Yes. Please don’t move here. Next worse is Louisiana. After that California.

Report names New Mexico as the worst state to move to for third year

A year later we are still getting settled in the new house.  When we moved in we were given a bag of keys, all well labelled.  There are also electronic locks on the front and garage entry doors.

My first lesson was learning that my two electronic lock are different brands.  They look very much alike, but the instructions for programming one won’t work on the other.  Trust me, I spent hours trying.

We also decided that instead of a bag of keys we might like just one key.  I read up on, and watched YouTube videos on, re-keying locks.  Not beyond my skills but seems like a place to call in the pros.  $500 or so later the best we could get was two keys for the whole house.

Seems there are two (or at least two) completely incompatible types of keys.  The grooves are different and you can’t physically put one type of key in another type of lock.  Who knew?

I decided I would have a run at the problem.  About half our doors are one type and half the other.  We have 6 total external doors.  Seems like a lot.  One I learned has a bathroom style lock that you can open easily with a screwdriver.  Why I can’t say.  Even the locksmith didn’t mention this one.

So I bought four of these KwikSet smartkey knobs (and one deadbolt) that you can re-key yourself. This should get nearly all doors on the same key.

Now I just have the incompatible smart lock in the garage to replace.  Then we will have a single key for all the locks, like God intended.

It seems in the US almost anything you can buy is made in somewhere else, usually China.  Except cars. And Pharmaceuticals.

Republicans & Democrats in Congress Unite in Effort to Ban Chinese Electric Vehicles

The AI data center boom continues.  From Tom’s Hardware.

Samsung chip division’s single-year profits beat its past 40 years of profits, combined, due to increased memory and storage prices — Samsung passes Nvidia to become most profitable company in the world, notches 19x quarterly increase in profit

There is a large data center project here in New Mexico run by Oracle that keeps getting into trouble, for, well, all sorts of stuff.  I’m not sure why this pattern of behavior is allowed to continue.  I’m also not sure why anyone would trust these people.

Even with all the scrutiny, Project Jupiter forged the names of local citizens on letters of support.  Now they are making similar fraudulent claims of support from local officials.  What are they possibly thinking?

New Mexico residents say their names used without permission to support Project Jupiter data center

Impersonator pretends to be New Mexico public officials supporting Project Jupiter

I have been reading about this in places like the Guardian (UK) (Louisiana court halts criminal indictment against state attorney general) but could not understand what was happening.  I am going to copy an email from Senate candidate Jaime Davis which explains it better than the newspapers.

Besieged Louisiana Democrats are now headed into uncharted waters as Louisiana heads into what is now recognized as a full blown constitutional crisis.

In the month prior to MAGA’s unprecedented cancellation of the May 17th Elections in their state of emergency coup to remove Congressman Cleo Fields (D-LA), MAGA did something barbaric that received far less attention.

Calvin Duncan, a wrongly incarcerated Black survivor, won the election for Clerk of the New Orleans Criminal court on a mandate of reforming the system that took 30 years of his life. In response, our MAGA legislature passed a law to eliminate his office entirely rather than allow him to be sworn in this past May.

Democratic New Orleans Mayor Helena Moreno moved to correct the injustice by calling for a special election that would see Duncan’s victory restored. In retaliation, Louisiana’s MAGA Attorney General Liz Murrill, threatened to ‘take out’ Moreno in a coup.

Because of her coup threats, a grand jury in New Orleans has indicted Murrill on 16 felonies charges, her bond has been set at $400,000 USD, and an arrest warrant has been issued.

But Louisiana’s MAGA governor refuses to let her face justice. He has promised her a pardon if she is found guilty and has vowed to use the Louisiana State Police to defend her. On Friday his far-right State Supreme Court put a stay on the proceedings, however, in an exraordinary move, the special prosecutor in New Orleans has refused to remove the active warrant for Murrill’s arrest.

Louisiana is now in nothing short of a full blown constitutional crisis.

If the Attorney General steps foot in New Orleans she will be arrested by the New Orleans Police, but with the Louisiana State Police protecting her, what happens when they execute the warrant. How far could this escalate?

From The MIT Press.

American Progress Was an Optical Illusion

A story about the history of New Mexico, on July 4, in the London Review of Books.

Before 1776

Ok I’ll say it. American needs to stop letting these private companies monetize our privacy.  From The Next Web.

The CEO of America’s most powerful surveillance company spent $200 million on places nobody can find him

What could go wrong?  According to Oracles financial statements (via Gizmodo):

overbuilding, customer defaults, excess leases, stranded capacity, credit risk, power shortages, GPU shortages, site shortages, permitting delays, construction delays, contractor failures, zoning fights, environmental rules, water limits, grid strain, fixed-price contracts, volatile power costs, supplier delays, shipping disruptions, tariff shocks, export controls, geopolitical instability, obsolete hardware, service outages, security flaws, AI errors, biased outputs, copyright exposure, privacy risks, patchwork regulation, compute restrictions, cross-border limits, weak adoption, competitor advances, legal liability, and reputational damage

Oracle’s Data Center Warning Is a Worst-Case Scenario for the Whole AI Boom