It's imperative to inform politicians about tech scams that target their ideological hopes with false promises.

Crypto mogul donors lure politicians to betray their communities by saying they're doing it to benefit their communities. It's a trick.

Apr 14, 2025

My posts on crypto, AI hype, and data center power plant related stuff are at the bottom of this page.

We can’t just depend on politicians to do the right thing just because they’re Democrats, surely that’s obvious by now.

Tech tycoons and people fully bought in on AI are trying to sell this AI stuff as the solution to so many different problems, that it should be very obvious that it’s not a real solution to anything. It’s like the many quack treatments based in pseudoscience that just get repurposed again and again for various ailments.

The New Republic - Kate Aronoff / April 11, 2025 Democrats Are Embracing AI for the Dumbest Possible Reason - Just say “China,” and everyone except AOC suddenly supports massive data center build-outs that will torch the planet. Researchers at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, or IEEFA, expect that all of the country’s remaining coal plants could close by 2040. That’s good news for the people who may now be spared the effects of coal pollution, which are estimated to have killed around half a million people, in one study of Medicare records, between 1999 and 2020. But a striking number of congressional Democrats seem to agree with Trump on the importance of pouring limitless amounts of energy into AI in service of a vaguely worded set of national security priorities. During a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on Wednesday—featuring former Google and Alphabet chief Eric Schmidt—Democrats adopted an odd position: It is imperative that the U.S. do whatever it takes to beat China in the race for AI dominance, and Donald Trump is making that harder. “Instead of winning the future,” ranking Democrat Frank Pallone said in his opening statement, “Trump’s economic turmoil could send America’s tech leadership into a tailspin.” While noting the need for safeguards around privacy and energy bills, several Democrats praised Schmidt’s call for energy build-outs for AI. Schmidt’s opening statement contended that the “technological revolution and the prosperity” AI promises “depend entirely on a modern, resilient, and vastly expanded energy infrastructure.” He also argued that the “future of computation” could require “potentially 100x more energy.” He put it more bluntly later on in the hearing: “Let everybody build everything. We need it all now.”

Tech moguls like Eric Schmidt have admitted that it will require enormous amounts of power.

The idea of replacing teachers with AI is a scammy strategy that con artists can sell to people vulnerable to anti-union wish-casting. The false over promises of AI can be invoked to propose all manner of impossible things by people hoping to sell some hapless politician on something. Things that politicians hope can satisfy their more extreme anti-government anti-union backers, and satiate the business interests with boondoggles, and keep the money flowing to their campaigns. I wouldn’t feel at all bad for people who don’t center humanity in their politics falling for scams that ruin them - but unfortunately these are people who are going to ruin it for the rest of us and waste taxpayer money funneling it to trickle down economics ruses that only benefit the already rich, while they simultaneously they refuse to spend our money on us. And then on top of that, wrecking the environment we have to live in.

Bucks County Beacon - Texas Businesswoman Wants to Open AI-Driven, Teacherless Cyber Charter School in Pennsylvania - Among Unbound Academic Institute’s wild claims about educational rigor and success is that students only need 2 hours of daily instruction in core subjects. by Peter Greene | January 17, 2025 Price has been clear that “AI” in this case does not mean a ChatGPT type Large Language Model, but apps more along the lines of IXL Math or Khan Academy’s Khanmigo, that pitch themselves as being able to analyze student responses and pick a next assignment that fits, or perhaps recommend a video to explain a challenging point. If that seems like an extraordinary stretch, Price has decided to go one better and turn that model into a virtual charter model. (...) In Pennsylvania, it’s not legal to run a charter school for profit. But the law says nothing about running the school as a non-profit while hiring other for-profit organizations to handle the operation of the school. In Unbound Academy we find the Prices hiring themselves to operate the school.

This AI-driven cyber charter school idea seems to be combining multiple tricky scammy things all at once. They’re mentioning AI just for the hype because they don’t even mean they’re using some LLM chatbot, so it seems like they’re promoting vaporware. They’re using a self-dealing business model that has been popular with charter school businesses in Pennsylvania for ages now. And they’re pitching school privatization of course. Remote school doesn’t have to be robots and it doesn’t have to be private either.

Pivot to AI - It can't be that stupid, you must be prompting it wrong - Adobe tells artists to get with the program on NFTs, er, AI - Amy and David 31 October 2024 The catch is that Adobe’s customers aren’t the artists, but the artists’ bosses — who would dearly love to replace these annoying creatives with a bot.

I "pivoted" away from Adobe years ago and I’m so glad I did. But employees of course often have no say in it.

But you just say words like “AI” and “tech” and “future” to some politicians and they don’t even know what it is, but either they see dollar signs or they figure it must be something cool to do. I don’t believe they have ordinary constituents lobbying them for this stuff though, there’s something else going on here. Because is Gerry Connolly the most savvy person to be deciding what the government needs to do with tech?

Nextgov/FCW - Top Oversight Democrat says he’s open to collaborate with the DOGE By Natalie Alms January 10, 2025 01:21 PM ET Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., the new top Democrat on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, says he’s open to working with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Department of Government Efficiency in some areas. That may make for strange bedfellows. But the lawmaker — who recently beat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., to be the committee’s ranking member — has long focused on the government’s often-aged technology, a shared interest for both Ramaswamy and Musk. In recent months, Musk has posted about federal IT several times, referencing 2023 congressional testimony on legacy tech from the Government Accountability Office.

Something tells me no.

Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000: The Newsletter - March 18, 2024, 10:17 a.m. - US DHS attempts to use "AI" - Three more uses cases where synthetic text is not appropriate, now paid for with tax dollars - By Emily So, in other words: they're planning on putting synthetic text, which is only ever accurate by chance into a) the information scanned by investigators working on fentanyl-related networks and child exploitation; b) the drafting of community emergency preparedness plans; and c) the information about the laws and regulations that immigration officers are supposed to uphold. I searched the roadmap linked to the press release for "accuracy", "false", "misleading", and "hallucination" to see if there was any discussion of the fact that the output of synthetic text extruding machines is ungrounded in reality or communicative intent and therefore frequently misleading. None of those terms turned up any hits. Is the DHS even aware that LLMs are even worse than "garbage in garbage out" in that they'll make papier-mâché out of whatever is put into them?

And that’s before you even get to the idea of cooperating with accelerationist burn-it-down tech tycoons who want to drown the government in the bathtub.

Expecting Fascism The second Trump administration is likely to begin with a series of shock events designed to overwhelm our capacity for sense-making. Dave Troy Jan 9, 2025 Russell Vought, a key architect of that plan and Trump's pick to lead the Office of Management and Budget, has said that he will advise the use of the military to suppress domestic unrest and will enact cuts that "traumatize" federal employees — effectively making conditions so unbearable that those who aren't fired will be strongly incentivized to resign.

AI is not the answer to human problems. And it’s not even a serious vehicle to government destruction. Going all in on vaporware is a bad idea – especially gambling on this with taxpayer money. But in truth everyone is getting had here by tech tycoons pumping up their own “business” schemes. Nobody voted for this – nobody.

My letter to reps:

Nobody voted for these AI tech “solutions” that are obviously going nowhere because none of this stuff actually works as advertised. I’m not sure why politicians are falling for this and failing to see this nonsense for what it is. Trying to sell us on data centers and such saying “it creates jobs” is the most blatantly obvious trickle down economics bs, because AI’s whole hype marketing is based on cutting jobs and replacing human workers. You can’t have it both ways. It gives away the whole game of “job creators” as just something people say to try to invoke the idea that business owners are some kind of God-like entity to be worshipped or something because some of these business tyrants have megalomania. I don’t want the data centers and the power plants that are devoted solely to these pointless and low quality ventures just to undercut ordinary workers by scamming employers hoping to cut jobs. Nobody I know wants any of this crap. We want coal burning to end, and we sure don’t want these plants burning tires to print cryptocurrency that’s used to scam people, often bilking Americans out of so much money. It doesn’t matter if you’re pro-Trump or con-Trump, nobody voted for AI to take jobs and put data centers into our neighborhoods. And government officials should feel embarrassed and angry that these people are trying to trick and scam y’all with their AI hype & false promises.

Please feel free to repurpose the contents of my letter for your own letters to reps.

I've also sent a copy of Boondoggle's post on this to my local reps.

Boondoggle - Big Tech's AI Blackmail State and local data center extortion is going national. Pat Garofalo Dec 18, 2024

Note: Some people local to me in NEPA (Northeastern Pennsylvania) say pro or con instead of pro or anti, I think it comes from the idea of a “pros and cons” and also maybe people might feel it’s softer than saying anti-something.

And if anyone needs an explainer on what AI really is and most importantly what it’s NOT, I recommend the youtube video explainer AI does not exist but it will ruin everything anyway by Angela Collier and also recommend the twitchstream & podcast Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000.