ECP NetHappenings AI – When Thinking Becomes a Commodity

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Democrats Need to be Harder

Graham Platner—Democrat running for U.S. Senate in Maine—isn’t asking, he’s telling. The Supreme Court is a corrupt, far-right partisan weapon, and both Alito and Thomas need to be impeached.
Real Republicans, Democrats, and independents who actually give a damn about democracy: you’re either fighting this fascist takeover or you’re on the wrong side of history.
The Trump party chose their side. We the people choose ours. Period.

The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax

billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett pay little in income tax compared to their massive wealth — sometimes, even nothing.

Erin Brockovich Launches Map Tracking AI Data Center Complaints
The site brockovichdatacenter.com lets people report issues like massive daily water consumption equivalent to a small town’s needs, skyrocketing utility bills, health worries, and wildlife disruptions at operational, under-construction, and proposed facilities. By May 25, over 2,716 submissions flooded in from 49 states, with Texas topping the list at 612 and water concerns leading the pack. Brockovich aims to highlight how the AI boom’s infrastructure race plays out town by town, balancing community costs against jobs and economic boosts from these projects.
This story is a summary of posts on X and may evolve over time. Grok can make mistakes, verify its outputs.

AI
When Thinking Becomes a Commodity

Adam Zmarz @AZiHeron
A time will come when we’ll look at AI and wonder why we were so desperate to outsource our imagination and creativity to a dead thing. AI reasoning vs intuition, reasoning (weight of one vs the other) is most accurate but “intuition”- this is where spirit resides in timeless state- not capable in algorithmic deciphering.

Yann LeCun @ylecun
Professor at NYU & Executive Chairman at AMI Labs.
Ex-Chief AI Scientist at Meta.
Researcher in AI, Machine Learning, Robotics, etc.
ACM Turing Award Laureate.
POSTED Ed Elson @edels0n May 26
I read all 277 pages of SpaceX’s IPO filing so you don’t have to.
Losses up 700%. Revenue decelerating. 107x price-to-sales multiple.
It’s a trainwreck. Full breakdown below
SpaceX-stasy This IPO is a trainwreck
In a few weeks’ time, Elon Musk’s SpaceX will go public. The IPO has been described as a “once-in-a-generation market event,” and for good reason: At a roughly $2 trillion valuation, it will be the largest IPO in history.
https://x.com/edels0n/status/2059273253131350255

AI Origins and Utility Explained

Massive bombshell. Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah warns that AI will displace human labor on a catastrophic global scale. He confirms tech elites have absolutely no mechanism to share the wealth, leaving the global poor completely abandoned to suffer. He is 100% accurate.
https://x.com/charise_lee/status/2059625837213954117

Great Way To Explain AI
https://x.com/charise_lee/status/2059625837213954117

SAM ALTMAN: “WE SEE A FUTURE WHERE INTELLIGENCE IS A UTILITY, LIKE ELECTRICITY OR WATER, AND PEOPLE BUY IT FROM US ON A METER.
video https://x.com/Vivek4real_/status/2059058179955380493
Why this should terrify you:
Right now knowledge is still somewhat free. Libraries. Google. Wikipedia.
His vision:
Thinking becomes a commodity
Owned by one private company
Gatekept behind a paywall
Poor people get dumb AI
Rich people get smart AI

Sam Altman: “Intelligence will be a utility. Like electricity or water. You’ll buy it from us on a meter.”
Translation: Pay-per-think.
Every query. Every answer. Every idea. Meter running.
Electricity powers your home. Water keeps you alive. Intelligence? They want to own that too.
Welcome to the subscription economy for your brain.

ESSAYS

M.A. Rothman
@MichaelARothman
https://x.com/MichaelARothman/status/2059331212775506259/photo/1

In December 2020, Google fired . , the co-lead of its Ethical AI team, because she refused to retract a 14-page paper called . The paper had not even been published yet. , saying the company’s version of the story — that she had resigned — was a lie.

Five years later, every prediction inside that paper has come true.

Hallucinations. The paper argued that large language models trained on internet-scale scrapes would produce systems that sounded fluent but had no actual understanding — statistical parrots that would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable. The hallucination problem now defines the industry.

Bias amplification. The paper predicted hiring tools that would discriminate against women, healthcare triage that would underperform on Black patients, and lending algorithms that would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral. Every one has now been documented. Amazon’s hiring algorithm penalized resumes that mentioned the word “”. Apple Card’s credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands at the same financial profile.

Environmental cost. In 2024, Google’s emissions were up 48% from 2019; Microsoft’s up 29%. Both companies blamed AI infrastructure and quietly walked away from climate commitments they were celebrating the year Gebru was fired.

Undocumentable datasets. The paper said the training data was already too large for anyone to audit. In 2023, researchers found that LAION-5B — used to train Stable Diffusion — contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies training on it had no way of knowing.

Model collapse. The paper predicted that AI-generated content fed back into training would degrade languages and centralize cultural power in the small number of firms that could afford to train. A 2024 study found that 57% of new English-language web content is now AI-generated or AI-assisted.

The deeper point of her work is the one the industry refuses to quote. , , . Anyone who raised safety or ethics concerns inside the system was ignored, sidelined, or removed. Gebru was making that argument from inside Google. Then Google proved her right by removing her.

Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of Ethical AI, was fired two months later for searching her own email for evidence of how Gebru had been treated. The Ethical AI team was dismantled in 90 days.

Gebru founded ( ) in 2021 to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers. The number of researchers willing to speak publicly about safety inside the major labs collapsed after her firing and has not recovered.

 

Alex Prompter @alex_prompter

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody’s connecting it.
Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying.
Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it “artificial intelligence.”
Step 3: Go to BlackRock’s Infrastructure Summit and announce: “We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter.”
Step 3 is where you sell people’s own knowledge back to them. On a meter.
They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created.
One Reddit user put it perfectly: “They stole all this data from us, the people, our life’s work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility.”
Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies.
That’s the metered intelligence business model.
And they’re pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.

Dave W @dmweisberger May 25
Another great example of America’s orchestrated decline from political and corporate greed. The common thread, corporate donors influencing policy. This case (undisclosed cellulose as ingredients in “Parmesan cheese”) is actually relatively benign, compared to literally HUNDREDS of European BANNED substances allowed in American food. Whether Glyphosate in farming, potassium Bromide and titanium dioxide in flour, or many emulsifiers in dairy, there are all manner of POISONS in our food. The cause: a requirement to PROVE harm before banning additives. Yet? With no INDEPENDENT funding for such research, food companies can self certify… It’s like having chemical companies having the right to tell the EPA “don’t worry about that waste, it’s not toxic, TRUST US”… The only way to fix the food supply is to ban all additives, pesticides, herbicides, etc, banned in Europe, unless independent research proves them to be SAFE. Please

BITCOIN

The Fed History lesson why Bitcoin is the answer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gozj4cMjduc

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ECP NetHappenings Reading and Why We Love Librarians

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Librarians and Reading

A Podcast Studio, 18,000 New Books — How 3 School Librarians Won National Award
The honorees were among 10 recognized by the American Library Association for transforming their libraries and boosting student engagement.

In a survey of more than 1,200 K-3 educators in the fall of 2025, researchers at the Fordham Institute, an education reform nonprofit, found 30% of teachers don’t “favor phonics,” a major pillar in the science of reading that teaches students how letters represent sounds and how to blend those sounds together. The number of teachers “less informed and committed” to the science of reading is even greater in high poverty schools, according to the From the Teacher’s Desk: A Science of Reading Progress Report.

Anatomy of a ‘Learning Recession’: Academic Losses Began in 2013, Report Finds
Latest release from Education Scorecard argues that the spread of social media — and a rollback of accountability — hurt students long before COVID.

Florida removed more library books than any state last year
Florida’s 2023 law, HB 1069, created a legal process for removing books, including a requirement that they be pulled while schools respond to challenges filed by parents or citizens. The list compiled by PEN includes books permanently removed from schools, removed pending investigation, and restrictions based on grade level or requiring parental permission.

BITCOIN

BILLIONAIRE MICHAEL SAYLOR SAYS “WE CAN BUY MORE #BITCOIN THAN THE SELLERS CAN SELL”
“WE DO NOT HAVE BUYER FATIGUE”
840,000 BTC AND COUNTING
SUPPLY SHOCK IS REAL

FREE EDUCATION

Carpentry, masonry and welding are important
WHERE CAN WE FIND FREE EDUCATION ABOUT THESE SUBJECTS?

AI Sparks
@AiSparks12
NotebookLM from Google DeepMind is a game changer. Upload all your textbooks and PDFs for one course, ask questions across all of them. Anna’s Archive for free textbooks is a lifesaver. Perplexity replacing 90% of academic Google searches with citations. Zotero saving 20+ hours a semester on bibliographies. Wolfram Alpha showing step-by-step solutions. The students with the biggest head start aren’t smarter. They just found the right tools earlier. Thanks for sharing. Saving this. Will share with every student I know. Really helpful.

Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005
10 WEBSITES EVERY STUDENT SHOULD USE BEFORE GRADUATION.

Bookmark every single one. Your university will never tell you about most of these.

1. http://notebooklm.google
Upload every textbook, lecture, and PDF for a course. Ask questions across all of them. Built by Google DeepMind.

2. http://sci-bot.ru
Search scientific research fast. Ask any question and get answers with links to relevant papers in seconds.

3. http://annas-archive.gl
The world’s largest open library. Almost any textbook your professor assigned is on here for free.

4. http://perplexity.ai
Research assistant that cites every source. Replaces 90% of Google searches for academic work.

5. http://zotero.org
Free reference manager that builds your bibliography automatically. Saves 20+ hours per semester.

6. http://wolframalpha.com
Solves math, physics, chemistry, and engineering problems step by step. Shows the full working.

7. http://handshake.com
The job platform built specifically for students. 1.4 million employers actively recruiting on it right now.

8. http://fastweb.com
Matches you to scholarships you actually qualify for. Over $3.4 billion awarded to students every year.

9. http://coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn
Free Barbara Oakley course taken by 4 million people. The science of how to actually study and remember.

10. http://linkedin.com/learning
Free with most university logins. 16,000+ courses on everything from Excel to AI engineering.

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ECP NetHappenings Memorial Day and remembering the past

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Remembering my great great great grandfather,
great great grandfather, great grandfather,
grandfather, my dad and all my grandmas who defended this country on Memorial Day.
All Defenders of liberty. All Legends

My Dad Jerome H. Ellis past President of the Philadelphia Trial Lawyers Association
SETTING PRECEDENT The Captain of the Ship Doctrine – Jerome H. Ellis, Philadelphia, for appellee
http://law.justia.com/cases/pennsylvania/superior-court/1978/255-pa-super-381-2.html
Case Law Yorston v. Pennell
Yorston v. Pennell, 397 Pa. 28, 153 A.2d 255 (1959). However, the master must have control not only over the agent but over the work and the performance thereof before liability can be extended to him. Collins v. Hand, 431 Pa. 378, 246 A.2d 398 (1968). And the determination of whether a resident was the servant of a senior surgeon is a factual issue to be determined by the trier of fact. Thomas v. Hutchinson, 442 Pa. 118, 275 A.2d 23 (1971).
Grubb v. Albert Einstein Medical Center, 387 A. 2d 480 – Pa: Superior Court 1978

Today I’m working on The Educational CyberPlayGround
http://edu-cyberpg.com
which has been going through some changes to keep up with the times, and found that some of my .pdfs made in 2001 were corrupted and are now blank. I need to go into my 2001 backups from 30 years ago and find them again to reclaim the info so we can all see it. My website has captured info since the the early early 90’s and stayed operational – so if you ever wonder how or why we got here in 2026 this we can see what happened on my site. http://edu-cyberpg.com

AI

“Asking the right question is the most powerful skill in the AI era. Joe Carlasare @JoeCarlasare” 

or maybe just owning all the companies like scumbag David Sacks!
David Sacks a private citizen killed AI regulations.

After living in the world with Adults who cared about the country and about the citizens who live here, we now have to suffer this breed of scumbag like David Sacks who could care less about what is right and what is good for the common wealth.

Ryan @bitstratford
The example I keep coming back to – there is not a single LLM that would have advised the early colonists to revolt against Britain. It would have told them that they’d be crushed, no chance, forget it.
The early patriots weren’t driven by probabilistic outcomes.
I wonder what pivotal moments we’ll miss because we’re relying on boring NPC probabilistic advice.

New York passes law requiring ads to disclose if AI actors are in it They’ve also banned deepfakes of deceased performers without their estate’s consent

BITCOIN

Compute scales overnight. Factories don’t.
US money supply growth is the fastest it’s been in 4 years.
Got Bitcoin?

Michael Saylor Interview
https://x.com/BitcoinNewsCom/status/2058531082278961205

Saifedean Ammous @saifedean
SAIFEDE : AMMOUS
THE BITCOIN STANDARD
The DECENTRALIZED ALTERNATIVE to CENTRAL BANKING
WILEY
• Jun 22
It seems some people are pirating early drafts of my book. Please only
pirate the final version! It’s much better and it’s easily available thanks to
Library Genesis:

NEW CONGRESSIONAL PUSH FOR THE US TO STOCKPILE 5% OF ALL BITCOIN
Republican lawmakers are pushing to get the new ARMA Act signed into law while their party still controls both parties of Congress.

TRUMP ERA OF CRIME PAYS

CITADEL SECURITIES FINED 1 MILLION FOR 42 BILLION IN CRIME
1 Million for 42 Billion in crime is not even a speeding ticket
Ken Griffin Citadel Securities is the biggest opponent against the Consolidated Audit Trail CAT WHY??
Because the CAT was designed to track all trading activities.
Which is a big problem when you Counterfeit the Stock Market.
FINRA fined Citadel 1 MILLION
back in October 2024 for failing to accurately report data for YEARS in the amount of 42 BILLION
Where did the fine go??
Into FINRA’S GENERAL FUND TO PAY SALARIES.
ORGANIZED CRIME SYNDICATE
Regulatory Reporting & Fines
Because Citadel Securities processes billions of equity and options order events daily, it has been a heavily scrutinized entity under the CAT mandate. TA ThinkAdvisor
• FINRA Penalties: In October 2024, FINRA fined Citadel Securities $1 million for failing to timely and accurately report order event data. The firm reportedly failed to accurately report data fields for approximately 42.2 billion order events spanning multiple years. © Steel Eye +1

“I Decompiled the White House’s New App”
https://thereallo.dev/blog/decompiling-the-white-house-app
White House App Found Tracking Users’ Exact Location Every 4.5 Minutes via Third-Party Server. The app requests access to precise user locations, biometric fingerprint scanners, and internal storage modification.
The official White House Android app has a cookie/paywall bypass injector, tracks your GPS every 4.5 minutes, and loads JavaScript from some guy’s GitHub Pages.
Under the Presidential Records Act (PRA), we are generally required to retain information until the end of the current Administration, at which time it will be transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
People who installed this deserve it.

FEAR MONGERING DON’T LISTEN TO HIM
The CEO of BlackRock, Larry Fink, says ordinary people’s savings accounts and pension funds, worth trillions of dollars will be used to build data centers and power grids for AI
He says that people will be forced to invest in it
“Much of this will come from savings accounts and pension accounts.”
Larry Fink, BlackRock: VIDEO
“Trillions are needed for AI infrastructure…”
Where will that money come from?
“From savings accounts and pension funds.”

God @TheTweetOfGod
I dislike most of you.

Officer Caroline Edwards was attacked by the insurrectionists on January 6th. They cracked her heac open, resulting in a permanent brain injury. For all those who support Trump’s pardons and say you “back the blue”. You don’t. You support fascism.

Johnny AGI @JohnnyAGI
They loved Marjorie Taylor Greene, now they hate her.
They loved Thomas Massie, now they hate him.
They loved Lauren Boebert, now they hate her.
They made fun of Biden for nodding off (“Sleepy Joe), now they ignore Trump outright falling asleep.
They put “I Did That” Biden stickers on high gas prices, now they ignore gas prices being even higher.
They bragged about Trump being the no wars President, now they support war.
They bashed Biden for sending money to Ukraine, now they ignore Trump sending money to both Ukraine and Israel.
They demanded the Epstein files, now they bash anyone asking for the Epstein files.
To be a MAGA is to be a slave. Not physically, but mentally.
They stand for nothing. We’re up against people who stand for nothing.
And with the most misplaced confidence you’ve ever seen, they try to tell us whats-what.
We shouldn’t even acknowledge these people.
The Trump supporters that remain are mentally too far gone.
I don’t even want to argue with them anymore.

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ECP NetHappenings David Sacks a private citizen killed AI regulations.

David Sacks a private citizen killed AI regulations.

ESSAY Ricardo @Ric_RTP
https://x.com/Ric_RTP/status/2058901265698955742

Trump was about to sign the biggest AI executive order in history.

CEOs flew to Washington and the pens were ready.

But then ONE phone call killed the whole thing. And the guy who made that call literally owns 449 AI companies.

Here’s what happened:

On Thursday, every major tech CEO in America was either in Washington or on their way. Sam Altman, Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Mark Zuckerberg, and more.

The White House had invited them to watch Trump sign an executive order that would have given the federal government up to 90 days of access to test the most powerful AI models before they were released to the public. It would have created a coordinated response to AI-enabled threats against banks, hospitals, and critical infrastructure.

The order had been in development for months. White House staff believed everyone was on board.

Then at some point, David Sacks called the President directly.

Sacks is the venture capitalist who served as Trump’s AI and crypto czar until March 2026. His firm Craft Ventures holds stakes in 449 companies with AI products.

The New York Times investigated his portfolio and found he remained invested in hundreds of AI companies despite divesting from some holdings. A government ethics expert at Washington University called his ethics waivers “sham waivers” that were “like a presidential pardon in advance.”

On Thursday morning, Sacks told Trump the executive order could slow AI development and hand China the lead. He argued that the voluntary review process could one day be made mandatory. His pitch was simple:

Regulate AI, lose the race.

Elon Musk called Trump with the same message. So did Mark Zuckerberg.

Three billionaires who collectively own or invest in the majority of America’s AI infrastructure called the President in the span of a few hours and told him NOT to regulate their industry.

Trump walked into the room where the ceremony was supposed to happen and told reporters he didn’t like the order. Pulled the plug on the spot.

Now here is the part that makes this truly insane:

The executive order was VOLUNTARY. Companies did not have to submit their models.

There was no licensing requirement, mandatory approval process, or penalties for non-compliance. The government was simply asking to look at frontier AI models before they went live so they could test for dangerous capabilities.

And even THAT was too much.

Politico reported that White House officials believed Sacks supported the order all the way through the review process earlier that week. He raised zero objections during the meetings.

Then on Wednesday night, he suddenly had concerns. By Thursday morning, the order was dead.

The draft leaked to Axios on Friday. Now every AI company in America is operating in a policy vacuum because nobody knows what rules apply.

The national security team that spent months writing the order got overruled in 12 hours by a phone call from a man who profits directly from the industry staying unregulated.

But the companies that killed it are the ones building the most powerful systems with the least oversight. Musk’s xAI and Zuckerberg’s Meta AI are both developing frontier models. And both called the President to make sure nobody gets to test those models before release.

David Sacks officially LEFT his White House role in March 2026. But on Thursday morning, one phone call from a private citizen with 449 AI investments was enough to override months of national security policy work and cancel a presidential executive order hours before it was signed.

Nobody elected David Sacks or can vote him out. And he just decided what the rules are for the most powerful technology on Earth…