Beige Book: Economic Activity Picked Up In 11 Of 12 Districts; Only San Fran Flat As "Employers Invested In AI"

The Coming Food Crisis May Look Nothing Like A Crisis Until It's Too Late Authored by Madge Waggy via MadgeWaggy.blogspot.com, Just after the morning deliveries and before the first customers, a supermarket looks both ordinary and slightly deceptive. The lights are on, the coolers hum, and the shelves hold exactly what they held last week. Strawberries show up in February, lettuce comes from ground that was desert two generations ago, and on the same shelf beef raised across three states sits beside bread baked from grain cut a thousand miles away....

Inanity Of Identity Politics Exposed At Canadian NDP Convention Authored by Jonathan Turley, The recent convention of the Canadian New Democratic Party (NDP) became a microcosm of the inanity of identity politics found in forums ranging from politics to higher education. Participants were given familiar “equity cards” as literal card-carrying members of groups demanding preferred treatment. The problem is when one identity group demands preference over another. The result, as seen in Winnipeg, was calamity and quickly became comedy. Many in education have long pushed equity cards and “identity markers” to get...

Nadella's Hedge: Microsoft Wants To Make AI Models Cheap - Then Own The Rails They Run On The entire AI capital cycle - roughly $700 billion in hyperscaler capex this year, an estimated $2 trillion-plus through 2028 - is collateralized by one belief: that intelligence is scarce, and therefore priceable. That belief is already under strain. Per-token inference prices have fallen on the order of 200× in a year, and the only thing holding revenue up is volume; the cost of intelligence is dropping even as the cost of deploying...