Issues You May Know, 27 February 2026.
A list of things you might want to know about - or write your reps about.
Forested wetland.
Howland’s Island Wildlife Management Area, Port Byron New York. June 5, 2017. Photo by Chloe Kaczenski Humbert.
Stop the taxpayer giveaways to nonsense AI boondoggling.
Nextgov/FCW - Tech bills of the week: AI training tax breaks; modernizing agriculture with emerging tech, and more By Alexandra KelleyFebruary 20, 2026 04:44 PM ET Introduced on Friday, Feb. 13 by Reps. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., and Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., the AI Workforce Training Act would modify the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to support tax credits for companies providing AI training to employees equal to 30% of the qualified expense with a limit of $2,500 per employee
My letter to reps:
Vote NO to the tax credits to corporations providing “AI training” because that’s some sketch boondoggle, obviously. Because nobody even knows what “AI” even means, other than that there’s a financial bubble around “AI” and associated marketing buzzwords signaling. Stop giving away taxpayer money in corporate welfare that can be manipulated for fraudulent purposes because it’s incredibly easy to call anything at all “AI training” because AI just refers to anything and everything automated anymore. Where are the tax benefits for people who are supposed to be losing jobs to AI?
Please feel free to copy or repurpose for your own letters to reps.
Infranoise. Data centers as acoustic weapons.
Noise pollution is really bad. Infrasound pollution might be even worse.
Datacenters Behaving Like Acoustic Weapons Benn Jordan Premiered Feb 18, 2026
The Documentary Podcast - LOUD: Is noise an invisible killer? March 16, 2025
No, not everyone is using chatbots.
When someone says “We all use chatbots” they’re telling on themselves that they in fact use chatbots and they believe the trickery of AI hype that everyone else is using chatbots. Because everyone’s not using chatbots.
Elite solidarity is a throughline with data centers and other corruption.
We Uncovered The Most Infamous Secret Society: And The Truth Is Shocking More Perfect Union Feb 24, 2026 In the months that Project 2025 was being written, the board of the Heritage Foundation was like a quarter Bohemian Club guys. But it goes even further. On our 2023 list in Mandalay, the same camp as Michael Bloomberg and Henry Kissinger, for whom this would be the last Grove, is another name: David McCormick. At the time, McCormick was but a simple hedge fund billionaire who’d tried to run for Senate in Pennsylvania before being defeated by Doctor Oz in the primary. But just two months after this encampment, he announced he was running again. And this time he won. So I compared our attendee list to McCormick’s donors. 11 men in Mandalay Camp donated to McCormick’s campaign. And that’s not even including the ones who gave through dark money channels. As Senator McCormick was part of an announcement with President Trump for a big push for AI investment in Pennsylvania. Data centers and power plants. At the same event was... this guy Brendan Bechtel, the latest family CEO and heir to the Bechtel fortune. Bechtel is poised to get billions in construction contracts from this deal. Funneling money and power to Bechtel seems as important to the Trump administration as it did to earlier administrations. Bechtel is getting big deals with foreign companies for U.S. construction, brokered by Trump. They have money tied up in the Venezuelan pipelines Trump wants to seize from the Venezuelan people, and they’ve been floated as a beneficiary of the Kushner-Trump plan to rebuild Gaza. We’re seeing a level of collusion among the ultra wealthy that seems almost unbeatable. They are all on the same team. They are all protecting each other. It’s not even about party politics, Paul Pelosi, Nancy’s husband, is on the list, as is his nephew, who works for Harlan Crowe, as are several major centrist and Democratic Party donors. They have class solidarity, but so do we. A tenants union was organized specifically to fight against John Atwater’s Prime Realty, and they’ve had big wins because they organized every building that Prime owns. Even workers at the Grove had a win. A class action lawsuit by Grove valets alleging wage theft, misclassification and other labor violations, went in favor of the workers. (EMPHASIS ADDED)
The problems with the tech industry are beyond what I think most of us comprehend.
Hanging a financial future on the promises of OpenAi seems dodgy.
AI Bubble: ‘This is dumber than WeWork’ | Ed Zitron The Tech Report Feb 20, 2026 I’ve said before, data centers are all unprofitable the second you don’t have a tenant. And even when you do have a tenant, I’ve heard out of Stargate Abilene that Oracle will not be extending buildings past building 8 because OpenAI is not making them enough money. These stories should rattle the market. Nvidia should get dumped. But no, Nvidia will beat and raise because there is a weird capital situation where private equity is still feeding debt to it.
The financials of AI seem as dodgy and unreliable as the AI chatbot output.
Financial Expert Says OpenAI Is on the Verge of Running Out of Money He expects OpenAI to go bust “over the next 18 months.” By Victor Tangermann Published Jan 14, 2026 3:06 PM EST Futurism In a new essay for the New York Times, Sebastian Mallaby, senior fellow at the nonpartisan think tank Council on Foreign Relations, predicts that the Sam Altman-led company could run out of money “over the next 18 months.” He argued that OpenAI’s competitors, industry stalwarts like Google, Microsoft, and Meta, could use the money they earned from their legacy businesses to pour hundreds of billions into developing and scaling their AI models — while OpenAI doesn’t have that luxury. Mallaby is no AI hater. He’s extremely bullish on AI overall, arguing that “businesses usually take decades to deploy new technologies successfully,” whereas the AI industry has made “striking” progress in just three years. In other words, Mallaby isn’t betting against a growing AI bubble — he’s singling out his predicted winners and losers of the ongoing AI race. And despite becoming a household name after the launch of ChatGPT just over three years ago, he expects OpenAI to become a footnote in AI history less than two years from now.
Private equity seems to skew the real economy in ways that do not benefit civilization.
Nobody knows exactly when the AI bubble will burst but there’s no question that data centers are built on a financial bubble.
When Does the AI Bubble Burst? It’s hard to know what bursts a bubble, even after the fact Dean Baker Feb 25, 2026 There had been warnings in both cases. In the 1990s bubble it was hardly a secret that many totally crazy businesses were raising hundreds of millions of dollars in IPOs. Investors were worried about missing out on the next Microsoft, so they were willing to throw big bucks at seemingly hare-brained schemes, just in case. In the housing bubble, the fact that many of the mortgage loans being issued were of rather dubious quality was hardly a secret. Lenders were issuing loans at 100 percent of appraised value and sometimes more. In many cases, people were borrowing in excess of the value of their home to cover closing costs or moving expenses. The verification on these loans was minimal. There were frequent jokes about “liar loans” or NINJA loans, with NINJA standing for “no income, no job, and no assets.” But these warnings came well before the crashes. There is no obvious event that caused the stock market to turn in March of 2000 or the housing bubble to peak in the summer of 2006. The Fed arguably played a role in the latter. The federal funds rate rose from its tech recession low of 1.0 percent in the spring of 2004 to a peak of 5.25 percent in the summer of 2006. This made mortgages more expensive, which made it harder for people to pay bubble inflated prices to buy homes.
Different times, but only slightly different shenanigans.
Premium: The AI Data Center Financial Crisis Edward Zitron Feb 13, 2026 Where’s Your Ed At? Since the beginning of 2023, big tech has spent over $814 billion in capital expenditures, with a large portion of that going towards meeting the demands of AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. Big tech has spent big on GPUs, power infrastructure, and data center construction, using a variety of financing methods to do so, including (but not limited to) leasing. And the way they’re going about structuring these finance deals is growing increasingly bizarre. I’m not merely talking about Meta’s curious arrangement for its facility in Louisiana, though that certainly raised some eyebrows. Last year, Morgan Stanley published a report that claimed hyperscalers were increasingly relying on finance leases to obtain the “powered shell” of a data center, rather than the more common method of operating leases. The key difference here is that finance leases, unlike operating leases, are effectively long-term loans where the borrower is expected to retain ownership of the asset (whether that be a GPU or a building) at the end of the contract. Traditionally, these types of arrangements have been used to finance the bits of a data center that have a comparatively limited useful life — like computer hardware, which grows obsolete with time. The spending to date is, as I’ve written about again and again, an astronomical amount of spending considering the lack of meaningful revenue from generative AI.
My letter to reps:
Taxpayers should not be subsidizing the AI data center financial bubble. When they go under I’m concerned we’re again going to see rich people and their companies bailed out by taxpayers while the actual taxpayers are never made whole by the exploitation and profiteering we’ve endured from the industry. It’s unacceptable and I’m watching closely to see what politicians are on the side of the humans, and which are shmoozed up with industry players, and it will inform my choices in all elections.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose for your own letters to reps.
Smart TVs are invasive because corporations are greedy.
It really seems like most products are just about collecting your data, so they charge you to buy the product, and then they take your data and sell that, so they’re making money from both ways. In a surprise, Texas is actually taking action against companies and warning the public. Of course the reason Texas Republicans would be pushed into actually taking action against companies harming the public only by the spectre of the CCP, but ok.
Attorney Gneral of Texas: December 19, 2025 | Press Release - CONSUMER ALERT: Ken Paxton Warns Texans About CCP-Aligned Smart TVs that are Spying on Them Attorney General Ken Paxton is issuing a consumer alert both warning Texans about the dangers of smart TVs spying on them, as well as providing general guidance as to how to turn off the invasive technology.
My letter to reps:
Texas isn’t really known for great consumer protections and even the Texas AG is taking action against Smart TV companies and issuing warnings about the way they spy on consumers with invasive surveillance technology. These smart tvs take screenshots of what’s on the screen and collects and then uses or maybe sells that data, including what little children are watching on tv which is already illegal, and including screenshots of what someone has on the screen when connected by HDMI for example, from their private photo slideshow. And then they make it hard or impossible for people to figure out how to opt out. And I’m not convinced that it stops even if you opt out and disconnect the tv from the internet and use an Apple TV streaming device instead. They can put stuff in there that connects independently to cell services and transmitting data on its own. They have medical devices that do that, after all. Why do we have to put up with all these things we have to use in life being filled with garbage spying on us, and worse, we pay for it to happen to us? There ought to be a law against all this outrageous conduct by companies.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose for your own letters to reps.
Just outlaw the NDAs. NonDisclosure Agreements are a threat to a civil society.
Jeffrey Epstein’s most powerful ally was silence - Gretchen Carlson and Julie Roginsky - Mon 8 Dec 2025 06.00 EST The Guardian This pattern echoes across institutions and industries. When abuse occurs, the first instinct is too often containment, not accountability. Corporations draft non-disclosure agreements that muzzle employees. Organizations force workers into arbitration, protecting executives while survivors are bound by confidentiality and pushed out the door. Even government agencies, as in Epstein’s case, have shown a willingness to trade transparency for expediency.
Names shouldn’t be hidden to protect the guilty.
Trump Faces LEGAL NIGHTMARE After Survivors FLIP THE SCRIPT Katie Phang Feb 19, 2026 The victims and survivors of Epstein, Maxwell, and others deserve justice. But, as Julie Roginsky and Gretchen Carlson note, “Jeffrey Epstein’s most powerful ally was silence.” They join Katie Phang for a discussion on NDAs, forced arbitration clauses, and other weapons to keep the truth from coming out when abuse occurs.
Elected representatives especially shouldn’t be signing NDAs to hide projects and their impact from the public they work for.
The PR operations on social media have really jumped the shark in trying to defend the Department of Homeland Security.
On Bluesky I saw some PR hack saying democratic politicians can’t risk “falling for” “abolish Ice” “again” whatever that all even means because it makes no sense. I’m not even clear who that was meant for, or what they assume people believe because it’s just not based in any reality. This person, who was advertising their op-ed was even warning Democrats to NOT fight the GOP. Should anyone be taking advice from someone who’s saying we should just all lie down and take it? Then to boot there’s someone in the comments reply thread all condescending and trying to lecture, who knows what audience this is for, saying how you can’t say this or that, you have to say what he thinks you should say in this word salad. And of course he’s also selling “anti-maga merch” check the link in his bio!
Don’t boost anonymous accounts selling merch by pumping out viral content, often boosted by inauthentic networks.
Pandemic denier in control of both the NIH and the CDC
Bhattacharya’s growing power in Trump’s HHS worries health experts - Joseph Choi and The Hill Feb 22, 2026 “Candidly, this is someone who very clearly has an ax to grind with science and the scientific community in general,” Kayla Hancock, director of Protect our Care’s Public Health Watch project, said of Bhattacharya. “We’ve seen with his record already at NIH and his history of Covid denialism before he even took this office that this is just not the kind of person that we need at the helm of our key public health and medical research institutions.” Bhattacharya, confirmed as NIH director in March of last year, was a Stanford University professor of medicine before joining the Trump administration. He was also one of the lead authors of “Great Barrington Declaration,” a 2020 open letter calling for COVID-19 lockdowns to be rolled back.
New CDC Director Has Questioned Vaccine Safety Jay Bhattacharya’s recent new appointment may suggest more changes to the vaccine schedule. Walker Bragman Feb 20, 2026 Important Context He has previously cast doubt on vaccine safety. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Bhattacharya questioned the need for COVID-19 boosters and claimed they were insufficiently tested prior to approval. In a 2024 documentary, he suggested that the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin, which research has shown is not effective against COVID, had been suppressed to secure vaccine approval. Even before his NIH appointment, the new acting CDC director was an ally of Kennedy. When the secretary ran for president in 2024 as an independent, Bhattacharya spoke at the campaign event announcing his running mate. That summer, Bhattacharya also organized a public health conference at Stanford University featuring individuals like writer and COVID vaccine critic Alex Berenson.