wat3rm370n

AI Is Slowing Down Ed Zitron Jun 8, 2026 Where’s Your Ed At Whatever obtuse fantasies you have about the current state of generative AI are irrelevant to a much larger problem: that the infrastructure being built and compute commitments being made are being done so at a level that demands that generative AI and AI compute generate over $2 trillion in annual revenue by 2030. When I say that, I mean it absolutely has to do that otherwise none of the data center capex makes sense, and neither Anthropic nor OpenAI can pay their commitments. OpenAI expects to spend $50 billion on compute in 2026, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Anthropic spends anywhere from $30 billion to $50 billion. Between them, Anthropic and OpenAI represent the vast majority of all AI compute demand — at a minimum 70%, if not 80% to 90%. Put another way, there’s barely a few billion dollars of demand outside of two companies that lose billions — or tens of billions — of dollars a year.

Cops Keep Getting Arrested for Using Flock to Stalk People Jason Koebler  · Jun 10, 2026 at 9:22 AM According to the affidavit, Brown’s stalking extended beyond license place lookups; at one point while they were dating, he put an Apple AirTag in her wallet. But the bulk of his surveillance came through Flock, the affidavit says, noting that he kept “randomly showing up at the places she was at.” The affidavit states Brown told investigators that “he would occasionally run her tag through Flock to track her whereabouts” because he believed she was lying to him. “It was dumb as hell on my end, emotions flowing, mind going,” he told investigators. The investigators ultimately determined Brown “knowingly and intentionally accessed the password protected computer systems, Flock and DAVID [a Florida DMV vehicle information database], to run the license plates of vehicles [she] frequently drove, for his own personal reasons. There was no work related, justifiable, reasons to do so, other than to track [her] whereabouts.” Brown was ultimately charged with stalking and hacking-related charges; he served one day in prison and was sentenced to five years of probation. Brown’s case was not a one-off. Local news reports from around the country repeatedly detail police abusing the Flock surveillance systemic order to stalk their partners or ex-partners. The contours of each story are much the same, with the police officer in question using their access to the system to repeatedly track a specific person over the course of weeks or months. The cases highlight the fact that Flock can be used to track the whereabouts of individual people, that police do not get a warrant in order to use the system, and that, if they have access to the system, they have the technical ability to look up any license plate they want for any reason they want. (emphasis added)

My letter to reps: 

As reported in 404 Media, police employees keep getting caught using mass surveillance camera systems to stalk and harass people in their personal lives, and that is just one of the plethora of reasons these mass surveillance state systems should not exist and security camera footage should be subjected to the usual expected warrants and formal barriers of access across jurisdictions. Lawmakers must find a way to hit the brakes on this egregious invasion of privacy and tools for abuse of power. 

The ICE warehouse boondoggles are related to the data center debacles. 

We Tracked Down Who's Getting Rich Off ICE Warehouse Deals More Perfect Union May 19, 2026 "ICE doesn't necessarily want to be using warehouses. The plan came from folks very close to the White House who were sitting on properties that were causing them losses every year. And the decision was to buy them at taxpayer expense. So, let's take a look at three ice warehouse sales that have used your money to make people in Trump's orbit even richer. First up, Goldman Sachs. It was the majority owner of this warehouse in Roxberry, New Jersey, that ICE purchased for nearly $130 million. That's 137% over a previous valuation in 2025. For years, Goldman Sachs executives have had close ties to Trump, like Steven Minutian, who served as Trump's Treasury Secretary in his first term. Next up, Blue Owl. You may not know this private capital company, but honestly, you should. 35 members of Trump's administration reported investments in Blue Owl funds. Even Trump himself has over $5 million invested in Blue Owl, which has also been a major funder of data centers across the country. So maybe it's not a huge surprise that Blue Owl was paid about double the market valuation of a warehouse it owned in Tremont, Pennsylvania. And then there's Deutsche Bank." (emphasis added)

The Boston Globe - A small group of ‘superdodgers’ insist they’ve never had COVID. Here’s why they may be wrong. By Sarah Rahal Updated June 3, 2026, 5:30 a.m. Last month, The Boston Globe asked readers who believe they’ve never caught the coronavirus to share their experiences. The response was overwhelming. More than 500 people wrote in, many offering to sign up for clinical trials, convinced their stories might help researchers uncover why some people appear to have evaded the pandemic. In fact, researchers are already working to answer that question. Their most definitive finding so far: NOVIDs are exceedingly rare. “There’s a difference between people who believe they’ve never had COVID and those who truly haven’t,” said Dr. Sabrina Assoumou, an infectious disease physician at Boston Medical Center and a researcher at Boston University. Data suggest only about 2 to 3 percent of people have no COVID antibodies worldwide, meaning they may never have been infected, Assoumou said. Even that may be an overestimate, since most people who feel like outliers likely had asymptomatic or mild infections that went undetected. But the possibility that a tiny fraction truly escaped infection has intrigued researchers. They formed an international consortium of 250 scientists, known as the COVID Human Genetic Effort, who are hunting for an even smaller group: people with genetic variants that may make them resistant to the virus.

We’ve known about asymptomatic covid since the get go of the pandemic, because that’s how the spread was so diabolical. So it’s true there are probably many cases where people have no idea they had covid. All you have to do is look at the amount of people who just assume they have a really really really bad cold, or the flu, without even bothering to test. I hear that all the time from podcasters, pundits, and other content creators. We also know that there could be things that make people more or less likely to be resistant to other things, like HIV, for example. I remember decades ago being riveted by a PBS NOVA episode about Stephen Cohn. But of course there are also people such as myself who have never been sick with covid and never tested positive for covid. I even had an antibody test a month or two after a known exposure in March 2020, and that was negative. I’ve not even had an actual cold-like illness since January 2020. And even so, I couldn’t say for sure. In my case, avoiding covid is likely a mix of luck and because I actually take precautions. I say it’s a mix of luck because I do in fact likely get exposed from time to time, at dental or medical appointments, for example, though I request healthcare providers to mask when I’m having to unmask, and my dentist, who masked prior to the pandemic because he doesn’t want to breathe in tooth dust, canceled when he had cold symptoms. I do think there are probably more people avoiding covid, at least to some extent, than people realize. There’s been marketing research all along that has showed that behaviour patterns remained shifted even after the push to get back to normal for The Economy. The reason that it’s not so obvious is in my opinion a damning one; it’s because it’s largely groups that are already ignored and marginalized otherwise as well: the elderly & disabled.

it’s the same picture the office meme with the 2 white cards one says AI boosters the other says AI doomers and the person is saying “they’re the same picture”

The loopholes in Maryland’s surveillance pricing law make it a real deal breaker.

If you’re in any type of loyalty program at all, or clicked “yes” or “I agree” at some point, to a store’s program to get coupons or whatever, you will probably have signed your right away to be protected by surveillance pricing law in Maryland. And we all know that nobody reads every little part of all those things one has to agree to in order to get the sale price. These programs have been a problem for decades, the realtime corporate surveillance has just put the unfairness and target marketing exploitation on hyperdrive.

iapp - Maryland enacts a first-of-its-kind surveillance pricing law, but there are loopholes Questions around baseline pricing, loyalty program exemptions and enforcement may limit how Maryland’s grocery pricing rules work in practice. Published 13 May 2026 Four loopholes. The legislation leaves four potential paths for businesses to bypass the surveillance pricing ban and keep earning extra money from consumers. No baseline price. Both prohibitions require proving the consumer paid a higher price than they otherwise would have paid. However, the bill does not define a baseline price for comparison. Any price charged will be interpreted as a discount from the implied price, even if the retailer sets a nominal regular price and offers personalized discounts. This means consumers who do not receive a discount may have to pay a higher price for the same product. The segment gap. Both prohibitions contained in §13-321 apply only to prices set for one consumer. Dynamic pricing prohibition refers to “a specific consumer.” Personal data use prohibition refers to “a single consumer.” At first, the enrolled version of the law contained language allowing banning of the use of personal data to set prices for “a specific consumer or a group of consumers,” was intentionally removed from the final bill. Loyalty programs carve-out. The bill explicitly provides that any discounts given by food retailers to consumers participating in loyalty, membership, or rewards programs and subscription pricing are not covered by this prohibition. Loyalty programs are the primary way to collect granular data. Thus, removing loyalty programs from the ban list means removing the biggest chunk of surveillance activity. Limited enforcement mechanisms. This is perhaps the most significant loophole. It is also the only one that might affect plaintiffs’ decisions. There is no private right of action regarding surveillance pricing ban provided in §13-321. No citizen of Maryland may sue the violator for any compensation or injunctive relief because of a violation of this prohibition. (emphasis added)

My letter to reps:

We need laws on surveillance pricing that do not default allow a loophole to treat people unfairly because they’re in a store “loyalty program” for people who have opted in to get some coupon or signed up for a mailing list. Meaningful crackdown on this abusive business practice needs to not set up a situation to blame the customer for not having read some tiny little print somewhere on a page they were anxious to get past in order to move on with their day. There should also be a mandate for stores to set baseline prices storewide in order to not obfuscate what they’re doing with discounts, coupons, and sneak in surveillance pricing and hyper-individual target marketing that way. Transparency should be required.

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

We Found The Radical Solution To Surveillance Pricing  More Perfect Union Jun 10, 2026 To understand the danger surveillance pricing bills face, we wanted to investigate how those lobbyists gutted the Maryland bill so effectively. We looked at public disclosure documents for some clues. Members of the state Senate committees debating the bill were gifted over $10,000 in dinners by the Maryland Retail Alliance at restaurants serving up salmon Wellington and $150 Wagyu tomahawk ribeye. I mean, I don't know if that's what they ordered, but if a lobbyist was paying, you’d be stupid not to. The disclosures don't actually show what was discussed, but the first dinner was just one day after the legislature began considering the surveillance pricing bill. The Maryland Retail Alliance initially opposed it until those carve-outs were added to make the bill impotent. On their board of directors: executives from Target and Amazon. And the bill's passage got high praise from the head of the Chamber of Progress, a former Google exec. What we've seen in terms of pushback on a lot of these bills is attempts to get exemptions from the protection that really swallow the rule. Now, this blunder could go national — a way for lawmakers to say they've banned the practice, but in reality, not. 

I’ve been noticing that a lot of people who call themselves progressives are actually parroting the positions of corporations. And this is why I keep saying don’t use shorthand, spell things out and say what you mean because if you use shorthand, people might not even be talking about the same things.

Just Say No to Bernie Sanders’s AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Don’t give more money to the billionaires Dean Baker Jun 09, 2026 The economics on this look even worse. The job-killing effect of AI exists much more in the minds of our political elite than in the data. Productivity growth, the measure of job killing, has been extremely weak the last two quarters. Quarterly data are erratic and perhaps the future will be different, but if AI is killing off large numbers of jobs, it is doing a great job concealing the evidence. Most likely the AI sector is in a massive bubble. At its peak value, Nvidia’s market capitalization was roughly 20% of U.S. GDP. In the late 1990s tech bubble, Microsoft’s market cap peaked at less than 6% of GDP. An AI sovereign wealth fund is likely to end up being a mechanism to shovel yet more money to Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and the rest of the right-wing billionaire gang. We have already given this crew enough money. I doubt that we will see massive AI-related job displacement, but if we do, we have old remedies that should work just fine.

And Dean Baker goes on to give suggestions that are pretty standard and not at all novel, like higher tax on the rich, stronger labor standards, and better antitrust enforcement. It reminds me a little of all these false climate solutions that get trotted out, because nobody making money off the bad things happening wants to do what we already know we need to do to mitigate the climate damage, there’s no mystery, just rich people who are resistant, and people who want to sell the snake oil solutions.

My comment: I agree this is wrong headed in every way. But I don’t think it’s anything to do with Donald Trump per se. I still want medicare for all, even if those beef tallow snake oil whackadoos RFKJr & Dr. Oz are temporarily in charge of medicare in the federal govt. I don’t think this wealth fund investment in these companies is good because yeah they shouldn’t even be given government contracts. They need to stop funneling my money to these tycoons. But also I don’t want to invest in this crap they’re doing because I think it’s at best useless, but actually very very bad. I do not want “ai mass surveillance for the people”, I don’t want “ai slop for the people”, I don’t want “gas plants and data centers in Archbald Pennsylvania for the people”. And it’s not a new species holy shit just stop with the new species I made fun out of Maureen Dowd saying that on MSNBC and I have proof I was complaining back then because I mentioned it on TheLetterhack livestream over a year ago, now I heard Bernie saying “species” in a clip they played on Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 podcast, and I feel like I’m losing my gosh darn mind. MAKE IT STOP!!! Everyone needs to just stop parroting PR buzzwords from tech execs high on their own supply suffering from chatbot psychosis. If you're tempted to call chatbots a new species please put your phone down slowly, back away from it, and go outside and if you don't want to touch grass, just look at a tree, or just look at the sky, or just something farther away from you than 2ft away.

There’s ice under that basketball court and this arena has its own superspy mass surveillance state policing people for personal vendettas of the magnate who owns it.