Doug Haugh

The real drivers of our rising power costs are not data centers, they are being used as a scapegoat for decades of poor management, over regulation, lack of any competition and lack of investments by those you in the government granted monopolies. Focus on bringing investment to our state and sure let’s be smart about the supply and demand balance for electricity, but this is a once in a lifetime chance to bring abundance of generation to our state and have investors not ratepayers footing the bill. Read up if you want to understand the facts thinkingonenergy.com/2026/01/31/ele…

Florida is requiring data centers to cover the costs of the power and infrastructure they demand, shielding everyday ratepayers from being stuck with the bill. We are calling on South Carolina to do the same. South Carolina families are already stretched thin. Groceries cost more. Energy bills cost more. They shouldn't have to subsidize massive data centers on top of it. South Carolina STRONG. Read More: nancymace.org/nancy-mace-dat…

Here are some ways in which the world has gotten better.

Exactly

Most AI pilots don’t fail because of the model. They fail because organizations aren’t ready to scale. That’s the real takeaway from my recent Future of Convenience podcast conversation between very experienced industry guys I like to listen to: Dan Munford and Jeffrey Rubin. Listen to this podcast on the GC website or see links to Spotify and Apple Podcasts lnkd.in/gthdt-5N We’ve entered a new phase of AI adoption: 👉 The question is no longer “Can we build it?” 👉 It’s “Can we operationalize it at scale?” And that’s a completely different challenge. From what we’re seeing across industries, a few patterns are clear: 🔹 Pilots are easy. Production is hard. Controlled environments hide the complexity of real-world data, systems, and users. What works in a demo often breaks at scale. 🔹 Data is still the bottleneck. Without reliable, well-governed data, even the best AI models underperform. Most “AI problems” are actually data problems. 🔹 Integration > innovation. The real work is connecting AI into existing workflows, systems, and decision-making processes—not building flashy use cases. 🔹 Change management is everything. AI adoption is as much about people as it is about technology. If teams don’t trust or use it, it doesn’t matter how good it is. 🔹 Value beats volume. Scaling AI isn’t about running more pilots—it’s about focusing on fewer use cases that deliver measurable business impact. ✅The companies that are winning with AI aren’t experimenting more..They’re executing better. They treat AI as infrastructure, not a side project. They design for scale from day one. And they stay relentlessly focused on outcomes.

@Houseofyogi Wonderfully put!

They want you to be ashamed of the American Dream Your grandpa showed up with a suitcase and $40. Didn't speak the language. Didn't know anyone. Washed dishes until he could afford something better. Saved enough to buy a truck. Started a business. Then bought the building. Your grandma watched it happen. And she raised four kids to believe they could do it too. That's the American Dream. It never mattered if you were born here or came on a boat. What mattered was what you were willing to build. A kid grows up on a cattle farm in the middle of nowhere Nebraska. His dad never finished high school. His mom works the register at the only store in town. Nobody in his family has ever left the state. He tinkers with engines after school. Builds things out of scrap. Shows up to college with everything he owns in the back of a pickup truck. Ten years later he's running a manufacturing company. Not because his parents had connections. Not because someone handed him a trust fund or a last name that opened doors. Because this is America. And in America, you're allowed to try. You're allowed to dream. And the numbers prove it. ~23 million millionaires in this country. 79% of them are self-made. 902 billionaires. More than anywhere else on the planet. 13 out of the 15 richest people in the world are American. 73% self-made. They didn't inherit empires. They built them. In garages. In dorm rooms. In strip malls. On kitchen tables. Jeff Bezos never knew his biological father. He started Amazon out of a garage and couldn't afford a desk so he bought a door from Home Depot and screwed four legs onto it. Larry Ellison was abandoned by his mother at nine months old. His adoptive father told him he'd never amount to anything. He dropped out of college twice and built Oracle into a $200 billion empire. Oprah was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a single teenage mother. She became the most influential media figure on the planet. Three people who had every reason to fail. Look what they built instead. Tell me where else a broke kid with no connections can build a billion-dollar company and nobody asks who his father was. You won't find it. Because every other system on this planet was built to keep people where they were born. Castes. Classes. Last names. Bloodlines. Old money. Old power. America was built to break all of it. An entire generation has been brainwashed into being ashamed of it. They taught your kids that this country was built on nothing but slavery and genocide. They put it in the textbooks. The movies. Every feed. Until your 19-year-old can't say "I love my country" without feeling like he has to apologize. They told you the American Dream was a lie sold to keep people down. 53 million people born in other countries chose to live here. 71% of them say they'd do it all over again. They didn't pick France. They didn't pick Germany. They didn't pick China. They picked here. Because they already know what you've been gaslit into forgetting. Don't let them do this to you. Don't let some professor who's never built anything tell your kids that the country their great-grandparents bled for is irredeemable. Don't let some activist with a blue check convince you that a nation of 22.7 million self-made millionaires is a monument to oppression. Don't let a politician shame you into believing that the people who build are the villains. Every time this country creates greatness, they tell us to apologize for it. And don't you dare let a foreigner who's never set foot here tell you what your country is. They've never watched a janitor's daughter become a surgeon. They've never seen a single mom put herself through night school and end up running the department. They've never sat at a Thanksgiving table where five different accents argue about football and nobody thinks twice. That's not some ad, it's a Thursday. Somewhere right now a kid is lying on the floor of a studio apartment doing homework while his mom works a double. He doesn't have a trust fund. He doesn't have a single connection that matters. But he's got a shot. A real one. Because he lives here. And if you let them take that from him, what are you even defending? This is the country that looked at the moon and said "we choose to go, not because it is easy, but because it is hard." So build. I hope you understand what's at stake.

@handre x.com/doughaugh/stat…

Mises obliterated the entire socialist project in 1920 with one devastating insight: "Where there is no free market, there is no pricing mechanism; without a pricing mechanism, there is no economic calculation." The socialists spent the next century pretending this problem didn't exist while their economies collapsed around them. And yet here we are, watching politicians promise they can "fix" healthcare, housing, and energy markets through central planning. They can't even calculate the cost of their own programs correctly — how exactly are they going to allocate resources across an entire economy? Every Venezuelan breadline, every Soviet grain shortage, every Chinese famine was just Mises being proven right in the most brutal way possible. But sure, let's try democratic socialism this time. What could go wrong?

The real contest is not capitalism vs. socialism on a spreadsheet. It is myth vs. myth: a utopian promise of purified justice vs. a harder, humbler story of fragile freedom and imperfect progress.

Because socialism is not defeated by white papers and policy memos. If its power comes from myth, then the only serious response is a better story.

It is good to make sure they are not confused. Communism is far less insidious. While Socialism snakes up the back steps Communists just blow down the front door. Either way both of them take your house if you let them set up in your neighborhood., but yeah good to know the difference.

@doughaugh @handre Stop conflating socialism with communism.

The Return of Industrial Policy Brings the Physical Economy Back Into Focus - How Marco Rubio’s speech on national security in Munich highlights the importance of energy policy and investment in industrial capabilities.thinkingonenergy.com/2026/02/16/the… via @doughaugh

Electricity Affordability, AI Data Centers, and the Real Drivers of Rising Rates thinkingonenergy.com/2026/01/31/ele… via @doughaugh

So one size doesn’t fit all, doesn’t mean it’s not a great fit for some hauls. There are a lot of lanes that cube out long before they weight out and the extra truck weight doesn’t restrict those lanes . We did this with CNG tractors for the last 20 years, they work great in certain applications and not great in others, which was fine, did not mean they didn’t work.

Pepsi uses them to haul light weight chips and snacks. Basically use them to haul air. Hauling heavy loads is not an option as the truck weight (battery requirements) plus load weight will exceed roadway load restrictions. As is today, they would tear up the pavement and leave deep furrows which collect water and increase safety risks. . So, Gates is right on this one until higher density batteries are developed.

Bill Gates visited Elon at the Tesla Giga Texas factory and told him straight up: "It’s impossible to have a long-range semi-truck. It doesn’t work" Elon replied: "We literally have them. Drive one yourself. Pepsi is using them RIGHT NOW" Gates just kept saying: "No, it doesn't work" Today, Tesla Semis are hauling cargo 425+ miles for one of the biggest companies on Earth Imagine being this confidently wrong, refusing to accept reality, and somehow the media still sells him as a "climate expert" 🤡

@MSMoon1967 @LarryWilliamsTI No, but sure would be expensive

@LarryWilliamsTI Which is really not illegal.

Dabo on the Pete Golding/Luke Ferrelli saga: "This is like having an affair on your honeymoon."