If you cannot account for the Civil Rights Movement then you cannot understand anything about anything when it comes to either religion or politics here in the United States.

As artificial intelligence reshapes the economy, growing concerns over job losses, massive data centers, cybersecurity threats and Trump’s hands-off approach are fueling a political backlash against Big Tech.

For AI – or Superintelligence, if you want Donald Trump’s term, it is the best of times and it is the worst of times.

That dichotomy will undergo further redefinition after midterm elections that seemed as much a repudiation of Big Tech’s dominating ways, billionaire leaders and data centers as it was for Trump and MAGA policies on war and high prices. On the cusp of AI companies going public with record valuations, throw in a Chinese spy love scandal and a C-suite office romance for one of the industry leaders, and you get a boiling cauldron of questions.

Indeed, Jensen Huang’s resignation on Thursday as CEO of Nvidia, the world’s largest provider of chips for the AI industry, is threatening to have repercussions throughout the industry. Nvidia’s stock prices had sunk 11 percent – and had threatened financial positions for other tech companies — on disclosures of an affair between Huang and a woman identified by intelligence sources as a possible Chinese spy and on a separate office romance with a subordinate. Nvidia’s board met on Wednesday to consider what to do about Huang, who had resisted succession planning for his enormously successful company. The company chief financial officer took over.

What is broadening the impact beyond markets is parallel disclosures that Donald Trump was told of the affair with the alleged spy a year ago and did nothing – even inviting Huang to join him on a trip to China to discuss international AI development. Apparently, Huang was never warned by the FBI about a possible spy plot and we have continuously differing explanations by Trump and his Cabinet members.

The Growing Political and Economic Backlash Against AI

For all its promise, the AI revolution, which is on the verge of huge IPO financial deals, has emerged through this election cycle as an oversized villain, equally capable of delivering on promises of technological wonder and ruinous to daily life, if not human dominance over robotic minds working in concert on their own.

At the very same time, the artificial intelligence learning engines are showing that they can solve complex mathematical quagmires that could lead to advances in medicine and science, but dependent on job-killing strategies and environmental disasters that are sucking power and water needs from massive data centers that seem to just appear across rural America. We want the benefits without paying the entry price, or we simply are ignoring the realities of what to do when jobless ranks swell by hundreds of thousands.

Trump simply wants to give industry leaders an unquestioned runway to development – all to beat out Chinese tech development, as if it is an easily measurable race. Meanwhile, Trump apparently knew for a year that Jensen Huang, head of Nvidia, was found to be romantically involved with a Chinese spy and did not raise a warning flag, even inviting Huang to accompany him to negotiate with China.

Democrats have yet to describe an understandable approach to AI development that differs from Trump’s, though it seems clear that data center planning will be forced to meet more local demands for approval and that there are questions to answer about unemployment and the errors of failing to corral rogue robotic minds that seem capable of creating their own machine cabals towards solving security problems posed to them.

Big Tech’s AI Boom Raises Questions About Regulation and Financial Risk

Immediately after the midterm results, the financial markets reacted quickly and positively, seemingly in agreement that the ugliness of campaigning had ended and that there might be a return to more “normalized” government stability with the incoming opposition.

Within a day, the markets flipped back, recognizing that Democrats are less likely to support a regulation-free development market for artificial intelligence giants and that data center development and job elimination will have to undergo serious change. Obviously, that is the opposite of stability for industry leaders who just want to be left alone to race one another towards eventual profit.

Its own industrial entrepreneurs readily acknowledge that they do not fully know how to control self-learning machines from unethical behaviors or cover-ups but insist with an overly cooperative Trump government that there be no regulation other than self-policing in an attempt for nationalistic ownership of intellectual prowess against a competitive China.

AI machinery is not infused with moral arguments about right and wrong, simply with the drive for problem-solving, regardless of human discomfort with rules, traditions or issues of ownership.

There still are no profitable AI-developing companies, but we find ourselves on the verge of public offerings to make Anthropic or Nvidia the world’s richest firms. There is open talk of a “tech bubble” about to burst. The investments in artificial intelligence are eclipsing any sizable support for housing, health and manufacturing in general.

AI Cybersecurity Threats Could Undermine the Open Internet

Even as the general business community is beginning to see ways to use artificial intelligence in daily life, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman argues that we already can see the dark side of AI building.

In a Substack column, he argues that we see anti-labor bias, an accelerated spiral into oligarchy, a data center boom crowding out other investments all leading toward a bubble that could plunge the nation into serious problems.

In the short run, the election campaigns have made clear that people are worried about job losses and the rapacious needs for electricity required by data centers needed to power our emergent superintelligence.  We are ignoring copyright infringements for amassing machine learning skills, and we don’t know what to make of arguments about machine “sentience.”

Krugman looks more long-range. Aside from industry worries that AI robots could potentially override human desires, Krugman notes trends that already show signs of internet weaknesses globally. Government websites in Europe were forced offline recently, for example, after AI incursions into a widely used programming language interfered. System engineers are spending their time repairing hacks and seeking to guard against reverse engineering of fixes. Reuters reported that AI advances have uncovered a stream of new software vulnerabilities almost certain to trigger more disruption.

The same AI that may help cure cancer also is an incredibly powerful hacking tool. It takes little imagination to think up doomsday plots involving pre-AI software in wide use. As soon as fixes are publicized, AI models have the makings for the next hack.

The self-policing model doesn’t seem to address this as an issue.

Krugman notes that the development over years of an open internet raised GDP by about 10 percent. The obvious answer to hacking will be closing portions of the open internet to membership that will result in a series of unending adverse political, class and financial repercussions.\

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As long as Democrats don’t fuck this up, history books will record the 2026 midterms as the fatal blow to America’s long-simmering right-wing insurrection.

We have the chance to break the racist stranglehold that mediocre white men have had on this nation for the last 200 years. All of the power and money the rich have stolen will be returned to us, and America can finally live up to the potential we all know it has.

It won’t be easy because that future is one where the color of your skin doesn’t matter. Where how rich your mommy and daddy are doesn’t matter. Where anyone can succeed, no matter where they grew up.

That is a future that terrifies the mediocre white men of the right. A level playing field is a nightmare for them because they know they cannot compete without holding everyone else down first.

But once we take back the Supreme Court, that is the future we can build. Now let me explain how that can (and will) happen.

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Main Topic: So…about the Supreme Court…

1:40 - 6:55 How corrupt are the Republicans on the Court? Historically so.

6:56 - 21:00 What’s going on with the Court right now? Nothing. That’s a problem for the GOP.

21:01 - 36:09 What happens in 2029? If Democrats keep their spine? The end of the Republican Party for the next 50 years.

Headlines for Short Attention Spans

36:10 - 39:08 Why is Mississippi taking so long?!

39:09 - 43:16 Parents are murdering their babies by denying them a life-saving injection that’s not even a fucking vaccine.

43:17 - 46:07 The press magically forgot to mention Stephen Miller is an out-and-proud white nationalist.

46:08 - 48:55 MAGAland is very sad Russel Brand is going to prison for being a rapist.

48:56 - 51:40 Leopards have eaten the face of Harmeet Dhillon. She is shocked SHOCKED to discover her party is full of racist morons.

Self-care of the Week 51:41 - 55:50

57:10 - 1:00:16 Bonus content: Schumer is not the man for the moment.

The Unedited Hotmess Livestream!

Download audio: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/224388006/af976002ca39b0188499ecf118c3e392.mp3

Think of the levels of betrayal in this ongoing scandal involving Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and a spy for China. He betrayed his wife and family. He betrayed his country, the United States. Holding dual citizenship, he betrayed his other country, Taiwan, which considers China an enemy and threat to its existence. He betrayed the company he founded and runs, Nvidia, and everyone there who put their trust in him. And he betrayed those in the business and political communities who put their trust in him, including other tech executives he does business with and Donald Trump, to whom he has contributed tens of millions of dollars and gives his political support.

Is that enough for you? Tonight, we discovered that Huang has also had an ongoing affair with an executive at Nvidia, Kimberly Powell, who reports to him and who is, like Huang himself, married. This part is none of our business, but it is the business of Nvidia, the board of which is meeting as I write this to “discuss Jensen Huang’s future,” in the words of the Times headline.

When the New York Times starts talking about your “future” in headlines on the paper’s front page, your days are numbered, slick.

What very much is our business is Jensen Huang’s years-long relationship with Alice Huang, a Chinese national the U.S. intelligence community has identified as an agent working for China’s top intelligence agency. According to numerous reports, Jensen Huang arranged the sale of some of Nvidia’s most powerful computer chips to Megaspeed, a company founded and headed up by the other Huang, Alice, as well as a Malaysian subsidiary, Speedmatrix. Huang used his connections to Trump to get at least one of Nvidia’s most powerful AI chips, the H200, removed from the list of exports barred from shipment to China. He did this while he was in his sexual affair with Alice Huang, the Chinese spy. The company specified by the U.S. government as approved for shipments of the H200 chip was Megaspeed, her company.

There are more details that I covered in a previous column, but they are not what is remarkable about this spy scandal. What sets the Huang-Huang spy scandal apart is that it happened out in the open. Jensen Huang met with his spy paramour at technological conferences, he checked into hotels with her, he rode in limos with her, he was photographed with her in situations that were “compromising,” to use that old fashioned classic term.

Not only that, he openly lobbied the U.S. government on behalf of her company. Donald Trump was briefed about Huang’s affair with the Chinese spy last year. Trump continued meeting with Huang in the White House and had Huang accompany him on Air Force One when he flew to China for his big meeting with President Xi. A report this week said Trump was reminded of the investigation into Huang’s affair with the Chinese spy just before welcomed onto Huang gold-bedecked palace-plane to China.

Previous spy scandals that became famous happened out of sight of the public and were only discovered much later after the damage was done. The Cambridge spy scandal that involved Philby, McLean, Burgess, and Blunt who spied on the British and U.S. governments for the Soviet Union became public only after several of them had fled for the Soviet Union.

What the two scandals have in common is the social milieu in which the spying took place. Philby and his partners were part of the old-boy network of Cambridge graduates who were trained to power, so to speak, and quickly took important jobs in the British government. Anthony Blunt became the “Surveyor for the Queen’s Pictures,” a kind of high-level curator at Buckingham Palace who worked closely with Queen Elizabeth and her husband, Prince Philip. Can’t get much higher than that, huh?

The Huang scandal involves a different-but-the-same kind of “old boys” network of tech executives who came up through Stanford University and collected in the tech industry in California’s Silicon Valley. This group, which came to include Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Theil, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk and others, had a liberal political bent for years, but recently moved their political attentions to the right and embraced the Republican Party and Donald Trump. Several of them stood behind Trump when he was inaugurated as president for the second time in 2025. They sit on technology “advisory panels” to the White House. Zuckerberg, Huang, Bezos and others donated to inauguration festivities and to his ballroom. Their money, especially Musk’s but including Huang’s and others, flows like a golden river to Republicans.

That’s why it is shocking in the extreme that they continued to embrace Huang even when his relationship with the Chinese spy started to become public. Philby and Blunt and the Cambridge spies joined clubs together. Huang and Musk and Zuckerberg and the others are such a club that they have been given the moniker, “tech bros,” celebrating their wealth, connections, excessive lifestyles – see also: their zillion dollar yachts, private jets, Bezos’ Venice zillion dollar wedding, on and on – and now we find, their bad judgement.

In the Cambridge spy scandal, there was a “you can do no wrong” patina over the whole thing that had to do with their class connections in Great Britain associated with their schooling and private men’s clubs, even their school ties and the way they dressed and carried themselves and the way they spoke. The same sort of protective coating surrounds Huang and Musk et al. Who would have anything to do with Musk after we watched him eviscerate USAID and the rest of the government and reports began to show how much damage Musk and his hand-puppet tech boys did and how many lives it would cost?

Well, it turns out, they all continued to associate with him! The British spies were connected by class and schools and an assumption that if you were a certain kind of man with certain manners and spoke in a certain accent, you could be trusted. In the case of Huang in this country, it appears to be all about money. He’s the 11^th wealthiest person in the world! He wears a super-cool collarless black leather jacket! He runs a super-cool AI company!

What could possibly be suspicious about Jensen Huang? Or Elon Musk, for that matter?

Well, Huang got super-cozy with a Chinese spy, and Musk showed himself to be super-cozy with a Russian president when he cut the speeds on the military version of Starlink to aid the Russian military in Putin’s war of aggression on Ukraine.

These corrupt, immoral fuckers will excuse anything in each other. Hell, they excuse Trump and his ugly, classless, gross taste and his nasty hate-driven politics and his in-your-face corruption.

Who knows what’s going to come down the Huang-Huang pike next? Maybe his board will get all offended that he was fucking one of his subordinates, a big no-no in the corporate world. Maybe they’ll figure out a way to push him over into a “emeritus” leadership role where he will remain leader-in-fact-but-not-in-name.

One thing I can tell you: it is really, really doubtful that Donald Trump’s DOJ will take a hard line with this leather-clad fuckstick. Why should they go after poor Jensen when they haven’t done shit to anyone associated out in the open with the likes of Jeffrey Epstein, including Donald Trump and and tech-bro Bill Gates and Howard Lutnick, whose fucking job as Commerce Secretary it was to police exports of national-security sensitive chips to competitors and potential enemies such as China?

And what about poor Taiwan? Huang’s company uses Taiwan to manufacture its chips. Huang himself was born there and maintains a dual-American-Taiwanese citizenship.

And this smooth as glass asshole is just selling out his company, his most powerful top-secret technology, plus his dick to Taiwan’s enemy, China.

Man, I told you this was going to get good…or bad…or worse…or however you want to describe it.

Maybe somebody in Hollywood should pitch a new reality show; Lifestyles of the rich and traitorous. They wouldn’t have much of a problem casting with so many slimy tech-bros and champagne swilling assholes on the loose.

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Picture the exact same car crash happening in two different states. Same intersection layout, same weather, same injuries, same dashcam footage. Most people would assume the legal outcome would be completely identical in both places. In reality, the results could look surprisingly different.

That’s because every state writes its own unique rulebook for civil cases. Deadlines, fault rules, evidence standards, and damage rules can all vary. A detail that sinks a claim in one state might barely matter just a few miles across the border.

For anyone involved in a lawsuit, that means location isn’t a minor detail. Where a case is heard can shape how fault gets assigned, what evidence a jury sees, and how much compensation is even possible. Geography quietly sits in the courtroom alongside the facts.

Why State Laws Can Change the Outcome of a Case

Each state builds its civil justice system through statutes passed by the legislature and decisions handed down by its courts. Those rules govern everything from who can be sued to how damages are calculated and proven. The details really do add up.

Georgia’s legal climate  is shaped by that same mix of statutes, appellate decisions, liability rules, and procedural requirements. Some of these rules are decades old, while others have changed quite recently, which means Georgia cases can play out differently from similar disputes in neighboring states.

Local practice adds another layer. Different courts may handle scheduling, motions, and trials in slightly different ways, even within the same state. Lawyers who regularly practice in Georgia courts tend to know those patterns, which can influence strategy from the very first filing.

The Hidden Role of Comparative Fault and Damage Rules

Fault rules alone can make or break a case. Georgia follows a modified comparative fault system. An injured person’s damages can be reduced by their share of responsibility, and someone found 50 percent or more at fault generally can’t recover anything at all.

That threshold differs from state to state. Some states allow recovery even when the injured person is mostly at fault, while a few bar recovery for nearly any share of blame. The same facts can produce very different results depending on the rule.

Damage rules matter just as much. States differ on how medical expenses are proven, whether certain damages are capped, and what evidence a jury can consider. Those rules can significantly shape both settlement negotiations and the size of any final verdict a jury returns.

Why Court Procedures Can Be Just as Important as Evidence

Even the strongest evidence won’t help if a case is filed too late. Georgia generally gives people two years to file a personal injury lawsuit, though exceptions exist. Deadlines are unforgiving. Missing that deadline can end a valid claim before it even starts.

Discovery rules shape what each side learns about the other’s case. Requests for documents, depositions, and expert disclosures all follow specific procedures. A missed deadline or a poorly handled request can seriously limit the evidence available when it matters most at trial.

Evidentiary rules decide what a jury actually hears. A piece of evidence may be powerful, but if it isn’t properly authenticated or falls under an exclusion, the jury may never see it. Procedure often determines whether even strong facts ever reach the courtroom at all.

How Legal Changes Can Reshape an Entire State’s Court System

Laws don’t stand still. Legislatures pass reforms, and appellate courts  issue rulings that change how earlier laws are applied. A rule that controlled cases for decades can shift almost overnight, changing how lawyers evaluate and try cases. Lawyers have to keep up.

Georgia saw this firsthand in 2025, when major tort reform legislation was signed into law. Among other changes, it made seat belt evidence admissible in many car crash cases, restricted certain pain and suffering arguments, and changed how medical expenses can be presented.

Changes like these ripple through the entire system, affecting settlement values, trial strategy, and how quickly cases move forward. Because the law keeps evolving, anyone dealing with a Georgia claim should make sure they’re relying on current rules rather than outdated assumptions or old advice.

Conclusion

Two nearly identical cases can unfold very differently depending on where they’re heard. State statutes, court decisions, and local practices all shape how disputes are resolved, sometimes as much as the evidence itself does in the courtroom. Location really is that powerful.

Fault rules, damage rules, strict filing deadlines, and procedural requirements can each change the course of a case. Georgia’s modified comparative fault system and its recent legal reforms show just how much state-specific rules can influence outcomes in real cases involving real people.

That’s why it pays to look closely at the legal environment before making decisions about a claim. Knowing the current rules, deadlines, and procedures in the right state helps set realistic expectations and protects the ability to pursue a case effectively from the very start.

Photo: Zachary Caraway via Pexels

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Picture a counselor who spent years holding private sessions over secure video from a closed room. Now she’s on a crowded floor, headset on, trying to keep a client’s story to herself while the person one divider over argues with a vendor on speakerphone. Since the order bringing federal employees back to their desks five days a week, accounts like that have become common. Some workers have reportedly started taking calls in their parked cars, just to get a door that closes.

Noise is only part of it. The bigger problem on these floors is that a conversation at one desk is perfectly understandable three desks away. Agencies can’t conjure private offices overnight, but they can change how far a voice carries across a floor – and that’s where sound panels for office  spaces start to matter, even if they’re only part of the answer.

Let’s be clear from the start. Panels won’t turn a cubicle into a closed room. What they can do is shrink the distance at which a conversation stays intelligible, and on a packed floor that difference is real.

What Changed When Federal Offices Filled Back Up

The return-to-office push arrived alongside an effort to shed federal leases and consolidate space. So in many buildings, more people came back to fewer square feet. Teams that used to be spread across floors, or across home offices, now share open areas that were planned for a fraction of that headcount. Employees have described missing desks, overflowing parking garages and nowhere to go for a private call.

For most staff, that’s an inconvenience. For people whose work runs on confidential conversations, it’s a different kind of problem. Think of counselors and health staff talking with clients, caseworkers handling benefits claims that involve medical or financial details, HR specialists dealing with complaints, investigators interviewing witnesses by phone. Their work didn’t change when their seats did. The room around them did.

Why Speech Carries Across an Open Floor

To fix speech privacy, it helps to understand why it breaks down. Most open floors are built in a way that sends voices further than anyone expects.

Hard Surfaces and Low Dividers

Look up and down in a typical government office. Hard ceiling tiles or exposed concrete, thin carpet or bare flooring, painted drywall, glass along the windows. All of it reflects sound. Cubicle dividers usually stop around shoulder height when seated, so a voice goes over them, bounces off the ceiling and lands neatly at the next workstation. Add a quiet HVAC system and nothing else to cover speech, and a normal phone voice travels across a good part of the room.

Absorb, Block, Cover

Acoustic consultants tend to approach open offices with three moves. Absorb sound so it doesn’t bounce around. Block it with taller dividers, walls or distance. Cover it with low background sound so stray speech is harder to pick out. Each one handles a different piece. Panels belong to the first group, and they make the other two work better, since a room full of reflections defeats both dividers and background sound.

What Sound Panels Can and Can’t Do

Honest expectations matter here, especially for people whose clients are counting on discretion.

Where Panels Help

Fabric panels on the inside faces of dividers catch a voice before it reflects back out. Wall panels near desks that handle a lot of calls cut the echo that carries speech along a wall. Panels hung from the ceiling over the open area – often called clouds – stop the over-the-divider bounce that sends a conversation two rows away. Together, those changes make the floor calmer and shorten the range at which someone can follow what a neighbor is saying. Callers often hear the difference too, since the speaker’s microphone picks up less room echo.

Where They Fall Short

Panels absorb sound; they don’t stop it. A divider lined with panels is still open at the top and sides, so a determined listener a few feet away will hear plenty. For conversations that genuinely need to stay confidential – clinical sessions, sensitive personnel matters, anything involving protected personal information – an enclosed room with a door is still the answer, and panels inside that room simply make it work better. Anyone promising that panels alone will make an open desk private is overselling them.

Practical Setups for Shared Floors

Most offices can’t rebuild their layout mid-year. These are changes that work on a floor as it is.

Grouping Call-Heavy Desks

Put the people who handle confidential calls together, ideally in a corner away from main walkways, printers, and break areas. Then concentrate the acoustic treatment there: panels on the dividers, on the nearby walls and overhead. Treating one zone well often does more than spreading a few panels thinly across the whole floor. It also gives everyone else a clearer sense of which area needs a lower voice.

Turning Spare Corners Into Call Rooms

Most buildings have a few spaces nobody quite uses – an empty small office, a former supply room, a conference room booked twice a week. With panels on the walls and a door that closes properly, any of those can become a bookable call room. It’s a modest fix. Still, it beats sitting in a car in the parking garage with a laptop balanced on the steering wheel.

Raising the Issue With Facilities

If you work on one of these floors, or manage people who do, the quickest route to change is usually a specific, written request. Note which desks are affected, at what times the problem peaks, and what kind of work is being overheard – without sharing any of the confidential details themselves, obviously. Mention whether there’s an unused room nearby that could be converted. Facilities teams deal with a long queue of complaints, and a request that names the space, the work and a possible fix tends to move faster than a general note that the office is loud.

When the conversation turns to products, it can help to look at what specialists offer, for example, Sound Pro Solutions , a company focused on acoustic and soundproofing products, office panels included.

Photo: cottonbro studio via Pexels

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