Matt opens with a poll finding he calls one of the great PR failures of our time: people would rather have a nuclear power plant built next door than a data center. Pennsylvania's governor has now signed legislation that effectively stops data centers unless they clear a long approvals process.

Craig's answer isn't a defense of data centers so much as a description of what a few counties actually did. They said yes — on conditions. Generate your own power, and 20% more than you use, fed back into our grid. And pay full property tax, none of the abatement deals. It worked well enough that those counties are now tax-free for individual residents, with more power on the grid than before.

He also separates the honest concern from the manufactured one. If a data center is pulling from a stream and returning it at 120 degrees, that's a real problem worth zoning for. But China has been found amplifying anti-data-center sentiment in the United States through social media — the nudge concept again — because they would rather the U.S. not build. Alibaba's newest Qwen is reported on par with the best American models.

Then the second half, which Matt frames as another step toward Skynet: a near-autonomous cyberattack on the Taiwanese government, plus two more documented company attacks in a week and a half. In one, the attacker was brash enough to publish the prompt he used and describe walking away while it kept working.

Craig's framing is what makes it land. The old way was one vulnerability, one piece of code, six months to a year of work. The new way is "go for it, figure it out" — and it works because vulnerabilities are everywhere: over 500 Microsoft patches this month, about a dozen from Apple for macOS. As for regulating it, he asks how a law stops a Chinese open model that anyone in the world can already download.

Also in this segment: whether social media feedback loops explain the spread of political extremes, and Craig's read that this is a problem of financial motivation rather than technology.

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