Bo Marr

Founder, executive chairman, CTO of Chaos Industries. Technical Founder of Epirus.

[Bo Marr @Bobiwon]

Air defense is one of the biggest barriers to world wide safety. @ChaosDefense is announcing complete vertical air defense solutions, making air defense robust, at commercial scales, and affordable. Check it out: https://t.co/OjRLZThVRn

[OSINTtechnical @Osinttechnical]

The Ukrainian Navy has released footage of the first ever battle between a pair of drone boats.

Seen here, a Ukrainian Sargan 3000 USV engages and sinks a Russian USV using its M2 Browning .50 HMG.

[Gavin Baker @GavinSBaker]

Regret the tone of my post on data centers yesterday.

What I should have said:

There were reasonable concerns about data centers 18ish months ago: water, taxes, jobs, electricity prices, the environment and what they would do to small towns. Well-structured data center projects have largely addressed these concerns today and we should be celebrating this.

On balance, data centers are awesome for America in every way.

On water: U.S. data centers use a fraction of what golf courses use. A lot of the numbers from 18 months ago were off by over 1000x. Newer data centers use closed-loop systems or recycled water. Should be required by every town approving a data center project.

On taxes: looking only at sales-tax exemptions, as Ronan Farrow did, is the wrong way to evaluate this. Data centers pay significant property taxes. Loudoun County, which is the wealthiest county in America, now collects on the order of $1 billion a year from data centers. In Quincy, WA, data centers are more than half the property-tax roll. Over time, property taxes can go to zero while government spending increases in these towns.

On jobs: this has been unambiguously awesome for blue collar Americans. Demand for electricians, plumbers, welders, HVAC techs, and contractors has gone vertical, and it is not a one-time construction job. These buildings get upgraded and expanded over time. That is why the building trades are fighting for them, and why some unions are now treating opposition to data centers as a reason not to endorse politicians.

On power: the original fear was that households would pay for the incremental electricity demand in the form of higher prices. That is why the ratepayer-protection deals and the new large-load tariffs exist. The right structure is: the data center brings or pays for new generation and signs a contract long enough that existing customers are protected. Where that is happening, utilities are cutting or freezing residential rates and saying so on the record. Where it is not, people are right to object. Electricity prices are going down *today* in a number of large states because of data centers.

On the environment: data centers overwhelming use natural gas today, which is the cleanest power source outside of nuclear, solar and wind. And the companies that are building the data centers are committed to carbon neutrality such that an equivalent amount of solar will likely be built. Maybe more importantly, the data centers need batteries to function effectively and these batteries can also sell energy back into the grid (which recently prevented blackouts in Texas). Over time, data centers will run on solar plus batteries.

On the towns: Poverty in Quincy, WA fell from 29% to 6%. Data center taxes paid for a new high school, a hospital, a library, police and fire stations. This is happening in many left for dead former mill and farm towns that had no other bidder for the land.

Data centers are actually reindustrializing parts of America and creating the kind of working-class jobs both parties have spent decades claiming to support. That should not be a partisan issue. Data centers can and should be awesome for America and they increasingly, overwhelmingly are. Supporting the outsourcing of data centers to China will likely age just as well as support for the outsourcing of high quality, blue collar manufacturing jobs to China has aged.

When the facts change, I change my mind. I hope that reasonable people who had good faith reasons to oppose data centers at least consider updating their beliefs given the change in the facts over the last 18 months. This really matters for America.

I will say I also think the idea of making data centers beautiful is a good one that has yet to be implemented. Data centers should be just as beautiful as Grand Central Station. We can learn a lot from the railroad buildout. Neoclassical revival ftw.

Might write up open-weight AI tomorrow as this is equally essential to America.

[CHAOS Industries @ChaosDefense]

$510 million Series D raised in a few days. A $4.5B valuation.

The era of taking things slow is over.

Thank you to Valor Equity Partners, @8VC, @Accel, our customers, and partners for your continued belief and support.

Read the full press release: https://t.co/CO1x5PdJL7

[Forterra @ForterraDefense]

"One of the critical uses for autonomous systems is to be that forward, blunting force," Scott Sanders, CGO at Forterra.

Forterra’s about to get chaotic with our most recent partnership with CHAOS Industries. One of the DoW’s biggest threats are unmanned aerial systems. Forterra and CHAOS Industries are teaming together to build the next generation of counter-UAS technology

https://t.co/mMg41VyDdY

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

Something is clearly broken.

It’s time those of us who were able to live this out, figure out what to do to help the millions who aren’t anymore.

[Bo Marr @Bobiwon]

https://t.co/FqzlGdvQJn

[Bo Marr @Bobiwon]

Proud of what has gotten built and continues to be built at Epirus. The only truly operationally viable directed energy system out there for mass scale operations.

https://t.co/LNA6G3K6dJ

[Bo Marr @Bobiwon]

@JTLonsdale So true: the energy required to taking outsized credit could be used instead to solve the problem

[Shawn Ryan @ShawnRyan762]

I mean was it not? 🤷🏻‍♂️

Full episode is streaming now on the SRS YouTube channel.
@realErikDPrince

#shawnryanshow

[Bo Marr @Bobiwon]

Stanford now lower acceptance rate than Harvard, Duke now lower acceptance rate than Yale. Berkeley, Georgia Tech, Stanford 3 out of the top 5 in engineering. Dare I say ACC > Ivy League?

[Bo Marr @Bobiwon]

This run by NCSU possibly the greatest conference championship run of all time. Never has a team won 5 games in 5 days to win a championship.

[Bo Marr @Bobiwon]

@andoerr From your Duke area representative in the NC senate :)

[Bo Marr @Bobiwon]

@andoerr This is from a Raleigh area hospital. And some of these vaccinated folks didn’t get a booster or had the J&J. Basically seeing almost zero hospital / severe cases for those that have been boosted with an mRNA vaccine

[Bo Marr @Bobiwon]

@paulkrugman Key stats are not number of cases (imagine if we tracked cases of the cold) but hospitalizations, ICU visits, number of folks on ventilators, and deaths.

[Bo Marr @Bobiwon]

@anothercohen @ctjlewis Cheap debt, and parents. You can buy a $1.2M house, put 20% down with help from parents, get a < 3% loan, only pay $3800/month.

[Bo Marr @Bobiwon]

@paulkrugman https://t.co/nnNjgiaUr3

[Bo Marr @Bobiwon]

@paulkrugman 80% of energy in America (much higher world wide) comes from fossil fuels. The global warming solution must include technologies to sequester carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning. Renewables will not solve it alone.

[Bo Marr @Bobiwon]

@PluggedLiePod Fairly straight forward golf etiquette to not move in someone’s backswing.

[Bo Marr @Bobiwon]

@jenni_tabler PhDs should stop elevating an academic career over one in industry. A well executed research program at a startup that is productized absolutely will change the world. And in some cases has much more potential (capital and resources).