jwz

Plunge their ski resorts into darkness for data centers:

The Sierra Nevada tourist hub -- home to ski resorts, lakeside casinos, and roughly 25 to 28 million annual visitors -- is facing an energy crisis with a familiar culprit: the data centers powering the AI boom.

NV Energy, the Nevada utility that has supplied the bulk of Lake Tahoe's electricity for decades, told Liberty Utilities -- the small California company that services the region -- that it will stop providing power after May 2027. The reason? NV Energy needs the capacity for data centers. As in: the energy supplier for the Lake Tahoe region is telling the utility company that it has less than a year to find another power source.

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On Thursday, I hosted a screening of They Live. And then today this happened. Racist, election-denying, insider-trading, fascist, methane-breathing space ghoul "Coach" Tommy Tuberville busts out the Hoffman lenses.

People keep describing things as "mask off" but this is just getting ridiculous.

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Secret Handshake:

Three "fully functional" arcade games were installed Monday at the District of Columbia War Memorial. According to the group, the game features "furious tweet battles against Iranian schoolgirls, low-flow shower heads, and other threats to American freedom like DEI and The Pope, and an opportunity to collect several Trump style peace trophies."

"Just to save you time, the only way you can lose is by trying to hold Melania's hand. But it's The Middle East, so you also can't win either," the group said in a statement shared with HuffPost.

A plaque next to the machines states: "The Trump administration knows that the best way to sell combat is by making it a video game, that's why they've been pumping out the 'sickest' Iran War video game hype reels. But why stop at clips when you could go full throttle? Introducing Operation Epic Furious: Strait to Hell, a high-octane, flag-waving, boots-on-the-ground simulator where freedom isn't debated, it's deployed. No briefings, no hesitation; just pure pixelated patriotism. Strap in and play hard, because this game may never end."

The arcade games are expected to stay at the D.C. War Memorial, located near the reflecting pool in West Potomac Park, for a few days. The group also made the game available online. [currently not working.]

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Flames erupt as crews dismantle Vaillancourt Fountain:

▶︎▶︎

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SF Memory:

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# date +'%F %r %Z = %s'
2026-05-02 08:09:37 PM PDT = 1777777777

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Six-Month Sentence in Bee-Assault Case

She seems to have argued at trial that she had no intent to harm anyone, and had only released the bees so they could "enjoy the lovely, flowering landscape" in the area. The landscape was also infested with deputies, though, and the jury does not seem to have believed that was a coincidence. [...]

I've seen no evidence that the one deputy taken to the hospital suffered from anaphylactic shock. It seems a lot more likely that his "elevated heart rate" was caused by his decision to tackle a 59-year-old beekeeper than by the bees themselves. But I'm speculating about that. [...]

This week, the judge sentenced Woods to six months on those charges. According to her lawyer, with time served she will be out in two weeks anyway. [...]

Finally, kudos to The Guardian for refusing to let society ignore the real victims in this case: the bees. "[A]bout a thousand of Woods's bees died during the encounter," it reported, "many of them crushed when several hives toppled as she wrestled with deputies trying to arrest her, and others because female honeybees die after delivering their sting." I assume that "about a thousand" is based on a careful reckoning by a court-appointed bee expert and not just a number that Woods threw out there. Regardless, while I don't really buy the deputies' story here, I do sympathize with the bees. They have enough trouble these days without humans getting them involved in dispute resolution. Leave the bees out of it.

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Amadeo Capelli:

▶︎

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It continues to amaze me that everyone in the Sunset is a single-issue voter, and that issue is wanting to turn a park into a freeway.

District 4 shaping up to be San Francisco's loudest and silliest race:

This level of turmoil befitting a Latin American junta is, again, incongruous for a nice, quiet little beach community. But, again, don't believe it -- this is a place where odd stuff happens. District 4 voters have managed to elect two representatives who later spent time in federal prison -- Leland Yee and Ed Jew. Other than Dan White, who murdered Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, the only supes to be incarcerated have been from District 4. And, for what it's worth, both of them went down for on-the-job crimes. [...] In the era of district elections, no D4 supervisor has served two full terms. No district has run through more representatives than District 4. [...]

And yet these are the issues getting the most play in this race: hand-waving about a done-deal zoning plan, calling for the installation of a Great Highway on top of Great Highway and pushing distorted and hyperbolic crime narratives during a time of citywide and nationwide crime reductions. But it gets better: All of this is being undertaken via a tsunami of third-party cash. Vast sums of money are flowing into the sleepy Sunset to further rile everyone up.

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When people sign their names on the point-of-sale tablet at the bar, at least half of those signatures are "wavy horizontal line". Most of the rest are an attempt at an actual signature, but probably only about 1 in 1000 of those have anything in them that you would perceive as letters, or in fact, writing.

And about 1 time in 100, the customer draws a little picture for us instead. So I thought I should share some of those.

If you're thinking, "they're all dicks, aren't they"...

...you are a smart person.

Of the drawings, I'd say that it's 90% dongs; the rest are a mixture of smilies, pentagrams and cats, in about that order.

(I especially like the ones that just wrote out the word "PENIS", which is like, the Philip K. Dick of dicks.)

To generate this gallery, I had to place eyeballs on hundreds of thousands of signatures, going back to 2021. That's right, I just white-knuckled it, you're welcome. (If you're about to start replying with "Why Didn't You Just", I am begging you to Not.)

Now, if you're thinking, "Wait, why do you even still have that 5-year-old data"... you are, again, a smart person.

Even though the payment processors won't let you issue a refund or a chargeback on a transaction older than 6 months, our point-of-sale saves every bit of information it has about every transaction forever. "Oh geez, you should delete that" you might be thinking. There literally is not a delete button.

After a year, one might want to look at daily graphs, but there's no way you'd care about individual transactions, or anything of higher aggregate resolution than "hourly". Maybe "10 minutes" if you're a complete maniac. But nope, we still have the full PDF of the receipt, including name, last-four, scrawled signature and exactly what products were purchased.

(Though, the customer name isn't included most of the time, only sometimes. I'm not sure what the difference is.)

Anyway that means that when -- not if, when -- this vendor gets popped, all of that data will be stolen, sold, laundered, mixed, and purchased by a data broker who will annotate their profile about you with how much you drink and what, how many nights a week, and whether you attend gay parties. Some of it might even be true! That profile will then be purchased by your car insurance company, your health insurance company, the recruiters used by every future employer, Google, Amazon, Instagram, ICE, TSA, FBI, CIA, all of the "AI" companies, and Deputy Dewey of the East Cowfuck, Texas Police Department.

Oh no, what started off as a juvenile story about poorly-drawn dicks turned into a dystopian nightmare. Welp.