…when people do shit that seems absurd…like claim they’re going to sieze the panama canal…& they’re…that sort of people…odds are you can guess what kicked it off…even if it doesn’t seem to get mentioned overmuch?

The owners of a 70-story Panama City hotel tower formerly managed by President Donald Trump’s companies are accusing them of stiffing the Panamanian government.

In a legal filing Monday in an ongoing lawsuit in Manhattan federal court, private equity manager Orestes Fintiklis and the company he leads, Ithaca Capital Partners, claimed that two Trump companies failed to pay Panamanian taxes equal to 12.5% of the management fees they drew from the hotel.

The Trump entities were allegedly supposed to withhold those fees in advance and pay them to the government regardless of whether the property was profitable or not. Instead, the Trump companies simply kept the money, the suit claims, “thus intentionally evading taxes.” That and other financial irregularities exposed Fintiklis and the companies he represents “to millions of dollars in liability,” according to the suit, which also claims Trump companies sought to cover up their actions. The filing does not say whether a tax penalty has been levied by Panamanian authorities.
[…]
The dust-up is the latest fallout from Trump’s foreign business entanglements. Trump projects in Canada, Mexico, India, Azerbaijan and elsewhere have also come under scrutiny. And he has spent nearly his entire presidential tenure seeking to dismiss or downplay his dealings with Russians related to a plan to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. His former lawyer Michael Cohen is serving a prison term in part for lying to investigators about that project.

In recent years, Trump has typically licensed his name to other players — selling the right to put his name on the building but not investing his own money. He often also seeks to manage the building once it’s built. Like many other projects, the Panama development is a hotel-condo arrangement, where buyers purchase hotel rooms that are then rented out by the management company.

Ithaca Capital’s suit, filed originally in January last year and amended Monday, is seeking at least $17 million in damages, alleging that Trump companies mismanaged the hotel and let it fall into disrepair. The suit claimed that the hotel sat “virtually empty,” with portions going uncleaned for years.
[…]
Trump’s company tried unsuccessfully to convince Panamanian President Juan Carlos Varela to intervene on Trump’s behalf. When Fintiklis’ group eventually took control, it found walls had been hastily built to obstruct access to certain areas — one was in the middle of a hallway, another in front of an elevator bank — including inner offices. Trump employees also shredded hotel documents, Fintiklis’ group alleged.

Trump’s name was scraped from a stone wall in front of the tower, which is now the JW Marriott Panama. It was one of several properties that have removed Trump’s name in recent years.

In its complaint, Ithaca Capital also claims Trump’s son Eric and employees misled Ithaca when it was performing due diligence before buying into the hotel. The claims echo similar complaints made in other projects involving Trump businesses. ProPublica in October detailed how Trump and his children engaged in deceptive practices — including in Panama — while promoting at least a dozen development projects in the U.S. and abroad.

At an August 2016 meeting, Eric Trump allegedly told Fintiklis and two other Ithaca board members that the hotel was outperforming the market in Panama, a claim the suit asserts was false. After the meeting, Trump companies sent Ithaca two brochures that reiterated his statements about the hotel “maintaining a leading market share” in Panama.

Trump representatives repeated the statements to Ithaca in early 2017, the new legal filings say. At a February 2017 Trump Tower meeting that included Donald Trump Jr., Trump employees again said the hotel was outperforming the market. Ithaca Capital leaders relied on these statements when deciding to make the purchase, the suit said, adding that “these representations were false and designed to mislead Ithaca into believing that the Hotel was performing better than its peers.”

…2017…so…immune…natch?

Trump companies also “artificially deflated” the hotel’s expenses and underreported Trump’s management fees in financial statements presented to Ithaca, the suit alleged, leading the hotel to appear to be in a better financial position than it was.

The suit alleged other improper financial behavior, saying that instead of making the necessary distributions to hotel room owners, “Trump hoarded their cash.” It said Trump companies failed to make appropriate financial disclosures and drained reserve accounts to pay operational costs, “all the while Trump lined its pockets with ill-gotten management fees.”

The suit said Ithaca wouldn’t have bought the hotel if it had known about the tax and social security problems and other financial irregularities.

An earlier suit filed by Trump Ocean Club condo owners also objected to the Trumps’ management practices. The plaintiffs accused Trump employees of overspending and taking excessive bonuses, as well as mishandling the building’s finances. Owners said they saw a steep increase in fees. Trump responded by suing those owners, too, demanding $75 million for wrongful termination. That litigation was settled in 2016.

https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-companies-accused-tax-evasion-panama [Jun ’19]

…you’re shocked…I can tell…what with it being such a…surprise…& all…I know…let’s make a bunch of sweeping generalisations based on most of the stuff they use for astrology

No festive family gathering would be complete without elder relatives waxing lyrical over “the good old days”, as millennials mumble anxiously about their future. Baby boomers were indeed a lucky bunch. After the second world war, many were able to accumulate substantial fortunes as fast-growing economies propped up earnings, real estate values, and stock markets. By contrast, younger generations today have been hit by low productivity growth and several economic crises, from the 2008 financial crash to the Covid-19 pandemic. Many young adults cannot afford their own digs. And to top it off, there is the threat of climate change and geopolitical instability.

But mum, dad and the grandparents’ good fortune — and, of course, their hard work — means millennials and Gen-Z do have something to look forward to: a decent inheritance. In the next 25 years, over $100tn in assets — ranging from property, aged wines and artwork — will be transferred from the boomers and older generations to their heirs in the US alone, according to Cerulli Associates, a wealth manager. Vanguard — another such firm — recently projected that over $18tn in wealth will be handed down globally by 2030. It will be the largest intergenerational transfer of assets in history.

…well…that’s how it looks if you’re the FT, anyway…ymmv & such

…seems like it might have been worth including at least the currently-18-30 block…but maybe that would be too depressing for them…I mean, the mix is different but that “millennial” block only scrapes over the line of being north of the over-78’s holdings…&…putting this whole thing under the heading of “the great wealth transfer”…it’s…a look…but not a lot of folks still call this sort of thing the pink pages so I don’t know what sort of name that look gets these days

What might it mean for our economies, markets and societies? First, not everyone will be lucky enough to have a wealthy benefactor. In America, the wealthiest 10 per cent of households will pass on the majority of the wealth. In Britain, research by the Resolution Foundation think-tank finds that the wealthiest boomers are more than twice as likely to pass on gifts to their children than their poorer counterparts. In other words, intra-generational inequalities could become entrenched, particularly if advanced economies still struggle to raise their paltry growth rates.

…could? …you’re talking about britain FFS…

When Who Owns Britain was originally published in 2001, the Government was forced to admit that the Land Registry did not possess information about the total acreage of land in England and Wales, nor records as to the ownership of at least 35% of the two countries.

Now, nearly 10 years on, we are told that more than 24.7 million acres-or just under 75%-of land is subject to a register of title with the Government agency. However, as compulsory registration was brought in on a regional basis -beginning with parts of London in 1890 and the rest of England and Wales by 1990-a piece of land that has not changed hands or been remortgaged since the date when it became compulsory to register in that particular area of the country may not have been registered at all. Therefore, although the Land Registry aims to reflect another 618,000 acres through voluntary registration in 2010/11, we may never know exactly who owns how much of the British countryside.

‘It’s important to point out that Land Registry deals solely with land, not ownership details. We register land, not “people”, and therefore do not quantify “how much” land is owned by any particular person or company,’ says a spokesperson.

What we do know, however, is that the aristocracy and the Royal Family still play an important role in the ownership of our country. More than a third of land is still in the hands of aristocrats and traditional landed gentry. Indeed, the 36,000 members of the CLA own about 50% of the rural land in England and Wales.

What is also clear is that, for all of us-not only the very rich-the pursuit of land is as important as it’s ever been. And, according to leading estate agents, an increasing number of overseas buyers feels just the same way about owning a slice of the British Isles.

Who really owns Britain? [Country Life – Nov ’10]

https://whoownsengland.org

…take the duke of westminster, for example…what else do you call that sort of intergenerational wealth…& being as that title was granted by victoria as recently as 1874…making it “the most recent dukedom conferred on someone not related to the British royal family” (per wikipedia)…but…it’s the boomers that are bogarting all the assets or whatever

The economic impact also depends on what happens with the money. The financial windfalls may go largely towards paying off mortgages and the grandchildren’s university fees, or even for retiring earlier to hotter climates. That would be a plus for indebted millennials, and sunny destinations. But it may dash hopes for an inheritance-led surge in spending. Whatever happens, cash-strapped governments will take keener interest in ensuring they are taxing bequests, judiciously.

…&…a bunch of expensive wealth managers & estate planners & tax advisors later…I imagine the 8th duke of westminster will in due course be wealthier than the 7th…it’s…traditional?

…all those zeros do kind of add up…for some folks, anyway

When it comes to investing, millennial and Gen Z investors tend to be less confident with traditional assets like stocks and bonds. A recent Bank of America survey found that younger generations allocate three times more of their portfolio to alternative investments such as private equity, start-ups, and crypto assets, compared to boomers and Gen X-ers. They are also more drawn to purpose-driven financing. This may add volatility to future portfolios, but it could also be a boon for environmental and social causes, as well as helping to spread finance farther.

…still…if you aren’t in duke of westminster territory…generationally-speaking the odds are against even the seemingly wealthy

Some inheritances could also go to waste. A 20-year US study found that 70 per cent of wealthy families lost their wealth by the second generation, and 90 per cent by the third. Estates can get tied up in family squabbles and lawsuits. Young beneficiaries with sudden riches could fritter away cash on exotic investments, or the latest meme stock craze. Succession planning and financial education will become more important. Just 40 per cent of young adults in Britain are financially literate, according to a 2023 survey. Elders might be extra precious about how they want their money to be spent.

The great wealth transfer [FT]

…who needs financial literacy when you got tik tok…right…rriiigggghhhtttt?

The term for the issue is “bad harmonics.” It may seem a bit esoteric, but you can think of it like the static that can be heard when a speaker’s volume is jacked up higher than it can handle. Electricity travels across high-voltage lines in waves, and when those wave patterns deviate from what’s considered ideal, it distorts the power that flows into homes. Bad harmonics can force home electronics to run hot, or even cause the motors in refrigerators and air conditioners to rattle. It’s an issue that can add up to billions of dollars in total damage.

More importantly, bad harmonics are symptomatic of much deeper problems that are engulfing the US grid.
[…]
Distorted waves are just one measure of broader power quality. When homes experience good, or stable, power quality, it means that the flow of electricity for lights and appliances is being delivered at an even and predictable pace. The worse power quality gets, the more the risk increases. Sudden surges or sags in electrical supplies can lead to sparks and even home fires. Left unaddressed, one problem can morph into another. That means the bad harmonics of today can be a sign of potential disaster down the road.

“Harmonics are a pretty good canary in the coal mine for early signs of stress and problems,” said Bob Marshall, chief executive officer of Whisker Labs Inc.
[…]
More than half of the tracked households showing the worst distortions of power quality are located within 20 miles of significant data center activity, according to the analysis, which covered readings from February through October. US census figures show that about 3.7 million Americans live in the most-impacted areas.
[…]
Experts have been warning for some time now about the impact data centers will have on power grids across the globe. The AI boom has only underscored the issue: The digital economy is sucking up so much power that demand is now straining available supplies of electricity in many parts of the world, leading to concerns over price increases and even widespread outages. And that’s only projected to worsen as more data centers are built.
[…]
The grid has never faced the kinds of strain that comes with data centers. These city-sized users can pop up very quickly, within a year or two, which is much faster than grid planning usually happens. Even during population booms, the rise in power demand paled in comparison to the expected installation in the coming years of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of these facilities to power AI. That stress is adding to problems of aging infrastructure, extreme weather and the electrification of more parts of everyday life, such as the rise of electric vehicles.

It’s especially important to understand the power system impact from AI “because it is such a big hammer” on the grid, Dharmawardena said. “The data center is a very large load. Take your house and increase that by 10,000. That is the difference between your house and a data center.”

The US today is by far the largest operator of data centers in the world, with Northern Virginia’s hub boasting more than twice as much operational capacity as Beijing, its next-biggest rival, according to estimates from Bloomberg Intelligence. But other countries are racing to build out their own facilities, with growth expected in nations including Saudi Arabia, Ireland and Malaysia, which will all face their own pressures on domestic power systems.

The problems in the US are compounded by the fact that not enough investment has gone into the grid to fortify it for the coming demand boom. For decades, US power use was largely flat. Now, it’s about to be turbocharged. The nation’s demand for electricity will surge almost 16% over the next five years, more than triple the estimate from a year ago, driven largely by new data centers, according to a recent report from Grid Strategies, a DC-based consulting firm.

The increase means that without major improvements to the grid and power equipment, harmonics issues seen today are likely to get worse.

Some of the biggest data-center clusters are near big cities, so that the facilities can tap into larger grids and the fiber networks that are often located close to consumers for latency issues. That underscores why harmonics are often worse in urban areas. But while the effect appears to be more severe where population density is higher, Bloomberg’s analysis shows that even in rural areas, sensors that are closer to significant data center activity are more likely to have distorted power.
[…]
The harmonics data in Bloomberg’s analysis was measured through Whisker Labs Ting devices, which track total harmonic distortion inside individual homes and show on a granular level how electricity is being delivered to residences — the data also goes deeper than what utilities are typically required to collect and report to regulators. That can explain why there’s sometimes a discrepancy between the company’s data and what power providers are observing, because they aren’t seeing the home-level distortions.
[…]
Harmonics, along with power-quality issues more broadly, “is another element in these perfect storm scenarios we are not monitoring and addressing quickly and efficiently enough,” said Thomas Coleman, CEO of consultant Structure Energy Solutions and a long-time expert on grid reliability.

Almost nowhere are the correlations between data centers and bad harmonics as clear as in an area of Northern Virginia that’s been dubbed “data center alley,” the global center of the industry. The area is mostly located in Loudoun County, outside of Washington, DC, which saw its data-center capacity increase by 2% in 2024 to about 3,000 megawatts (MW).

Nationally, the data analysis showed that roughly 1.7% of sensors in the average county had at least one monthly reading that exceeded the 8%-threshold for bad harmonics. That share was more than four times higher in Loudoun County.

Neighboring Prince William County added 240 megawatts worth of data centers this year, for a total capacity of more than 1,000 megawatts. About 6% of the 1,100 sensors plugged into homes there had too-high distortions, nearly all within 7 miles of significant data center activity. Two dozen of those sensors had double-digit readings, with some of them reaching as high as 12.9%.

Meanwhile, a couple hundred miles away in York County, outside Colonial Williamsburg, Whisker Labs data shows steady, low harmonics, averaging less than 3%. The nearest major data center activity is more than 80 miles from the area.
[…]
A NERC task force focused on modeling data centers and other big users plans to release an analysis in 2025 for impacts on the transmission system. Oversight of local distribution systems under stress often fall to state regulators and utilities.

AI NEEDS SO MUCH POWER, IT’S MAKING YOURS WORSE [Bloomberg]

…amazing what some people will loan serious money for

Global corporate borrowing climbs to record $8tn in 2024 [FT]

…including just throwing it at stuff that…objectively…is a credible candidate for what it looks like when you throw good money after bad

Tesla billionaire Elon Musk, who has been waging a campaign against spiraling U.S. debt, has again warned of looming U.S. bankruptcy as a Federal Reserve “nightmare” could be coming true.

The bitcoin price has surged following the election of incoming U.S. president Donald Trump, climbing after he confirmed plans to create a bitcoin strategic reserve — something proposed as a way to combat soaring debt and sticky inflation.

Now, as Trump has been pitched a “capital markets renaissance fueled” by bitcoin to “unlock trillions in wealth,” Musk has warned “de facto” bankruptcy will happen in the U.S. without a “fix.”

…uh huh…& the 11,500 or so bitcoins tesla was holding that he spread across some seven or so “wallets” when they were worth about .75 billion bucks…they wouldn’t spike in value if they got strategically reserved…because self-dealing isn’t a thing the alleged administration would allow…stop laughing…this is serious business

“We either fix this or go de facto bankrupt,” Musk posted to X, quoting a post from the prediction market Kalshi’s account that warned the U.S. “has a severe spending problem [with] current national debt is now at $36 trillion and growing” and proposing a “potential solution” in the form of Musk’s Doge department of government efficiency—named for the bitcoin-inspired meme-based dogecoin.

The U.S. debt has soared over recent years, topping $34 trillion at the beginning of 2024, with Covid and lockdown stimulus measures contributing to massive government spending and helping to send inflation spiraling out of control in 2022.

…& we know the preferred solution is to scrap the debt limit so they can send that through the roof cutting themselves out of the tax burden…while “efficiency” cutting spending on public services like having a functional government until that shit is broke enough that they can campaign on being the only ones who know how to fix it…& somehow enough people will believe them to put them in contention for another bite out of the damn thing

Earlier this year, Trump floated the idea he could use bitcoin to “pay off our $35 trillion—hand them a little crypto check, right? We’ll hand them a little bitcoin and wipe out our $35 trillion,” he said.

In July, Trump promised to create a “strategic national bitcoin reserve” and predicted bitcoin could eclipse gold’s $16 trillion market capitalization during an appearance at the Bitcoin 2024 conference.

Earlier this month, Trump confirmed he plans to create a U.S. bitcoin reserve.

“We’re gonna do something great with crypto because we don’t want China, or anybody else … but others are embracing it, and we want to be ahead,” Trump told CNBC. “Yes, I think so,” Trump said in response to a question about whether the U.S. will create a bitcoin strategic reserve similar to its oil reserve.

Republican senator Cynthia Lummis introduced a bill to congress earlier this year, entitled the Boosting Innovation, Technology and Competitiveness Through Optimized Investment Nationwide (BITCOIN) Act, which proposes the U.S. buy 1 million bitcoins over five years to reduce the spiraling $35 trillion U.S. national debt.

…it’s not a resource-intensive ponzi scheme…or vulnerable to…well, let’s just say it would be funny…for a given value of funny…if he did that shit & then the wallets got wiped because of a solar flare…not saying that would happen…but that level of hubris taking the traditional fall would certainly be on-brand

Some bitcoin price and crypto market watchers have warned the bitcoin price could crash back if Trump fails to deliver on his promised bitcoin plans, however.

“The build-up of expectation around Trump has led to a price surge—however, investors will be watching closely for action in Trump’s first 100 days,” Ed Hindi, chief investment officer at Tyr Capital a Swiss-based crypto hedge fund, said via email. “If Trump’s actions do not match the rhetoric, many weak hands will fall.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2024/12/27/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-issues-us-bankruptcy-warning-amid-calls-for-a-bitcoin-inspired-fix/

…meanwhile…the kinda-sorta president…the one whose age puts him right on the cusp between that first & second block in the FT’s generational divisions…continues to not really understand the difference between devices, apps, platforms & DMs vs public posts

“Where are you? When are you coming to the ‘Center of the Universe,’ Mar-a-Lago,” Trump posted on his social media platform Friday morning. “Bill Gates asked to come, tonight. We miss you and x! New Year’s Eve is going to be AMAZING!!! DJT”

…the general view is that he intended that to be a less public message to musk…& the reference to bill gates is your typical “I don’t need you” quasi-threat to not stray out of his lane…but…c’mon…how much more proof is required that the man doesn’t understand how fucking anything works that isn’t following the rules of systems-that-register-as-RICO-positive…AKA the only game he knows?

Gates would be the latest tech mogul to make nice with Trump. Apple’s Tim Cook and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg have both met with him, and others have collectively donated millions to Trump’s inauguration fund.

“The first term, everybody was fighting me,” Trump said in remarks this month at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida. “In this term, everybody wants to be my friend.”

Trump Says Bill Gates Asked To Meet With Him In Bizarre Truth Social Post [HuffPo]

…& the world is hard of reading

Today, even literature students don’t read long books any more. The Shakespeare scholar Sir Jonathan Bate, who teaches at universities in both the US and UK, recently lamented this decline. Forty years ago “you could say to a student, ‘This week it’s Dickens. Please read Great Expectations, David Copperfield and Bleak House’,” he told BBC Radio 4. “Now, instead of three novels in a week, many students will struggle to get through one novel in three weeks.”

A recent survey by the charity the Reading Agency showed that only half of adults in the UK read regularly for pleasure, down from 58 per cent in 2015. More troubling still, 35 per cent are lapsed readers who used to enjoy the hobby. My cocktail-party confessors — among them novelists — tell me they now find themselves scrolling in bed rather than reading. And who can blame them? Social media is designed to hijack our attention with stimulation and validation in a way that makes it hard for the technology of the page to compete.

According to the neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, author of Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain In A Digital World, while our brains are primed for language acquisition, they are not innately programmed to read; reading is a learnt skill. But brain plasticity works both ways: use it or lose it, and we are increasingly choosing to lose it. The Oxford University Press word of 2024 was “brain rot”— meaning both the “low-quality, low-value content” found online and the intellectual deterioration from its overconsumption. First recorded in Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 book Walden, this year’s uptick in usage is (ironically) attributed to references in TikTok videos.

The easy dopamine hit of social media can make reading feel more effortful by comparison. But the rewards are worth the extra effort: regular readers report higher wellbeing and life satisfaction, benefiting from improved sleep, focus, connection and creativity. While just six minutes of reading has been shown to reduce stress levels by two-thirds, deep reading offers additional cognitive rewards of critical thinking, empathy and self-reflection.

…maybe it’s nostalgia…or…wishful thinking…but here’s to the hard copy

Maria Popova, an author and essayist who started the literary website The Marginalian, once described literature as “the original internet”, with every reference and footnote “a hyperlink to another text”. The advantage is that you can get lost in this analogue internet without viral content jumping up and down screaming for your attention.

Social media, brain rot and the slow death of reading [FT]

…& the miracles of modern technology

Imagine taking a hammer to your laptop. You smash it apart and shards of plastic, batteries and circuit board go flying. It would be an act of vandalism, a shocking waste of money and resources, so much so that it sounds absurd. But the truth is that, every time we use a computer, we are dealing with a machine that is, at the fundamental level, even more wasteful than this.

It all goes back to a decision made decades ago about the deep workings of computer logic and how these machines delete data, a process that inevitably produces a large amount of waste heat. For a long time, we have muddled through with wasteful computers. But with the rise of artificial intelligence, which has pushed the power demands of computing to new heights, this seemingly inconsequential decision might be about to bite us. We may need to redesign computing from scratch.

Thankfully, we know exactly what to do. It involves a trick that might sound a touch unlikely: getting processors to do everything twice, once forwards, then in reverse. “Reversible computing can be so much more energy efficient than conventional computing, and it’s potentially the way we should have originally built computers,” says Hannah Earley at UK-based reversible computing company Vaire Computing.

The increased energy efficiency is the result of a thermodynamic trick that we have known about since the 1970s, but was never put into use because of the relentless improvements in traditional computing. Now, though, it may be reversible computing’s time to shine. If it can avoid computers’ constant, built-in waste, it may be crucial for reaching a future where advanced computing and AI improve our experience of the world without simultaneously wrecking it.
[…]
As most of the energy currently used by AI comes from fossil fuels, meeting this demand is increasing greenhouse gas emissions. To accommodate the growing demand for AI, companies are building more of the data centres needed for this technology, and these construction projects further add to AI’s carbon footprint. Data centres and cloud computing, which are used for several services including AI, already account for as much as 2 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, a larger share than the whole aviation industry.

Proposed solutions to this growing problem vary from the plausible to the downright wacky. Some companies are resolving to use more renewable energy, others are betting on the rise of nuclear power. More extreme ideas include cooling data centres not with air conditioning, but by putting them underwater – or even in space.

Yet none of these ideas lowers the amount of energy that computers need to run programs or software, they merely find new ways to supply it. “There is a huge gap between what software wants and what the hardware can really do,” says Aida Todri-Sanial at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands.

The main reason why AI is so energetically costly is simple: standard computers use energy extraordinarily inefficiently. And they are inefficient because they are constantly erasing information. Though it may seem trivial, this action brings computers right into the crosshairs of the laws of thermodynamics, fundamental principles dealing with energy, heat and entropy, or the measure of disorder that also determines which processes can be reversed.
[…]
Today’s computers constantly erase information. At the level of hardware, each computer program becomes a sequence of operations on electrical signals – a bunch of tiny electronics directing electrons where to go and what to do. The most basic operations are represented by so-called logic gates such as “AND”, which takes the input signals A and B and outputs their sum, A+B. As soon as A+B is fed into the next gate, A and B are erased. All logic gates erase information in this way, so heat production is baked into the very building blocks of any computation – computers are heat-producing machines as much as they are computational devices.
[…]
In fact, computers expend far more energy on making heat than on doing calculations. In 1961, IBM’s Rolf Landauer determined how much energy a device has to spend to erase a single bit, the so-called Landauer limit. If today’s best computers really used just that much energy every time they erased a bit, they could be powered by a few milliwatts of electricity, thousands of times less than a typical light bulb. In reality, they are much worse than the idealised situation Landauer envisioned and operating them requires dozens of megawatts, or the equivalent of millions of light bulbs.

Researchers who followed in Landauer’s footsteps suggested a way to avoid this remarkable inefficiency: create a computer that doesn’t just forego erasing information, but where all processes are completely reversible. While thermodynamics dictates that any effectively irreversible process be accompanied by an increase in entropy – just as happens in conventional computers – reversible processes leave entropy unchanged, so little energy is wasted as heat. If reversible computers could eventually run AI programs, this would be at a much lower energy cost, making their hunger for power more manageable with existing energy resources.

Building these machines, however, requires radically unconventional computer chips and a computing philosophy that is far from intuitive for traditional programmers. The key intervention is to shift how we use the logic operations that underlie computer programs.

Consider again the AND logic gate that takes inputs A and B and outputs A+B. In a conventional computer, A and B are erased, but in a reversible computer, they must be stored in some memory to avoid the energy cost of deleting it. Landauer was worried that any effort to sidestep that cost would eventually mean running out of memory, but researchers have since developed a workaround that requires every calculation to be performed twice, first forwards, then backwards. This is because any extra memory that must be used during the forwards operation gets freed up once the same operation is run in reverse.
[…]
Though it might seem that doubling the number of operations would also double the computer’s energy consumption, that isn’t how it plays out. Neither direction of operation involves erasing information, nor any other irreversible process, so the added backwards step doesn’t incur any notable energy costs. Given a bit more work, the stored data can even be reused in more complicated operations rather than the practically essential but computationally useless task of running the same operations in reverse.

Reversible computers take advantage of thermodynamic quirks in one other way: they move electrons, which is the physical process underlying everything a computer does, more slowly than traditional computers. This means that, viewed as a physical system, a reversible computer is never too far from equilibrium, with fewer electrons being blasted back and forth. It is therefore less likely to expend lots of energy returning to its base equilibrium state – again reducing waste.
[…]
In 1973, Charles Bennett at IBM proved it is theoretically possible to construct fully reversible computers that could perform any computation that a traditional computer could. So, how did we end up with lossy, irreversible computers?

Michael Frank says the answer is easy: conventional computing kept improving so quickly that it felt unrealistic to try to compete. “You can’t really hope to catch up and surpass a very fast-moving industry where a lot of resources are being poured into advancement,” he says.

Gavin Crooks at Normal Computing, a US-based start-up, is more direct: “Whenever a new idea for unconventional computing came around in the past, conventional computing steamrolled it.”

Traditional computers owe this success largely to Moore’s law, which postulates that microchips can be miniaturised, and the power of computers thus increased, exponentially quickly. Although it remained an accurate conjecture for years, it started to falter about two decades ago. “We’re getting to the point where there’s diminishing returns from further miniaturisation and we’re starting to approach limits on the efficiency of chips that relate to very fundamental physical phenomena,” says Frank.

How to fix computing’s AI energy problem: run everything backwards [New Scientist]

…so…can we figure out how to run this pair backwards?

Elon Musk riles up Trump’s far-right base by praising immigrants [The Verge]

…& don’t get me started on the flaws in this definition of AGI

One important detail in this report about Microsoft and OpenAI’s exclusive cloud arrangement is that last year’s extension apparently defines the often-disputed term artificial general intelligence (AGI).

While reaching AGI could let OpenAI end the deal, the report says that it’s defined as returning $100 billion or so in profits — a tall task for a company “with no path toward profitability in sight.”

https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/26/24329618/openai-microsoft-and-the-100-billion-agi-question

…or I’ll never get this posted…much less turn up some tunes?