Carl Rigney

please support ur friends making creative shit in this cruel world. u have no idea how much a kind comment can mean to an artist when every website just tries to make you focus on the numbers

"The World of the Dark Crystal" documentary (1983, 1 hour) is available for free on Youtube.
>> www.catsuka.com/breves/2025-...

GenAI truly was the worst technology to come along at this moment.

An energy and water guzzler when we most urgently need to take climate action.

A disinformation machine as our journalism fails.

A bias machine as fascism takes root.

A job killer in a cost of living crisis.

lots of people still don’t believe Team Trump want to crash the economy, likely because it’s hard for normal people to think like sociopaths

Sarah Kendzior is smart to invoke memories of 1980s corporate raiders. That should give many Boomers and some Gen X food for thought. We remember that crap.

A photo of the entrance to The Word for World exhibition, with two banners hanging vertically down outside the doorway to a brick building with white-paned windows. A row of bicycles are parked in front. The banners are purple and white and say the name of the exhibition and Ursula K. Le Guin's name.

A cord-wrapped rock rests on a vivid blue background next to a map of and program for The Word for World exhibition.

A stack of copies of The Word for World book, which shows the title in vivid blue against a black cloth cover.

Today, The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K. Le Guin opens at AA Gallery in London! Curated by Sarah Shin and Harriet Jennings, the exhibition presents a selection of Ursula's maps, including some that have never been exhibited before.

Business Insider headline reads: UPS is telling customers that their packages coming to the US are marked for destruction.

About a month ago, the Trump administration got rid of the de minimis exemption, whereby packages valued under $800 could slide in without import duties. Now there's a backlog as the government can't process all of this paperwork, leading to UPS just destroying packages

Last time shouting about this: I have a livestreaming concert online on Sunday, afternoon west coast, nighttime in Europe.

Tickets: mariancall.bandcamp.com/merch/rain-b...

details on what I'm up to musically are below!

@sporadicerratic.bsky.social Midnight hydration check! Have you had tea today?

His immediate dawning understanding of just exactly how much he could fuck things up made him go "That's a GREAT analogy," heh

YouTube video by The Mark Thompson Show Sarah Kendzior: The Fiction of Antifa, Plus, Answering the Epstein “Files” Question

"A great way to get censored in this country is investigate Epstein and Maxwell and to research the origins of the Maxwell family and Robert Maxwell's ties to organized crime."
www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtTW...

@sporadicerratic.bsky.social Hydration check! Have you had tea today? Mmmm, tea.

BREAKING: Friday night massacre underway at CDC. Doznes of "disease detectives," high-level scientists, entire Washington staff and editors of the MMWR (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report) have all been RIFed and received the following notice:

From the latest Q&A by the ever-wise and frank @sarahkendzior.bsky.social (via her free Substack).

Evening viewing recommendation? Watch A BETTER TOMORROW (1986) on our Hong Kong Action Classics collection! The box-office sensation that established director John Woo as the king of 1980s Hong Kong action cinema and set the standard for the heroic bloodshed genre.

Pass it on: If you FILE A COMPLAINT about police activity, it flags the body-worn camera video so reporters can obtain it later via FOIA requests.

City: www.chicagocopa.org/complaints/i...
County: apps.cookcountyil.gov/oiig/
State: oeig.illinois.gov/complaints/o...

House Press Gallery: During today's pro forma session, the Clerk read a message from the Speaker designating Tuesday, October 14 through Sunday, October 19 as a district work period.

Punchbowl's Briana Reilly: House gaveled in and out of its pro forma just now w/o recognizing Rep Elfreth, who was seeking to UC a mil pay bill from Rep Sykes. Elfreth told reporters after that House Dems stand “ready and willing to take” up standalone legislation to pay troops.

A few minutes ago in the House:

- Speaker Mike Johnson officially cancels votes next week, extending the House recess through a fourth week

- House Republicans block Democrats from passing a bill to pay the troops during the shutdown, ensuring they will miss paychecks next week

She Fought the Far Right Online for Years. Now She Wants to Do It in Congress Kat Abughazaleh, 26, made her name swatting down right-wing talking points on social media. Now she’s hoping internet fame can propel her to Congress.

Worth the subscription. @katmabu.bsky.social is bringing the fight that the incumbents don't have in them. We need more like her.

"She's betting that voters, above all else, want a brawler."

Yes.

www.wired.com/story/kat-ab...

Mothership Month 2025 Wargame: OVER/UNDER - Sam Sorensen Starting on October 14th, as a part of Mothership Month 2025—the annual group-crowdfunding campaign and general season of celebration for

on Tuesday, October 14th, as a part of Mothership Month 25, I'm going to launch another real-time play-by-post wargame, open to the public, called OVER/UNDER. the server will open to players on Monday the 13th, but in the meantime you can read about it here: samsorensen.blot.im/mothership-m...

We can see from losses in recent school board elections around Texas and the number of local groups fighting censorship documented by @penamerica.bsky.social that Americans are tired of library censorship battles and are pushing back.

What can you do? Join @uabookbans.bsky.social to start!

Higher Ed in 2025 is opening your mailbox to see that your institution has sent you:

1. A Center for Teaching and Learning call to integrate AI into your classroom; and

2. An Office of Academic Integrity email encouraging you to crack down on students who use AI to cheat.

'When authoritarians seize power, it is crucial to recognize courageous defenders of freedom who rise and resist,' the Norwegian Nobel Committee said as it announced Maria Corina Machado as the winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize

Kristi Noem Secretly Took a Cut of Political Donations A dark money group paid $80,000 to Noem’s personal company when she was governor of South Dakota. She did not include this income on her federal disclosure forms, a likely violation of ethics requirem...

Kristi Noem, while governor of South Dakota, supplemented her roughly $130,000 salary by secretly accepting $80,000 donated to a political nonprofit she was affiliated with, records show.

She never disclosed this income on federal ethics forms.

(Published June)

The AI Bubble's Impossible Promises Readers: I’ve done a very generous “free” portion of this newsletter, but I do recommend paying for premium to get the in-depth analysis underpinning the intro. That being said, I want as many people ...

Premium: The AI Bubble's promises are impossible. NVIDIA's customers are running out of money, GPUs die in 3-5 years, most 1GW data centers will never get built, and OpenAI's Abilene data center doesn't won't have the power it needs before 2028 - if it ever does.
www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-bubbl...

@sporadicerratic.bsky.social Hydration check! Have you had tea today?

Expect to see me banging the Die-drum a bunch across the next week. You need to get your orders in a week on Monday. It doesn't even need to be formal - talk about the books you like to the retailer, and it effects their orders. Now back to making marketing material.

Actually, wait - how long do GPUs last, exactly? Four years for training? Three years? The A100 GPU started shipping in May 2020, and the H100 (and the Hopper GPU generation) entered full production in September 2022, meaning that we’re hurtling at speed toward the time in which we’re going to start seeing a remarkable amount of chips start wearing down, which should be a concern for companies like Microsoft, who bought 150,000 Hopper GPUs in 2023 and 485,000 of them in 2024. Alright, let me just be blunt: the entire economy of debt around GPUs is insane. Assuming these things don’t die within five years (their warranties generally end in three), their value absolutely will, as NVIDIA has committed to releasing a new AI chip every single year, likely with significant increases to power and power efficiency. At the end of the five year period, the Special Purpose Vehicle will be the proud owner of five-year-old chips that nobody is going to want to rent at the price that Elon Musk has been paying for the last five years. Don’t believe me? Take a look at the rental prices for H100 GPUs that went from $8-an-hour in 2023 to $2-an-hour in 2024, or the Silicon Data Indexes (aggregated realtime indexes of hourly prices) that show H100 rentals at around $2.14-an-hour and A100 rentals at a dollar-an-hour, with Vast.AI offering them at as little as $0.67 an hour. This is, by the way, a problem that faces literally every data center being built in the world, and I feel insane talking about it. It feels like nobody is talking about how impossible and ridiculous all of this is - it’s one thing that OpenAI has promised one trillion dollars to people - it’s another that large swaths of that will be spent on hardware that will, by the end of these agreements, be half-obsolete and generating less revenue than ever. Think about it - let’s assume we live in a fantasy land where OpenAI is somehow able to pay Oracle $300 billion over 5 years. Said money is paying for access to Blackwell…

Every single AI data center is a toxic investment, with most of its value tied up in GPUs that will be multiple generations behind by the time these things turn on - and then die in 3-5 years.

All to build for AI demand that doesn't exist.
edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo...

Everybody is very casual with how they talk about Sam Altman’s theoretical promises of trillions of dollars of data center infrastructure, and I'm not sure anybody realizes how difficult even the very basics of this plan will be. Nevertheless, everybody is happily publishing stories about how “Stargate Abilene Texas - OpenAI’s massive data center with Oracle - is open,” by which they mean two buildings, and I’m not even confident both of them are providing compute to OpenAI yet. There are six more of them that need to get built for this thing to start rocking at 1.2GW - even though it’s only 1.1GW according to my sources in Abilene. But, hey, sorry - one minute - while we’re on that subject, did anybody visiting Abilene in the last week or so ever ask whether they’ll have enough power there? Don’t worry, you don’t need to look - I’m sure you were just about to, and had simply been busy! - but I did the hard work for you and read up on it, and it turns out that Stargate Abilene only has 200 megawatts of power - a 200 megawatt substation that, according to my sources, has only been built within the last couple of months, with 350 Megawatt of gas turbine generators that connect to a natural gas power plant that might get built by the end of the year in the event that one of the multiple construction firms involved . Said turbine is extremely expensive, featuring volatile pricing (for context, volatility fell in Q2 2025…to 69% annualized, meaning that if you had these prices across the entirety of a year you’d see swings of 69% up or down) and even more volatile environmental consequences, and is, while permitted for it (this will download the PDF of the permit), impractical and expensive to use long-term. Analyst James van Geelen, founder of Citrini Research recently said on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast that these are “not the really good natural gas turbines” because the really good ones would take seven years to deliver due to a natural gas turbine shortage. But th…

Stargate Abilene does not have sufficient power to run at even half of its supposed IT load of 1.2GW, and at its present capacity - assuming that the gas turbines function at full power - can only hope to run 370MW to 460MW of IT load. I’ve seen article after article about the gas turbines and their use of fracked gas - a disgusting and wasteful act typical of OpenAI - but nobody appears to have asked “how much power does a 1.2GW data center require?” and then chased it with “how much power does Stargate Abilene have?” The answer is not enough, and the significance of said “not enough” is remarkable. Today, I’m going to tell you, at length, how impossible the future of generative AI is. Gigawatt data centers are a ridiculous pipe dream, one that runs face-first into the walls of reality. The world’s governments and media have been far too cavalier with the term “gigawatt,” casually breezing by the fact that Altman’s plans require 17 or more nuclear reactors’ worth of power, as if building power is quick and easy and cheap and just happens. I believe that many of you think that this is an issue of permitting - of simply throwing enough money at the problem - when we are in the midst of a shortage in the electrical grade steel and transformers required to expand America (and the world’s) power grid. I realize it’s easy to get blinded by the constant drumbeat of “gargoyle-like tycoon cabal builds 1 gigawatt data center” and feel that they will simply overwhelm the problem with money, but no, I’m afraid that isn’t the case at all, and all of this is so silly, so ridiculous, so cartoonishly bad that it threatens even the seemingly-infinite wealth of Elon Musk, with xAI burning over a billion dollars a month and planning to spend tens of billions of dollars building the Colossus 2 data center, dragging two billion dollars from SpaceX in his desperate quest to burn as much money as possible for no reason. This is the age of hubris - a time in which we are going to watc…

Tomorrow: The AI Bubble is built on impossible promises. GPUs die in 5 years, nobody has built a 1GW data center, and they have the power to do so. Stargate Abilene won't have enough power before 2028.

Here's a link for $10 off premium.

edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo...

*applause*

Pack it up... We have a winner for today, y'all

If you’re not reading The Power Fantasy by @kierongillen.bsky.social then you’re really missing out.

Issue 12 is the start of a new arc and is probably my favorite issue of the series so far.

You can even read the first issue online for free!

imagecomics.com/read/the-pow...

YouTube video by The Mark Thompson Show The Dark Fraud Behind the Promise of AI: Sarah Kendzior

AI is a dictator's dream, and it is being forced upon us in an unnatural way: www.youtube.com/watch?v=uo1I...