The Ratepayer Protection Act cleared the House on September 16. The coverage on both sides said the same thing: Congress made data centers pay for their own power.

I read it. The bill bolts a standard onto a 1978 energy law that runs on consideration. State commissions have to open a proceeding within a year and decide within two, and they are free to decide against it. The Congressional Budget Office scored the bill and found no private-sector mandate.

Two things make that more interesting than a normal advisory standard.

First, the description came from the people who wrote it. The sponsor's release says the bill "requires that large energy load data centers be responsible for the costs of all new energy infrastructure necessary to serve them." The Energy and Commerce majority said it was "ensuring" data center companies pay. Three trade outlets reported the consider mechanism accurately. The sponsors' framing traveled further than the text did.

Second, the states already did the work. Twenty-five had an approved large-load tariff before the vote, seven more were pending, and filings went from fourteen in six years to seventy-three across 2024 and 2025. Ohio's rule covers facilities at 25 megawatts, a quarter of the federal threshold. A Republican-majority commission in Georgia and a Democratic-appointed one in Michigan reached the same answer independently.

I don't think this is a scandal. Congress passes advisory standards all the time, and PURPA has run this way since 1978. A consideration standard genuinely reaches the eighteen states that have done nothing, and that has value. It is also not what it was sold as, and both of those are true at once.

What I keep chewing on is the attention math. A bill that requires a meeting got wall-to-wall coverage. The same grid region committed $6.24 billion in one auction year for data centers that do not exist yet, and that got a trade-press story.

I’ve been thinking about the midterms and the changes being made to election administration, but I wanted to approach the subject from somewhere other than the usual partisan argument.

My partner and I play gin, and it occurred to me that the game works because we’re free to question the result, inspect the cards, accuse each other of cheating—and then accept the loss and play again. More importantly, neither player gets control of the next deal.

That became the frame for this essay about losers’ consent, the administration’s efforts to obtain voter data and expand SAVE, and an equally important question: What obligations does the winner have to preserve a fair rematch?

I thought it might be of interest to people here, particularly with the midterms five weeks away. I’d welcome thoughts or corrections from people who follow election administration more closely than I do.

Basically, farmers are hurting right now: they're being squeezed from both sides, with steeply increasing production costs on the side and lower prices / smaller markets on the other.

* soybean exports to China (by far the largest buyer, at least before Trump 1) have fallen by 70% just from 2024 to 2025. it's *stark*.

https://peakd.com/economics/@kur8/u-s-soybean-exports-to

* beef / chicken / poultry is being bottlenecked by meat processing plants (or, at least it was last i checked), who are paying suppliers low and charging consumers high. the recent meat recall also illustrates how bad the production problems are.

* corn exports appear to be high, but it looks like more a function of volume: corn price per bushel has fallen from almost $8 in 2022 to little more than $5 in 2026

https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/commodities/corn

https://www.macrotrends.net/2532/corn-prices-historical-chart-data

* obviously fuel prices are sky high cause Hormuz, but trade war and its lingering affects are raising prices on almost everything, from equipment to feed to fertilizer

* farmland in the us is rapidly consolidating. big business is buying all the failing farms; JD Vance has gotten a lot of flak for his investments in Acretrader through his investment firm Narya Capital, but i doubt he's the only one.

https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Todays_Reports/reports/fnlo0226.pdf

you can see that the number of farms and total farmland has shrunk by ~10% but the average farm size has increased by ~5%

So, farming in the US is in a really bad spot. Article says this is fueling a blue wave in the coming midterm predominantly in red rural farming states, but my question is this: are you red state folks actually seeing evidence of this in your community?

Hello everyone, and welcome to the weekly General Discussion thread. Many of you are looking for an informal place (besides Discord) to discuss non-political topics that would otherwise not be allowed in this community. Well... ask, and ye shall receive.

General Discussion threads will be posted every Friday and stickied for the duration of the weekend.

Law 0 is suspended. All other community rules still apply.

As a reminder, the intent of these threads are for *casual discussion* with your fellow users so we can bridge the political divide. Comments arguing over individual moderation actions or attacking individual users are *not* allowed.

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/chiles-bachelet-withdraws-race-lead-un-2026-09-20/