#boondoggles

THE TIME TUNNEL - A BOONDOGGLE?

In the pilot episode of Irwin Allen’s “The Time Tunnel” (1967) Senator Clark is flown to a mysterious research base in the middle of the desert. The desert is absolute flat, with no building or structures nearby. A car arrives and takes him to the complex - which is underground - an opening in the desert floor appears and the car drives down a ramp.

There, project scientist Dr. Douglas Phillips (Robert Colbert) gives the Senator a tour. He shows him:

Eight buildings built underground, explains each is 800 floors with over 12,000 working in each structure.

That’s only 15 people assigned to each floor.

A complex of 800 floors is estimated to be 11,200 feet deep or over 2 miles underground.

Compare that to the deepest underground structure today in China (the Jinping Laboratory) - only 1.5 miles!

Trickle down economics and privatization are things that have been repeatedly discredited, yet repeatedly pushed, and combining them is corruption.

I’ve been seeing a lot of mention of CBAs in regards to data center projects, and sadly I see a lot of data center opposition activists seemingly believing this might be an avenue to get treated fairly, except that Community Benefits Agreements seem to never culminate in a fair exchange. So at first glance perhaps it looks like it’s a great Idea, but it’s most certainly not. It’s a privatization scheme based on thoroughly discredited ideas around trickle down economics, which is, of course a trick.

Community benefits agreement - From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia “A community benefits agreement (CBA) in the United States is a contract signed by community groups and a real estate developer that requires the developer to provide specific amenities and/or mitigations to the local community or neighborhood. In exchange, the community groups agree to publicly support the project, or at least not oppose it. Often, negotiating a CBA relies heavily upon the formation of a multi-issue, broad based community coalition including community, environmental, faith-based and labor organizations.”

It’s a needlessly complicated way to work out the math in favour of the corporations with the community still carrying the burdens, with a lot of confusion, instead of just having corporations and tycoons pay their fare share of taxes, and then providing community amenities and regulatory protection with that tax revenue. So it’s really diabolical, a most convoluted privatization scheme. Companies benefit from tax breaks or even taxpayer funded grants, for projects in communities that don’t even want the projects, and for development that isn’t necessarily actually useful to society, and just exists for the owners to make money, and then communities are cajoled into taking token gifts by signing agreements that may not even in the end be enforceable. And sometimes the promised gifts may never come to fruition if the company involved goes under or otherwise skips out. And this is all in order to dodge real true accountability.

From what I’ve seen, community benefits agreements in general are typically garbage too, they almost never actually offer a fair trade in any sense that would be considered compensation. It often looks like a cheapskate insulting bribe in exchange for allowing companies to do irrevocable damage to a community. Maybe they offer the town a firetruck, or to build a park someday in the future, in a town that’s been made extremely undesirable in a bunch of other ways.

They seem to include things that look like “concessions” by the company that are in fact already required by laws and regulations in the jurisdiction, so it’s weighting the balance sheet by passing off as “good will” things that are legally required anyway. In some cases tricky language can be used to make the community think something that’s not quite true. For example, in the case of the Lancaster City data center CBA, the term “clean energy” is used, and reports in the news were claiming the Community Benefits Agreement provides for “100% renewable energy” data centers only, when I could find no such evidence of that being guaranteed in the CBA text in the summary nor in the long form. It said “clean energy” and Donald Trump has referred to “clean coal” and I’ve even been hearing methane gas generally described as “clean” too. Nowhere in that CBA does it specify renewable, nor is there language to exclude fossil fuel, especially not to ban “backup generators” which are often called “temporary” but then utilized long-term for multi-year continuous operation, such as the data center plant in Memphis Tennessee.

So in the end the business interests get away with what would otherwise be considered horrible, or even criminal, avoid being held accountable by regulatory bodies, force arbitration maybe, or otherwise avoid getting sued which might have a hope of restitution, so instead, as the cost of doing business, they can just do a pittance “investment in the community” and call it even when it’s not, because it’s a lot cheaper than impact fees or paying their fair share of taxes. Often in the cases where CBAs come up, the corporations and business entities are already getting big taxpayer money grants or tax credits or tax breaks of some kind. So one part of government tries to give the companies freebies on the backs of the taxpayers, and another part of government under pressure from the actual community members paying those taxes and living in the community, comes up with the idea of a “Community Benefits Agreement” as a superficial fix, to try to claw back some token in order to try to appease constituents who recognize the harm being done.

CBAs are a tool for privatizing the profits and socializing the losses. So nobody who considers themselves “left” or “liberal” or who considers themselves “fiscally responsible” with taxpayer money should be on board with this corporate friendly industry catering privatization scheme.

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The Tech Right Gets Its Own Phyllis Schlafly - Katherine Boyle, an influential venture capitalist who is a friend of the vice president, thinks the country’s path forward involves cultural conservatism and more weapons production. By Julia Black Oct. 19, 2025 In February, the “American Dynamism” fund announced that it was hiring Daniel Penny, a Marine veteran best known for restraining a New York City busker named Jordan Neely in a chokehold until he died, as a deal partner. When asked about Mr. Penny’s lack of business experience, Ms. Boyle simply told me: “He’s wonderful. He’s a gentleman.”

It's all extremist right-wing bonkers monarchy and tech rapture delusional nonsense, and it's not benign. 

The Abundance agenda is totally gaslit. The Abundance Agenda really represents a bunch of people who want to hold their world together with the cheeks of their asses. Chloe Humbert Jun 17, 2025

These projects could be in the works almost anywhere without anyone knowing because elected representatives are signing NDAs to keep these projects secret until they're ready to push them through.

Journal-News. Residents say ‘no’ on $1B data center project, want Hamilton to do the same By Michael D. Pitman Oct 10, 2025 Hamilton residents voiced concerns about a planned data center that could — pending several factors, including the results of two impact studies and a land sale — be under construction as early as next year. Residents don’t want to see that happen, citing — among other issues — potential noise and light pollution and environmental concerns. Between 40 and 50 people attended what became a standing-room-only Hamilton City Council meeting, and they want the potential $1 billion-plus project to just go away. City Council has been publicly discussing the Logistix project since 2024.

Notice they say the City Council has been discussing it PUBLICLY since 2024. In many places it’s been found that these projects have been in the works for much longer, but with elected city officials and others signing Nondisclosure Agreements to keep the taxpayer giveaways and detrimental projects secret from constituents and the communities who will be adversely impacted by the boondoggles to make some insiders a windfall.

I agree with what Pat Garofalo and Sumitra Rajagopal wrote about the NDAs issue: “economic development NDAs are corrupt under any circumstance.”

My letter to reps:

Have you signed NDAs about data centers to keep things secret about these projects from the public? Do you believe in a government for the people and by the people or do you think people shouldn’t self-govern? Economic development NDAs are corrupt under any circumstance and we should have laws to prevent politicians who would engage in such anti-democratic corruption out of malice or not understanding the job of representing people in a representative democracy.

Please feel free to copy or repurpose for your own letters to reps.

See also:

Public officials who sign NDAs should resign because they don’t understand the job. And there really ought to be a law to prevent any such thing from ever happening where elected officials sign agreements to keep secrets from the communities they serve. Chloe Humbert Aug 12, 2025

Deloitte provided shoddy AI chatbot derived "research" report to Australian government with fake citations. 

Deloitte delivers report to government using AI which contained errors | ABC NEWS ABC News (Australia) Oct 6, 2025

Here's a tip, if you are at all knowledgeable about a subject, and you should be at least somewhat knowledgeable if you're writing about it to inform other people; then you already know of citations that you would refer to, because you've already read those sources you put in the footnotes, because you've been learning about the subject from such research materials. The whole point of writing about stuff is to impart the information. Someone nearly clueless about something shouldn't be the one relied upon to communicate anything on it. And that's what's going on if someone is just letting AI chatbots write something, and then not even "fact checking chatbot fake citations" which is really bad. Also doesn't seem like it could possibly save time in the long run. And it certainly won't save face! This whole gaffe is especially damning when it comes to an outfit like Deloitte which is supposed to be so fancy and superior in providing quality information and analysis. I've always thought that reverence wasn't deserved when it comes to these companies. But what a way for these companies to finally shit the bed for all the public to see. 

My letter to reps from March 2024: