While Trump has been falsely trying to blame the Russia-Ukraine war for high US fuel prices, the real activity recently seems to be attacking Russian data centers. Today, a Sunday, after a data center bombing, Elon Musk suddenly declared that Ukraine had “gone too far“.  Not for bombing energy infrastructure, which has been going on for some time, but for bombing a data center.

It seems to have hit a nerve for Mr Musk, who hasn’t complained when Russia recently bombed his StarLink data centers in the Ukraine.

One immediate effect of the Ukrainian bombing of these Russian data centers seems to be the loss of Russian bots, which are used to spam various sites across the internet, including Elon Musk’s X / Twitter.

You may think Mr Musk would be happy to see an end to the spamming of his social media site.  Unless of course he is the one spamming his own site, to boost traffic and push certain postings.  It has been assumed for some time that this is how X / Twitter has been operating under Musk.

I will make a bit of a leap and say that I believe that this is directly tied to the upcoming elections and the DOGE theft of Americans personal data.

Mr Musk has been heard to brag recently that he has a secret weapon to sway elections, calling it 10,000 lasers from space.  Of course this isn’t literal.  But he does seem to believe he has had a major influence on recent US elections via some unknown mechanism.

It is known to be difficult, if not impossible, to directly meddle with US election results.  Mr Musk and others have hinted that already cast votes can be changed, particularly with electronic voting machines.  This borders on the nonsensical, but it is a good story to throw people off the trail.  The actual meddling probably occurs before the election.  And there is an obvious precedent to this.

Trump’s first election in 2016 was won by using personal data stolen from Facebook.  This is the infamous Cambridge Analytica story.  You can read about it and how social media data has been used to sway elections in the US and around the world.

At this point I will speculate.  What if all of that personal data DOGE collected was sent to Russia? As it appears to have been. What if the goal was to use Russian AI data centers and spam bots to sway upcoming US elections (again)?

I imagine it would be difficult to keep this all a secret, especially from western security services.  But what could be done to stop it?  Maybe we are witnessing it being stopped.  And Mr Musk and Mr Trump are very, very angry at Ukraine and Mr Zelensky all of a sudden, calling for his replacement.

If this were the Republican election plan, it would explain a lot.  The links in this posting verify most of the factual information.  The connections are, at this point, only speculation but seem to explain many things that need explaining.

I still buy music as MP3s and listen to it on a Plex server.  Spotify is nice for mainstream music but I’m not a fan of what I hear about their business model.  I also listen to live radio, mostly WWOZ and WNOZ.  The music I buy is mostly “archival”; stuff I want to keep and that I worry might not be available in the future.  Below is a screenshot of my recent purchases.

Does anyone really think this is a good idea?  Is AI and robocalls protected “Free Speech”?  From Associated Press.

FCC considers allowing more political robocalls before midterms, including those created with AI

I guess I can say:  I. Don’t. Know. Either.

Except.  I’ll crudely refer to all these previous “bubbles” as large scale versions of the old “pump and dump” stock scams.  I see AI as a “pump” that might have missed their “dump” offramp.  In the last phase of the scam, stocks are usually sold to / bid up by small investors.  That hasn’t happened yet, except for Elon Musk and SpaceX which might have had the right model and the right timing.  Of course, Nvidia is already public and widely held which is the complication the article mentions.

I guess another possibility is a situation like the  2008 subprime mortgage crisis where the holders of the debt are declared “too big to fail” and a government bailout happens.

Anyway a good read from A Wealth of Common Sense.

The Biggest Risk Everyone Already Knows About

I had occasion to do a search for an actor and found what I was looking for at the old Internet Movie Database (IMDb).  Almost immediately I received an email welcoming me.  I didn’t create a log in, didn’t want a log in, didn’t give them any information.  Somehow they knew who I was.

I have used IMDb for years (decades?) and didn’t realize they were an Amazon ™ company.  Ok, so what?  I ignored the welcome email.

This morning I get another email to assist me in the use of my new IBDb account.  At this point I’m a little annoyed at this further attempt to collect data on me, so I tagged them as spam.  I was sent to another web page that would only allow me to stop these emails if I — yes — logged in.  To the account I never set up or asked for.

I’ve been trying to use Amazon as little as possible lately but I will redouble my efforts.

Thinking of sending some Iowa Hawkeyes merch to Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri (404 Russell Senate Office Building, Washington, DC 20510).  Anyone care to join me?

From the American Spectator.  So Elon Musk “lost” half a trillion dollars in a few months.  The author says this is why we shouldn’t / can’t tax stock market gains, as a wealth tax.  Well, you can just make him sell some and pay taxes.  So it might cause the stock to go down.  Well, then it was over valued in the first place.  Seems like taxing this is a good idea all around.

The Trillion-Dollar Illusion

My big question has always been: who is going to pay for this?  Bain says the global AI data center buildout is going to need $6 trillion in annual revenue to break even.  For reference the US annual GDP is $32 trillion.

Bain: AI needs $6 trillion in annual revenue to justify data centers