watched. Where I am in Alaska they wouldn't get away with that as most all the big utilities on the road system are coops and they already have high rates and are very conscious of anything that would push those up.
It's really sad the populist push against AI and the silliness of some of the prognosticators. I know as a Christian that it isn't going to get sentient and God won't allow it to destroy the world. It's a tool that will be used for good and bad as with all other technologies.
The resource argument is also bad as the new centers with closed loop cooling use an infinitesimal amount of water as compared to many other things including watering the grass.
Time will tell how it all works out. I just bemoan the ease of which the greenies are able to manipulate people, just like the Q think five or so years ago.
Well, I would like to hear god's plan for roping in the excesses of the data centers. Is it similar to his plan for eliminating the threat of nuclear armageddon or diseases killing massive numbers of good human beings or the heating of the planet in large swaths of the earth becoming uninhabitable?
As for "infinitesmal amount of water":
There’s a water–energy tradeoff. Saving water often means using more electricity for cooling, and vice versa.
Most data centers do use water in some form, but not all. Industry estimates show that roughly 75–90% of data centers worldwide rely on water-based cooling as their primary method.
What about using non-drinking water? Unfortunately, most of that cooling water has historically come from potable (drinking-quality) sources like municipal water or groundwater. One analysis estimated that around 57% of data centers’ direct water use is from potable water supplies. Another industry assessment was even starker: 80–90% of water used by data centers is drawn from “blue” water sources such as lakes, rivers, or aquifers – often the same sources providing community drinking water[15].
"Greenies" I guess is an epithet for those who care about the environment and actually having adequate potable water and who care about the creation that god has made? There are lots of interesting places to live where "those fanatics" live.
Greenies is definitely an epithet, for those who want to gain political power by pretending to care about the environment, or the sheep who follow them. Once they moved to use government power instead of cooperation with industry (like in the 70s) they just became another group focused on power. The Democrat party platform here in Alaska specifically says that they want to increase rates on energy to everyone. They ultimately would like to turn us and the US into a big park. They are even more evil than that because they worship the Earth instead of worshipping God. God will ultimately laugh at them like we now laugh at Al Gore and how he thought the world would be destroyed by now or how we laugh at the Malthusians who thought the world could be overpopulated.
I have many thoughts, but the tech companies did themselves no favors by seeking special tax breaks so enormous that these facilities end up paying virtually no taxes. Hence there's not much fiscal value to the town for having one. But yet, we need to build them.
This is very bizarre. Who is envying whom, if I could ask? I qualify as pretty well off and have been for most of my working life and now. My guess is you're next going to call me a sucker for happily paying my fairshare. At least that is one I get from your sorts.
If progressive taxes aren't fair, then most of the rest of the developed liberal democracies are REALLY unfair, but oddly seem to enjoy a great many more living and lifestyle advantages that we're either low on the totem-pole or entirely without: free/means-tested medical care, free education from pre-k to post-doc or hands-on-worker-master-license and paid 4-6 week vacation and all public holidays paid.
So, I can only presume we are NOT the greatest country on earth since we have such miserable living standards compared to most OECD (developed) countries
To Lance's point, here are what I see as substantial objections to data center construction:
1) they aren't all built "in the boonies" - next time you fly in or out of Washington-Dulles give yourself an hour to drive through nearby Loudoun County - and it may not be possible to build them there.
2) the buildings feel intimidating and inhuman architecturally - 100 feet high walls on all sides with few or no windows/adornments.
3) they generate very few jobs for the amount of land they occupy, which, aside from being an economic development challenge in its own right, reminds people of the constant refrain that AI is going to eliminate a bunch of jobs in a more indirect fashion.
There might well be ways to mitigate all of these concerns but so far the tech companies haven't been great at proffering up such measures.
Agree, though the other problem going on is that it is debatable whether DCs are paying their share of electricity costs. In truth, they probably need to be paying a good deal more than their share, and consumers need confidence in it. Which means they need to see actual relief in electric bills amidst the boom.
It doesn't help that PSCs are notoriously corrupt institutions of state government. Textbook "regulatory capture." The data center boom is huge for utilities, historically a sleepy industry with close to no load growth, and they will push every lever they have to try to get their regulators behind it. They don't want to miss out on the boom to other states with more favorable regulation.
I would say Hochul is wrong here, but I can sympathize with the urge to say "we don't trust anyone involved, we're not messing with it, the risk-reward for us locally is not worth it." Of course, the natural experiment that I will watch with interest will be comparing the trend of residential electricity prices in NY and relatively DC-constructive NJ over the next few years.
Indeed, Republican corporate welfare is a major wedge I feel still between the MAGA right and traditional. Also doesn't help they were slow to move on building additonal power plants to power these things.
I was mussing yesterday that they'll probably will be/is a united front from MAGA and the socialist and scaling back the property rights of corporations because rights should only apply to people or something. I don't hate the sentiment but its a VERY slippery slope.
Yeah I feel like the traditional GOP seems to worship at the altar of business, like business are an undeniable good no matter what. Like some how business are naturally virtues and all that logic about market incentives don't apply to them, no way they'd pursue rent seeking behavior! Business' behaviors need to be cudgeled into something that is good for or at least not bad for society just like an individuals.
The real issue isn't business, it's that business has been perverted with the corporation. The biblical model is that each man is his business and is accountable to God and man for the actions of his business. The corporate model was specifically designed to divorce ownership from accountability, i.e. limited liability. If the stockholders were responsible for what the business did we would have a completely different dynamic out there.
As someone who built the financial platforms of virtually every Wall Street company (defunct or still operating and the last one being GoldmanSachs) the only thing our financial systems' underpinning is responsible for is profit and the more and more ways you can generate it, the merrier.
Yeah that's a better way to put it. I get allowing someone to protect their home and certain assets from the business going under and a lawsuit, but that separation leads to those cases of CEOs of stores who sold the store real estate to their PE firm for cheap and rented the space back out the stores to pillage the company he's CEO of for money. Seems like a clear breach of fiduciary duty to me but evidently their isn't the mechanisms or will to enforce such things
It's been a while since I've visited (and now paid) for this. You're welcome ;-/
I don't really see the "end" of the populist style and I certainly do not see a waning of the neo-fascist style that Trump and pretty much the entire Republican party are about. I see (or hope to see) what seems to be both bug and feature of Americans' voting and belief systems: a wearying even from the "believers" when they realize --consciously or not-- that they followed another false prophet. Just like religion, you have to ignore reality or dive into an alternate reality in order to feel good or righteous: WE ARE AMERICANS AND THE GREATEST COUNTRY ON EARTH.
When enough Americans come to realize the Populist/Fascist/Fake Economic Ideology is NOT really improving their lives, once again they slink off, hide who they became, what they believed and how nothing improved.
I'm sure I'll incur a great deal of opprobium for this remark, but what the heck: AMERICANS ARE THE DIMMEST POLITICAL ANIMALS in the Western World in that they are so easily manipulated into voting against their own welfare and well-being.
Even the NPR staff seems to have been finally beaten down. They used to sound the alarm with every report as if some imaginary HR department was going to rescue them from Trump. Now they are like the last page of 1984, where Winston concedes that he loves Big Brother.
Could you provide an substantive example/s?
NPR is pretty much thriving and without the subsidies they got and deserved. Even, strangely, in some red states and red areas where the locals needed the many services only NPR could provide:
https://www.npr.org/2026/07/23/nx-s1-5903860/a-year-after-trump-funding-cuts-public-media-finds-support-from-audiences
This will sound simplistic, but it’s something I’m seeing on the ground, personally and professionally. There’s a saying that 90% of life is showing up. There’s a lot of folks with work, with personal lives, with communities, that have largely tuned out or are distracted with the many avenues that take one’s time. The new constructivism will come from those that show up. This can be good and it can be bad. You mentioned examples in the influencer area, which has gone off the rails. There’s an example of people who show up that can lead to bad. Perhaps, as you allude to toward the end of the essay, the successful constructive good will come from folks who handle personal relationships, or human-social activities, well. It might be that aspect where there’s the most fertile ground, particularly in-person opportunities.
There are great opportunities to build. The human-social aspect, along with Big Tech issues and emerging demographic trends are the challenges for constructivism.
Metaphorically speaking, average citizens are the children who have sat through a long Pentecostal church service—tired of the noise, tears, falling out, long speeches, testimonials, calls to give money and volunteer, the pageantry and restriction of it all, the same old people telling their rambling old people stories.
Thoughts have turned to much more tangible and future-oriented questions like:
“What are we going to eat?”;“When are we going home?”; “What’s the plan for later?”
That's great.
Great piece, Aaron!
There seems to be a bystander problem on the right that prevents them from capitalizing on victories the populist right has achieved. As always, the conquest is a lot more fun and sexy then having to rule afterwards. As a people become more wealthy they tend to become more risk adverse, given that the vast majority of Americans who could build and shape institutions in their spare time, but don't because the opportunity cost is so high. So many fun things you could do in those evenings, or more profitable things, and it can be spun as "focusing on my family". Truth is doing those other things produces much tangible results instead of the slow societal change a lifetime of dedication to an institution. I think perhaps there is a great mistrust of conservatives in future generations to lead anything they build, like they don't want to create any worthwhile institution because it will just be taken over by the left in a generation or two.
I'm not familiar with "Big Eva", but I'm no stranger to seeing my fellow Indy Baptists refuse to leave their comfortable spot in the pew to be the salt and light Christ commands us to be. So many rather virtue signal by talking about the need for revival and change instead of being the change. God reward us all the fruits of our labors?
What made you foresee the rise of the manosphere? In 2013 I was a freshman college, and me and friends would often complain about what women claim they want and their actions did were wildly different, but we were scared to be bold because of hyper consent culture on campuses at the time. Maybe we noticing something legitimate after all...
I'm sure this will be ignored, but what the hell...
The "manosphere" is something completely bizarre to many of us baby boomers (I'm mid-century). Sure, we went through much more change and conflict. For most of us, that grew us. Growing up with Viet Nam and our draft cards and drugs and early death of our friends and family members. But the fall of the "Communist" world and the rise of more rights for those denied them and better and freer lives for all was the continuous feature, foundation, and oxygen to us and certainly NOT figuring out what "being a man" meant.
We did, however, have to figure it out and, yes, some number of us didn't make it, including a cohort of my friends. But, paradoxically, we were more concerned with actually being in and improving the world and that was our "being a man" and "being a woman".
And now a big deal is the navel-gazing of the "manosphere" and religion? Whodda thunk.
We made good-to-great changes even if at the expense of many lives. And then Reagan started turning America inward and morally downward. Sure, there were still "commies" to fight. I was living in Germany when he made the "Mr. Gorbachev..." speech. As odd as it seems, that seemed to be the turning point toward America's inwardness. Sure, we went on to try to change everywhere to modern liberal democracies. But as good of an impulse that was, America and, most of all, Americans were not up to the task because Americans were still the provincial hicks of the world.
Leaving aside the soldiers stationed abroad, only a tiny number of Americans lived abroad and even fewer in the civilian cultures and an even tinier number spoke another language or bothered to even try.
I read the stuff that gets published and commented on here and it truly strikes me as wholly foreign. I understand the pull of religion. I grew up a Jew and son of a career military officer (WW2, Korea, Viet Nam) on 6 military bases around the USA. My perspective is very different from what I read here: the number of times I was shunned, insulted and beaten was what I took away from America. Or, at least, until my father retired and we moved to New York. Then in the '70s I spent 9 months on a kibbutz and then 9 months at the first Ba'al Tsuvah yeshiva in Jerusalem Aish haTorah. It didn't change anything. Just another interesting life experience. And Israel under first Sharon and then later Netanyahu showed me that religion and tribe were truly the worst pestilences and worst than that, the pestilence of prescribing what "being a man is": Even with Golda Meir and Tzipi Livni and women in the army, there was always a "manosphere" and a sphere was still a closed object. It was there to assert "dominion".
And the accusations that "women claim they want and their actions were wildly different" is a stunning and frightening self-serving justification of men entitling themselves to whatever they want from women. Shocking. And the real essence of the manosphere.
Well that was a very Boomer-esque speech for sure lol.
The millennial and gen z challenges are certainly more spiritual then physical, and yeah some of them are probably overblown, but idol hands do indeed to the devils work. For all our relative peace and prosperity, people aren't getting married, having kids, and even friendships are way down, suicide is up. Clearly this material abundance isn't a substitute for the much closer and homogeneous culture most baby boomers got to grow up in, but so few of them will bother to entertain that perspective.
It was always hilarious to me how so many people pearl clutch when I point out most women want to have their cake and eat it too, cause women are indeed human and that's just human nature. Many, heck I'd say most women want to benefits of traditional man while still having all the privileges of the modern, equitable marriage. Men in turn want the benefits of a traditional woman but the responsibilities of modern equitable marriage, and when they do it the hypocrisy is rightly called out. Can't say I've seen the case with women across any sphere of society, I came to know Aaron's work from his piece on the issues of servant leadership.
"The End of History" in the 1990s was a materially easy time for many boys to grow up but a hard one spiritually. Boys were not taught to have goals at school, other than college for all. Girls heard girl power and matching or exceeding boys as the goal.
Then, few adults realized how effective the campaign against teenage pregnancy would be. The main take away was that a baby will ruin your life.
Looking back, I think if good Christians were honest that they would have done something. Adults were fooled to an extent. Adults heard that kids were being taught to do the right thing, but kids were hammered at school that babies were worse than many diseases.
As for women, the exception proves the rule. Women have been called out for staggering amounts of college debt without a commensurate degree. It's rare enough to be interesting when it happens.
I would like to learn what makes a "boomeresque speech.
I suppose the only thing to point out here is this remark:
"...women want to have their cake and eat it too". Pretty one-sided when men don't just want, but rather just take and eat it and assume that's the order of things.
Maybe I need to know with some examples what "servant leadership is". It sounds on the face of it a perfect oxymoron.
What made it boomeresque was all the "what me and my generation went through" framework in an attempt to give your argument some moral authority.
I said men want to have their cake and eat it too, its just socially acceptable to call men out.
It can be an oxymoron. Leaders can and should be sacrificial and work for the best interests of those under them, but not at the expense of the mission they were appointed to accomplish. Aaron has a great article on it, this what made me subscribe: https://www.aaronrenn.com/p/servant-leadership
I can't decipher why you sent me over to that link. It's all about (to my mind) this elaborate male conservative Christian wish list about how the sexes must behave.
As a short comment, I met my wife at work. We were instant peers since we were both consultants building Wall Street trading systems. She was also a fairly recent immigrant from the Soviet Union and unhappily married with an 8 year old son and was supporting her husband through pharmacy school. We fell instantly in love, she divorced her husband and we married on the way to work. The husband apparently had the hots for my wife's then best friend and they ended up almost in the same time period as us marrying.
This prescriptive view of the sexes and marriage, etc. is so bizarre to me. Human beings and their relations are hugely complex. Some manage them well and probably somewhat more don't. All I can say is that will never change.
And..... IS THAT "BAD"?
Agreed, I'm coming at it as Christian and God's design for the marriage and home. You aren't, so we're at an impasse so it's not worth our time to engage further.
Have fun telling the kids how bad nam was and what not.
Nothing moral at all about "what my generation went through". Simply statement of fact and cause and effect analysis. I mean, the Viet Nam war providing "moral authority"? Is that what you think? That is pretty weird given the enormous literature that followed properly characterizing it as the worst and likely most immoral example of American power projection. It was abject on every level. I can tell some pretty harrowing tales of friends of mine who served there.
I couldn't agree more about men wanting to have their cake and eat it too. I'll read the article and perhaps comment there or come back here. Thanks.
I'm saddened by the new populism against Data Centers. I think the MAGA side is being co-opted by the environmentalists, who want to stop anything that uses energy so they can drive down our energy use. All technologies are disruptive: printing press, steam engines, cars, planes, computers, the internet and now AI. It's not going to destroy the world. It will disrupt things and we will end up at a new normal. Data Centers are just a piece of infrastructure. As long as we don't strip property rights (eminent domain) or allow stupid environmental crap we will be just fine. Put them out in the boonies and the will help raise the tide to raise all boats.
For one, I can only believe you are someone who has not worked in the majority of companies (as I have) that want these. They are and always have been in a race for faster computing. As things went from seconds, to milliseconds and now to micro seconds to nanoseconds... it was always about making more money and not about making anything better.
Even materials scientists and drug designers wanting to do molecular folding can/will quickly get where they need to with other technologies. Even the increasing strides made by hybrid quantum computing has so progressed that anything USEFUL you might want to do with these giant investments and impositions on communities will be relatively soon obsolete.
The real reason these things are so desired by their constituency is what they have not much hidden: obtaining, storing, processing and misuse of human data (race, social-standing, wealth, education level, car choices, travel preferences, buying behavior of all sorts and.... POLITICAL choices, etc.) at scale. And they can test manipulating these to control or influence behavior with near perfect success.
It's not MAGA being "co-opted". MAGA (for once) shares the same concerns listed above and, certainly more so, not wanting these things to be anywhere near where they live. The hogging of the available electrical infrastructure to keep them humming and requiring more infrastructure to be bought and paid for by communities to keep their power bills low is shattered.
I just hope one (or more) comes to your community. I'm betting you'll be just another nimby.
I have worked and currently work in the electrical utility space, so I get really keyed off when I hear the electricity arguments. Utilities are supposed to be cost-causer--cost-payer. There is some limited circumstance where rates could rise, but in my neck of the woods it would only help rate-payers as the corps would share the fixed costs of operation and pay their own variable costs.
Not that it matters too much, I began my tech career at ConEd NYC modeling and building software for the distribution of electricity, outage or slowdowns in service and operations of a oil/gas generating plants. Whatever.
You're part right, but only if most or any of our privatized infrastructure uniformly worked as cost-causer/cost-payer. It doesn't in law YET. And it's going fast the opposite way. See Trump's ceasing to allow payments to FEMA, NWS, etc.
But I suppose the apposite question would be: so do you have any reliable evidence that the giant data centers are going to be mandated to be cost-cause/cost-payer? I know there is some push for this, but....
1. While major tech companies signed a voluntary Ratepayer Protection Pledge to cover their own power infrastructure, traditional utility cost-sharing rules still routinely shift billions in regional grid upgrade expenses onto everyday residential ratepayers.
2. Despite this emerging consensus among industry and policymakers, public opposition to data centers remains high and is driven more by concerns over resource use, quality of life, and AI itself than by electricity costs alone.
3. Turning the pledge into enforceable protections now depends on state legislatures, utility commissions, and governors translating broad commitments into detailed tariff and cost-allocation rules. WATCH THE MONEY IN THIS SPACE.
I'm sure some of that is valid in the Lower 48 and needs to be watched. Where I am in Alaska they wouldn't get away with that as most all the big utilities on the road system are coops and they already have high rates and are very conscious of anything that would push those up.
It's really sad the populist push against AI and the silliness of some of the prognosticators. I know as a Christian that it isn't going to get sentient and God won't allow it to destroy the world. It's a tool that will be used for good and bad as with all other technologies.
The resource argument is also bad as the new centers with closed loop cooling use an infinitesimal amount of water as compared to many other things including watering the grass.
Time will tell how it all works out. I just bemoan the ease of which the greenies are able to manipulate people, just like the Q think five or so years ago.
Well, I would like to hear god's plan for roping in the excesses of the data centers. Is it similar to his plan for eliminating the threat of nuclear armageddon or diseases killing massive numbers of good human beings or the heating of the planet in large swaths of the earth becoming uninhabitable?
As for "infinitesmal amount of water":
There’s a water–energy tradeoff. Saving water often means using more electricity for cooling, and vice versa.
Most data centers do use water in some form, but not all. Industry estimates show that roughly 75–90% of data centers worldwide rely on water-based cooling as their primary method.
What about using non-drinking water? Unfortunately, most of that cooling water has historically come from potable (drinking-quality) sources like municipal water or groundwater. One analysis estimated that around 57% of data centers’ direct water use is from potable water supplies. Another industry assessment was even starker: 80–90% of water used by data centers is drawn from “blue” water sources such as lakes, rivers, or aquifers – often the same sources providing community drinking water[15].
"Greenies" I guess is an epithet for those who care about the environment and actually having adequate potable water and who care about the creation that god has made? There are lots of interesting places to live where "those fanatics" live.
Greenies is definitely an epithet, for those who want to gain political power by pretending to care about the environment, or the sheep who follow them. Once they moved to use government power instead of cooperation with industry (like in the 70s) they just became another group focused on power. The Democrat party platform here in Alaska specifically says that they want to increase rates on energy to everyone. They ultimately would like to turn us and the US into a big park. They are even more evil than that because they worship the Earth instead of worshipping God. God will ultimately laugh at them like we now laugh at Al Gore and how he thought the world would be destroyed by now or how we laugh at the Malthusians who thought the world could be overpopulated.
I have many thoughts, but the tech companies did themselves no favors by seeking special tax breaks so enormous that these facilities end up paying virtually no taxes. Hence there's not much fiscal value to the town for having one. But yet, we need to build them.
Oh, and I meant to ask:
Are the taxes being spread fairly such that the greater the income & wealth, the greater the tax burden?
I'm going to go out on a limb and say NO.
Progressive taxes aren't fair, they show the results of envy.
This is very bizarre. Who is envying whom, if I could ask? I qualify as pretty well off and have been for most of my working life and now. My guess is you're next going to call me a sucker for happily paying my fairshare. At least that is one I get from your sorts.
If progressive taxes aren't fair, then most of the rest of the developed liberal democracies are REALLY unfair, but oddly seem to enjoy a great many more living and lifestyle advantages that we're either low on the totem-pole or entirely without: free/means-tested medical care, free education from pre-k to post-doc or hands-on-worker-master-license and paid 4-6 week vacation and all public holidays paid.
So, I can only presume we are NOT the greatest country on earth since we have such miserable living standards compared to most OECD (developed) countries
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/best-countries-for-quality-of-life
And you can explore in detail with this:
https://www.oecd.org/en/data/tools/well-being-data-monitor.html
Amen.
To Lance's point, here are what I see as substantial objections to data center construction:
1) they aren't all built "in the boonies" - next time you fly in or out of Washington-Dulles give yourself an hour to drive through nearby Loudoun County - and it may not be possible to build them there.
2) the buildings feel intimidating and inhuman architecturally - 100 feet high walls on all sides with few or no windows/adornments.
3) they generate very few jobs for the amount of land they occupy, which, aside from being an economic development challenge in its own right, reminds people of the constant refrain that AI is going to eliminate a bunch of jobs in a more indirect fashion.
There might well be ways to mitigate all of these concerns but so far the tech companies haven't been great at proffering up such measures.
Agree, though the other problem going on is that it is debatable whether DCs are paying their share of electricity costs. In truth, they probably need to be paying a good deal more than their share, and consumers need confidence in it. Which means they need to see actual relief in electric bills amidst the boom.
It doesn't help that PSCs are notoriously corrupt institutions of state government. Textbook "regulatory capture." The data center boom is huge for utilities, historically a sleepy industry with close to no load growth, and they will push every lever they have to try to get their regulators behind it. They don't want to miss out on the boom to other states with more favorable regulation.
I would say Hochul is wrong here, but I can sympathize with the urge to say "we don't trust anyone involved, we're not messing with it, the risk-reward for us locally is not worth it." Of course, the natural experiment that I will watch with interest will be comparing the trend of residential electricity prices in NY and relatively DC-constructive NJ over the next few years.
Indeed, Republican corporate welfare is a major wedge I feel still between the MAGA right and traditional. Also doesn't help they were slow to move on building additonal power plants to power these things.
I was mussing yesterday that they'll probably will be/is a united front from MAGA and the socialist and scaling back the property rights of corporations because rights should only apply to people or something. I don't hate the sentiment but its a VERY slippery slope.
See above my thoughts on the matter, Curious how much they intersect.
Yeah I feel like the traditional GOP seems to worship at the altar of business, like business are an undeniable good no matter what. Like some how business are naturally virtues and all that logic about market incentives don't apply to them, no way they'd pursue rent seeking behavior! Business' behaviors need to be cudgeled into something that is good for or at least not bad for society just like an individuals.
The real issue isn't business, it's that business has been perverted with the corporation. The biblical model is that each man is his business and is accountable to God and man for the actions of his business. The corporate model was specifically designed to divorce ownership from accountability, i.e. limited liability. If the stockholders were responsible for what the business did we would have a completely different dynamic out there.
As someone who built the financial platforms of virtually every Wall Street company (defunct or still operating and the last one being GoldmanSachs) the only thing our financial systems' underpinning is responsible for is profit and the more and more ways you can generate it, the merrier.
Yeah that's a better way to put it. I get allowing someone to protect their home and certain assets from the business going under and a lawsuit, but that separation leads to those cases of CEOs of stores who sold the store real estate to their PE firm for cheap and rented the space back out the stores to pillage the company he's CEO of for money. Seems like a clear breach of fiduciary duty to me but evidently their isn't the mechanisms or will to enforce such things