Election Night Links

• Ford's perspicacity in the 1880's formed the basis of what is now the Beaver Coal Corporation. His work of rounding up the lands comprised in its holdings was finished in 1891.…" The current internet website for Beaver Coal Company, Limited, under the  "About Us/History" tab,  provides confirmation:  "In 1889, Anthony Drexel, Logan Bullitt and J.P. Morgan, three prominent men from Philadelphia, PA, sent their land agent, Azel Ford, to Raleigh County, WV, to purchase approximately 50,000 acres of property in and around the Beckley area. The acquired property was later placed under the banner of Beaver Coal Corporation, the predecessor to Beaver Coal Company, Limited, …" The names of Mr. Bullitt's partners mentioned here will be familiar:  Anthony Drexel was a partner in his family's banking and investment company, Drexel & Co., in 1891 he founded Drexel Institute, now Drexel University; J. Pierpont Morgan was Drexel's protégé and partner who went on to develop another important corporate giant which today is known as J.P. Morgan and Chase. [William & Mary Libraries]
•  JD Vance was originally a product of the Obama-Chicago-Pritzker Democrat machine and that he was designed to be a Democrat Presidential candidate. JD Vance came out of the network which is now attacking him. Behind the scenes, all of these people know each other, and it's all intensely personal. He was supposed to be Bill Clinton 2.0, a moderate Democrat candidate. That's what the multiracial marriage was about. It was supposed to be a symbolic political marriage union between America's 2 key groups, America's past and America's future: the white working class (traditional Blue Dog Democrat Bill Clinton voters) and the immigrant Obama voter base (Usha Vance, as a credentialed second-generation immigrant brown woman who clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, and as a woman who attended Cambridge and Yale Law School, was supposed to represent an aspirational rolemodel of an immigrant family rising to be an American elite). It was the Democrat media which promoted JD Vance. It was the Democrat media which promoted his book "Hillbilly Elegy" and turned it into a Netflix big budget film directed by Ron Howard and starring Amy Adams. [@ThomBrady5]
• The creatures! The creatures! Every sort on this earth, inching along, inching along, inching along, shafts of blue denim, inching along, blue denim legs, tight blue denim bottoms, blue denim buckled underneath ponderous guts, with T-shirts covering all but a bottommost bulge of tallow over the belt, denim pants ending midcalf with T-shirt to just above the knee with shirttail to mid-thigh with North Face jacket to just below the waist, miles of hurricane hair, so long it conceals the tiny texting keyboards held close to assisted breasts—to the tintinnabulation of aluminum walkers, the human tide carries us inch by inch toward a barrier of staggered metal detectors manned by a whole platoon of zookeepers whose word, we gather, is law. [Tom Wolfe]
• Stephen D’Ambrisi: Just a quick one. Most of my questions have been asked and answered, but just a quick follow-up on the TSMC announcement. Obviously, the ramp rate is a critical factor. But just given the commentary that TSMC's previously announced investment represented more than a gigawatt of demand. Can we use that prior $165 billion for greater than 1 gigawatt as like a rule of thumb for potential power demand from the incremental $100 billion? And just -- or if there's anything you could highlight that would potentially change the intensity per dollar of capital invested in this announcement versus prior announcements? Theodore Geisler: Yes, Steve, I think directionally, that's probably a fair general assumption, but we're still working through the details of what each fab will require as well as the ramp schedule of that. And certainly, the fabs do differ with respect to the type of chips they manufacture and the energy intensity. The more advanced the chips tends to be, the more energy intensive. And so I think there could be variation to that rule, and we'll be prepared to detail more about that when we finalize things with TSMC and hopefully able to put those details in the IRP as well. But for the purpose of just a general directional estimate, I think the way you outlined it may make sense. [Pinnacle West Capital Corp.]
• We study empirical scaling laws for language model performance on the cross-entropy loss. The loss scales as a power-law with model size, dataset size, and the amount of compute used for training, with some trends spanning more than seven orders of magnitude. Other architectural details such as network width or depth have minimal effects within a wide range. Simple equations govern the dependence of overfitting on model/dataset size and the dependence of training speed on model size. These relationships allow us to determine the optimal allocation of a fixed compute budget. Larger models are significantly more sample-efficient, such that optimally compute-efficient training involves training very large models on a relatively modest amount of data and stopping significantly before convergence. [Dario Amodei]
• Electric trucks made up 50.3% of all heavy trucks sold in China in September. That’s 33,100 electric big rigs in a single month, up 37% from a year ago, while the overall heavy-truck market shrank by 21%. And it’s showing up in the oil data. China’s diesel demand is on track to fall by about 230,000 barrels per day this year, and trucks running on batteries and natural gas are doing most of the work. [electrek]
• “Based lesbian” Katie Herzog, host of the Blocked and Reported podcast, has reported on Last Ditch since it opened. She describes it as a radical queer bar as opposed to a lesbian bar: lesbians drink beer, listen to NPR, and vote reliably Dem while radical queers do meth, live in their vans, and don’t vote at all. Western Massachusetts used to be the lesbian belt of the country, now it’s the “queer belt” of the country. Completely different things. Western Mass is home to old school lesbian colleges such as Smith and Mount Holyoke, and has always been an incubator for rich kid communism. [MAMA Magazine] 
• You are an election official who is not being closely monitored. There is a list of eligible voters in your precinct. Suppose it is a normal year, with relatively few absentee/mail ballots. You have hidden a genuine ballot box of pre-filled in ballots, with genuine ballot papers, that you know contains 1000 votes total, of which 97% are for your candidate. All registered voters in your precinct are on a list, and get crossed off as they come in. You wait until polls close, and you can see the list of everyone who hasn’t voted. You cross 1000 names off the list, and bring in your pre-filled in box of ballots, mingling it with the main ones. [Shylock Holmes] 
• Dauntism—a set of precepts about the best way to stock, shelve, and display books, the best way to cultivate and promote booksellers, and the best way to appeal to readers—has radiated out to the whole of the U.K. and now, through Barnes & Noble, to places such as Wichita and Skokie, nurturing a spirit of renaissance in the trade. “I think many of us can remember a time, not so long ago, when Barnes & Noble briefly appeared to be evolving into a glorified toy store,” Jordan Pavlin, the publisher of Knopf, told me. “Now they’re bookstores again.” [The New Yorker]