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KateAL

@katieal.bsky.social

2.2K followers 2.5K following 4.2K posts

Nature Regeneration, Equity, LivingWage, Redistribution, UBI, Upcycle♻️ Share, Inspire, Grow > People, Planet🌎, Prosperity. Biz Human Rights, Enviro. SupplyESChange. 11yrs in China, Jp, Asia London Cornwall Aotearoa: Sea, Surf, Cycle.Was Councilr

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KateAL @katieal.bsky.social · Jul 21

Maybe 100,000s are starving in Palestine, and it's not enough, but didn't feel right to do nothing (and yes hostages must be freed).
Had a go at 5 things we can maybe do to take action for #palestine and #gaza
Do what we can. Save lives.
causingchangeopenletterstomp.wordpress.com/2025/07/21/w...

What can You Do for Palestinians in Gaza

Felt super sad today knowing 10,000s, 100,000s, perhaps 2 million Palestinian people are starving in Gaza (21 June 2025). So, it’s not enough, but I’ve written (below) this 5 things you…

causingchangeopenletterstomp.wordpress.com

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KateAL @katieal.bsky.social · 19h

It will also be heart rending to see Palestinian hostages returned to their loved ones too, and starving Palestinian people finally given aid, fresh water, food, medicine.
Yes to wishes for Peace for all

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KateAL @katieal.bsky.social · 1d

I did wonder where all those old trains had ended up..
I have such nostalgia for them…
Beijing <> Shanghai,
Beijing <> Shanghai
every month for 2 years.
Met so many lovely people

Reposted by KateAL

Doug Parr @dougparr.bsky.social · 1d

Greenpeace UK says high fees for offshore wind developers to lease the seabed is an abuse of monopoly power by Crown Estate

High fees push up the price of offshore wind & will act as a tax on energy bills, to fund the monarchy & lower taxes

It's time it stopped

www.ft.com/content/c29c...

Greenpeace threatens to sue Crown Estate for pushing up UK energy prices

Cost of offshore wind increased by monopoly ownership of seabed, alleges campaign group

www.ft.com

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KateAL @katieal.bsky.social · 1d

At least it’s not all “Mei You” anymore!
And “Yingwo Huozhe Yingzuo”!

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KateAL @katieal.bsky.social · 1d

Xiexie. Helpful.
Thought so. So 1980s!!!!
A new gen, yet just like the Mums 😂

KateAL @katieal.bsky.social · 1d

How did you get out of here tho?

KateAL @katieal.bsky.social · 1d

That sounds amazing.
Where do I get some?

KateAL @katieal.bsky.social · 1d

😂😂 not much has changed then.
Surely you can just buy your tickets on an app (like we do in the UK) or from a machine now (like UK had 25+ years; albeit still no bullet trains 🚅!)

KateAL @katieal.bsky.social · 1d

😂😂😂

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KateAL @katieal.bsky.social · 1d

Ugh @bbcnewsnight.bsky.social cut the bias!! “How much it meant to them for have their hostages home” for the Israelis, but what about Palestinians who’ve also had family taken by IDF for months on no charge; also hostages maltreated …

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KateAL @katieal.bsky.social · 1d

So scary. Population corrections about to happen. Stay safe folks

KateAL @katieal.bsky.social · 1d

😂😂 I get it 😂

KateAL @katieal.bsky.social · 1d

Learn something new every day

Reposted by KateAL

Extinction Rebellion London Actions MoM (Movement of Movements) @xrlondonactions.bsky.social · 2d

Trade unions supported yesterday's action for Palestine 🇵🇸

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KateAL @katieal.bsky.social · 1d

Only knew Marx on that list (and haven’t read that either), so thanks 🙏

Reposted by KateAL

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 3d

Oracle's "1.2GW" Abilene data center that they're building for OpenAI is meant to be turned over end of 2026 - yet they've only got, at max, 32.35% (535MW) of the power they need, relying on 10 gas turbines an analyst told Odd Lots were "not very good."
www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-bubbl...

$Abilene’s Power Situation Is Complicated, Insufficient (only 32.35% of the 1.7GW it need) and Involves Massive, Inefficient Gas Turbines So, there are many different vendors working on the “clean campus” in Abilene, but we’ll simplify by focusing on those building the data center and the surrounding power. Lancium is the owner of the land, and it’s hired construction and real estate firm Mortensen to build out the power infrastructure, starting with a 200MW substation and growing to a 1GW substation with five main power transformers according to Mortenson. My source at Abilene tells me that the 200MW substation only just got built within the last two months, and the bigger substation has only just started construction. This is likely why Crusoe hired contractor Primoris in November 2024 to build “Project Longhorn,” a fracked gas power plant featuring ten gas turbines, for delivery by the end of 2025. A permit filed by Crusoe on January 10 2025 states that it wanted to change how it’d power the facility using gas, choosing to run the turbines for 8760 hours per year — meaning that Crusoe intends to run turbines that are “not very good” according to analyst James Van Geelen 24 hours a day, all year. It’s not totally clear if the permit was issued. While permit 177263 was issued, it shows as “pending” in the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality’s search page, likely meaning the modification to run these turbines all year is still in process.$

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Reposted by KateAL

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 3d

Meanwhile, OpenAI has made Fidji Simo their CEO of Applications, and reports say that she now is responsible for making ChatGPT profitable. She's being set up as an Elizabeth Holmes figure, and we have to make sure Sam Altman actually takes the blame.
www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-bubbl...

I get that you think “wow, OpenAI has the monopoly over 800 million weekly active users, that’s exactly like what Google has,” except…Google is a massive operation precision-tuned to make sure ads are seen all the time, in a constant ever-increasing push against their users to see how far it can push them, with massive ad sales teams, decades of data, thousands of miles of underground cable, and unrivalled scale, all of it built on top of something that can be relied upon, unlike Large Language Models.

And guess what, even if it were possible, Sam Altman has now made so many promises of such egregious sums of money that it is effectively impossible for Fiji Simo to succeed. It isn’t Fiji Simo’s fault that Sam Altman promised Oracle so much money! It isn’t Fiji Simo’s fault that Sam Altman has said that she has to make the company $200 billion in 2030! It certainly isn’t Fiji Simo’s fault that Sam Altman has to build 26 Gigawatts of data centers and has plans to promise to build many, many more!

Fiji Simo is the fall girl, and it’s very important that history remembers her accurately. It was her decision to take this job — she is likely making incredibly large amounts of money in both cash and stock — but when OpenAI implodes from the sheer force of Sam Altman’s bullshit, we need to make sure she isn’t blamed for putting this company in this mess, even if it manages to die under her watch (assuming she isn’t fired or quits before the end).

Given the strength of feeling amongst the die-hard, I fear that when things inevitably go terminally wrong, Simo will receive the brunt of the blame — because blaming a single person is a lot easier than acknowledging that the business fundamentals behind OpenAI were deranged, and generative AI wasn’t the mass-market business and consumer tool that said die-hard believe it to be.

To be clear: any attempt to frame her as an Elizabeth Holmes will be a cowardly and nakedly sexist attempt to shift the blame from Sam Altman, a c…

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Reposted by KateAL

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 3d

There's growing evidence that everybody loses money renting out AI GPUs. Oracle lost $100m in the space of three months renting out NVIDIA's new "Blackwell" GPUs, destroying their gross margins. They owe Crusoe $1bn/year for 15 years for their Abilene data center.
www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-bubbl...

AI Data Centers Are A Complete Disaster
Oracle Lost $100 Million In The Three Months Ending August Renting Out Blackwell GPUs
The Information reported earlier in the week that Oracle had gross profit margins of 14% on GPU compute sales, making a “gross profit” of $125 million on $900 million of revenue in the three months ending August 2025.

While this could be actual profit, these margins only include the immediate costs of running the GPUs, and while they include (per The Information) “depreciation expenses for some of the equipment,” “other unspecified depreciation costs would eat up another 7 percentage points of margin.” With such thin margins, it’s very likely other expenses will eat into any remaining profitability, and I’m not sure why The Information chose to go with the 14% number rather than 7% (or lower).

Yet all of this obfuscates the really bad parts. Oracle’s gross profit margins appear to be dwindling with every increase of GPU revenue. In August, Oracle made $895.7 million — a month where it lost $100 million renting out NVIDIA’s blackwell chips. While The Information claims that this is “partly because there is a period between when Oracle gets its data centers ready for customers and when customers start using and paying for them,” a statement that doesn’t really make sense when you see Oracle’s revenue growing.

This might be because Oracle is signing unprofitable deals:

As sales from the business nearly tripled in the past year, the gross profit margin from those sales ranged between less than 10% and slightly over 20%, averaging around 16%, the documents show.

In some cases, Oracle is losing considerable sums on rentals of small quantities of both newer and older versions of Nvidia’s chips, the data show.
Oracle appears to be losing more money with every customer it signs for GPU compute, and somehow lost $100 million on Blackwell chips in the space of three months. I severely doubt that’s from not turning them on, considering its revenue increased by nearly $200 million between May and August 2025. In fact, I bet it’s because they’re extremely expensive to run, on top of the fact that Oracle has likely had to low-ball Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services to win business.

This is really bad on just about every foreseeable level. The future of Oracle’s cloud business has become inextricably tied to growing revenue by selling AI compute, with The Information reporting that Oracle’s GPU cloud business could equal its $50 billion+ non-cloud business by 2028. Said revenue is predominantly tied to a very small group of customers — Meta, ByteDance, xAI, NVIDIA and, of course, OpenAI — with the latter making up the majority of its future GPU revenue based on the $300 billion contract alone. If Oracle has made a bad deal with OpenAI, the only thing it’s guaranteed is that future margins will be chewed up by the incredible costs of renting out Blackwell GPUs.

Yet Oracle has a far, far bigger problem on its hands in Abilene Texas, where it’s trying to build a “data center” made up of 8 buildings, each with 50,000 NVIDIA GB200s and an overall capacity of 1.2GW, with Oracle on the hook for a $1-billion-a-year lease for 15 years regardless of whether a tenant pays or not.

And as you know from the intro, Abilene might be fucked.

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Reposted by KateAL

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 3d

Every single data center project is a decaying investment full of what will be old hardware that's constantly being made obsolete by NVIDIA - yet $50bn or more of private capital has been sunk into building them every single quarter. It's a disaster in waiting.
www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-bubbl...

Let me put it in simple terms: imagine you, for some reason, rented an M1 Mac when it was released in 2020, and your rental was done in 2025, when we’re onto the M4 series. Would you expect somebody to rent it at the same price? Or would they say “hey, wait a minute, for that price I could rent one of the newer generation ones.” And you’d be bloody right!

Now, I realize that $70,000 data center GPUs are a little different to laptops, but that only makes their decline in value more profound, especially considering the billions of dollars of infrastructure built around them.

And that’s the problem. Private equity firms are sinking $50 billion or more a quarter into theoretical data center projects full of what will be years-old GPU technology, despite the fact that there’s no real demand for generative AI compute, and that’s before you get to the grimmest fact of all: that even if you can build these data centers, it will take years and billions of dollars to deliver the power, if it’s even possible to do so.

Harvard economist Jason Furman estimates that data centers and software accounted for 92% of GDP growth in the first half of this year, in line with my conversation with economist Paul Kedrosky from a few months ago.

All of this money is being sunk into infrastructure for an “AI revolution” that doesn’t exist, as every single AI company is unprofitable, with pathetic revenues ($61 billion or so if you include CoreWeave and Lambda, both of which are being handed money by NVIDIA), impossible-to-control costs that have only ever increased, and no ability to replace labor at scale (and especially not software engineers).

OpenAI needs more than a trillion dollars to pay its massive cloud compute bills and build 27 gigawatts of data centers, and to get there, it needs to start making incredible amounts of money, a job that’s been mostly handed to Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s new CEO of Applications, who is solely responsible for turning a company that loses billions …

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Reposted by KateAL

The Serfs (youtube.com/theserfstv) @theserfstv.bsky.social · 2d

I remember when people were debating if Israel would actually strike a single hospital while they were leveling an entire civilization

Complete and total destruction of Jabalia camp in Gaza

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KateAL @katieal.bsky.social · 1d

Conniptions?

Reposted by KateAL

Robert Reich @rbreich.bsky.social · 1d

CBS reporter Edward R. Murrow embodied what a journalist should be: someone who holds power to account instead of capitulating to it.

Over 70 years later, his segment denouncing Joe McCarthy’s congressional witch hunts rings truer than ever.

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KateAL @katieal.bsky.social · 1d

That’s good. This is not a product consumers NEED.
It’s a luxury good

KateAL @katieal.bsky.social · 1d

Yes agree

Reposted by KateAL

Roisin 🌿 @roisin6.bsky.social · 2d

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