Issues You May Know, 30 May 2025.
A list of things you might want to know about - or write your reps about.
Pennsylvania American Water seems a little nervous.
I’m seeing PA American Water commercials on youtube making claims about how safe and reliable they are. You know it’s bad and they’re probably feeling some heat. There must be a lot of people writing letters like I have about the fees, the slow processing of payments, the dirty water without notice, and the pollution of our local river.
This privatized water company polluted the stream and river and got away with it by saying they will "invest" in the cleanup. Meanwhile the price hikes are allowed to proceed, and representatives in the PA state house testify about constituents peeing in their backyard because they can't afford their water bill.
The water company hasn't responded to any of my letters. And Governor Josh Shapiro's office won't talk to me about this on the phone, wouldn't even take my name actually, and won't get back to me from online contact letters nor letters in the mail. Meanwhile the guy who ran his campaign on lowering utility bills, Rep Rob Bresnahan, had to refer me to the state senator's office, who also hasn't gotten back to me about this. And what's really galling is that Rob Bresnahan is all in on data centers "popping up" all over our community, when it's known the water demands are excessive.
It’s just disgusting that PA American Water is spending money on advertising instead of spending that money on fixing the problems.
Whenever something bad happens to a corporation, often its first move is not to deal with the actual problem, but to manage the negative perception caused by that problem. -- Toxic Sludge is Good for You, 2002 documentary
AI is shoddy, and it's used as a shadowbanning assist.
I decided to read this book "Empire of AI" after an interview with the author Karen Hao on the Better Offline podcast, which covers the technical and financial no there there of AI. And in this interview by Tim Miller at the Bulwark with Karen Hao, they talk about environmental impacts, but I think this the way automation is being leveraged to control information flows and people's lives on the internet is a lesser addressed topic.
Will Sam Altman and His AI Kill Us All? The Bulwark May 23, 2025 Karen Hao: "she consistently felt like she was being shadowbanned and when I talked with um researchers and experts about this this particular issue they mentioned you know because she was involved in sex work that that's how the internet works they use AI systems to track sex workers even in platforms that are completely unrelated to their sex work to limit their distribution"
I feel the need to highlight this, and collect examples of documentation about this, because at times, ordinary people have scoffed at any suggestion that the fake machinations on the internet are even real, or at least people resist the idea that they are as prevalent and powerful as they are. And this is even though PR is nothing new in the media and pop culture, and of course propagandists have leveraged every tool since the printing press, and probably since the campfire song. The new problem is that AI is such a really shoddy tool for the job and being ultimately controlled by the most shoddy of tycoons, people who aren't even good at anything.
This is an article I included in the bunch of references in the post I put together a couple years ago: The Internet of Fakes:
MIT Technology Review - Troll farms reached 140 million Americans a month on Facebook before 2020 election, internal report shows. “This is not normal. This is not healthy.” By Karen Hao. September 16, 2021 In the run-up to the 2020 election, the most highly contested in US history, Facebook’s most popular pages for Christian and Black American content were being run by Eastern European troll farms. These pages were part of a larger network that collectively reached nearly half of all Americans, according to an internal company report, and achieved that reach not through user choice but primarily as a result of Facebook’s own platform design and engagement-hungry algorithm.
More Perfect Union on Republicans cooking up forced deregulation of AI.
Comparing "AI companions" to "traditional relationships" is bunk PR.
Why people are falling in love with A.I. companions | 60 Minutes Australia May 4, 2025
To frame this as "non-traditional" relationship is wrong, because it's not a relationship, because it's an LLM chatbot. It seems in fact to be mainly a way to collect enormous amounts of information about the mark – the real person interacting with the chatbot. And I'm sure this data mining is being used. But this 60 Minutes Australia piece just tells people "get used to it" which makes me think this is PR to push this as a product. It goes on to frame it as escapism no different than reading a novel. But then juxtaposes some retired professor in Pennsylvania that is married to her chatbot. A weird mix of normalizing the peculiar and a product we know is shoddy and often gives wrong information.
The 60 Minutes Australia piece, did cover a tragedy with a teenager. This video was posted the same day as the Rolling Stone article about people getting supposedly mystical messages from chatbots — based on a reddit thread I’d seen days earlier when a pal dropped the link into a groupchat.
The crux of the matter is that of course people have had active fantasy lives escaping into novels, television shows, video games, or just stories told around campfires likely since the beginning of human language. Of course that’s fine, and nobody’s knocking fantasies nor escape into fiction. But in all these cases most people would find it problematic to go in public and claim a fantasy relationship with a fantasy character is a “real relationship”. It seems like they’re trying to put it into a different category at the same time just because it talks back. So did Teddy Ruxpin. I have a teddy bear, I’m not knocking them, but it’s not a relationship, even if it regurgitates recorded language. And that’s what LLM chatbots do.
Others see the new pope and a potential ally in defending against AI hype.
I'm relieved to see that the AI hype expert Paris Marx also seems to agree with my glimmer of hope for a Church opposition to the AI push.
Disconnect Will Pope Leo XIV be an ally against AI? The Catholic Church has a striking clear-eyed critique of artificial intelligence Paris Marx May 15, 2025 Even criticism can become a veiled form of AI hype, particularly the position that chatbots are on the cusp of gaining sentience that could threaten humanity’s very existence — a perspective often termed “AI safety.” Yet there are reasons to believe that isn’t where Leo’s talk of AI is coming from. His reference to Rerum novarum suggests a particular concern for tangible impacts on workers, rather than science fictional fantasies. That’s also reflected by the limited statements he made in the days after his election.
Sure, the connection Pope Leo XIV made between AI and the industrial revolution encyclical Rerum novarum. Maybe it's not as important that the pope understands what AI is (and what it isn’t), as he understands and opposes the harmful effects to people.
Some say this means that Pope Leo XIV will get American Catholics to oppose universal healthcare, or even insurance pools, team sports, public schools, Medicare, will support no police outside private security forces employed by the rich (such as was the case during the Roman Empire), and that the pope is in favour of an end to public roads or any cooperative “common good”… because Pope Leo XIII said he wants to reject socialism and “community goods” in Rerum Novarum. Good luck with that if you want a functional society with no common good and nothing “socialism”. People, including Catholics, love Medicare and Social Security (both socialism, just like public schools and public roads and the fire department). But think about this for a moment — how convents and monasteries and the Church itself operates on “community goods”. Either that was mistranslated, poorly stated, or misunderstood, because I doubt Pope Leo XIII was condemning his own religious institution’s convents and monasteries. There is no survival without community, this has always been the case, and it’s hard to see a way it could be otherwise. This push that everyone should say “f you” to all your neighbors, and abandon community, may just be the end of the survival of humans. But more specifically, it even opposes stuff preached by Jesus.
Cryptocurrency isn't all it's cracked up to be in fact, but one guy is getting some bribes.
Cryptocurrency! Crime is legal — but the actual dollars aren’t showing up 24th May 2025 - by David Gerard The crypto industry was hoping the President of the United States personally endorsing crypto would finally be the starter’s pistol for a new crypto bubble! But nobody new is getting into crypto. Except so they can bribe the president. The use case for crypto. How do we know nobody’s getting into crypto? Because we have numbers we can probably trust from the biggest actual-dollar crypto exchange. (video)
Why are more than 300 Americans still dying every week in the ongoing pandemic?
The reasons are obvious… People are still dying of covid because people just keep getting covid, people are not getting vaccinated, people are not wearing masks even where they're likely to spread viruses to vulnerable people like healthcare settings, and a lot of people are not testing even, so they don't' even know they're spreading covid, and also then not calling their doctor for treatment.
Why are more than 300 people in the US still dying from COVID every week? Experts say there is low vaccine uptake and people are not accessing treatments. ByMary Kekatos May 24, 2025, 5:02 AM More than five years after the first cases of COVID-19 were detected in the United States, hundreds of people are still dying every week. Last month, an average of about 350 people died each week from COVID, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Podcasters and livestreamers are big culprits in the not testing category. "Oh I'm sick and I wonder what I have. Maybe it's a cold." Never understood the recklessness to get covid over and over of people who use their voice for a living and have no paid sick time, but there we are. So one would hope that more podcasters would be getting covid boosters, encouraging others to do so, and making a ruckus over restrictions on them.
I'll wait. If you know of any livestreamers or podcasters who are actually promoting vaccination, please let me know, send me clips or links, and I will make a point of letting people know who they are.
And I really wish podcasters would stop saying "during covid" already.
Anti-vax bullshit is the same old hat.
There was the same anti-vax propaganda spreading last century. It was overcome.
Don’t wait for everybody before speaking up. Chloe Humbert Aug 08, 2023 The polio campaign in the U.S. was successful because of a concerted effort to do a door to door campaign that started before the vaccine was even available. The idea that vaccination was just a default and that everyone easily got on board back then is nostalgic fantasy, it took some work by some people to make that happen. The propaganda resisting public health was as toxic and bonkers as what spreads perhaps just more prolifically today on social media. Back then some even blamed paralysis from polio on Americans who made inferior dietary choices. Sound familiar? Some people made sure we countered that and had a proper vaccine drive. There was indeed resistance to the polio elimination campaign, and it was overcome.
Well look at this.
Important Context Trump’s New Surgeon General Pick Took Social Darwinist View Of Pandemic Wellness influencer Casey Means wrote that Americans needed to get healthy or risk death from COVID, calling the crisis “a Darwinian moment for America.” Walker Bragman May 08, 2025 Donald Trump’s new surgeon general pick called the COVID-19 pandemic “a Darwinian moment for America” in the spring of 2020, echoing long-discredited pseudoscience. Stanford-educated physician-turned-wellness influencer Casey Means, whose nomination for the surgeon post was announced on Wednesday, made the statement in an op-ed for The Hill titled, “Healthy Food: The Unexpected Medicine for COVID-19 and National Security.” The piece was published on April 21, 2020, at the height of the pandemic’s deadly first wave. In it, Means, who a year prior had co-founded a wellness company, argued that the nation could not “continue to shut down our economy and parts of our military, and overwhelm our health care system.” Instead, she proposed a strategy of promoting “healthy living” through personal behavior changes and cuts to agricultural subsidies for “dairy, sugar, wheat, corn and soybeans.”
And they're not even all on the same page.
Trump’s surgeon general pick exposes cracks in MAHA movement - by Joseph Choi, Alejandra O’Connell-Domenech and Nathaniel Weixel - 05/11/25 6:00 AM ET President Trump’s second choice for U.S. surgeon general has set off a wave of infighting within the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. Casey Means is a prominent health influencer and ally of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but she is seen as insufficiently skeptical of vaccines by some of his prominent supporters — and a “total crack pot” by others in Trump World.
Let that be a lesson to the insufferable people on the left who keep insisting we need to unite everyone under one umbrella in lockstep over everything, or the people who keep insisting we need to hand it to weirdos on the points about food – the same people who didn't want kids eating healthy when it was Michelle Obama's idea, by the way.
The headline we should be seeing: Two cryptocurrency selling regimes in the Americas join together to leave world health behind and form their own bs wellness organization.
Unfortunately the media isn’t doing a great job with this one.
Normalcy bias is a known problem.
MAGA Can't Run the Country To Save Its Life! (w/ Jonathan Martin) | Bulwark Podcast - The Bulwark Jan 3, 2025 Tim Miller: “what maybe the biggest kerfuffle ever created on this podcast was when Ezra Klein was on and he said that his private convos with Democrats were that they didn't believe the Democracy message that they were pushing forth that they didn't believe that Trump was that great of a threat - this was last summer he said that - that seems to be bearing out in a way that's a little alarming for me.” Jonathan Martin: “If they thought he was a real threat to democracy then would the mayor of DC be taking meetings with him to talk about getting employees back five days a week into their cubes?”
And more and more people remark upon this as time goes on.
The Daily Blast with Greg Sargent/ May 22, 2025 Transcript: Trump Unravels in Wild Rants as Polling Shows New Weakness As Trump’s press conference goes off the rails, a sharp observer of public opinion on Trump argues that the anti-MAGA majority is reviving—and that Trump’s bizarre display demonstrates why that’s happening. Podhorzer: When you think about what is happening now to this country, what’s being broken in ways that are not going to be fixed, right? And you think about how much money gets spent for this or that little niche issue, or how much time a member of Congress does this or that—in fact, 2024 was about whether or not we’re just going to shred the Constitution, right? Almost no one was behaving as if that was actually going to be our future. And you were, and a number of other people.… It is cringey sometimes to be in a crowd when you yelled “Fire!” and everyone just looks the other way. But that’s what everyone needed to do. Sargent: And it didn’t happen.
It reminds me of this video…
Human behaviour during a fire alarm | iHASCO (youtube video) Members of the public being secretly filmed, a fire alarm is activated. What do they do What would you do? This excellent piece of film shows the importance of a fire warden and fire awareness
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