Meta is worried. TechCrunch reports that Meta warns the election backlash against data centers could make AI expansion harder. This follows this morning's numbers: data centers were on ballots 41 times and the buildout won once. When a company with Meta's capex starts saying so in disclosures, the opposition has become a line item. It also lands in the middle of the financing strain we've been tracking, with Nvidia-backed loan guarantees, tepid OpenAI fundraising interest, and PIMCO and Apollo warning about a downturn. Local land-use and ratepayer politics may constrain the buildout before the credit markets do.
The Texas tremor reaches boardrooms. The NYT's DealBook looks at the Texas-size political tremor rattling big business. Democrats flipping the Senate through Texas, South Carolina and Kansas upends the assumptions corporate Texas made about its regulatory climate. The New Yorker tied the shift to SpaceX, Musk, data centers and the Iran war. Watch for companies that bet on permanent one-party cover scrambling to hedge, and for ERCOT and grid policy becoming a bigger fight.
Horizon Air pilots are suing over fatigue protections. The suit is a reminder that rest rules are a labor fight as much as a safety one. It fits the pattern in the FAA and aviation story: thin staffing, tired people, and incidents that get blamed on individuals. Fatigue limits exist because the economics push the other way.
The oldest evidence of human cannabis use has a ghoulish twist. Per Nautilus and Scientific American, a Siberian burial shows cannabis was used in funerary rituals about 2,800 years ago. The psychonautic angle is that people were deliberately burning and inhaling it in a ritual setting, a long way from "recreational" as we think of it. Check the articles for the ghoulish details.
Hundreds of ice age engravings have turned up in a Spanish cave. Scientific American describes a large new cache of Paleolithic art. Each find like this adds to the picture of how much symbolic life Ice Age people had in the dark, and how much of it we still haven't found.
The ISS now has its last roll-out solar array. Spacewalkers installed the final one (see also the start of the spacewalk and the suit-up). This completes the power upgrade that began years ago, and it follows the Oct 29 walk and the failed Canadarm2 wrist joint.
Blue Origin's next launch slips to 2027. The Verge reports a long gap. That compounds the launch-capacity worry from earlier reports about Falcon 9 retirement, since the supposed competitor isn't flying. SpaceX's near-monopoly gets more entrenched by default, not by merit.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is changing the color of the ocean. Scientific American says the plastic accumulation is large enough to alter ocean color signals. That matters for the satellite remote sensing used to track plankton and carbon, so the pollution muddies the instruments that measure the ocean.
A Nerd Reich discussion with Timnit Gebru about the real dangers of AI, with data centers featured in the post's imagery.
Nautilus reports that chimps will steal but hesitate to rob friends, and that friends forgive the theft more quickly. A second piece interviews researcher Edward Wasserman on pigeon cognition, learning, and links to machine consciousness.