940 karma · joined February 27, 2026
These are signed contracts for future spending. However, we don't know what the terms are for those contracts and how easy it is to get out of them. For example, with Anthropic and Google's contracts with xAI's compute, they signed a long term contract, but they can get out of the contract with 3 months notice. That isn't a good indication of future spend. The same goes for all of these $3.2T, so these numbers are sus at best.
I had friends who were artists and graphic designers that lived in a 2-floor 4 bedroom apartment in Noe Valley with incredible views of the Bay. They were paying $3200/month combined, so $800/month each.
That time was probably one of the best in my life. There was always something to do in SF, we would go out every weekend, go to bars, clubs. Golden Gate park for sports, free outdoor concerts like Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, I saw Robin Williams perform comedy one year for free and most importantly it wasn't crowded. People didn't think that their social media life depended on them going to an event or a restaurant and posting about it.
It started getting worse because of the 7x7 list and lines grew longer because people wanted to follow that list like sheep. Then more and more tech workers drove up the prices until all my friends that I used to hang out with moved out of SF to other parts of the country. DC, LA, Denver. All their apartments got replaced by tech workers. SF is now a mono-culture and pretty destroyed if you ask me. Everything is overcrowded, unaffordable and overhyped. It's a real disappointment to see one of the most beautiful cities in the world rot from the inside.
And yet I have 4 of them in total because they are much better than the built in apps and I don't trust the TVs to connect them to the internet. It's basically CarPlay for my TV but does an excellent job because of the consistent interface and good apps.
I am in no hurry to get this latest version.
Utility companies are not incentivized to lower prices because it means less money for them. Do you remember when power companies told people to conserve power and then people successfully did this? And then they raised rates because they weren't making enough money? This happens in California ALL THE TIME. I've lived here 30 years in Silicon Valley and it's the biggest scam that no one talks about. It happens with electricity and water. With water its even more egregious because they told us to conserve water because of the "drought" but once the drought was over, they raised rates because people weren't using enough water. My connection fee to water is over $100/month without spending a drop of water. That's why I stopped conserving water and water my lawn every single day because it turns out that my water costs are only about 1/3 of the actual water bill costs so fuck it!
It's the same playbook over and over again, there's no incentive to lower rates at all because it's an easy way to make money over an entire population of tens of millions of people.
Now PG&E is fighting to charge solar panel owners $100+/month just for the privilege of being connected to the grid. That would make having solar panels even more expensive than not having solar panels which is utter hypocrisy but no one seems to care or point this out. It's a complete and utter scam.
EDIT: I forgot to mention last year the rates were $0.37-0.45 per kWh, until this year when they implemented a base fee of $25/month, so they lowered it to $0.33-0.45/kWh. Rates in Nevada are 1/4 of that.
2015: $0.17-0.33 per kWh
2020: $0.24-0.38 per kWh
so prices have more than doubled in 10 years. Fucking criminals.
$24 B unaccounted for and lost that was supposed to be for homelessness. $12 B already spent on high speed rail and they want $120 B more. $50 B in EDD unemployment fraud during the pandemic.
This is just in California in the last year or two.
How much more fraud and corruption and incompetence is there that we just don't know about?
There is no way I will agree to any increase in taxes just to see it wasted and going to corruption and political buddies on every side of the aisle.
I'm pretty sure that these TVs won't respect WIFI passwords and if you enter a wifi password in once, it will just remember it even when you clear it, and it will try to connect to the internet that way.
Typical Musk behavior to try to break the contract and try to re-negotiate even though it's clearly illegal.
It will never be cost or time effective if we never try. I'm paying out of pocket every year for an MRI scan, this was my second year this past year.
> He's been doing the paperwork to finally become a citizen, and as one of the final steps he was required to leave the country
You don't have to leave the country to become a citizen. I recently became a US citizen a few years back and leaving the country is not required.
If you somehow meant Green Card, the timeline still doesn't make sense. Until May 2026, 3 months ago, you could do Adjustment of Status within the country without having to leave. So there's no reason why you friend would need to leave the country to get his Green Card unless he chose Consular Processing.
Getting denied CP is rare, but it means that they lied about something.
And if he did live in the US for decades without having his GC, well, applying for GC under Trump in this climate was a huge mistake, especially leaving the country having been in here for decades illegally. He should have waited 2 years until the Republicans were voted out and maybe he would have some modicum of amnesty where at least ICE would get him.
> His wife and child aren't citizens of his home country either, so it's not like they can move to be with him.
This also doesn't make sense. First off, the country's immigration is even more restrictive than the US?? They can't even visit on a travel visa??
They can definitely move to his home country, since he's a citizen. There's a spousal visas for almost all countries, and the child is most definitely allowed to come in since they can usually get citizenship via the father.
But there's no way he hasn't seen his daughter in over a year since the forced Consular Processing didn't start until this past May, and his spouse and daughter can most definitely travel to see him.
None of this story makes sense, so either you have the details very drastically incorrect or this is completely fake.
If he wiped his phone before crossing the border, he would have been fine.
If he refused to give his password to the phone, he would have been held up for a bit and then he would have to leave his phone, but he would be fine. American citizens cannot be denied entry into the US.
The difference is that the phone was wiped while it was under investigation because of an instruction he gave the CBP. That was ill-advised because that is clearly obstruction. He didn't understand the law and now he's probably going to pay for it.
And I say this as someone who had a very bad experience at the border. A CBP accused me of not being the same person on my Green Card and I had to wait 15 mins for that to clear up even though there was nothing to dispute here, it was me. The CBP are fascists and it doesn't matter who is president, this was during Obama's presidency.
I spent an hour debugging my networking setup and I just turned on voice mode and used ChatGPT to help me figure out why everything was working except my networking equipment wasn't changing IP addresses when I set it. As it answered my questions, it gave thoughtful answers and explained everything along the way to the point where I started to guess that I needed to upgrade my control plane, and lo and behold, that was the answer. If I had to peruse through links just for the false idea that I would be getting a cognitive benefit, I might have spent 4x the amount of time or given up.
I'm very happy that we are living in an where we can get reliable answers immediately and move on to what we want to do.