Tag: Boston Globe

A.I. is making me nervous

A.I. companies burn billions while chasing distant profitability

In general, I try not to be a Luddite. Technology changes all the time. But A.I. is making me nervous. And part of it is the mindset of some of the technology’s promoters. In the Boston Globe, behind a paywall, I read the piece: “I had a front-row seat to the emergence of the Tech Right. It wasn’t pretty.” It was written by Richard Hanania, president of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, which funds policy research. He is the author of the new book “Kakistocracy,” from which the essay is adapted.

“One of the most important political developments of recent years is the surge of the Tech Right. The conservative-leaning Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is pouring unprecedented sums into the midterm elections, helping to prop up a dangerous Trumpism at a moment when it is weak. The crypto industry is taking regulatory capture to new heights. And Elon Musk’s X is poisoning the public conversation.

“I once believed that tech billionaires entering the Republican coalition would take it in a more fact-based and less populist direction. This did not happen. There is a bitter irony in the fact that adding smart people to the coalition did not raise the collective intelligence of the movement, and may have even made it dumber.”

Fighting Big Tech

Hanania, a self-described “repentant” FOTUS voter,  was engaged in delusional thinking. Cory Doctorow noted, “With America [under Biden] and the EU on the same side of the tech fight, the world had a fighting chance. Tech knew this, which is why Big Tech backed [FOTUS] hard during the 2024 election and aggressively curried his favor after he won. From the tech barons who paid $1m each to sit behind him on the inaugural dais to the millions tech companies donated to his Epstein Ballroom at the White House, tech has made it clear that it supports anything he wants to do, provided he shields Big Tech from any attempt to limit their ability to spy on and steal from Americans and the world.”

Early on, FOTUS delivered. “Pursuant to Executive Order 14179 of January 23, 2025 (Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence), I revoked my predecessor’s attempt to paralyze this industry and directed my Administration to remove barriers to United States AI leadership.”

Government corruption

The grift/graft is in plain sight. “Four senators bought AI stock while the Senate considered deregulating A.I. “Senators Capito, Moran, Fetterman, and Boozman all reported purchases (either personally or by their spouse or dependent child) of Google stock in May 2026… During that time, the Senate was considering the future of AI regulation across the country, including passing a 10-year moratorium on A.I. regulations that would ban any state laws on the technology… The A.I. regulation moratorium was eventually pulled from the Senate version of the budget bill, after passing the House, but the fact remains that these senators were purchasing stock in AI-related companies as those same companies were lobbying for a massive deregulation of the industry. “

The pitch is that A.I. will create great wealth. Peter Allen Clark writes in eMarketer that this is hardly a given. “SpaceX’s record-shattering public debut has become the first major test of whether investors will continue funding A.I. companies that burn billions while chasing distant profitability. The rocket company’s $75 billion raise, larger than all US IPOs combined over the past two years, signals both the enormous capital requirements of AI development and growing uncertainty about returns…

The money goes out… 

“ChatGPT maker OpenAI and Claude maker Anthropic have both filed confidential paperwork with the SEC for potential IPOs this fall, following SpaceX’s lead. The timing reflects an urgent need for capital as A.I. development costs spiral.”

“They’re burning money at an unconscionable rate, and they need to find new sources of capital,” said analyst Nate Elliott. “We’ve never seen this kind of CapEx spend.”

Note that tech stocks tumbled this week on worries about A.I. spending and China’s chip competition. This appears fiscally unsustainable without a government bailout. 

So when I read that OpenAI was blamed for a hacking event on its A.I. models going rogue, I was unsurprised. The first comment to the AP article:  “So if people can switch off safeguards, what’s to prevent someone from doing it for nefarious reasons? Issac Asimov’s 3 rules of robotics don’t exist.” 

It’s all playing defense. NYT: “How to Prevent Meta From Using Your Instagram Images in A.I. The company’s new A.I. image generator has a surprising twist: It allows people to use images from public Instagram accounts.” But it’s NOT really a “surprising” twist, is it?

Intellectual fraud

A Medium article by Matt Lillywhite, I’ll Instantly Know A Writer Used ChatGPT When I See This notes: “AI detectors regularly disagree with each other. I’ve watched writers paste the same article into multiple detectors and receive completely different results. So out of curiosity, I pasted the Declaration of Independence into two separate A.I. detectors.

“Guess what? The scores came back wildly different.

“ZeroGPT estimated 92.5% AI. And GPTZero gave the exact same text a score of 2% AI. So either the Founding Fathers were time travelers with access to large language models, which would certainly please my inner conspiracy theorist. Or, we can throw our hands up and admit these tools aren’t exactly foolproof.”

Librarians are hosting viral ‘Avoiding AI’ workshops for people who are fed up with Big Tech. A.I. music makes Rick Beato and me cranky. I despise Tilly Norwood, the A.I. “actor.”

Data centers

This is why we are seeing pushback on data centers, the lifeblood of A.I. American Rivers: “In 2023, U.S. data centers consumed enough electricity to power about 12% of US households. Electricity generation relies on water at many power plants, so this level of energy demand was associated with a substantial indirect water footprint, estimated at nearly 800 billion liters (~211 billion gallons) nationwide.”

Most new data centers in the U.S. are coming to rural areas. “4% of Americans don’t live near a currently operational data center but live within 5 miles of one that’s planned. Taken together, that means 42% of the population lives close to an existing or planned data center.” “Currently there are no legally binding energy standards that apply explicitly to the operation of data centers in the private sector.” Check out the .

How Meta Got Everything It Wanted in a Secret Louisiana Data Center Deal.

Inner ballast

I could tout some useful functions of A.I.  Indeed, my cousin Anne tweaked this picture from 115 years ago of our great-grandmother, Lillian Archer Yates Holland. 

Maybe Debbie Millman is correct in this New York Times opinion piece. “There is a stern warning to anyone who wants to study Kabbalah, a mystical tradition within Judaism that seeks to uncover the hidden nature of God and the universe: Just wait. In traditional practices, prospective students are urged to delay their studies until they reach the age of 40, at which point it is assumed they will have developed the inner ballast to withstand what they might encounter.

“We should consider doing something similar for artificial intelligence.

“There is something druglike about using A.I., not because it necessarily produces pleasure, but because it removes a particular kind of pain. A person who grows up with A.I. may never know the necessary agony of a blank page, the false start, the dull vocabulary and the private embarrassment of a first draft. A student who relies on A.I. too early will likely never sit long enough with confusion to distinguish it from failure.

“Confusion is a necessary state wherein they learn how to think for themselves…  Language is not merely how we express ourselves; it is one of the ways we become ourselves. We write in order to find out what we think, we revise in order to discover whether or not we believe it, and we speak, stumble, clarify, retract, and try again and again in order to understand the space between ideas and truth.”

Since I’m, er, over 40, when A.I. offers me suggestions I could have thought of myself, or are plain wrong or simplistic, or mine others’ intellectual property, I believe/hope  I’m savvy enough to separate the wheat from the chaff.  

Lazy racism

“welfare queens”

There is a lazy racism that takes place in the United States in periods of plenty, but especially in periods of difficulty. The poster above is from postbellum America, almost certainly during the term of President Andrew Johnson (1865-1869), at war with the so-called “Radical” Republicans in Congress. 

Redlining started in the 1930s or earlier and continued in post-World War II America, when many black veterans couldn’t take full advantage of the GI Bill.

A recent example, as laid out by Renée Graham in the Boston Globe (paywall likely) in early November 2025, about how FOTUS’s “government shutdown is fueling anti-Black propaganda.” 

The subhead: “Under the boot of an administration that would rather foment racism than end its manufactured crisis, the authoritarian president is willing to let millions of real people — regardless of race — starve.”

Early in the shutdown, “social media was suddenly inundated with AI slop, videos generated by artificial intelligence, depicting Black people complaining about the loss of federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits.

“Of course, the short clips on TikTok and Instagram evoked the ‘welfare queen’ stereotypes that Ronald Reagan first conjured nearly 50 years ago during his first race-baiting run for president in 1976.”

“A Fox News contributor… showed a slew of AI slop… introduced by saying that the clips would show ‘exactly why the welfare system needs to be completely overhauled because the entitlement in these videos … is certifiably insane.'”

The influencer “either didn’t know — or didn’t care — that some of the videos…  are phony… The clips served their intended purpose of villainizing Black people, particularly Black women, as lazy, greedy, duplicitous, and a burden to hard-working and honest (white) Americans.” The misogynoir is strong. 

“Them”

Then there’s this story from the same time period about “a viral chart [that] claimed to show the majority of the nation’s food stamp recipients are non-white and noncitizens.

“The chart, titled Food Stamps by Ethnicity, listed 36 groups of people and said it showed the “percentage of US households receiving SNAP benefits.”

However, according to “the most recent USDA data available, from 2023, white people are the largest racial group receiving SNAP benefits, at 35.4 percent. African Americans are next, making up 25.7 percent of recipients, then Hispanic people at 15.6 percent, Asian people at 3.9 percent, Native Americans at 1.3 percent, and multiracial people at 1 percent. The race of 17 percent of participants is unknown.” 

“The same report found that 89.4 percent of SNAP recipients were U.S.-born citizens, meaning less than 11 percent of SNAP participants were foreign-born. Of the latter figure, 6.2 percent were naturalised citizens, 1.1 percent were refugees, and 3.3 percent were other noncitizens, including lawful permanent residents and other eligible noncitizens.”

In periods of stress, blaming the “other” for the difficulties seems to be the fallback position.

Power

Read Black History Has the Power to Ignite Movements. That’s Why the Right Fears It. “In a perverse kind of trickle-down racism, his attack on Black Lives Matter became a permission structure for increased on-the-ground bigotry. White influencers proudly wore blackface for Halloween. Politico exposed a Young Republicans’ chat where they gleefully traded racist comments.

“Black comedian W. Kamau Bell has painted a portrait of a right-wing shift in standup performances in which anti-trans jokes and anti-Black slurs have become commonplace. This is not a series of isolated events: FBI statistics on anti-Black hate crime, consistently the most common form of hate crime, spiked during his two terms.” 

My two cents: the demise of the penny

Market 32/Price Chopper will double the pennies’ value on November 16

The demise of the penny piqued my interest. Coincidentally or not, Bennett Kleinman at Word Smarts posted, on the very day that the penny ceased to be minted in the US, Why do we ‘give our two cents’? “A dollar doesn’t go as far as it used to, but giving your two cents can still go a long way. Let’s look at the potential origins of this monetary idiom.”

“The truth is, there’s no clear origin story, but there are a number of possible examples. One relates to the Bible, specifically the Widow’s Offering, a parable that appears in the Books of Mark and Luke. In the story, a poor widow places two small coins into an offering box, which Jesus finds to be more meaningful than any of the vast sums donated by wealthier folks…

“The phrase also may come from the Twopenny Post, an early 19th-century British mail service. In 1801, Parliament passed a law increasing the cost of letter delivery from a single pence to two pence. So, if you wanted to send a letter expressing your thoughts to someone, you’d have to pony up two pence — or give your two cents.”

Nostalgia

The Boston Globe (paywall likely) noted: “First produced in 1793, pennies have been a living link to an earlier era in American history — the one in which one cent meant something — and so their end provoked a certain amount of numismatic nostalgia.”

That’s true for me. When I was a kid,  I used to collect pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, and half dollars. I knew about the mints in Philadelphia (P) (generally unmarked in the day) from Denver (D), and even San Francisco (S). To this day, if I see a wheat penny (1909-1958), I throw it into my Mickey Mouse bank that I’ve had for decades.

And surely, I bought penny candies from Ellis’ store on Mygatt Street in Binghamton, NY, in the 1960s, especially red licorice.  

Globe: “In recent years, though, the story of the penny’s persistence has never really been about pennies. It’s been about government dysfunction: how America continued to make a zombie coin that nobody wanted or needed anymore, and which cost taxpayers more than it was worth…. Even as other countries made the rational choice to discontinue their low-value coins as inflation ate away their worth, the United States continued spending four cents to make one-cent coins, up until [November 12].”

What’s the plan?

The problem, unsurprisingly,  is that there was no plan for what comes next. The regime “did not lay any of the groundwork needed for banks and retail businesses to handle the transition in an orderly way… Only now, with penny shortages reported across the country, is the Treasury Department “considering issuing guidance to help businesses navigate the transition, including how to round cash transactions and handle payments without one-cent coins, according to people familiar with the plans.”

Politico: ” Trade groups representing retailers, grocers, restaurants, and gas stations are urging Congress to pass legislation establishing a national standard for rounding cash transactions to the nearest nickel. Without such a policy, businesses are worried about potential class-action lawsuits under state consumer protection laws that could argue rounding shortchanges customers. Industry groups say a federal standard would create consistency and protect businesses from legal risk.”

People, and they are legion, who say that “nobody” uses cash anymore haven’t seen the eyes of retailers light up when offered cash, a function of how much they have to pay to accept credit cards, something I recall from my retail days.  That’s why many of them offer discounts for greenbacks. 

USA Today reported on November 13(!): “Already, some convenience stores, supermarkets and retailers, including Kroger and Home Depot, have had locations dealing with penny shortages.”

Double your money!

WTEN: Market 32 and Price Chopper are offering customers a chance to double the value of their spare change on November 16. That Sunday, grocery stores will host a Double Exchange Day from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., where anyone can bring in their spare pennies and trade them in for double their value. 

“When shoppers come in with a minimum of 50 cents and a maximum of $100 in pennies, an employee will count the change and match it with a gift card reward on the spot worth twice the amount the person came in with.” 

Syracuse.com adds: “Double Exchange Day will take place at all 129 Price Chopper and Market 32 locations… The stores are located in six states: Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, and Vermont.

“A representative confirmed that the deal will not be available at Tops Friendly Markets, despite Tops and Price Chopper merging in 2021 to become Northeast Grocery, Inc.”

Waving my pride flag

no tolerance for hate

How is it that things have moved backward in America? I feel a greater need to wave my pride flag, at least metaphorically, than I have in years.

Just last month, I quoted Kareem Abdul-Jabbar about the xenophobia that targets many folks. “They started by finding marginalized groups to demonize to unite people around a common enemy… to hate. Then they launched overwhelming campaigns of disinformation that ensured the people didn’t know what actually was happening in the world, only what they wanted them to know.”

It’s astounding how much misinformation – strike that: DISINFORMATION – is being spread about LGBTQ+ people.

Retrogression

An NBC News story on June 1: Companies under fire as Pride Month kicks off. “Some corporations are stepping into a fierce fight over transgender issues in the U.S. Target, Bud Light and Kohl’s are just a few of the companies getting backlash. ” And so is Chick-Fil-A?

To that end, this is from the Boston Globe. “From campy to controversial: How drag queens became a target of conservative lawmakers. The performers have gone from being the life of the party to facing tough restrictions and open animosity.”

From the LA Times on June 2: Police stepped in to split up protesters in a tense scene outside a North Hollywood elementary school as more than 100 parents rallied against a Pride Day assembly, bringing to a head weeks of turmoil that saw a transgender teacher’s LGBTQ+ Pride flag burned.

The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the largest LGBTQ civil rights group, issued its first State of Emergency in its 40-plus year history, citing a record number of bills across state legislatures targeted at regulating the lives of queer people. 

Several media outlets report that the Proud Boys plan to escalate their presence during Pride Month. “In private Telegram groups, Proud Boys have planned to counter Pride events by ‘taking back June’ with a so-called ‘Proud Month’ that would, as one militia member put it, ‘challenge this perversion of the Nuclear Family and Gender.” Proud Boys also plan to disrupt and co-opt Juneteenth celebrations with coordinated ‘Proud Day’ events “to break the chains of Pride Month” on June 17, two days before.”

The fight continues

Thus it becomes incumbent for allies to stay vocal and visible. The straight, cisgender Weekly Sift guy, notes, “I have attended Pride parades or seen drag shows. I’ve always found such events uplifting and life-affirming. I’ve never felt like anyone was telling me I should be gay or trans or anything else. The point is that we can all be what we are, and maybe even what we want to be.

“I see LGBTQ Pride as a little like ‘Black Lives Matter’; it’s a response to a negative. So often, our society sends the message that Black lives don’t matter, or that being anything other than heterosexual is shameful or sinful. Simply saying ‘I’m not ashamed of what I am’ doesn’t seem nearly strong enough, so I fully support people expressing pride in themselves.”

The AFL-CIO notes:  “We fight for all working people—no matter the gender, race, ethnicity or any other identity. Those identities intersect with your own identity as a worker, as a parent, as a sibling.  In America, we believe all people should be able to work without fear of discrimination or violence… LGBTQ+ people still lack basic federal legal protections in the workplace, which make them vulnerable to recent appalling and shameful actions by state legislatures. We have no tolerance for hate in our movement.” Amen.

Making the case against creating term limits

lobbyist domination

As a political science major and political junkie, I’ve long been interested in the issue of creating term limits for politicians. I read a piece recently in the Boston Globe restating that.

Jeff Jacoby’s January 12 opinion piece, “The case for term limits is as strong as ever,” says, “The case for term limits is straightforward: Men and women cannot be trusted for too long with too much power.

“That is why presidents may be elected to a maximum of two terms, why the governors of 36 states are term-limited, why 15 states impose term limits on legislators, and why nine of the ten largest cities, including New York and Los Angeles, apply term limits to their mayors and (in most cases) city councilors. Power not only tends to corrupt; it tends to do so fairly quickly. Term limits are a check on that corruption.”

I cannot disagree with this, although it’s been my observation that most politicians who are term-limited end up either running for a different office or are appointed to another post. Indeed, 47 current US  Senators had previous House service.

On the other hand…

Still, I was interested in the pushback to the column, most of which I also agree with. One writes, “readers of the recent Neal Gabler book ‘Against the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Rise of Conservatism, 1976-2009’ would probably disagree.

“If Jacoby had his way, term limits would have deprived the people of the Commonwealth of the decades of excellent public service that we enjoyed thanks to the labors of long-term officeholders such as Senator Kennedy, Senator John Kerry, and House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill.” And, might I add, Nancy Pelosi, whose experience allowed her to be an effective Speaker of the House.

“Experience matters in mastering the intricacies of most fields, including government. Cookie-cutter solutions such as term limits may seem superficially appealing, but they fail to address the problem of persuading good people to go to and stay in Congress.” Yes, it usually takes a while to figure out what the job is. Institutional memory has value.

Another says, “Jacoby looks to term limits to resolve his concerns over the advantages of incumbency rather than to campaign financing laws and to the end of gerrymandering.” Those, the reader suggests, are the real villains, not incumbency per se.

I came across this report by the Congressional Research Service.  “The average length of service for Representatives at the beginning of the 117th Congress was 8.9 years (4.5 House terms); for Senators, 11.0 years (1.8 Senate terms). ” Yes, there are indeed people who have stayed too long –  Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), for one.

Beware the lobbyists

This comment most resonated with me:  “Imposing term limits is also a recipe for lobbyist domination. Since lobbyists don’t have term limits, and they gain expertise at their jobs, they’d be even better at outmaneuvering legislators than they are now.” Also, the lobbyist pool sometimes comes from previously elected officials.

“It’s been said that we already have term limits; they’re called elections. What we need is better, fairer elections: ranked-choice voting, public campaign financing, a repeal of the Citizens United decision so that we can limit money in elections, and so on.

“There are plenty of ways to improve our democracy. Kicking out the folks who know how to make it work isn’t one of them.”

However, I’m willing to be convinced that creating term limits will be the panacea that will create a more robust democracy. And, if there were something less than lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court, I could get behind that.

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