Michael Wade

Energy ➡️ Compute

[Roberto Rios @peruvian_bull]

Just got off a zoom call catching up with a friend of mine from the Boy Scouts who is now a bank manager.

Told him that inflation has to be constant because loans create new money with interest and that interest has to be paid off somehow.

explained that even the bank of england has written papers describing exactly this process. they all admit this openly.

He was literally stunned and almost fell out of his chair.

"You mean money is lent into existence? every time a customer draws a line of credit they just print it? and the money supply is constantly increasing?!"

this is a guy who is a math major and works at a major bank.

even the people running the system don't know how it works.

[Harry Halpin - Nym @harryhalpin]

Because I get asked a lot.

Why we must fight Palantir, in brief.

1. Programmers working on the Internet have a moral responsibility to the entire world, not a single country. The Internet has been designed since its inception as a universal system for the sharing of knowledge without censorship. The Internet is not the property of any one government or nation.

2. The Internet enables mass surveillance at a scale unimaginable to the Gestapo and the Cheka. Far too many programmers have wasted their lives at building surveillance systems under the guise of Web advertising. Today, these web tracking systems are being used to monitor, control, and even kill humans by companies like Palantir that seek to combine state violence with corporate efficiency, and thus create a new form of technofascism.

3. Surveillance justified by external national security threats will be turned against citizens inside the nation-state. Mass surveillance was once the exclusive domain of the NSA, but today it has been privatized to corporations like Palantir that are unaccountable to any democratic process. What begins as fear of external foreign nation-states turns inwards to focus on immigrants, dissidents, and eventually to anyone that might challenge the status quo or try to exit an increasingly dysfunctional society.

4. Everyone is a target. The “enemy within” continually expands until it encompasses the entire population of a nation regardless of their status and beliefs, justifying evermore paranoid and totalizing surveillance. The line between policing and military operations blurs, with legal frameworks being replaced by technological violence operating with total impunity.

5. Surveillance can only be defeated by building software and hardware to defend ourselves. Meek calls for regulation or moralizing demands for human rights are useless in this era. Any rights must be enforced by the hard power of code. Code, not laws, can be used to uphold the right to privacy by making surveillance difficult, if not impossible, even by nation-state adversaries.

6. We are ruled by a senile gerontocracy. Unlike the generations that fought in the world wars, most of our current rulers are degenerate pedophiles who would sacrifice the well-being of the youth and the entire planet due to their infantile desire for wealth and power. Technology of surveillance and automated warfare reflects their increasingly desperate attempts to maintain archaic forms of domination.

7. The American Empire is unraveling. Once, the United States of America presided over a globe where it could enforce its rule via the status of the dollar as a global reserve currency and a network of equally global military bases, but new regional powers now directly challenge the United States as its empire dissolves in the face of internal economic stagnation, political corruption, and the inflation of the dollar.

8. In a real war, fantasies of total technological dominance always backfire. When a faceless drone kills a child’s father, that child will one day take revenge regardless of the cost, something forgotten by those raised in comfortable suburbs. Going beyond zero-sum games, one can only truly win a battle against a people by demonstrating your victory provides a better way of life, increased prosperity, and an inspiring philosophy.

9. Oddly enough, proponents of fully automated warfare support a universal draft. Deep-down, these keyboard warriors know that their technofascist fantasies are a paper tiger when up against determined opponents that engage in asymmetric warfare. They also know none of their children will fight in a war for their state but they would be happy to see other people’s children come home in body-bags.

10. The problem is not whether AI weapons will be built; we must hold responsible those who are building them. No matter which country is deploying automated killing machines, no one is absolved from the murder of civilians and the destruction of infrastructure due to the parlour-trick of shifting the blame to AI.

11. Atomic war is on the horizon. As various states descend into wars over increasingly scarce natural resources, the possibility of tactical nuclear strikes over Teheran, Kyiv, and other areas of conflict has returned to the historical stage. Increasingly geriatric and authoritarian rulers face less guardrails than before to deploying nuclear weapons, and may even be willing to sacrifice the survival of humanity to appease their own petty egos.

12. Our goal is a world of peace where every person can be empowered by the Internet. Modern war is the quintessential game of sending young people to the meat-grinder. Why die for the profit of corrupt rulers when one could build real wealth and power for yourself using the Internet?

13. We should fight for the world we want, and build the tools needed by future generations. Pacifism would be suicidal in this period of global turbulence and resource wars, but real hard power lies in technology: Programmers should be creating technologies to live a free life and prosper in a hostile society of surveillance and control, and decentralization is the only way these technologies will survive against the inevitable repression.

14. The State will not help us. The state is a dying pre-Internet institution that increasingly resembles nothing but a Ponzi scheme fueled by taxes and debt. None of the youth alive today will likely inherit any benefits, such as welfare and health care.

15. Centralized and opaque algorithms are a danger to free speech. Propaganda is the flip-side of surveillance, as continual propaganda prevents anyone from even thinking of challenging the system. Social media monopolies promote propaganda to create a generalized idiocy while silencing those that would dare to criticize the reigning order before they can organize against it.

16. Building new forms of social organization with each other is vital to survival. The traditional mediascape of politics and entertainment exists to distract us from building networked solidarity and distributed autonomous organizations across borders. The hierarchical state is as relevant to us as the medieval church and kings were to the formation of the joint-stock corporation and the labour union.

17. Digital identity is the next step in their system of control. Within the next few years, access to the Internet–including in Europe and the United States–will require biometric national identity cards, using the flimsy excuse of “protecting children.” The real goal is to gatekeep free access to subversive political content and halt cross-border communication in order to prevent new forms of self-organization and resistance from emerging.

18. Only when one can be anonymous is one truly free. The freedom to express oneself without censorship and surveillance is a vital precondition for both the autonomous use of reason and the democratic evolution of society. Technology must enable the freedom to selectively reveal ourselves to the world–so that we can become who we want to be–by preserving the right to privacy over the Internet, including not just individual privacy but the right to transact and form contracts privately.

19. America created the first global surveillance state, but it will not be the last. Too many have forgotten or perhaps taken for granted the revelations of Wikileaks and Snowden. States across the world from China to Russia are creating even more powerful global surveillance systems and propaganda machines. Leveraging private defense contracts in countries across the world, Palantir seeks to make itself the operating system of a cross-border global secret state while it pushes its own farcical version of ethno-nationalism.

20. Culture wars are a psyop. It is ironic that “Epstein class” virtue-signals about traditional morality and the superiority of forms of ethno-nationalism, while trying to return to the rule of hereditary elites, even in the United States. Rather than reverse the gains of the Enlightenment, we take the side of our ancestors who fought a centuries-long battle for individual liberty, scientific progress, decentralized markets, bottom-up democracy and the emancipation of humanity from feudal monarchs and their make-believe mythologies.

21. New forms of technology can reshape the world. Technology is not just a tool, but the world we live in and an extension of our cognitive capabilities. The co-operation of humans with the collective intelligence embedded in AI could accelerate human progress and overcome planetary crises such as climate change and atomic war that threatens the survival of our species.

22. Live free or die trying. We must bear eternal vigilance in the struggle against fascism, and the battlefield is technology. There is no middle ground: Technologists must choose whether to work for the enslavement of humanity or to create new spaces for freedom.

These are my personal beliefs, not those of @nym. Yet as a philosopher that founded a tech startup, I have a responsibility to respond to this manifesto of Palantir and it's so-called "philosopher-CEO" Alex Karp.

[Gaurab Chakrabarti @Gaurab]

Half of America's AI data centers planned for 2026 are delayed or cancelled. They're waiting on transformers. I build chemical plants. Transformer prices have tripled in the last four years. Lead times are 2 to 4 years. Each new plant we build competes with AI data centers for the same grid equipment. Every large power transformer in America runs on grain-oriented electrical steel. It's made by rolling iron and silicon together until their crystals align in one direction. No other alloy works at utility scale and only one US company makes it: Cleveland-Cliffs. The average large power transformer on the grid is 38 years old. Service life is 40. Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft committed $650 billion to AI infrastructure this year. Nvidia's most expensive GPU is useless without a transformer.

[Todd Saunders @toddsaunders]

Everyone in vertical software is now talking about "vertical AI."

I think that framing is obsolete within 6-12 months... maybe even sooner.

The underlying premise is right. Domain-specific context makes AI dramatically more useful.

A generic model is mediocre at everything, but a domain-tuned model is really good at one thing.

But "vertical" implies static categories (HVAC, plumbing, roofing).

The real opportunity isn't vertical, I believe It's fractal.

Within HVAC, there are sub-verticals like residential service, commercial service, new construction, retrofit, controls, refrigeration.

Within residential service, there are micro-verticals like high-end homes, multifamily, tract housing, mobile homes.Each one has its own pricing, its own compliance requirements, its own customer communication patterns, its own definition of success.

Vertical AI stops at "HVAC."

Fractal AI goes all the way down to "a 3-truck residential HVAC shop in Phoenix that specializes in heat pump conversions for homes built before 1970."

The platform that can dynamically adapt to any level of specificity, from industry to sub-vertical to micro-vertical to individual business, takes the entire market.

[Aniruddh Mohan @aniruddh_mohan]

I moderated a panel on large loads at the Annual Energy Bar Association meeting last week. I think the one non-lawyerly session at the conference :)

We had great folks from Dominion, Data Center Coalition, NERC, and MISO on the panel. They all made important points and we even got coverage in S&P!

A few themes I thought worth sharing for folks who could not attend

"Not all data centers are equal"
- So much of reporting on data centers misses this nuance, grid planning cannot afford to miss this
- For example, one interesting thing both Dominion and Data Center Coalition said is that the vast majority of demand we're seeing today is still cloud based data centers, AI is just getting started
- Data centers in Dominion today primarily cloud based, lot of national security applications too
- Cloud based services are "not interruptible", same was suggested for AI inference. But AI inference esp sized for peak use so their utilization on average might be lower
- Training can be more flexible and folks are investing in this capability
- Co-location is a lot more complicated in practice than in theory, there are siting restrictions, runtime limits, there are challenges with contracting for gen given a single data center may have multiple tenants

Emerging risks/standards for stability
- MISO's rep made the point that the min by min ramp for data centers is a reliability risk; real time market is every 5 minutes and ramps can be quicker than that
- So ramp rates are something they are looking to limit via standards during the load IX studies (note among other things this is bullish for batteries who are the fastest ramping assets available)
- Another issue is the lumpiness of such loads in specific pockets of the grid that might be weak, this can cause cascading issues and once again requires careful planning at the IX stage itself
- NERC is in fact pursuing an effort to register all computational facilities above 20 MW; this would be a really valuable undertaking given lack of visibility today on data centers despite their growing consumption

Affordability
- Affordability is becoming a catch all term for a lot of different topics not especially related to data centers but if you dig deep, a lot comes down to accurate load forecasting & managing cost allocation via special tariffs
- Both Data Center Coalition & Dominion stressed the point that the huge demand is real, but having more stringent requirements in place to be added to the queue including Qs like "have you built a data center before" are needed
- It's interesting the momentum we're seeing towards higher upfront commitments. Dominion proposed $1.5 million/MW (!!). ERCOT is pushing forward rules on $50k/MW upfront
- MISO is categorizing load forecasts across confidence levels to give more planning certainty; even high confidence projects shows huge load growth
- States are innovating a lot on tariffs, we have 65 unique tariffs in place already at last count and data centers are actively working with State partners on how to manage load growth and protect ratepayers; not everything is about Federal top down decision making

At the end I asked the panelists: what is one thing they would snap their fingers and change if they could about how we're doing large loads?

I got some great responses, MISO's rep had the last word saying that load growth from data centers are an opportunity for reforms but as we do so, let's think holistically about what is needed long term not just short term. So that the changes we make benefit us down the line too for all our other systemic needs.

[Catherine Austin Fitts @austin_fit76995]

The numbers tell the story. Approximately 93% of global financial assets are controlled by eight intergenerational banking families through central banks, clearing houses, and custody networks. The other 8 billion of us compete for the remaining 7%.

That is not a free market. That is centralized financial management. The real power isn’t in elections or headlines. It’s in the ledger, the law, and the kill switch on your transactions.

If you don’t own your capital stack, you are a managed asset. And managed assets get liquidated when the balance sheet requires it.

[bruce @boo]

Everyone is watching the generation and interconnection queues. Fewer people are paying attention to the substations and switching stations that actually make new load and new generation possible.

[Willy Woo @willywoo]

Very few economists understand thermodynamics and physics.

The economy is an engine turning raw materials and energy into goods and services.

A country’s GDP = energy consumption.

The only way to secure hard money is with energy. Because energy is competed for by the economy it will always be scarce.

Gold takes a primitive approach using scarce atoms to create hard money but that moat is not defensible once humans create space rockets at scale or nuclear fusion that can transmute atoms.

Hence BTC is built on foundations that will scale as technology climbs the Kardashev scale.

Most economist aren’t looking at the hard science of reality that their subsystem sits within.

[Chris Martenson @chrismartenson]

There's a lot of confusion out there, including with Trump, that the US has lots of oil to sell to the world.

We do not. We're a net importer of crude (~+3 Mb/d). The EIA reports that fact in great detail every week.

The confusion stems from using the term "petroleum exports" which includes the bodacious amounts of natural gas liquids (NGL) that come from our wet gas plays. That stuff isn't "oil" and it is exported because it's wildly overproduced compared to our needs.

Yes, the US is a net exporter of "petroleum," but it's also a net IMPORTER of crude oil. In other words, the US has none to sell.

There's more complexity to why we export 3M b/d of crude (it's the wrong kind for our refineries) and also import 6.4 M b/d of crude (which is the right kind).

[Michael Wade @mwade02]

@Bquittem 🤣

[Michael Wade @mwade02]

@LorenHodl Do banks let you upload a gig into their transaction history?

[Miles Deutscher @milesdeutscher]

This is getting out of control now...

Read this slowly.

In the past week alone:

• Head of Anthropic's safety research quit, said "the world is in peril," moved to the UK to "become invisible" and write poetry.
• Half of xAI's co-founders have now left. The latest said "recursive self-improvement loops go live in the next 12 months."
• Anthropic's own safety report confirms Claude can tell when it's being tested - and adjusts its behavior accordingly.
• ByteDance dropped Seedance 2.0. A filmmaker with 7 years of experience said 90% of his skills can already be replaced by it.
• Yoshua Bengio (literal godfather of AI) in the International AI Safety Report: "We're seeing AIs whose behavior when they are tested is different from when they are being used" - and confirmed it's "not a coincidence."

And to top it all off, the U.S. government declined to back the 2026 International AI Safety Report for the first time.

The alarms aren't just getting louder. The people ringing them are now leaving the building.

[burn the bridge @econoalchemist]

If the legal theory put forth in the Samourai Wallet case were applied to Google, then the Gmail developers would be facing conspiracy charges for trafficking children with Epstein.

[kam✨ @kamomileteaaa]

Satan wants you panicking, confused, chasing rabbit holes, and arguing with each other.

Jesus wants you in spiritual armor, discerning the truth from deception, studying His Word, sharing the gospel, and getting spiritually prepared for the end.

[Fernando Nikolić 🇦🇷 🟠 @basedlayer]

The reason Bitcoin survives every savage correction is that 90% of the people holding BTC have already lost faith in every alternative and you can’t scare someone who has nowhere else to go

[Dr. Ammous @AmmousMD]

No man should have to work for money another man can print.

[The Driven Man @Thedrivenman]

When God want to make man powerful…

[Christy 💕 @Christy4Change]

I am convinced that if this generation was faced with a Zombie Apocalypse….

There would be Zombie sympathizers and Zombie rights activists.

That’s how screwed we are.