This is just a brief post to explain to my old boss,
Eric Schmidt, why he and his ilk are getting
booed at college commencements, and why
laws against data centers are getting passed. The explanation is below the fold.
Let us start from an under-appreciated fact. Paul Campos
reports that:
The college wage premium, that is, the increased earnings associated with having a college degree as opposed to only being a high school graduate, hasn’t changed at all in the past 25 years, because median real wages have been flat as a pancake for everybody, no matter what their formal education level, for the past quarter century.
But:
I wonder what’s happened to capital over this time? Value of S & P 500, inflation-adjusted, 1/2000 to 9/2025 (same period as the wage data):
2000: $1,394
2025: $6,688
On average, for
more than the students' entire lives, stock-owners like Schmidt and (to a much lesser extent) I have stolen
every last drop of the productivity increase of US workers at every age and education level. (See the actual numbers in
the appendix)
Now, the perpetrators of this theft are telling their victims, the students and the public at large, that whether they like it or not they will be subjected to AI because that will make the perpetrators even richer. The victims have been informed that this new technology will:
Nothing better illustrates the contempt of the
Epstein class for the proletariat than that these oligarchs would expect the graduating class to enthusiastically accept this prospect.
Appendix
Here are the actual numbers from Paul Campos'
25 years of flat wages and no increase in the college wage premium, while value of capital has skyrocketed:
I was fooling around with FRED this morning, as one does, and here are some stats: (The FRED numbers are presented in nominal dollars; I’ve converted them to CPI-adjusted dollars).
Median usual weekly earnings of workers with a high school degree only:
2000: $968
2025: $980
Median usual weekly earnings of workers with a bachelor degree only:
2000: $1,587
2025: $1,580
...
Median usual weekly earnings of people with a bachelor’s degree or higher:
2000: $1,705
2025: $1,747
Here is a short list of YouTube videos on this topic:
As a boomer, I think this post might be the exception that proves Ms. Baba's rule.
Note that every single one of the ads that I saw watching these videos in an incognito window was advertising an
AI company! As are
49% of all the billboards in the Bay Area. Read the room, guys!
Update 25th June 2026
In
Why Does Everyone Hate AI?, Paul Krugman reinforces my point with actual data: He starts where I did:
Eric Schmidt, the ex-CEO of Google, recently gave a commencement speech in which he heralded the coming of AI — and was loudly booed by the students. This was not an outlier. There have been a number of similar incidents lately, evidence that many people now really hate AI.
Are we talking about a vocal but unrepresentative minority? No. A recent Pew survey found that American adults believe by a wide margin that AI will be negative for society and, by a smaller margin, that it will be bad for them personally:
Krugman goes on to pose a number of reasons for this PR fiasco.
First because:
we fear that AI will do terrible things because the companies selling it told us it would do terrible things. Last year, for example, Anthropic CEO Darius Amodei declared in an interview with Axios that AI could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs and drive overall unemployment as high as 20 percent within 1 to 5 years.
He points out that these negative views were not present at the advent of the Internet nor at the rise of social media.
Second:
many ordinary people view AI negatively because they feel that it is being forced on them.
It’s true that many people are voluntarily using large language models for personal convenience or as a business productivity tool. But a significant part of AI use isn’t voluntary. This Wall Street Journal headline from February says it all:
Why are companies doing this? Presumably they believe that AI will raise productivity. But just as importantly, they’re responding to pressure from financial markets, which are rewarding companies for quickly adopting AI, apparently without regard to demonstrated results.
And while Americans workers are being dragooned into using AI, American consumers are being force-fed AI whether they want it or not. Most dramatically, Google has replaced its search engine with AI, without offering the option to opt out. One has to turn to obscure workarounds or third-party sites to get traditional search results.
So many people feel, rightly, that they aren’t being allowed to choose whether to use AI — not using AI has become hard both as a worker and as a consumer.
Third because:
datacenters are a highly visible reminder of AI’s costs. Datacenters occupy huge tracts of land — one proposed site in Utah will be twice the size of Manhattan. They guzzle electricity and water. When they generate some of their own power, they create major local pollution. Not surprisingly, there is intense opposition to datacenter construction. According to a Reuters Ipsos poll, 57 percent of Americans — two-thirds of Democrats and half of Republicans — would oppose a datacenter in their neighborhood. Only 14 percent would support one.
The Utah data center proposal is definitely toxic. Finya Swai reports that
Data center controversy unseats powerful Utah lawmaker:
A massive data center project in Box Elder County, Utah, helped bring down the state’s Senate president, who lost his GOP primary on Tuesday after his support for the controversial development fueled voter backlash.
Stuart Adams, one of Utah’s most powerful politicians and the longest-serving president of the state Senate in its history, lost to challenger Stephanie Hollist, a former university lawyer and vocal opponent of the data center.
Hollist accused Adams, as well as the state’s broader political establishment, of ignoring public concerns about a Stratos data center project that critics feared could cause serious environmental harms.
...
Box Elder County Commissioners Boyd Bingham and Lee Perry, who voted in favor of allowing the plans to continue, also lost their primary elections.
Fourth because:
even before the advent of AI, tech companies had lost the public’s trust. Over the years Pew has regularly surveyed the public for its views on technology companies, asking whether they have a positive or a negative effect “on the way things are going.” In 2015 public opinion of tech companies was overwhelmingly positive. By 2022, the year ChatGPT was released, that goodwill had evaporated.
Why have Americans turned on tech companies? While it surely reflects growing awareness of the psychological and societal harm done by social media, much of it also reflects the enshittification of tech products.
Fifth because:
AI is tightly linked in the public mind with the tech oligarchs who are pushing it. There is widespread awareness of the growing concentration of wealth and power at the top and how this is distorting our politics and harming our society. Aside from the MAGA faithful, Americans overwhelmingly favor government policies to reduce wealth inequality:
And AI is widely perceived, for good reason, as a technology that will increase the concentration of wealth at the top. Indeed, as I said, the AI companies themselves have already told us that the technology will have extremely negative effects on workers.
Krugman
concludes:
There’s a strong element of poetic justice in this turn of events. The AI industry deliberately made itself look menacing as a financial strategy, believing that the markets would reward the appearance of being “edgy.” In so doing, however, tech made itself highly unpopular. And even in an era in which money all too often buys power, public opinion matters.
18 comments:
A tiny spark of light in the gathering gloom..... https://open.substack.com/pub/garymarcus/p/breaking-when-dreams-for-ai-sanity
Geoff's Gary Marcus link refers to Sheera Frenkel and Tripp Mickle's Trump Signs Executive Order Seeking Oversight of A.I. Models:
"President Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday that asked technology companies to voluntarily give the government oversight of new artificial intelligence models before releasing them to the public, a shift for an administration that had promoted a hands-off approach to the powerful technology."
In an ideal world it would be easy to understand Marcus' enthusiasm. But it is a mystery why anyone would think that (a) a voluntary system would actually get the AI giants to conform, (b) that there is anyone in the administration competent to analyze the models, and (c) that allowing the Trump administration to ensure that AI models conform to their world-view is a way to mitigate their harms.
Brandon Vigliarolo makes another good point in Trump's AI E-(I)-O could let feds pick winners and losers:
"The EO also asks that the voluntary framework enable AI companies to "collaborate with the Federal Government to select trusted partners that will have early access to covered frontier models,” meaning that the Trump administration would effectively have a role in picking which companies get to participate in programs like Anthropic’s Project Glasswing for its Claude Mythos Preview.
...
The Center for Democracy and Technology’s VP of policy, Samir Jain, likewise said that the EO takes necessary steps to address risks to critical infrastructure, and like others, he praised the choice to make the framework non-mandatory. That trusted partners element, however, raised his hackles, too.
“The EO should not become a mechanism for the Administration to punish companies for political or other arbitrary reasons, and so we will be closely monitoring the details of its implementation as they emerge,” Jain said."
Bess Levin writes in Good Luck Trying to Opt Out of the AI Stock-Market Bonanza:
"Being force-fed shares of SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI may be a bitter pill to swallow for the many Americans who are not at all excited about artificial intelligence. In April, a Gallup poll showed just 18 percent of people ages 14 to 29 feel hopeful about AI, down from 27 percent in 2025. The same month, an Economist/YouGov survey showed more than 70 percent of Americans believe AI is developing too quickly with 79 percent of people 65 and older agreeing."
And suggests:
"someone — Vanguard and BlackRock — should offer, like, the Total Market But Not SpaceX or OpenAI or Anthropic Fund, or the S&P 500 But None of Those Guys Fund, or maybe even the S&P 500 But Under the Old Rules Where You Had to Be Profitable and Wait 12 Months to Get Into the Index Fund."
Sanya Mansoor reports that In first, California city overwhelmingly votes to permanently ban datacenters:
"Residents in Monterey Park, California, became the first in the US to vote on a permanent ban on datacenters on Tuesday, and early results indicate a resounding victory for the prohibition.
While many cities and counties have already passed temporary or indefinite moratoriums via their local governments, Monterey Park would be the first to do so through a ballot initiative.
The ballot measure needs a majority vote – at least 51% – to win. As of 2am Pacific Time, 86.3% of the more than 7,000 votes counted so far were in favor of banning datacenters."
Ashley Berlenger reports that Trump plan to test AI models has a problem—US security teams were gutted by DOGE:
"On Tuesday, Donald Trump finally signed his executive order expanding the government’s efforts to conduct voluntary safety testing of frontier AI models. Now, critics are warning that the order may be short-sighted, offering only performative reassurances that the government is actively monitoring for AI risks, while changing very little about how and when models are deployed.
...
Politico noted that one former Trump AI advisor, Dean Ball, posted on X that the benefits of the voluntary reviews seemed “barely articulable.”
“What, exactly, is the intelligence community going to do in 30 days to make the models safer?” Ball wrote.
...
While finding vulnerabilities may be easy, consistently patching critical government systems to protect against risks would likely be challenging, Ferren suggested, especially without a specialized team of government experts. Last year, CISA was one of the hardest-hit agencies during the Department of Government Efficiency cuts. The government’s top cybersecurity recruits were “decimated,” CBS News reported, as top officers were fired, the agency was gutted, and cybersecurity contracts were canceled, Time Magazine reported."
Sophie Bakalar asks a good question in What if Consumers Hate AI Content?:
"Last week, OpenAI announced they’d be discontinuing Sora, their video generation app. If you believe the press release, this is a strategic move to divert compute to more valuable revenue streams, like agentic AI.
That’s a cleaner public narrative than the truth: consumers hated Sora.
Sora peaked at 3.3 million downloads in November 2025. Three months later, that number had fallen 67%. OpenAI was burning roughly $1M per day running an app with 2.8 stars in the App Store. The Disney partnership collapsed and the term “AI slop” hit the zeitgeist.
Sora is the most expensive consumer product flop in AI so far"
Bakalar writes:
"The backlash isn’t just aesthetic or that people think AI content looks weird. It’s that they feel deceived by it (back to that betrayal aversion). 52% of consumers say they’re concerned about brands posting AI-generated content without disclosure and 31% say AI in ads makes them less likely to choose that brand.
In other words, even if AI eventually can deceive us, it might not work. We have a natural allergic reaction to it, and the better AI gets at mimicking human work, the more betrayed people feel when they discover the deception."
@annapplebaum tweeted:
"Amazing: KPMG wrote a report describing the successful use of AI by businesses. But the case studies turned out to be AI hallucinations."
https://www.ft.com/content/b3828e92-4961-4b39-84f0-c42f33be3c3f?sharetype=blocked
Ashley Belanger reports that $130 billion in data center projects blocked by protests so far this year:
"Data Center Watch, a project from AI intelligence firm 10a Labs that tracks data center fights around the US, reported that protestors “blocked or delayed at least 75 projects nationwide worth about $130 billion from January through March,” NBC News reported.
That’s “the most in a three-month period since the group began tracking in 2023,” and it shouldn’t be parsed as “a cyclical spike,” the researchers said. Instead, there’s been a “structural shift,” as “communities have internalized an opposition playbook, legislative sessions introduced formal regulatory uncertainty, and the number of active opposition groups more than doubled to 833 across 49 states,” researchers said.
The political momentum behind data center protests is expected to influence the upcoming midterm elections, with both parties increasingly sympathizing with resistance as opposition intensifies."
Rebecca Crosby reports on How data centers are blowing a hole in state budgets:
"Many of these tax breaks have been in place for years, but as the AI industry has grown exponentially, the cost of the tax breaks has ballooned. Some states are now forfeiting billions of dollars in tax revenue.
Data centers provide limited long-term economic benefits to communities because they create very few permanent jobs. According to a 2025 Business Insider analysis, while data centers provide job opportunities while they are being constructed, “even the largest data centers generally employ fewer than 150 permanent workers.” In some states, the tax breaks “can amount over time to more than $2 million for every permanent, full-time job.” In Illinois, for example, a Microsoft data center “received more than $38 million in data center sales tax exemptions but created just 20 permanent jobs,” according to CNBC."
For example:
"Ohio projected that the tax exemption would cost $136 million in fiscal year 2025, but it ended up costing over $1.5 billion. Agreements with Amazon, Meta, and Google included 100% sales tax exemptions for up to four decades on any facility built in Ohio."
@BabyD1111229 tweeted about proposed Ohio legislation:
"Data center companies do not hold the power of eminent domain, but Callicoat says that this version could eventually allow for it. “Many of the services and utilities that they require do hold that authority,” he said. He fears that with this proposed idea, it’s broad enough that farmers could lose their land to data centers, not getting paid for it for months or years. 
Months or years. Without payment. While construction begins on your land."
Carly Page's KPMG's AI report becomes an accidental demo of AI hallucinations provides the details of the KPMG trainwreck:
"Research outfit GPTZeroo claims a forensic review of the Big Four firm's October 2025 report, "Total Experience: Redefining Excellence in the Age of Agentic AI," found that only five of its 45 citations correctly pointed to the cited source; the rest ranged from mangled and misleading to partially fabricated or too vague to verify.
...
GPTZero alleges that roughly half of the report's factual claims were false, unsupported, or attributed to the wrong source. Several case studies highlighting supposedly cutting-edge deployments of agentic AI appear to have been particularly creative."
Matt Levine comments on the KPMG fiasco:
"It’s a fascinating recursive vulnerability: Modern AI relies on trusted human sources to understand the world, but humans increasingly rely on AI to understand the world. If the trusted human sources take whatever AI says at face value, then whatever AI says will just become fact. Who can dispute what both Claude and KPMG say is true?"
Brian Fagioli observes that Sundar Pichai learned from his predecessor's experience in Was Google CEO Sundar Pichai scared to talk about AI at Stanford?:
"Yet after reading the full transcript of his speech, I was struck by how little he actually said about AI.
Instead, graduates got stories about a road trip to Las Vegas, California optimism, working on hard things, and doing what excites you. None of that advice is bad. In fact, much of it is quite good. But it also felt surprisingly detached from the questions many graduates are likely asking themselves right now."
Ed Zitron (and the FT) got a look at OpenAI's 2025 numbers and OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, With Spending Hitting $34 Billion. OpenAI spent the $34B to make $13B in revenue. But the number that really shows how the AI bubble is being inflated with a tsunami of hype is that they spent $5.73B on sales and marketing. That is 44% of their revenue.
Robin Wigglesworth reports that Anthropic has hired an economist with . . . interesting views on human survival:
"Here’s a delightful paragraph from a 2023 NBER paper authored by Chad Jones on the “AI dilemma: Growth versus Existential Risk”:
'What is the price of this amazing change in living standards? Recall that we would face a flow probability of existential risk of 1% per year for 40 years, so the probability we survive this A.I. explosion is exp(−.01 × 40) ≈ 0.67. In other words, with log utility it is optimal to take a 1 in 3 chance of ending human existence in exchange for a 2/3 chance of dramatically raising living standards by a factor of 55.'
HT Berkeley Law’s Andrew Baker. Now, economists gonna economist, but we’re not sure that this is a bet that most members of the human species would be willing to take."
Matthew Gault's County With 37 Data Centers Asks Schools to ‘Conserve Electricity’ is an example of why the public doesn't like AI:
"On June 26, the County Manager of Henrico County, Virginia, John Vithoulkas, sent an email to thousands of county employees asking them to help the local government conserve electricity. “Beginning July 1st, the rate we pay for electricity used in all Henrico County government and school facilities will increase dramatically — by 25%, increasing costs by an estimated $5 million next fiscal year. We anticipate more rate increases for electricity in the years ahead,” a copy of the email obtained by 404 Media said (emphasis his).
Henrico County is a community of more than 350,000 people in eastern Virginia just outside of Richmond. It also hosts 37 data centers and there are plans to build 17 more, including plans to convert hundreds of acres of Civil War battlefields into data centers. Thanks to its proximity to DC and vast amounts of land, Henrico County became a data center hub seemingly overnight and its services clients big and small. Meta built a data center there in 2017."
Richard Audoly et al of the New York Fed write on The Post‑COVID Decline in the Labor Share:
"we compare the dynamics of the labor share post-COVID to earlier periods to understand whether the recent decline represents the continuation of a trend or a new and distinct phenomenon. We find that both the cyclicality of the labor share and the contribution of reallocation to the labor share post-COVID are similar to earlier periods."
But they note that:
"For much of the post-war period, the labor share was remarkably stable, hovering around 63 percent through the late 20th century. Starting in the early 2000s, however, it entered a sustained decline, with a particularly sharp drop during the global financial crisis (GFC)."
Check out their graph. Yet more evidence that the Epstein class has been stealing the workers blind.
Evan Simon's Data Centers Are Quietly Taking Over Texas. The Pollution Could Be Catastrophic sounds the alarm:
"With some 300 data centers already in operation and 200 more in development, Texas could surpass Virginia as the nation’s leading data center market by 2030. Amidst the frenzy to capitalize on the AI boom, a regulatory loophole has allowed dozens of data centers like Stargate to quietly construct massive power sources that emit harmful pollutants with little to no public notice, a Floodlight investigation has found.
Typically, before you can build a major source of new emissions, you have to get a major air permit, which includes extensive environmental reviews and engagement with the local community. But in Texas, regulators have allowed some data centers like Stargate to avoid that process by first obtaining so-called minor air permits—the kind more commonly associated with dry cleaners and autobody shops and rubber-stamped with minimal review."
And:
"Including Stargate’s Abilene campus, at least 15 gas plants tied to data centers are planned for Texas, according to research by energy analytics firm Cleanview released last month. Permits reviewed by Floodlight show that nine of them combined could emit more than 130 million tons of greenhouse gases every year. That’s equivalent to the annual emissions of 35 coal-fired power plants, according to an Environmental Protection Agency calculator.
While actual emissions are usually lower than estimates, the impact on the climate could still be enormous: If completed, these nine plants have the potential to emit more annual greenhouse gases than most countries do—even if emissions end up being half of what’s permitted."
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