@Celtic1Joe@PatMacafee01@fiago7 I ❤️ Philly, not sure how that makes me a dipshit. Thanks for not suggesting he goes to a college football game at the end of August.
Okay this is genuinely insane.
SpaceX just unveiled a satellite whose only job is to run AI. Not internet. Not GPS. Just compute, floating in orbit.
It's called AI1, and the reason behind it breaks your brain.
AI data centers on Earth are hitting a wall, not a chip wall, a physics wall.
They need staggering amounts of power and water just to stay cool, and we're running out of grid and land to build them.
So Musk's answer is: stop building them on Earth.
In orbit, the sun never sets. Free power, 24/7. No water for cooling, you just radiate heat into the vacuum of space. The two things choking AI on the ground barely exist up there.
And here's the wild part: Musk says it's easier to build than a Starlink satellite. Strip out the complex antennas and it's "a lot of solar cells, a radiator, and some laser links."
One AI1 carries the compute of an Nvidia GB300 rack, the same hardware data centers fight over down here.
AI1 is just the first one. The plan is a constellation of up to a million of them.
And the timing isn't an accident, SpaceX goes public this week at a ~$1.75 trillion target. This isn't a rocket company anymore. It's positioning itself as the power grid for AI, in space.
The race for AI compute just left the planet. Literally.
@SpaceX
This is the Pritzker family property in Lake County IL, it’s located between two major highways, proximity to metra, the lake and a casino - 40 miles north of Chicago and 40 south of Milwaukee. If @GovPritzker wanted to keep the bears in Illinois, surely he could just gift them the property. The surrounding communities that would be positively effected could be the perfect end around. What say you JB?
Hey @GovPritzker , I know a site IN Illinois that would be great @ChicagoBears for their new stadium complex. It’s by two major highways, Metra and the Lake. Illinois newest casino is also around the corner @AmericanPlaceIL and it’s a 20 minute drive door to door from Halas Hall with traffic. I’m sure if the Governor REALLY wanted to keep the Bears in Illinois he could pull a few strings, right JB?
To anyone celebrating the Bears moving to Indiana because you think it saves us tax dollars: please wake up.
I hope you’ve been paying attention since 2022. This isn’t a victory; it’s a disaster. First it was Caterpillar, Boeing, Citadel, Tyson, and TTX. Now a $6 billion franchise is advancing a move across the state line because Illinois politicians refuse to create a competitive business climate.
When multi-billion-dollar corporations and their highest-paid executives flee the state, they take their massive tax revenues with them. Who do you think is going to pick up the tab for the state's massive liabilities when they're all gone? Hint: Look in the mirror.
And if you think the bleeding stops with corporate HQs, look at how our tax dollars are actually being prioritized. While state leadership claims we don't have the funds to incentivize major revenue-generating businesses to stay, state audits reveal that Illinois has spent an estimated **$2.5 billion to $2.8 billion** on state-funded healthcare, housing, and support services for non-citizens and undocumented immigrants over the last few years alone. Our politicians are actively funding massive cost overruns for non-citizens while letting our tax base walk out the door.
For those wondering how we can possibly have a massive housing shortage when our state's overall population has been declining since 2020 (White, 2023)—it's simple math. Population decline doesn't automatically mean empty houses when the state completely stops building.
Thanks to Illinois’ suffocating zoning laws, red tape, and the highest property taxes in the nation, new housing construction permits fell by 13% over the last five years. Available housing inventory in the Chicago area has plummeted by a staggering 54 since 2019. We have an existing deficit of over 142,000 housing units because the state has made it too expensive and heavily regulated for builders to build and for regular families to afford (Aurand, 2023; Corinth & Dante, 2022).
We are living in a state that chokes out supply, drives up home prices by 49%, taxes the middle class into oblivion, and spends billions on non-citizens while watching our biggest economic engines wave goodbye on their way to Indiana.
Stop cheering. Start paying attention.
### References & Sources
* **Illinois Demographics & Net Migration Trends:** Research from the University of Illinois Extension's Farmdoc Daily tracks how post-pandemic population dynamics, domestic out-migration, and low birth rates have driven continuous population decline in Illinois compared to neighboring states (White, 2023).
* **National & Local Housing Shortages:** Data from the National Low Income Housing Coalition documents the massive multi-million unit deficit in affordable housing options across municipal areas, driven by surging costs and a precipitous decline in overall rental and real estate vacancy rates (Aurand, 2023).
* **Regulatory Obstacles to Housing Growth:** A study published in the SSRN Electronic Journal details how strict zoning parameters and local municipal regulations function as a "regulatory tax" that severely suppresses housing stock expansion, compounding shortages even in areas facing negative net domestic migration (Corinth & Dante, 2022).
* **Chicago Housing Infrastructure Analysis:** The Metropolitan Planning Council outlines the regional constraints on the production and management of both private and subsidized housing units within northeastern Illinois (Lenz, 2023).
* **State-Level Non-Citizen Fiscal Outlays:** Official state budget presentations and audit reporting from the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services (HFS) detail the state-funded Health Benefits for Immigrant Adults (HBIA) and Health Benefits for Immigrant Seniors (HBIS) program expenditures, which drove the multi-billion-dollar non-citizen support infrastructure costs.