By Mike McGann, Editor The Times @mikemcgann.bsky.social
Maybe you saw the headlines: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raided a number of Chester County agricultural facilities recently and appears to have taken some workers into custody, setting up the potential for local chaos and spoiled crops in the coming weeks.
Random, nonsensical firings have occurred across the federal government stopping research, potentially impacting the national weather forecasting systems, leaving national parks unstaffed, thinning out an already undermanned Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
Meanwhile, robber baron Elon Musk — who claims alternatively to have all of the power when it comes to firing people or none of the power when people call him to account — seems ready to steal a $2 billion contract from Verizon to update the FAA’s communication system.
The list goes on, but you get the idea: crony capitalists are trying to pull the same crap with our government they’ve done with multiple companies — strip them for assets and then leave the ruins on the side of the road, destroying them and leaving workers out in the cold.
Despite claims, this is not about efficiency, it’s about gutting and looting our government — putting even more money into the hands of the wealthiest and stripping it from the neediest and most vulnerable.
Aside from being foolish, firing tens of thousands (or more) of federal workers will literally provoke a deep recession. All you have to look at is all of the economic indicators to see how quickly things have changed. The Federal Reserve in Atlanta this week projected negative growth (-1.5%) in the economy this quarter (three quarters like that would officially be a recession). The stock market is sliding. Consumer confidence is eroding. And all of these economic indicators have changed radically over the last six weeks.
Much of Congress seems frightened to do anything to restrain Musk and Donald Trump from obviously illegal and unconstitutional attacks on Congress’ power of the purse (shoutout to Chester County’s Chrissy Houlahan, who has not been silent and been actively detailing the damage Trump and Musk are doing to the people of the Sixth Congressional District).
But while Houlahan held a town hall this past week, most Republican members of Congress refuse to do so — knowing full well how angry folks are at the actions of the last six weeks. Falsely claiming said residents are paid Democratic operatives (recycling a fake, old claim of recent years), they refuse to listen to the voice of the people. Top tip: if you’re afraid to face your voters, you’re not doing the right thing.
We were warned things would be bad — and here we are.
Folks need to make sure members of Congress know exactly how you feel about these developments — because otherwise they’ll continue to bend to Trump’s will and things will get worse.
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You’ve probably heard a lot about Artificial Intelligence or AI, which is super buzzy but not remotely what some of its advocates suggest.
AI cannot think independently. Really, at this point it is an undercooked, overgrown search engine with different output modes (you might be used to seeing Google search result for text, image or video) — like audio, video and so on. AI can only take existing information and reformat it into other forms.
Even at that, however, AI frequently gets it wrong, either making up things from whole cloth or just getting things entirely wrong.
It also requires insane amounts of power — consider that Microsoft wanted to restart Three Mile Island, the nuclear plant, to supply enough power for one of its AI data centers.
It may well be a great and useful tool in the future — a decade of refinement and the advent of quantum computing (vastly faster and lower in energy use than current computers) will make it more efficient.
Meanwhile, billionaires are trying to sell you on a lot of crap that just doesn’t — and won’t ever — work. Think about the Web bubble of the late 1990s — a lot of people who did not understand what it was poured a lot of money into failed ventures. The same thing is going on now and the bubble is about to burst.
The idea of using AI for much of anything beyond tedious tasks is foolish. The idea of using it to “streamline” government operations is dangerous.
