[Quest]ionable

a collection of things found to be interesting to at least one person

[sick public transit, gloria @seungylee14]

@TheStalwart he threw out the first pitch at a KBO game last night! what a time https://t.co/VQCnSQteu4

[0xkato @0xkato]

LLMs explained without all that yucky math stuff

https://t.co/cpgVukSbJx

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

🚨 🔥 MAJOR NEWS: Here’s Why This Story Is Exploding In Albania.

According to critics, Prime Minister Edi Rama met with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump on a Rothschild-owned yacht.

Soon after, a protected stretch of Albania’s coastline was approved for development linked to Kushner’s investment plans.

Now the backlash is escalating.

Protesters have targeted Rama’s residence, courts have frozen funds connected to the project, and opponents are demanding answers about how the deal was approved.

The fight is no longer about a real estate project.

It’s about whether political connections opened doors that were supposed to stay closed.

[Adam Ozimek @ModeledBehavior]

Ghandi vs Ford on mass production from the NYT in 1931. Who was proven right? https://t.co/f4p9eduhQK

[Molly Ploofkins @Mollyploofkins]

Protester screams, "Erika Kirk protects pedophiles," during the opening of the TPUSA Women's Leadership Summit

[Brad Stulberg @BStulberg]

Y'all—this optimization stuff can make you fragile.

If you are in recovery then yes, of course, a few glasses of wine will mess up your week (or worse). If you get drunk then yes, I could see it messing up a day or two.

But if going out to dinner and having a few glasses of wine throws you for this much of a loop then perhaps you've actually just become fragile?

I mean how would Steven manage having a newborn, or really any age kid? Or just the general uncertainty and messiness of life?

In my new book I tell the story of golfer JJ Spaun, who was up all night with his vomiting toddler. His Whoop sleep score would have been zero. The next morning, he went out and won the U.S. Open.

Actual excellence (not the elaborate, performative internet variety) demands resilience. It controls the controllables, no doubt. But it also ensures you don't optimize yourself into fragility, which is an increasingly common trap and performance killer. https://t.co/DXJIiW7M9z

[Marco Fattorini @MarcoFattorini]

Trump: «Xi Jinping è un uomo buono e intelligente».

Ricapitolando. In questi mesi il presidente degli Stati Uniti ha lodato Putin, Kim Jong-un, Orbán, Netanyahu, Lukashenko, Xi Jinping.

E ha attaccato: Papa Leone XIV, Meloni, Macron, Starmer, Merz, Sanchez e la NATO.

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

Trump threatened to nuke Iran during the same press event where he called a woman reporter "baby" and a "bitch" and we'll all just supposed to continue on tomorrow as though any of this insanity is normal or acceptable

[Object Zero @Object_Zero_]

The Electricity Grid

I post a lot of stuff about the electricity grid, here the CEO of the largest grid in America (PJM) lays it out pretty clearly.

• What worked for 2 decades… no longer works
• This is structurally different from history
• You are facing an era of scarcity
• The situation is not tenable

PJM are facing a demand explosion. Now a demand explosion in some industries is +500% demand. But this is infrastructure, this is tens of trillions of dollars of assets and it takes time to mobilise and deploy things at this scale.

In infrastructure, when demand growth shifts from +1-2%/yr to +8%/yr, then you suddenly need to be building 4-8 times more assets per year, than you previously did.

If you were deploying $1 trillion / yr to grow at 1%, you now need to deploy $8 trillion / yr to grow at 8%.

Suddenly you need to deploy many trillions of dollars per year to meet this growth. If you cannot get it done, prices will rocket for everyone. Failure leads to inflation.

This is not a PJM problem, this is not even a US problem, this is a global problem. PJM are formally validating what some people have been saying for a while now.

This is not temporary, we cannot uninvent the technologies that have precipitated this change. The world has changed and we must adapt.

Global retail electricity sales are about $3.6 trillion per year, of that, around $900 billion goes to transmission and about $2.7 trillion goes to wholesale generation.

The transmission system many developed countries have is the wrong system going forward. Our transmission systems in the West are built for transporting power from big coal plants to power big towns. That’s not what we are doing now.

We have replaced most of the coal plants with two largely decentralised but highly correlated fleets of intermittent generators (wind and solar), that are growing like fracking wells because they are also quick to deploy.

Their quickness to deploy new generation projects is massively destabilising for the grid. The grid was designed for coal plants. The grid is a $50 trillion machine. It is by far the biggest asset in any country. It isn’t something you can toss away, it isn’t something you can swap out overnight.

We also have new categories of industrial demand (hyperscalers) that will capture an increasing share of GDP. This new demand category is going to set the marginal price of electricity for everyone else, and these guys are not as price sensitive as your widowed grandmother.

This is a difficult problem to address because of:
i) the scale
ii) the capital intensity

It’s also a global problem, because it’s born out of a new technological paradigm. It will not spread around the world at equal pace, but everywhere is going to eventually face it down.

Some people are fleeing to space for solutions to avoid this snafu, but that’s only a temporary fix.

Once the hyperscalers have their demand satisfied, the next demand explosion immediately follows, and this second wave is 20x the scale of the current problem.

The second wave is how do you power billions and billions of robots and billions of autonomous machines, doing work that currently can’t be done?

This industrial revolution is very much a two stage revolution, first you power up the chips, then you power up the actuators.

Chips scale down, actuators scale up.

There’s no Moore’s Law for actuators, they obey Newton’s Laws of motion instead.

This is the crux of the energy problem facing our civilisation. The energy system we have today is the one we wanted 20 years ago. The energy system we will have in 20 years from now, is the one we start building today.

It’s time to build this solution.

[Scott MacFarlane @MacFarlaneNews]

This clip .........

[Philip Smith 🇨🇦🇺🇦 @PhilSmith26]

Statcan released its real GDP-by-province estimates for 2025 today. Among many other things, the estimates show Ontario's economy, at the heart of Canada, to be growing even more slowly than in 2024. #cdnecon

[Joseph Brusuelas @joebrusuelas]

The stalemate in the Gulf does not mean that global or US economic risk is ebbing.

In fact as each day passes they increase

In this case it’s to the North American & Global food supply chains via rising urea spot prices & fertilizers.

Inflation via food prices is in train and will be part of the economic this summer.

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

Trump is about to hit REM on camera during an Oval Office event. It's just incredible.

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

RFK Jr: "A Democratic senator claimed it's mathematically impossible to have a drug drop by 600%. I said, 'Well, if the drug was $100 and it raises to $600, that would be a 600% rise. If it drops from $600 to $100, that's a 600% savings.'"

Trump: "Right"

[Furkan Gözükara @FurkanGozukara]

Prominent journalist Cenk Uygur exposes a massive insider trading scandal within the Trump administration. He reveals an anonymous account, heavily rumored to be Barron Trump, is making billions by manipulating oil markets using classified pre-knowledge of the Iran war.

[Furkan Gözükara @FurkanGozukara]

Former Visual Arts Curator Josef Palermo exposes how the Trump administration turned the Kennedy Center into a massive pay to play scheme. He confirms tickets to sit near Donald Trump were sold for two million dollars, blatantly selling political access under the guise of art.

[Ron Filipkowski @RonFilipkowski]

Today’s NY Post cover.

[@FERC @FERC]

Breaking News! 🚨 @FERC penalizes fraud with billion-dollar order: ‘Money-for-Nothing’ scam by American Efficient. FERC is vigilant, ensuring market participants are accountable to the law & consumers are fiercely protected. https://t.co/csSJsi3Z3b

[Javier Blas @JavierBlas]

I know we're all looking at oil.

But live cattle just rose above $2.5 per lb for the first time (to an all-time high). The BBQ season in America is going to be rather expensive for flipping burgers.

[shelby @thetrueshelby]

Now it all makes sense, y’all. She’s a MAGA prop. Here’s DoorDash Granny at a Nevada hearing for the Big Beautiful Bill last year 🤡