Originally published at: Trump Picks Tech Friends Over Republicans This Election Cycle
‘Backwards and Poor’ President Trump is leading his administration full steam ahead in supporting his friends in the tech industry as he bulldozes his way through an issue that could’ve been a relatively easy bipartisan win for him and Republicans ahead of the midterms. But Trump has made it clear for months — since he…
Opposition to data centers and opposition to flock cameras are creating new political fault lines. As Louis Rossmann, who is going around the country talking to people about this, says, “I saw a green haired kid and a man with a Trump 2024 shirt fist bump at one of my events after they both made their arguments.”
Donald Trump can sense the fault line, but he has placed himself on the wrong side of it.
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Came up on this data center being built on a rural highway right next to the small town of Hubbard in Limestone County on Aug. 21st. Horrible sight. 14 gates into the site.
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painting an ominous picture of the United States Postal Service’s
reliabilitywillingness in performing this essential democratic function
FIFY
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The Donnie Party, also known as The Donner Party. Bon Appetit!!
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(Kinda, sorta reiterating my post from the Morning Memo thread hours earlier, because I had no idea tonight’s Evening Briefing was gonna play Margaret Dumont to this very issue)
“AI” and “data centers” are a mass delusion: promises of magic that can never be real, but the financial powers-that-be have sunk so many trillions (with a “t”) into this madness, they can’t possibly back down, even as the runaway train races faster and faster toward the cliff face.
Maybe the boys at the top got high on their own supply, but they likely knew it was all smoke from the start; it was just so damn easy to con the lazy media, corporate managers, and investors that, once they started obscenely profiting from it, they just couldn’t stop.
It’s Dutch Tulip Mania but with silicon, Enron with Hegseth testosterone injections in both eyeballs every second of every day, total fantasy that, inevitably, will come to a crashing halt like a clown car through the storefront window of a methadone clinic.
The electrical and water resources to sustain it, let alone grow it 10,000-fold into the fairy tale they’ve spun, simply don’t exist on this or any other planet, to say nothing of the dwindling financial resources it’s now drained – with zero breakeven, much less “profit” on any timeline.
It’s (literally) Voodoo Economics.
The only question is how long the showmen can keep their plates spinning – or how quickly they drain their marks – but when the music finally stops, and they all scramble for the exits, the reckoning to America’s economy – and the global economy – is gonna be ruinous.
When that day inevitably comes, 1929 and 2007 are gonna look like the good ol’ days…
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Trump doesn’t care if the Republican candidates get clobbered in the midterms. He’s counting on cheating, voter suppression, the brutal suppression of protests, and a compliant, thoroughly corrupted Supreme Court to keep Congress in the hands of his legislative puppets. Thus he’ll have a free hand to give is tech-bro pals and bankrollers everything they want to turn the US into a full-fledged dictatorship.
It’s up to We the People to stop him. Can we?
(His dominance over the Supreme Court has just been demonstrated by the 5-4 decision that gives him free rein to build his damned ballroom.)
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I stopped trusting the USPS to deliver on a timely basis. If something had to get to its destination quickly, I would email it. And I no longer get my meds through the mail.
Now in other news: The cameras are rolling. The talking heads are talking. The CF is sleeping.
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I’ve been posting Ed Zitron videos, so I agree with you. For the sake of the last years my wife and I have left in our retirement and how that’s set up to be funded, I just hope it’s a soft landing instead of a total market crash.
There are plenty of red lights flashing, plus the pushback on data centers. Maybe we’ll get lucky and it won’t be too bad.
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Isn’t a significant part of the data center uproar that people are frustrated by being ignored while billionaires control the government?
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If you’re not reading Ed Zitron, you’re making missing out, on both the snark and the content of his writing on everything AI.
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To a certain extent, yes. But that’s sort of a top-down message for Democrats, the wider view. I think it does resonate.
On the other hand, data center opposition appears to be a local, bottom-up movement from communities affected by it. Which is great! All politics is local and all that. We can harness that outrage if our Dem candidates are smart enough.
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My ballot was rejected for not being postmarked in time. A first for me. I’ll be using ballot drop-off boxes from here on out.
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I always drop mine off at the courthouse drop box. In Colorado you can turn in up to 10 sealed ballots. We’re a mail in state, so that means you can take ballots of people who cannot drive to a drop box.
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Investing in that ballroom really paid off for the Tech Lords.
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Once it’s built. How many new jobs will it create for the county? How long will the tax easences last?
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But not for them. They’ll laugh at us from inside their compounds.
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How on earth could they claim health care is more affordable? Did they just make the statement and smile or did they back it up with false statistics?
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So there’s a water issue for cooling, a rising cost of electricity, and how much value is this data center going to benefit those that live around one of thee data centers?
I would also like to know what happens when we move from data center 1.0 to 2.0?
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People tend to know when they’re getting screwed. A bunch of lawyers and lobbyists showing up in your town and announcing that they’ll be taking all the water and driving up the power rates and there’s nothing you can do about it will inevitably invite a reaction.
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