>The company, which is now a division of SpaceX, is likely to buy more generators in the coming months or years. In SpaceX’s IPO filing, the company said that it will buy another $2.8 billion worth of gas turbines to power its AI data centers over the next three years. Of that, at least $2 billion are earmarked for “mobile gas turbines.”

SpaceX, the new Tesla... who saw that coming? :(

In case you haven't seen it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo

It is no longer about making good faith claims in court. It is all about RW media dog and pony show. They can make provably false claims in the RW media with - "Do you want China to overtake US in this race?" and still garner support. And even if they lose they can paint the judge as leftist etc. so they have stopped bothering with even trying.

> what violation of local law can't be excused by specious "national security" claims?

None. If this continues, the economy pivots to profits to the President.

The surprising part of buying off politicians is how absolutely cheap it is relative to the benefits received.

We are confused here too. Really could be any large enough group I suppose as long as it contains a lot of members living near the turbines.

I suspect because these data centers are usually placed in areas where land and labor are very cheap, which in some/many states are predominantly black(er) areas.

Really though, the USA has been chipping away at the ability for groups like these to show “standing” so its mildly impressive that this case got this far.

IANAL, but:

1. It seems the plaintiff is the Southern Environmental Law Center, which makes a lot more sense when the issue is violations of environmental law. The NAACP is supporting, and I can imagine that there are some consistent overlaps between what the two groups are concerned with, given that where people pollute in the south correlates to where certain ethnicities can afford (or were allowed) to buy property and live.

2. Certain laws (in this case probably the Clean Air Act) creates a category of "citizen suits", or "private right of action". While that doesn't totally eliminate "I am harmed" standing, it does means you don't need to "the one whose laws were harmed." In other words, it means you can sue for a violation of federal law instead of being stuck waiting for the federal Department of Justice to care.

Memphis is majority black

Because tribalism. NAACP is lefty, and Musk is righty. So they fight.

And watch them get charged with terrorism. Anti-nuke protestors who did no real harm were charged under 18 USC 1361 and faced up to 25 years in prison [1]. “Sabotage” here means over $1.000 in damage.

[1]: https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2019/11/20/...

> ... will eventually cause trouble for accounting.

Accounting has never been a concern in a Musk company or to his shareholders, as is evident from SpaceX IPO. People invest in him because he can make "number go up" regardless of profit and loss.

He's not running conventional profitable businesses, but ponzi-esque growth stories that keep ballooning to no ends without ever reaching a climax.

Nobody cares today what he promised 5 years ago (e.g. Tesla owners making $35k/yr passive income from their cars robotaxi'ing) because they're looking at what he's promising for the next 5 years (probably humanoid robots on Mars with an infinite TAM).

>I can assure HN that they want to be on the grid as quickly as possible.

In a conversation about negative externalities, I don't see the purpose of such a statement. If everything else were equal, nobody would choose negative externalizes just for the fun of it.

Furthermore, a company 'wanting' something is only loosely correlated with the internal political will and resource allocation to achieving it. And says nothing about whether that internal effort is appropriately scaled to the external complexity of the task.

“Iranian schoolgirls are world famous for their feminist protests, hence this girl school is a high priority target to protect the world from wokeness”

Letting power monopolies, backed by corrupt political investors, sit idle for decades, as their profits, and corruption lawsuits, soar.

setting up an interesting baseline for what the next administration is going to get away with.

You think Elon Musk would be stupid enough to give away control? He still has >80% of the vote.

That half of HN readers will only have Class A stock which does not hold enough power to overcome Musk's Class B stock that he owns. But you don't need capitalism to ask the board to do something. You can ask Musk on X.

They don't care much about connecting it to the grid. They'll take whatever is available and cheaper. If gas turbine on trucks are somehow cheaper (reduced regulation, taxation, planning...) than grid, that'll stay as-is in the foreseeable future. Once you spent billions on turbines and gas contracts, you most likely won't connect to the grid overnight.

“Temporarily”

Its obviously a permanent fixture. And well, electricity by virtue of having been around for 100+ years as a mass market product has been utterly ossified, saddled with far too onerous regulations and taxes and is being driven by inflexible, uninterested practitioners.

Of course someone will go „its just energy“ and use almost free natural gas. In some places in the US a diesel generator with gas from the pump is likely cheaper too.

> There's also turquoise hydrogen; H Hydrogen from Methane CH4.

But then what do you do with the CO2?

These self-made stories are total bs, most of them are nepo kids and their family's aristocratic, colonial-era wealth is repatriated to the US through startup investments.

Epstein files highlight that once you achieve intergenerational wealth there is a natural tendency to make your children legally immune so that your wealth can't be stolen. It's not only about achieving a diplomatic passport from some small nation as honorary consul in order to avoid a parking fee, but about placing your offspring in positions at five eyes intelligence agencies which makes them legally immune and gives them access to fake identities.

During cold war there was a national security need for extra-congressional operations in foreign countries and off-the-record budgets, which had to be managed by "someone" on a need-to-know basis.

My research indicates that many of the billionaires we see today are five eyes nepo kids. Their grandparents did great things for the country during WW2/cold war, many of them were researchers in national security context (Maxwell in electronics, Epstein in electronics/medicine/psychiatry, (van) Trump in radiology/agriculture/pathogens).

My theory is that their work for five-eyes intelligence ties together the now-famous family names such as Maxwell, Epstein, (van) Trump, Thiel, Jarecki, Sweeney, Ellison, Lawrence, Graham, Fox, King, Richardson, and many others, as they pop up together in primary sources in the national security context since at least WW2.

There is a reason why middle names such as "Baron" or "Earl" or "Don" (Spanish for lord) keep showing up. Many come from old-money aristocracy with the ability to change IDs at will.

For example Donald Trump is on the record to have (ab)used fake identities throughout his career, and some primary sources indicate that he used further identities that have not been publicly reported on such as "Donald Epstein" - a name that pops up together with Kashoggi. Also Maxwell and Epstein are documented in the files to have used fake identities.

So the whole thought process about "morals" or "stealing" is wasted time, the King and his Lords and Knights can do whatever they want and nobody can stop them.

The only thing that has changed is that for 50 years we all believed into the "American Dream" and the rags-to-riches fake stories, when in fact the aristocracy never left, kept their wealth offshore, and can make their kids pop up at will at the top of any industry of their choice.

how is it cheating?

Also the law is not static. Things can go back and forth. Out of phase with whatever trends in news cycles. Watch the Germans debating Nuclear phase out over 30 years.