Issues You May Know, 6 June 2025.
A list of things you might want to know about - or write your reps about.
I was on The Letterhack Presents with Matt Strackbein to talk about why FAFO doesn’t matter because there's no Invisible Hand of the Market.
DOES FAFO EVEN MATTER? - #MAGA REFUSES TO #LEARN W/ CHLOE HUMBERT! - The Letterhack
Among other aspects, we talked about how people didn't learn from the pandemic, and once you F around and find out unvaccinated, it's too late for the kids who died to "learn" anything from such an experience.
https://www.youtube.com/live/oCpnMFyV_Q8?si=q9j6LNEeaP5mKBAl
Rob Bresnahan appears to be on the side of the tech tycoons and the surveillance state, and of course, fossil fuel.
‘Once-in-a-generation opportunity’: business leaders plan for booming data center and AI industries - WVIA | By Isabela Weiss | WVIA News | Report for America Published May 2, 2025 at 3:51 PM EDT Energy leaders and state and federal representatives say they will unleash Northeast Pennsylvania’s natural gas reserves for the future of data centers and artificial intelligence. They said their goal is to cut the process for permits and possibly to create tax exemptions for AI development zones. U.S. Rep. Rob Bresnahan said the federal government needs to get “out of the way” of progress.
Hard to believe that Trump voters are interested in taxpayer money going to rich tech tycoons for boondoggles. But I don't think most people understand that "data center" means power plant, gas turbines, or even burning tires. They don't realize the data center is going to come with higher electricity and water bills, and will cause air pollution, noise pollution, and or light pollution in the neighborhood.
"Empire of AI": Karen Hao on How AI Is Threatening Democracy & Creating a New Colonial World - Democracy Now! Jun 4, 2025 Karen Hao: we're already seeing reporting of uh coal plants with their lives being extended they were supposed to retire but now they cannot to support this data center development we are seeing methane gas turbines unlicensed ones being popped up to uh service these data centers
Chatbots are addictive like social media, gambling, and video games, but I’m sure it’s just a coincidence.
Generative AI runs on gambling addiction — just one more prompt, bro! Pivot to AI Jun 5, 2025 "Hooked" builds on research papers about the mechanisms of gambling addiction a life- destroying problem to explain how you can use the same psychological manipulation techniques in your app this book is on the bookshelf at every startup.
I noticed the addictive aspect of the chatbot 2 years ago, and warned that I suspected it wasn’t a coincidence it seemed to have aspects that reminded me of the game Diablo. So I wasn’t surprised to hear from David Gerard that tech startups have a book called “Hooked in their offices.
Sam Altman @sama 8:19 PM · Oct 24, 2023 i expect ai to be capable of superhuman persuasion well before it is superhuman at general intelligence, which may lead to some very strange outcomes
CDC ACIP doctor already explained the problem with "shared decision making" on vaccine recommendations.
And I quoted this in my CDC ACIP public comment.
CIDRAP - CDC revises recommendation for COVID vaccines in kids Chris Dall, MA May 30 2025 at 4:05 p.m. The changes partly reflect a new position on COVID vaccine recommendations for healthy children announced earlier in the week by Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., though they do not go as far as Kennedy had suggested. Clinical judgment, personal preference - The CDC childhood immunization schedule now says that healthy children ages 6 months to 17 years, when the parent expresses a desire for their child to vaccinated, "may receive COVID-19 vaccination, informed by the clinical judgement of a healthcare provider and personal preference and circumstances."
So not really a win for public health. And pro-vaccine people advocating for public health ought to know better than to parrot these anti-vax right-wing talking points about personal choice.
Meeting the anti-vaxxers halfway to hell just means we’re closer to hell and further away from public health.
People are still being complacent about the anti-vaxxers in positions of authority.
I’m worried about people using this as a reason to “not worry about vaccine access” when “life hacks” and “one neat trick” for vaccine access is not an individualism solution to anything. The current regime’s revoking recommendations and proposing “studies” is a deliberate attempt to death spiral vaccines, and the less people get them the less effective the formula will be, the less updates, the less effective, the less it’s invested in, and then the less they’re available. Death spiral. It was never about personal choice that was always just right-wing propaganda. So I'm really worried about vaccine advocates adopting that phrase in some effort to meet the anti-vaxxers halfway to hell, when we've seen that these right-wingers never compromise, they always keep going.
I'm shocked at how many people just keep telling each other not to worry. My post on tumblr warning people how many things are considered risk conditions for and with covid went nearly viral with people re-posting it using it to claim don't worry about access to vaccines here's all these reasons you can claim. And that misses the point. Again, it's a death spiral. No new formulas, less uptake, eventually no vaccines at all. I've also heard stories about pharmacies turning people down on self-attestation or having their own lists of approved underlying conditions and some things excluded. One guy's out there assuring people that the anti-vaxxers will like and allow Novavax because it's not MRNA when we already know it's ALL vaccines they hate, it's not just covid vaccines and it's not just MRNA, and they've already restricted the Novavax completely from children, even high risk children.
Just stop that and start writing your representatives in government saying you want vaccines.
My letter to reps:
I want vaccines. I want research on effective vaccines funded, I want covid vaccines, I want vaccines covered by all insurance, and I want free vaccination available to the uninsured. I want you to make sure I’m able to get vaccinated and that we have effective vaccination campaigns.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose for your own letters to reps.
Ask Congress to Reinstate Universal COVID Vaccine Access for All Ages Write your members of congress now to stop dangerous restrictions on COVID vaccines and support vaccine access for all ages; Mark your calendar for CDC public comment open 6/9 through 6/20 Kaitlin Sundling Jun 04, 2025 All of us must have regular access to updated COVID vaccines, which must be made available widely and must be covered by health insurance. Public health officials, including Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Martin Makary, Jay Bhattacharya, and Vinay Prasad, have severely restricted access to COVID vaccines. They have taken this action without the appropriate expert advisory committee input and without opportunities for public comment.
We need public information campaigns on scams.
There's a public library making video content on this, but we need more. There should be robust funding of libraries to be able to do this, and also just public figures being sent out to warn people about how scams are perpetrated.
For example, I was about to write to my state reps about a text scam involving the state DMV, but my PA state Rep. Bridget Kosierowski already put a notice out in her newsletter before I had a chance.
There was a story on CBS about another teen who died after being blackmailed with AI generated nude pictures, and the article details all the various legislation they're proposing for punishment and remedies for this sort of thing. But the reality is that most of these scams targeting Americans and Europeans are perpetrated by people basically being held hostage in overseas scam call centers. The Take It Down Act is only going to work when it comes to domestic revenge porn, not on the kind of industrialized scam operations that Americans are dealing with today.
My letter to reps:
There may be some legislation to attempt to legislate against scams, but the fact is that the perpetrators of these scams are mostly coming from trafficked workers overseas trapped in call centers and being forced to scam Americans and there's no domestic law that's going to touch those operations. What we really need to fund public information campaigns. And fund libraries. There's a library in Ohio that puts out youtube videos describing the latest scams. And we need to have people in positions of leadership and government representatives to speak up about this more.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose for your own letters to reps.
I also thanked my state rep for putting out an alert in her newsletter.
"Sponsored" Ad Scams Putnam County District Library Jun 4, 2025