David Chico Pham writes on technology, sourdough, and current events.

The message is simple. Shut down the consolidation of power and end the funding of an autocrat takeover. There is no second chance after this round of government funding. If Senator Schumer finds his spine in time, we have a chance to save our country. If he doesn't, may God have mercy on our Republic.

"I want to be very clear. Donald Trump is corrupting the government," warns Ezra Klein. Schumer heed this alarm.

What a generational political talent. This political ad does more in conveying his message (we are doing very well in raising money that we met the cap) and his call to action (give us your time instead) than the Trump campaign could ever muster.

Democrats of the last war are lost with a finger up their nose. But Zohran Mamdani aint.

Eva Roytburg reports for Fortune, the astonishing leaps and bounds of the Chinese in clean energy abundance:

“Everywhere we went, people treated energy availability as a given,” Rui Ma wrote on X after returning from a recent tour of China’s AI hubs.

For American AI researchers, that’s almost unimaginable. In the U.S., surging AI demand is colliding with a fragile power grid, the kind of extreme bottleneck that Goldman Sachs warns could severely choke the industry’s growth.

In China, Ma continued, it’s considered a “solved problem.”

AI bubble may pop as a result of running into a wall head first. Asking a chatbot for a simple search might not be clear at first to the level of electrical demand, but a hard limit on scaling AI is feeding electrons to the GPUs in data centers and cooling them with air conditioned rooms. This requires a lot electricity. We are still coasting on 80 year old infrastructure from last century and we gutted the next generation in clean energy production. The grid is just as old, and we have not passed permit reform to make it easier to build transmission lines across states.

Compared to the infinite source of power of the sun and the boundless force of the wind, it seems pretty dumb to pump oil, and dig coal out of mines given how capital intensive. The years it takes to survey, permit, extract, refine, and sell fossil fuels is extensive, requiring billions of dollars. Meanwhile solar and wind on a KwH per dollar basis, it's cheaper to produce a solar farm than to extract coal.

The Chinese Century started in 2025. We gave up when Trump passed his big bad bill.

Hip hop is the music of the freed black man. Tyler the Creator is sharing a freedom that is beautiful and joyous. The video is NSFW. Watch it though.

Brian Merchant makes a convincing case the US has a AI bubble on it's hands and it is staggeringly massive. Quoting a WSJ column by Paul Kedrosky, Merchant sets up just how big this AI bubble is:

spending on AI infrastructure has already exceeded spending on telecom and internet infrastructure from the dot-com boom—and it’s still growing… one explanation for the U.S. economy’s ongoing strength, despite tariffs, is that spending on IT infrastructure is so big that it’s acting as a sort of private-sector stimulus program.

Capex spending for AI contributed more to growth in the U.S. economy in the past two quarters than all of consumer spending, says Neil Dutta, head of economic research at Renaissance Macro Research, citing data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Merchant, underlines just how jaw-dropping the size of the bubble is:

I’ll just repeat that. Over the last six months, capital expenditures on AI—counting just information processing equipment and software, by the way—added more to the growth of the US economy than all consumer spending combined. You can just pull any of those quotes out—spending on IT for AI is so big it might be making up for economic losses from the tariffs, serving as a private sector stimulus program.

The private sector is under going a government size stimulus program. These companies are so big that they in the aggregate outsize growth in consumer spending!

To me, this is just screaming bubble. I’m sure I’m not alone. In fact I know I’m not alone. I’m thinking especially of Ed Zitron’s impassioned and thorough guide to the AI bubble; a rundown of how much money is being poured into and spent on AI vs how much money these products are making, and surprise, the situation as it stands is not sustainable.

These companies, openAI, perplexity, anthropic, etc, are all unprofitable. They are burning billions in venture capital and have little to show for. There has not been one company out there, in the 3 years chatGPT released 3.0, that has been able to build a successful genAI product.

Ed Zitron in his piece AI is a money trap argues,"fundamentally, generative AI does not let companies build something new." I think thats true and it reflects the monocultural malaise and stagnation that we are currently in.

I read some of How The World Really Works by Vaclav Smil. A basic premise he introduces in the book is that GDP or the prosperity of a country is deeply related to its energy consumption. There are only a handful of countries that can produce abundant cheap fossil fuels, the US as one of them. The United States in the 20th century witness unparalleled growth as a consequence of securing said cheap fossil fuels. Some have referred the 20th Century as the American Century because the US dominated in just about everything.

Trump Presidency marks the end of the American Century. With the recent law passed gutting clean energy production (solar and wind), we have ceded to China in the clean energy revolution. From cheap electric vehicles, batteries, PVs, and wind turbines, China is responsible for half of all global renewable deployment. Half. It is setting up the infrastructure necessary to build the next generation of technology and living standards. No longer are the Chinese copying American IP, but instead truly innovating and creating a future, a Chinese future.

The Atlantic shares some astonishing pictures in the sheer scale of what China is doing. Ana Taylor writes:

As the Trump administration’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” eliminates many clean-energy incentives in the U.S., China continues huge investments in wind and solar power, reportedly accounting for 74 percent of all projects now under construction worldwide.

These few pictures are incredible:

I am glad the clean energy revolution is still speeding ahead, but we gave up this century when Trump signed said bill into law.

Thump the bass.

I just love album cover here. The exaggerated fists reminds me of Ludacris albums.

The energy in St. Louis circa 2000 was so electric. Nelly released his album Country Grammar when I was in high school. His album dropped in the backdrop of an ascended city. It reached echelons of bigger sports towns. The city saw Super Bowl Champs St. Louis Rams. The Cardinals' Mark McGwire shattered homerun records*. Wayne Gretzky, GOAT of NHL, for a couple of years played for the Blues. Then you had Nelly thumping beats, putting St. Louis on the map in mainstream radio.

* Allegedly on steroids.

Remember when they were mad about Little Mermaid being black? Well now, they are mad about Superman being nice. Parker Molloy gets right to it. The extreme nature of the right wing media means basic things like kindness is seen as a cultural attack.

But this isn't really about Superman. It's about how conservative media takes the most innocuous statements and transforms them into culture war ammunition. It's about how the right-wing ecosystem has become so reflexively oppositional that even "basic human kindness" reads as a partisan attack.

And perhaps most tellingly, it's about what happens when you've built an entire media apparatus that needs a constant supply of things to be mad about — even if that means getting upset that Superman, of all characters, stands for truth, justice, and helping people.

If they are mad at Superman for being nice, wait until they learn about Jesus.