Critics argue that money needed to fix public schools is now being siphoned to private ones. (Skeptics of this underfunding narrative note that, nationally, average per-student spending has been at record highs. But much of the recent surge was pandemic aid that expired in 2024, and national averages don't tell the full story: three of the biggest voucher states—Arizona, Florida, and Texas—rank in the bottom ten in per-student spending.)

No federal law protects an AI employee who warns the public about a danger, and no bill under consideration would. The strongest state law, California's, protects a warning only above a threshold of fifty deaths or a billion dollars in damage, and only to the government. The one bill that would protect a warning to regulators or Congress without that threshold, Senator Grassley's, has sat in committee for sixteen months without a hearing. Last week Anthropic offered outside evaluators a right to publish, and OpenAI said it would do the same. Neither company has offered that to its own staff.

A question one of you asked in the comments: if I run a business, the power company reads my meter and I pay for every kilowatt-hour, why don’t data centers? Actually, they do pay for every kilowatt-hour they use. If anything, some pay less per kilowatt-hour than you: big industrial buyers negotiate discounted bulk rates, and Georgia’s state audit notes that data centers do the same, saving them millions. Bigger bills for consumers aren’t really coming from those metered amounts. For about two thirds of all US electricity, the companies that deliver it don’t make it, they buy it in bulk from power plants, in auctions run for your whole region’s grid. Picture every plant in your region, lined up, cheapest to most expensive. Some are cheap to run (wind, solar, nuclear) because their fuel is free or close to it. Gas plants cost more, because they burn fuel every hour they run. And at the expensive end sit the "peakers": plants that stay idle most of the year and only fire up on the hottest and coldest days. The few hours they run have to cover the cost of keeping the whole plant staffed and ready year-round, so their power costs the most, and the grid calls on them last. Because it’s all one shared pool of power, the price of the last plant needed sets the price for the whole pool. Everyone’s rates then reflect that. Most of the time, the grid never has to reach the expensive end of the line. When you add a buyer that uses more power than a small city, the grid has to go further down the line, into pricier plants, more of the time—and that new, higher price applies to everyone’s electricity, not just the data center’s. It’s reflected in the rates they pay for their meter, and in what you pay for yours. On top of that, the grid has to keep extra plants on standby and build new lines to serve big new users, and under today’s rules, those costs get spread across the region’s bills too.

The Census Bureau also asked families what those 2021 payments were going toward: Food, 51 percent. Clothing, 30 percent. Utilities, 29 percent. School supplies, 25 percent. The lower the household income, the more likely the money went to those four things.

Let me know if you've had an experience with these practices (and, if you find this informative, please save and share).

Some key research: @gupta_atulk, Howell, et al.: academic.oup.com/rfs/article… Kannan, Bruch, et al.: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4098…

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