A whopping 68% of Americans say they worry about surveillance pricing increasing the cost of goods, while just 5% believe it will lead to lower prices, according to a new survey from GBAO Strategies distributed by the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. Twenty percent say it will likely just keep prices the same.
The new survey is part of the UFCW’s “Affordable Groceries and Good Jobs Campaign,” an effort to encourage states to pass laws banning surveillance pricing and electronic shelf labels (ESLs), the increasingly common price tags that some activists worry allow companies to rapidly change prices in stores several times per day.
The concern includes obvious dynamic pricing models, like increasing the cost of cold beverages when it gets hot outside, but also involves more sophisticated and as-yet theoretical examples like increasing the cost of food staples when a customer’s data is analyzed in store and it’s determined they’re willing to pay more.
Fifty-eight percent of Americans in the survey say digital price tags would make them less likely to shop in a store, with 35% saying it would make no difference, and 3% saying it would make them more likely to shop there. Sixty-seven percent are in favor of banning ESLs outright, according to the new survey.
Walmart, which has patented AI-powered price changes, has been rolling out electronic shelf labels across its stores, and it aims to feature them in every U.S. location by the end of 2026. But the company has insisted it’s not going to use ESLs for jacking up prices and insists that a human manager must be in the loop when prices change.
Unsurprisingly, 66% of those surveyed say they’re worried about the cost of groceries. And it’s no wonder, given the trajectory of inflation in recent months. The University of Michigan’s May sentiment index hit a record low last month at 44.8, down five points from April, according to Bloomberg.
In April, inflation rose 3.8% on an annualized basis, while wages rose just 3.6%, the first time wages have failed to keep up with inflation since 2023, according to CBS News. And that’s causing major concerns about supermarkets’ plans to squeeze customers for more money with new tech.
The new survey takers at GBAO Strategies noted that some grocery stores are replacing paper price tags with digital price tags and asked Americans whether that technology was likely to increase or decrease prices for consumers. Just 3% thought it would decrease prices, while 65% thought stores would use digital price tags to increase prices. 24 percent of participants believe it will keep prices about the same, with the remainder (8%) saying they don’t know.
UFCW International Vice President Ademola Oyefeso told Gizmodo that he believes electronic shelf labels are a tool for price gouging and that tech companies are marketing them for that purpose.
“The ESL industry sells the prospect of higher prices and job losses as positives,” said Oyefeso. “Across the country, families are having to make tough choices in the grocery aisle every day as a result of sky-high prices, and polling clearly shows that they want these predatory technologies banned.”
Proponents of digital shelf labels take issue with the idea of using the term surveillance pricing at all. They prefer terms like “personalized pricing” and believe that stores have an incentive to make pricing competitive. But unions like UFCW don’t believe that’s true and are urging legislation to be passed around the country to fight it.
“Federal and state lawmakers know these practices are wrong, and the UFCW urges them to get ahead of them before they appear in every store,” Oyefeso told Gizmodo. “Any lawmaker that is serious about cutting costs for hardworking families must support a ban on electronic shelf labels and surveillance pricing in grocery stores.”
At least a dozen states are currently considering legislation that would regulate surveillance pricing, with Maryland recently passing the first law banning the practice at grocery stores. But activists have spoken out about that law and worry that it has way too many loopholes.
for their constituents (or are supposed to!), and not posted as a dig on the National Weather Service, which is doing what it can with what it has, and has very little leeway to talk about why they don’t get everything done as they used to in the Before Times.
TOPEKA — U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids expressed frustration Friday with the National Weather Service’s failure in the last month to launch three-fourths of the balloons typically sent aloft in Kansas to assess atmospheric conditions and assist with weather forecasting.
Davids, a Democrat representing the 3rd District in eastern Kansas, said publicly available records indicated NWS didn’t conduct on 25 of the past 30 days the standard 7 a.m. weather balloon flight dedicated to collecting atmospheric data in Kansas.
“That’s unacceptable,” she said. “Kansans deserve transparency about what’s happening, why it’s happening and what’s being done to fix it. Kansans deserve confidence that the systems meant to keep them safe are fully operational during tornado season and meteorologists deserve the reliable data they need to do their jobs.”
In the past year, Davids and U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kansas, have raised questions about staff shortages and other issues at NWS bureaus in Kansas.
Moran recently said staffing problems persisted despite Congress appropriating sufficient funding for 24/7 operation of Kansas weather offices in Topeka, Wichita, Dodge City and Goodland.
Davids said she requested explanations one month ago from NWS about disruptions in gathering data after an outbreak of severe weather. NWS didn’t respond to the inquiry, the congresswoman said, despite seven more tornadoes touching down in Kansas last week.
NWS has an obligation to be transparent with the public about data collection failures, Davids said.
“These are not abstract bureaucratic problems,” Davids said. “You don’t get to quietly scale back something this important without transparency, especially in a state where severe weather can turn deadly fast. The administration owes the public answers and immediate action to address these reported failures before tragedy strikes.”
Davids said weather balloons provided forecasters real-time measurements, including temperature, humidity, pressure and wind conditions useful in anticipating storm intensity. Missed launches limited information available to meteorologists, she said.
She previously asked NWS to share details about reasons for missed balloon launches and how missing data contributed to delayed tornado advisories.
“For decades, 7 a.m. weather balloon launches have been a standard part of how we track severe weather and protect communities. If that standard has changed, the National Weather Service owes Kansans clear answers about why and the science and data behind that decision,” she said.
The Red-naped Sapsucker is one of four species in the genus Sphyrapicus, the sapsuckers, which are a distinctive group of North American woodpeckers with a peculiar and unique foraging strategy. The sapsuckers are accurately named in that they do, in fact, drink sap, but not by sucking. Rather, these industrious birds create rows of small openings in the bark of specific trees to allow the sweet, nutritious sap to flow, much like a syrup maker tapping a maple tree. They then drink the sap directly from these wells, lapping it up with their specialized feathery tongues. Sapsuckers maintain these openings or “wells” throughout the breeding season, regularly expanding existing holes and opening new ones to take advantage of changes in sugar flow through the season. Their sign on trees is conspicuous: Neat grids of shallow holes that create rings around the trunks of thin-barked trees such as aspen, willow, alder, birch, lodgepole pine, and young Douglas-fir.
In creating these wells, Red-naped Sapsuckers also open an irresistible opportunity for other animals with a taste for sweets. Many birds, especially warblers and hummingbirds, are drawn to sapsucker wells. Researchers have also reported a range of mammals visiting wells, including chipmunks, squirrels, mice, deer, and even bears. Insects feed at these wells too, especially butterflies, moths, flies, wasps, and ants. In turn, the insect activity can attract additional birds that prey on insects, such as flycatchers. (snip-MORE)
More than two-thirds of adults oppose the construction of the massive and costly complexes used to power artificial intelligence, with a majority saying they’d prefer to have a nuclear power plant in their backyard instead. While women and men overwhelmingly expressed opposition, women did so more intensely. Out of 1,000 adults surveyed, 55 percent of women said they strongly oppose data centers, compared to 43 percent of men. In fact, men were more likely to favor data centers, citing their economic benefits and job opportunities.
Jeffrey Jones, a senior editor at Gallup and the study’s author, attributed the distinction to women having more empathy for public-facing issues like the environment and healthcare, and favoring Democratic policies that protect the environment. Resistance to data centers often focuses on the imposition of environmental and financial problems, like water scarcity, noise and air pollution, and excessive energy use that can result in higher utility bills and increased health complications for the low-income communities of color who live near where they are usually built.
“A lot of the opposition is based on environmental concerns about using too many resources, especially water,” Jones added. “Centers need a lot of water to cool the computing machines that they’re using. Land, electricity, and resources are the most common concerns people have.”
Gendered fears about the environment are nothing new, experts say. Women are disproportionately impacted by environmental degradation and at higher risk of poverty, food insecurity and gender-based violence when displaced by climate change, the United Nations reports. Studies have consistently shown that women are also key to driving inclusive, effective action to address the impacts of climate change.
“I’ve been organizing for 15 years, and it’s always been the case that women are leading our fights,” said Danny Cendejas, a campaign specialist for MediaJustice, who works with grassroots movements across the country that are opposing data centers. “We are definitely seeing everyone join the fight, but we have to recognize the truth, and it’s women, trans, queer and nonbinary people leading the work.”
Cendejas pointed to environmental justice movements in places like Memphis, Tennessee, and Amarillo, Texas, which have already been overburdened by environmental pollutants and health impacts from gas and oil industries. Those impacts are now being exacerbated by data centers.
“There’s a big connection where big tech is targeting Black, Brown and Indigenous communities,” Cendejas said. “The progress that has been made over the years to shut down coal plants or gain protections… a lot of that is being undone, by big tech and the demand for data centers.”
Data centers have become an increasingly pressing issue for candidates and their campaigns heading into the midterms in November. They’re also a rare source of bipartisan concern in a polarized political environment.
“There are really strong feelings about this. I see this playing out as a political issue, and now people who are running for governor, Senate, or local offices, are having to take a position on this, whereas this is not something people were talking about two years ago,” Jones said. “And now politicians across both parties are coming out as against data centers, which seems like the more popular viewpoint.”
During a House hearing on Wednesday featuring the Environmental Protection Agency’s Assistant Administrator for Water Jessica Kramer, Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York held up jars of an opaque, brown liquid that she said had come out of a rural community east of Atlanta where Donald Trump got 70 percent of the vote in the last election. Meta has disputed the claim.
“This is the current drinking water in Morgan County, Georgia, right after a data center was constructed, the Meta data center was constructed,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “The only difference between the clean water and this was that data center.”
In New Mexico, first-time candidate Daisy Maldonado is running for county commissioner in Doña Ana County on a platform that includes opposition to Project Jupiter, a $165 billion mega data center under construction in the area. Maldonado was recently endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a proponent of data center regulation, adding to the national conversation about community resistance to AI infrastructure and environmental accountability.
“I see a lot of moms concerned,” said Ana Carolina de Assis Nunes, a researcher at the nonprofit Data & Society Research Institute who studied Pittsburgh’s data center industry. “It’s very connected to ‘I want a good future for my kids and if things go this way, I don’t know what world we will have for them in 15 years.’”
To Nunes, the Gallup poll’s results serve as a reminder and reflection of the gendered impacts of AI in society.
“A lot of the interviewees we had in Pennsylvania, when it comes to developers, or people in government, are mostly men, but people who are activists and doing work on the ground, they are mainly women,” Nunes said.
Some news about No Labels from my state; what’s happening with parties in your state? And great news regarding suicide prevention efforts aimed at LGBTQ+. I bet my state isn’t the only one!
No Labels Kansas is no more as a political party, despite bizarre bid to hijack the organization
Party didn’t fulfill plan to nominate candidates for president, vice president
TOPEKA — Demise of the No Labels Kansas political party was inevitable after it neglected to fulfill the organization’s central objective when formed in January 2024 to nominate candidates for U.S. president and vice president.
The failure of No Labels Kansas to field candidates for any type of statewide office or to win at least 1% of the total votes cast for that office in a general election meant the organization would eventually lose its standing in Kansas among the state’s five political parties. Instead of leaving Kansans to speculate when that might occur in 2026, No Labels Kansas secretary and treasurer Shane Mathis requested May 15 the termination of state recognition of the political party.
“Because No Labels Kansas declined to nominate candidates for those offices in 2024 and has no intention of doing so in the future, its central organizational purpose no longer exists,” Mathis said.
Secretary of State Scott Schwab complied Monday with the request and notified county election clerks and commissioners of state law requiring voter registration records be amended so 5,955 people registered with No Labels Kansas would be reclassified as unaffiliated.
In Kansas, the Republican Party dominates with 897,000 registered voters compared with the 575,000 unaffiliated and 495,000 Democratic Party registrants.
While founders of No Labels Kansas didn’t make a dent in Kansas elections, the existence of its organizational shell led a pair of longtime Republican operatives to attempt a hijacking of No Labels Kansas so it might be transformed into an organization with a broader mission that included nomination of candidates for state offices. (snip-MORE)
TOPEKA — A Wichita organization created an online training program for suicide prevention and mental health education to improve the care that LGBTQ+ Kansans receive when reaching out to crisis resources, including the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
The organization, Center of Daring, focuses on inclusivity and leadership training. Its 10-part training program takes nine hours to complete and is available for free on the center’s website, according to an April 28 press release announcing the program.
“We believe this training series will fill a deep need here at a time when many LGBTQ+ Kansans don’t feel safe in our state,” said Liz Hamor, the Center of Daring founder, in the release.
Through learning activities, videos and surveys, the training covers trauma-informed intervention, intersectionality and promoting equity within a crisis response organization. The training was designed with input from LGBTQ+ residents and Kansas crisis care providers, according to the press release.
The 988 helpline is a mental health crisis resource available 24/7. It went nationwide in 2022. Kansas’ line received more than 34,000 calls, 12,000 texts and 9,000 chats in 2025, according to a state-mandated annual report.
The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is a free, confidential hotline available 24/7 for individuals in crisis or those looking to help someone else. To speak with a certified listener, call or text 988 or visit 988lifeline.org.
Last summer, journalist turned comedian Charlie Berens started getting social media messages from concerned Wisconsin residents about plans for a massive datacenter campus in their state.
The developer, Vantage Data Centers, claimed the $8 bn project would largely run on zero-emission energy resources like solar, wind and battery storage. The company said the campus would bring thousands of temporary construction jobs and potentially more than 1,000 permanent jobs to Port Washington, a city of 13,000 people about a half-hour north of Milwaukee. Residents opposed the project for what they said was lack of transparency and criticized the lucrative tax incentives offered to Vantage. They worried about the strain on local water and energy sources from an enormous 1.3-gigawatt project that could ultimately span 1,900 acres.
Berens, who shot to internet fame with his “Manitowoc Minute” videos that play on midwestern quirks and stereotypes, had his own reservations about the artificial intelligence datacenter boom. A Milwaukee-area native who still lives in the city, he’d heard about the potential environmental hazards, the steep rise in energy costs for neighbors and noise pollution, among other risks.
When he Googled, he found that lawmakers in his state had paved the way to make the Port Washington project a reality. The deal between Port Washington and Vantage gave an estimated $458m in tax breaks to the developer over 20 years to fund infrastructure for the project,with the city not seeing any of that tax revenue during that period.
“It was shocking,” Berens said.
That’s when he decided to do something he had rarely done before: discuss politics in his videos. He used his platform to address one of the more polarizing issues in contemporary life: what AI portends for Americans.
In August 2025,Berens published his first “Manitowoc Minute” video on AI datacenters.The two-minute skit matched the typical style of Berens’s videos, where he intersperses facts with humor in the style of a TV news report. But he was remarkably direct in his critique of big tech. Sporting a Green Bay Packers tie, he lambasted Silicon Valley CEOs, accusing them of using Wisconsin as a “dumping ground” for datacenters at the expense of the state’s cherished natural resources while evading any type of public scrutiny.
“It is our civic duty to make sure the billionaires become trillionaires,” said Berens in a satiric bit.
He channelled his outrage at lawmakers in Port Washington, a historic city on the banks of Lake Michigan and once home to thriving fishing and shipping industries. In a contentious vote last August, officials there approved the initial $8bn datacenter campus despite strong resistance from residents. (The project later expanded to a $15bn joint venture with OpenAI and Oracle, one of the Trump administration’s showcase “Stargate” megaprojects.)
“I was shocked at how many people I saw speak against this [at public meetings he watched online] and then to see a unanimous vote for it,” Berens said. “It just felt like an imbalance of democracy.”
The video went viral, garnering more than 2.5m views on YouTube alone. Berens’s inbox was soon flooded with messages of support from Wisconsinites of all political stripes – self-declared Maga supporters, avowed socialists and everyone in between – sounding the alarm on datacenters.
“It was 99% positive comments, which doesn’t happen on anything these days,” said Berens. “From that point, I decided that I should do more because nobody’s negotiating for the people here.”
Berens has since thrown himself into the cause, routinely publishing videos and headlining well-attended events with field experts and anti-datacenter activists. He has quickly become the most famous face of a burgeoning movement in Wisconsin, where resistance to these projects – Port Washington is just one of seven hyperscale datacenter projects across the state– has risen dramatically in the last year. A March survey from Marquette University Law School found that nearly 70% of registered voters in Wisconsin say the costs of large datacenters outweigh the benefits they provide, a remarkable shift from last October when that figure stood at 55%.
The attention has placed the comedian in the crosshairs of most of the state’s labor unions, pro-business groups and much of its political establishment, who argue the badger state cannot afford to be left behind in the AI arms race.
In a series of interviews, Berens laid out why he decided to jump head-first into the movement; his case for how big tech destroyed public trust through hard-armed, often secretive tactics to push forward datacenters; and what he has learned as he has crisscrossed the state and toured the country.
“Every step of the way, the more people look, they’re seeing that this is not really a fair fight here,” said Berens.
‘Protecting the people’
On a late winter evening in March, hundreds of people packed a community center in Juneau, a tiny rural town about 45 miles north-east of the state capital, Madison.
The crowd had assembled for a “people’s town hall” to address a $1bn Meta datacenter that has pitted residents of nearby Beaver Dam against their elected officials. The featured speakers ranged from community activists to a former Meta employee. The main act was Berens, who squeezed in the appearance between stops in Iowa and Vermont on his standup comedy tour.
“This is the most bipartisan issue since beer,” he said in opening remarks.
Construction is ongoing at the Beaver Dam Commerce Park where a new Meta datacenter is being built on 2 February 2026 in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin. Photograph: Wisconsin Watch/Getty Images
In his roughly 15-minute speech, he called for more regulation of AI, pointing out that a beloved Wisconsin staple, bratwurst, was more heavily regulated than the trillion-dollar industry. Berens warned the audience of the risks of AI technology, running through a slideshow of news headlines that highlighted the potential, and very real, harm to children. He also addressed his critics.
“I will stick to comedy when our politicians stick to policy and stop protecting big tech and start protecting the people that put them into office,” said Berens, to applause.
As he turned his attention to the project in Beaver Dam, he attacked Meta’s use of a shell company and nondisclosure disagreements (NDAs) that required secrecy from some public officials in the process of getting to an approval. In April 2025, a report found Meta was the mystery tech company behind Degas LLC, the listed corporation on the development. By November, the company acknowledged they were behind the project.
Meta’s practices in Beaver Dam are part of a larger pattern across the state, where datacenter projects have often been developed in secrecy despite their huge price tags and massive footprint on communities. A recent investigation from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit news site, found that NDAs have been signed in at least five cities in Wisconsin where AI datacenters are proposed or under construction.
Another panel speaker that night was Maily Kocinski, a lifelong Beaver Dam resident whose farm lies less than 2 miles from the 700,000 sq ft datacenter campus construction site. Last June, she posted a TikTok video after a creek that runs on her property had gone dry one morning. The water came back, but occasionally appeared milky white and gave off a toxic smell. Kocinski said she contacted the state’s department of natural resources on several occasions and was told the agency collected water samples but were not always able to reach her property in time before the water cleared up again.
She personally commissioned a water analysisin February from a lab at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, which found metal levels in her well water above what was considered safe to drink, per recommendations from the Wisconsin department of health services. She questions whether the daily controlled blasts on the construction site led to disruptions in her water supply. Meta commissioned its own study in response, denying any link.
A spokesperson for the Wisconsin department of natural resources confirmed that the department collected a water sample at Kocinski’s creek last November. The results, shared with the Guardian, show elevated metal levels but the department did not speculate as to the potential cause.
“Without a site specific review, the DNR cannot speculate on the role of the blasting on the aquifer and Ms. Kocinski’s private water supply,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
Protesters gather for a statewide datacenter day of action at the Wisconsin state capitol on 12 February 2026 in Madison, Wisconsin. Photograph: Wisconsin Watch/Getty Images
Kocinski, an elementary school teacher, saidsince last fall, she has spent up to 15 hours a week researching the large-scale construction of datacenters and the potential environmental harms they can wreak in a community. In March, she testified in the Wisconsin senate in favor of a datacenter oversight bill that ultimately failed to reach a vote.
She said she had never met Berens before the event in Juneau but the two had been in regular contact for months after she cold-emailed him her story.
“Charlie has really put in the work to understand this issue,” said Kocinski. “Most people came to Juneau probably because he was there, but they stayed and maybe learned a bit about these things [datacenters] … That kind of education leads to action.”
The risks of speaking out
As Berens’s critiques of datacenter projects in Wisconsin have gained traction with the public, he has faced pushback from the state’s trade unions, who welcome the thousands of temporary construction jobs that typically come with a project.
A major Wisconsin labor leader called out Berens in a December op-ed in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “For us in the building trades, data centers aren’t some big, scary mystery,” wrote Emily Pritzkow, head of the Wisconsin Building Trades Council that represents nearly 50,000 workers in the state. “They’re high-skill, long-term work. The kind of work that feeds families, pays mortgages, and sends kids to college.”
Local governments have weighed in too. In Port Washington, city officials posted a “fact sheet” online to “clarify some lingering misconceptions” after Berens posted a second video urging residents to question officials about the datacenter project at an October council meeting.
Ted Neitzke, Port Washington’s mayor, expressed frustration with the attention that Berens’s videos had brought his city. He noted that more than 100 people began showing up at council meetings after the comedian published his first video last August, forcing the city to move them to a hotel conference center with an added police presence.
“After Charlie Berens’s video, things escalated very rapidly, very contentiously, and our city was besieged with people from outside of our town,” said Neitzke. “Charlie Berens created chaos for us.”
Neitzke also challenged some claims Berens has made in his videos, including those about the amount of jobs the project would create, its environmental impact and whether residents’ power bills would increase.
“I don’t know where the line gets drawn between factual and embellishment for him,” said Neitzke. “There’s a very gray area between the entertainment and the facts.”
Berens defended his videos and the people who showed up to council meetings in response, noting that a hyperscale datacenter affects not just one city but the surrounding communities and “they deserve a say too”. He maintained that his videos were well-researched and cited news articles to back up his claims.
“I informed people about a massive AI datacenter going up by adding some punchlines,” said Berens. “If the truth brings chaos, that seems like something the mayor would want to take accountability for.”
Neitzke met with Berens last fall in an attempt to find common ground. The mayor described the two-hour meeting as cordial but both left in disagreement. He has been the project’s greatest champion, referring to it as a “transformative” development for the Rust Belt city, one that has the potential to once again make Port Washington a hub in the midwest.
That stance has drawn some fierce public opposition, even leading to an attempted recall effort over the $458m tax incremental finance, or TIF, district with Vantage. Under the deal, Vantage will pay upfront costs for the development and the city will reimburse the company with new property tax revenues over a period up to 20 years. Neitzke said he was no fan of TIFs but called them a “necessary evil” in negotiations to win the contract over other cities chasing major developments to boost revenue.
“This is a save our city strategy,” said Neitzke. “[Berens is] doing what he does, and we’re going to do what we’re doing.”
Berens has also faced criticism online from those who say the comedianhas built his career on tech platforms, while looking to close the door to their projects in Wisconsin. He said he “understands the irony” but wants to use his sizable platform to educate his audience on these types of developments that could remake their communities.
Berens engaging with his audience on stage. Photograph: Todd Rosenberg
Advertisers, too, have noticed his shift to politics. Berens acknowledged that he lost a major brand deal with a company that did not want to appear alongside his anti-datacenter content, though he declined to name the business.
“I’m asking for transparency. I’m asking for honesty. I’m asking for people to get informed,” said Berens. “I’m trying to facilitate that and if that at the end of the day means I lose everything, then so be it.”
A personal evolution on AI
Berens was not always an AI pessimist.
A few years ago, he believed the utopian vision laid out by AI luminaries like OpenAI’s Sam Altman, who spoke of how the technology could be used to cure social ills, even to treat intractable diseases. Berens thought maybe it could also help Wisconsin deal with its Pfas contamination issue. “My interest in AI started with a lot of hope and optimism actually,” he said.
That sentiment eventually turned to cynicism as, he claims, the industry’s billionaire CEOs dispelled any virtuous use of the technology for the social good in favor of enriching themselves and their investors. He cited Altman’s recent efforts to create an Erotica feature in OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot, despite concerns even from the company’s advisers that such a tool could create a “sexy suicide coach”, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
“I thought this thing was supposed to cure cancer,” Berens said, referencing Altman’s past statements. “Is this what we’re giving our land for? Is that what we’re giving our water for? Is this what you’re asking to change our communities for?”
For him, the “tip of the iceberg” was the gold rush to build hyperscale datacenters in his state through secretive tactics and potentially exploitative agreements in post-industrial cities longing for an economic revival.
“Wisconsin created an environment that would please the billionaire tech companies,” said Berens of the tax incentives. “Billionaire tech companies took full advantage of that.”
Prescott Balch knows a bit about those types of corporate tactics. A former technology executive at US Bank turned anti-datacenter activist in retirement, Balch was on the frontlines of the successful effort to stop a major Microsoft AI datacenter project last fall in the picturesque eastern Wisconsin village of Caledonia, where he lives. In April, he won a seat on the town’s village board, beating an incumbent who supported the datacenter. He views the AI datacenter boom as akin to the dot-com bubble crash of the early 2000s, another chapter in the boom-and-bust cycles of the volatile tech industry.
“We got irrationally exuberant and built too much stuff,” Balch said of the dot-com period. “Maybe the company running your datacenter will go bankrupt. This big dollar amount that you’re chasing comes with significant risk.”
Balch’s insider expertise in the wonky world of municipal subsidies has been fundamental for Berens. Balch factchecked many of Berens’ videos on the issue, even appearing in one where he methodically crunched the numbers on thesedevelopments, referring to the Port Washington project as “up and down a horrible deal”.
The 62-year-old is, in many ways, the polar opposite of Berens. He is professorial in demeanor and careful to point out that he is not an AI alarmist. Where the two agree is a belief that there’s been an information vacuum around these projects, leaving the public largely uninformed abouttheir size and scope. That’s part of the message they have taken on the road, appearing together at events in Wisconsin and Illinois. Berens’s celebrity has been the draw for people to turn out.
“[He] gets people interested in the topic and warms them up,” Balch said. “And I get to do the dry delivery of the financial perspective.”
Port Washington vote
On 7 April, Port Washington residents passed the nation’s first anti-datacenter referendum. By a roughly 2-1 margin, voters approved a measure that would require city officials to get approval from voters before approving tax incremental districts of more than $10m.
An aerial view of Port Washington, Wisconsin. Photograph: Lena Platonova/Shutterstock
The effort came together after a group of residents called Great Lakes Neighbors United gathered more than 1,000 signatures in less than two weeks to get it on the ballot. The referendum does not stop the $15bn datacenter campus under construction, but would apply to all future projects above that $10m threshold. Industry advocates have warned the vote could set a dangerous precedent for municipalities across the country, potentially paralyzing AI datacenter developments.
Mayor Neitzke said the referendum makes the city less competitive and puts it at a disadvantage to vie for future projects. For Berens, the vote reflected the energy he has seen on the ground in Port Washington and in every corner of the state.
“The people who are the heartbeat of this movement are like people in Great Lakes Neighbors United,” said Berens. “These are people from all different walks and all different political stripes, but they all care about the same thing: [that] their community should have a voice.”
The federal government is escalating efforts to seek private medical data for children undergoing gender-affirming care, as at least one hospital faces the first known criminal probe of its kind.
Last week, NYU Langone Hospitals in New York City received a grand jury subpoena for information about young patients who received gender-affirming care at their facilities anytime in the past six years.
A grand jury subpoena indicates that a federal criminal investigation is underway. This would be a first in regards to gender-affirming care.
The subpoena came from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Texas, part of the Justice Department. The office is also seeking the names of hospital employees involved in providing gender-affirming care. The government has previously sought medical records of transgender kids from other states, and so have Texas officials, but not like this.
Parents of trans youth under the age of 18 who have received care at NYU Langone got a notification from the hospital alerting them to the grand jury subpoena. According to that notification and to the hospital’s public statement, NYU Langone is one of several institutions that received a subpoena May 7. The hospital said it is still evaluating how it will respond to it.
New York law prevents the disclosure of medical records related to gender-affirming care and abortion except in limited circumstances and broadly prohibits law enforcement from cooperating with investigations into gender-affirming care. This sets up a potential legal fight over the subpoena.
Several legal battles are currently playing out in response to other attempts from the government to obtain trans kids’ medical records.
Eleven families just filed a class-action lawsuit to block the Justice Department from obtaining confidential information about young trans patients seeking gender-affirming care. The agency sent more than 20 subpoenas last summer to doctors and clinics involved in providing such care, with the intent to investigate “healthcare fraud, false statements, and more.” Both the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have sought to investigate gender-affirming care as medical fraud.
Multiple judges halted these DOJ subpoenas in their tracks, after hospitals fought back. A federal judge in Massachusetts called the agency’s investigations into gender-affirming care “motivated only by bad faith.” A judge in Colorado, who blocked a similar subpoena, said patient medical records must be protected from “improper disclosure.”
Separately, a federal judge this month temporarily blocked the FTC from investigating two medical groups that support gender-affirming care for transgender people. Those groups, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and the Endocrine Society, were served civil investigative demands for years of internal records and financial information. Both groups sued.
Over the past year, hospitals in states like New York, where gender-affirming care is legally protected, have come under pressure by the federal government to halt care for trans youth. For patients, that care has been spotty: earlier this year, NYU Langone halted gender-affirming care for young patients, citing “the current regulatory environment” as a key reason. More than 40 hospitals across the country have done the same, per STAT News.
Gender-affirming care for trans youth primarily refers to hormone therapy and puberty blockers used to treat gender dysphoria, which is a medical condition that can cause significant distress. Very few transgender youth seek and access surgeries. Restricting gender-affirming care is a top priority of the Trump administration, which has proposed regulations to greatly restrict the care for youth and stated its opposition to trans identity as a whole.
Donald Trump is not thinking about you. Don’t take my word for it, take his.
“I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all.” Trump told us last June that he obliterated Iran’s capability to build a nuclear weapon. Of course, this wouldn’t be a problem if he hadn’t torn up the nuclear agreement that Iran had with the United States and five other nations, which the Obama administration had crafted.
Trump said this to reporters as he was boarding a plane to China. And on that plane were billionaires like Tim Cook, Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Stephen Schwarzman, Larry Culp, and Larry Fink. Other executives on the trip included Meta’s Dina Powell McCormick, Cargill’s Brian Sikes, Micron’s Sanjay Mehrotra, Qualcomm’s Cristiano Amon, Visa’s Ryan McInerney, Mastercard’s Michael Miebach, Illumina’s Jacob Thaysen, and Coherent’s Jim Anderson.
Trump said on Truth Social that he would ask Xi to “‘open up’ China so that these brilliant people can work their magic.” Their financial situations, he thinks about. Your financial situation, not so much. (snip-MORE)
It’s easy to only be focused on Trump’s ever increasing unhinged behavior but his Republican enablers in Congress haven’t changed their tune. And they are the main reason he’s still in office.
When I tell people the premise of Ignore All Previous Instructions, they often remark how it reminds them of real life these days. In Ignore, the characters live in a space colony on Callisto where a generative AI company owns everything – and where making art or telling stories, without the AI’s assistance, is strictly not allowed. (snip)
Another part of the novel, even closer to my heart and equally timely, was the problem of queer self-expression and book bans.
In 2023, I was at an early stage in therapy. I was just starting to think back, in ways I hadn’t allowed myself before, about how some of my experiences growing up had shaped me. This included a lot of things, many of them not germane to this post, but it also included the experience of growing up queer without understanding that that’s what it was. (snip-MORE, and it’s really good; go read it!)
Explanation: These people are not in danger. What is coming down from the left is just the Moon, far in the distance. Luna appears so large here because she is being photographed through a telescopic lens. What is moving is mostly the Earth, whose spin causes the Moon to slowly disappear behind Mount Teide, a volcano in the Canary Islands of Spain off the northwest coast of Africa. The people pictured are 16 kilometers away and many are facing the camera because they are watching the Sun rise behind the photographer. It is not a coincidence that a full moon sets just when the Sun rises because the Sun is always on the opposite side of the sky from a full moon. The featured video was made in 2018 during a full Milk Moon. The video is not time-lapse — this was really how fast the Moon was setting.
Scottie's Playtime 
