As a person with an 800+ credit score, I can confirm that I can get credit anywhere I apply for it, at the best rates available, even though I pay off my credit card bills in full every month, and have no other debt.

Coming from a guy called Tony Isaac? Yep, username checks out.

(But yeah, I have much the same experience, though I do have a mortgage also)

The government was the originator of redlining, and it was quite openly about denying mortgages in minority areas. The redlining maps were created by the FHLBB and the HOLC, both New Deal government corporations. This was ended in 1968.

The Clinton changes were designed to increase loans to poor people. And they did. But this turned out to be a bad idea.

The Fair Isaac score was anything but fair. It predicts whether or not you will default on a loan in a given amount of time.

Yes, that's what it's supposed to do.

It is highly correlated with ethnic back grounds, parents income and where you lived. Does your spouce have the same last name as you, is your name in the top 100 names of the year you were born.

It may in fact be correlated with these things (because they're correlated with likelyhood of default), but it's not based on them. Some of those aren't even in the credit report the score is based on. Location isn't used in the FICO score.

I think the key was to get the government securitizers (Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae) to accept their new credit score. But they have people for that too. Possibly including blackjack dealers and hookers (or more likely "procurers").

Headline promises open warfare. Summary says the price of a FICO score is going up $5. Weak sauce.

To anyone younger than Gen X, there are no more than four generations -- Boomer (anyone older than a Millennial), Millennial, Zed, Alpha. Probably the Zeds think the Millennials are Boomers too.

It's possible the cop took this to a prosecutor, and the prosecutor told him something like:

"Look, Sergeant, I can't say for sure the lady in the Flock camera isn't your suspect, but I can't say that it is either. You've got her truck in the neighborhood, and a similar truck driving by but no license plate on the drive-by and no direct connection between the thief and the truck anyway. All this is suggestive but not proof beyond reasonable doubt, and if I can see that so can opposing counsel. If I bring this to court it's going to get thrown out and I'm going to look like an idiot. You'll have to get me more evidence before I'll go to court with this."

And so the Sergeant heads over to the lady's house and tries to pressure her into a confession.

Really, as soon as the cop let it be known he was there accusing her of a crime, her next words should have been to the effect that she was refusing to speak further without legal representation. And then she should have gone in and closed the door. This cop was trying to bully her into a confession (likely because he knew damn well the video couldn't identify her).

So, if an employer values compliance over productivity, they should make it a criteria in their performance reviews, and the employee who is producing only a third of the output using company approved tools should get a much bigger bonus than the employee who produced 3x as much getting creative paying for their own tools. As long as employers value productivity over policy compliance, good (as per performance eval criteria) employees will always find ways around the policies.

The way it is supposed to work is that policy is not optional and not a factor in performance reviews. You break it, you're out the door, or maybe you get called up on the carpet by some CorpSec manager who makes it clear to you you'll be out the door next time. BUT... not getting work done due to the corporate policies is not an excuse, and that WILL count towards your performance review. You tell your boss you didn't get shit done because your laptop was locked down tighter than San Quentin, and you'll be PIPped out of there in no time. So if you can violate the policy to get work done, you're better off; you might not get caught but you will be fired if you don't get the work done.

Looking at CorpSec's own incentives, you can see the problem. If the company gets hacked despite their policies, they take the blame. If the company gets hacked because someone violated their policies, they only share the blame (and they can then do a crackdown to get the heat off). If work slows down due to their measures but the company does not get hacked, they get no blame at all. The only caveat is the computers still have to work for important people -- execs and their secretaries, and salespeople. Fortunately for CorpSec this mostly means email, docs, and spreadsheets, which are easy to keep working even with a draconian security policy. So basically they're incentivized to make things absolutely as hard as possible beyond those basics. Want to run an unapproved program? Here, fill out this form, get your manager, director, and the VP of engineering to sign it, and CorpSec will get back to you in 6 weeks with a "No" citing an alternative way to do it with already-approved programs that gets you half of what you want at 10x the work... but doesn't require CorpSec to lift a finger.

Do you know how many interstitials I have to deal with when trying to log into a corp approved app. Five, Bob. Five interstitials. And this is for every app, every day. And sometimes I have to type a password. Or generate a code. Do you know how impressed my manager will be when I tell him my work isn't done because of all the time I spent dealing with CorpSecs hurdles? That's right, Bob, not at all. So do you think I give a damn, Bob, about unapproved AI tools? No, I do not.

Google restarts a fairly-innocuous sounding plant in Iowa

Microsoft restarts the infamous Three Mile Island

Broadcom is no doubt looking at Fukushima Daiichi.

Which leaves Chernobyl for Oracle.

Apparently the North Koreans were actually doing the jobs. Sure, the money ended up with the North Korean government, but when your own government takes your money that's taxation, and only libertarians call it theft.

Uh, you realize the Federal Reserve already does this with the dollar, right?

Google reported using 32.11 million MWh in 2024. Average cost per megawatt hour for industrial customers in the US was $87.50, so we can estimate (with wide error bars, but the right order of magnitude) about $2.8 billion in electricity cost for the year. Google's net income in 2024 was about $100B, so electricity costs are a small fraction of profit. Electricity expenses are included in their cost of revenue, which was a total of $146B.

I believe the second-order effect of being able to scale faster will easily swamp the first-order effect of saving money on electricity.

Google makes so much money even their enormous electricity bill is probably only a small fraction of profit, yes. But if they can cut the amount of power they use, they can add more compute without having to increase the amount of electrical capacity in a data center (or build more data centers), which not only means less capital expense but also means they can increase compute in less time. So it's definitely a concern.