I grew up eating red beans and rice, lentils, black beans, and hummus (does that count?).  From Space Daily

People in the longest living populations on Earth tend to eat roughly four to five times as many beans as the average Westerner

A local story.  Very local. This vineyard is next door to Placitas, just to the north. We found some wine made by Gruet from this vineyard and it was very good.  An article from 2018 that explains the arrangement with the Santa Ana pueblo.

Why Gruet Partnered with an Indigenous American Tribe to Grow Grapes

Russia is paying off its debts by nationalizing the businesses owned by its oligarchs.  Not a bad idea I suppose.  But ironic because most of the great post-Soviet Russian fortunes were made by “privatizing” state-owned enterprises.  From The Moscow Times (published in Amsterdam).

Russia Confiscates $7.6Bln in Assets in Largest Nationalization Yet

A good essay on how communication changes humans, physically.  I think he misses the final point by not going far enough.  The changes caused by future communication technologies will make real and at least semi-permanent change your brain, if that hasn’t happened already.  By Terry Goodier.

Body Language

Been seeing the TV ads here for months.  Finally admitting it’s an Oracle data center.  Does anyone else find it bizarre that this one data center will consume pretty much as much electricity as the rest of the state?  I keep wondering who is paying for all of this.

A data center for OpenAI is building its own power plant in a New Mexico desert town, big enough to out-generate the state’s largest utility. The people next door are fighting it

It seems Tom’s Hardware picked up this story and does a nice job of collecting all the facts.  They completely avoid the racial angle, though.  Bluntly, the farm was owned by a black family and the neighborhood is lower income and minority.

For non-techies, Tom’s Hardware used to be (still is?) the place to go for deep info on technology, usually consumer products and components for consumer products.  So it’s a bit funny to go to Tom’s Hardware for this sort of news.

Farmer donates land for a park, city sells it for data center development — $10 gift became $10M for city government, with $30M tax expected over next decade

I had to go to several sources, all of them small independent press, to get this whole story.  Seem a family donated land in Taylor, TX to be used as a park.  The county turned around and sold it to a data center developer for $10 million.  This land was some of the original land where minority (black) families were allowed to buy land and build houses in Taylor.  It is still a mostly low income minority neighborhood.  You will have to search around for more information on this one but the Austin Free Press covers much of it.

Minority Report: Taylor data center plan raises community ire and questions of equity

An interesting read from The Baffler.  Tech companies shift to Texas from California as their businesses shift from creation to extraction,

The Texan Ideology

I like Oil Price.  It’s a sort of insiders trade journal for the oil and gas (energy?) industry.  A pretty clear eyed view of what could (will?) go wrong with gas fired / peaker buildout.

TL;DR:  “renewables” more or less lock in prices after initial investment.  Oil and gas and other non-renewables are subject to price fluctuations.  People (and businesses) don’t like prices that fluctuate.  Renewables will win out not just on price, but price stability.

Why America’s Gas Power Boom Could End in Disaster

Everybody is going to want one of these in their neighborhood.  From Tom’s Hardware.

Meta putting up tents across the US to house AI servers, like ‘a scene out of the movie Mad Max’ — structures take three months to build and use jet engines for power