Author Archive: Stephen Green

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Camo-Clad ChiComs Caught Crossing Into Texas. “This seems like the sort of thing we should be paying closer attention to. How many military-age Chinese national men are already here, and how much of the anti-border control networks funded by Shanghai-based Neville Roy Singham are designed to to keep ICE from deporting them?”

DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES:

Every Republican needs to do things like this.

OUCH: The AI economy could crash on mounting chip costs — and those token costs won’t help.

Hardly a week passes without news of another hyperscaler spending billions of dollars on AI chips. A single moderate-to-large data center today uses AI chips costing billions of dollars. A single Nvidia Blackwell GPU in a modern AI chip cluster could cost as much as a new Tesla Model 3. Non-AI chip costs have also risen sharply, with both total spending and unit costs for CPU and memory chips at unprecedented levels. All of this has significant implications for the economy.

The primary reason chip costs are increasing is excessive demand. Proliferation of AI, the Internet of Things, and electric vehicles has increased the overall demand for chips. In particular, chip demand for AI has exploded, supporting both the training of AI models and their deployment across applications. Historically, AI model quality scaled with the volume of compute used to build it — more chips meant better outputs. But the demand driver now is shifting from training to inference. Goldman Sachs forecasts a 24-fold increase in token consumption by 2030, reaching 120 quadrillion tokens per month, as agentic AI systems replace single-prompt interactions with multi-step tasks that consume orders of magnitude more compute per query. Meanwhile, chips must still be replaced every few years simply to remain cost-competitive, compounding demand pressure from both ends.

The enterprise reality is already arriving. Microsoft recently canceled most of its direct Claude Code licenses after discovering that employee AI usage had grown so large that, in the words of one Nvidia executive, “the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees.”

If that last line isn’t indicative of a bubble, I’m not sure what else it might be.

On the consumer side, a low-to-mid-tier 2TB SSD like the one I bought 18 months ago for $89 now goes for $299.

CHANGE? Iran’s president offers resignation, citing total takeover by IRGC commanders.

In the letter sent on Sunday, Pezeshkian stressed that the president and the government have effectively been excluded from major and vital decision-making processes in the country, and that the vacuum created by this situation has enabled hardline factions within the IRGC to take control of affairs, the source said.

Pezeshkian added that under such circumstances he is unable to run the government and carry out his legal responsibilities, and for that reason has requested to step down immediately.

It is not yet clear whether Mojtaba Khamenei will accept the president’s resignation, but the contents of the letter point to a deep and unprecedented rift at the highest levels of power.

Keep up the pressure.

HOW IT STARTED:

How it went:

DRUG WAR: U.S. military strike on alleged drug boat in Pacific Ocean kills 3 people in fourth attack this week.

It’s the latest in a monthslong campaign against alleged drug boats traversing the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific.

Video released by the military on social media shows a small vessel moving in the ocean before it’s hit and engulfed in a fireball.

The attack brings the death toll to 205 in a series of U.S. strikes that began in early September, with other attacks announced on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. The death toll also rose slightly this week because some people that had been initially reported by the U.S. military as survivors of the strikes have not been found.

They could have tried not being drug smugglers.

SKIN SUIT STAR WARS, SKIN SUIT GOP:

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Graham Platner Is Not an Outlier in the Democratic Party. “What the few remaining normie Democrats don’t understand is that the coastal Dems are OK with Platner because he’s not that different than any of them. We’ve seen the hard turn to antisemitism that the Democrats have taken in recent years. They’ve been big defenders of the ‘Free Palestine’ campus Brownshirts. The only real difference between Platner and a lot of the Dems in D.C. is that he got the tattoo.”

THE COUNTER-RECONQUISTA IS AIDED BY THE ENEMY WITHIN:

GOOD: Hegseth Says US and China Agreed to Keep Talking About AI Guardrails.

Trump and President Xi Jinping discussed guardrails on AI and how to prevent bad actors from exploiting the most powerful AI models, such as Anthropic’s Mythos, which has exposed major software security vulnerabilities.

Hegseth said the two countries agreed to continue talking as technology develops.

“Guardrail conversations are productive between two strong countries,” Hegseth said, “but it’s also our job to run the fastest, and certainly at the War Department, we’re trying to do everything we can to maintain that.”

If we learned anything from The Terminator or WarGames, it’s to keep a human in the loop.

ANALYSIS: TRUE.

BILL WHITTLE JOINED THE SPENCER PRATT VIDEO VOLUNTEER BRIGADE:

Update: Now with 100% fewer spelling errors, Bill tells me!

CLASS ACT, HIDING BEHIND YOUR WIFE: Maine Senate Dem Graham Platner puts wife Amy on video to defend against claims he was posting on creepy hookup app.

Amy Gertner, who married Platner in 2023, said that she was “deeply hurt” about the campaign’s former political director, whom she tipped off about the sexting, confirming the messages to the press.

The randy oyster farmer is believed to have had sexting affairs with up to a dozen women, according to reports.

“It makes me really angry, disappointed, and I find it really shameful that there’s a group of media outlets and people who are willing to spread gossip, instead of talking about real issues that Graham is running on, like healthcare and education and childcare,” Gertner groused in a video addressing the scandal.

Here’s the video, but be warned that the cringe factor is high.

Related: Platner reshuffles campaign and sends out NDAs as he struggles to get ahead of controversies.

Amid fallout from Platner’s controversial years-old social media posts, his campaign began sending non-disclosure agreements to staffers last week, according to his former top political director, Genevieve McDonald, who said she declined to sign one.

“The campaign offered me $15,000 to sign a NDA,” McDonald told POLITICO in an interview. “I did not accept the offer. I certainly could have used the money. I quit my job to work on Platner’s campaign, believing it was something different than it is.”

And here’s the background on what happened with McDonald: Mamdani spin doctor accused of threatening Graham Platner’s ex-staffer before she blew whistle on sexting scandal.

100 MILLION SEEMS (AHEM) A LITTLE MUCH, BUT POINT TAKEN:

UPDATE (From Ed): And that’s why the left no longer sounds like this anymore:

 

When Rahm Emanuel Called for “Record Deportations of Criminal Aliens.”

● Harry Reid in 1993: It’s insane to reward illegal immigrants by giving their children birthright citizenship.

● “Trump took to Twitter on Thursday to remind Democrats that even former President Barack Obama spoke out against illegal immigration. Trump dug up a 2011 tweet from former President Obama which said: ‘I strongly believe that we should take on, once and for all, the issue of illegal immigration.’ ‘I totally agree!’ Trump wrote, retweeting the former president.”

—The Daily Caller, December 27, 2018.

COME SEE THE VIOLENCE INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM:

WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO SCREW UP THEIR WHOLE STRATEGY?

GROW UP, ABDUL: