"The best friend of a nation is he who most faithfully rebukes her for her sins—and he her worst enemy who, under the specious… garb of patriotism seeks to excuse, palliate or defend them." - Frederick Douglass

The president is not a king. He is not free to disregard the rule of law whenever it becomes politically inconvenient for him. The Trump admin must comply with recent court orders to fund SNAP in November for millions of hungry seniors, children, veterans and the disabled.

Being afraid of imaginary things while ignoring real threats is perfectly on brand for the 2025 @GOP.

Indeed. Support for No Kings is broad, and across nearly all demographic groups, is much higher than support for MAGA. Independents are 3x more likely to identify with No Kings than MAGA. #NoKings

This is fascinating, for a whole lot of reasons. And a good reminder that - notwithstanding what you might hear elsewhere - most Americans are good people who think our Constitutional democracy is worth defending.

13. Anyway. High tariffs, isolationism, Jim Crow segregation and anarchic utility regulation are all bad ideas from the 1890s that we don't need to repeat. No matter how much the historically, economically and ethically illiterate buffoons in the WH say to the contrary. /fin

12. To a world where assets are overbuilt and underutilized. I could go on, but there is no technical or economic case for what their doing other than narrow, short-term thinking that doesn't understand or doesn't care about what will inevitably follow.

11. To a world where electricity producers and consumers are now way too exposed to the variability in the other's business / industry / skill set, raising the cost of capital for both and reducing economic efficiency.

10. So when Trump & Chucklehead of Energy Chris Wright are now telling data centers that he'd like them to build their own generator they are essentially taking us back to the 1890s. To a world where the rich get something others can't afford.

9. To be sure, there are plenty of problems with that structure too, mostly related to the loss of competitive discipline. But - much like the creation of universal K-12 education - we got universal access to something important and a way to pay for it that was affordable to all.

8. The solution that emerged is largely what we still have. A central utility owner/operator (sometimes a regulated monopoly, sometimes a government entity like TVA or your local municipal utility) serves everyone in the area at a standard set of conditions and rates.

7. But that means a lot of needless redundancy, and is a part of the reason why pictures of cities from the 1890s / 1900s look like spiderwebs in the sky. Lots of economically independent actors, making independently rational decisions creating deeply suboptimal outcomes.

6. One early solution was to run your power plant at a unique voltage or frequency & set up a side hustle selling electric devices that only you could serve. This is why so many of the early utilities are still known for their refrigerators. (Westinghouse, Edison = GE, etc.)

5. After all, the generators faced the mirror risk of the consumer: a loss in supply on one side bore the same risk as a loss of demand on the other. Pressure that forced one to bundle non-coincident demand encouraged the other to try and bundle non-coincident supply.

4. e.g., having convinced a few people to shift to electric lights, or electric motors, what's to keep their competitors from hooking up a separate wire and undercutting their service, reducing the amount of cash they were expecting to pay off their investment?

3. In the early days of the power industry, that meant that utilities only built generators in densely populated urban areas where they could serve lots of loads, mitigating their risk. But that then still left them with competitive risks.

2. A perfectly reliable power plant that is theoretically capable of generating power 24/7/365 still requires 2 weeks of scheduled maintenance a year. And no plant is perfectly reliable. Fuel disruptions happen, parts wear out, humans make mistakes, etc.

1. Investing in electric generation for a single user is a massive, largely unfinanceable bet - for the generator and the consumer. Both are investing a lot of money on the assumption that the other will be there 24/7 as needed to produce or provide revenue.

The White House's push for data centers to build their own power plants is an almost perfect distillation of their preference for wealth inequality and historical / technical ignorance. Brief thread:

This reminds me of the old high school joke. Yes, I'm sure you have a girlfriend. Who I've never met. Who lives in Canada. Who's really hot. Whatever you say, Sparky.

For context, this is where Nixon was when he fired Haldeman, Erlichman and Dean in the wake of Watergate revelations.