cross-posted from: hexbear.net/post/6952495

cross-posted from: news.abolish.capital/post/1191…

Public opposition to artificial intelligence data centers—and the push by corporations and officials to move forward with their construction anyway—were vividly illustrated in a viral video this week of a woman who was arrested after speaking out against a proposed data center in her community in Wisconsin.

Christine Le Jeune, a member of Great Lakes Neighbors United in Port Washington, spoke at a Common Council meeting in the town on Tuesday evening. The meeting was not focused on the recently approved $15 million "Lighthouse" data center set to be built a mile from downtown Port Washington—part of a project developed by Vantage Data Centers for OpenAI and Oracle—but the first 30 minutes were taken up by members of the public who spoke out against the project.

As CNBC reported last month, more than 1,000 people signed a petition calling on Port Washington officials to obtain voter approval before entering into the deal, but the Common Council and a review board went ahead with creating a Tax Incremental District for the project without public input. The data center still requires other approvals to officially move forward.

"We will not continue to be silenced and ignored while our beautiful and pristine city is taken away from us and handed over to a corporation intent on extracting as many resources as they can regardless of the impact on the people who live here," said Le Jeune. "Most leaders would have tabled the issue after receiving public input and providing sufficient notice. But you did nothing, and you laughed about it."

Le Jeune spoke for her allotted three minutes and went slightly over the time limit. She then chanted, "Recall, recall, recall!" at members of the Common Council as other community members applauded.

Police Chief Kevin Hingiss then approached Le Jeune while she was sitting in her seat, listening to the next speaker, and asked her to leave.

She refused, and another officer approached her before a chaotic scene broke out.

Last night, the Port Washington Police Department used excessive force to arrest a woman for speaking up against the Vantage data center.

We are thankful that this local advocate is safe, and we condemn the Port Washington PD’s actions in the strongest possible terms. SHAME! pic.twitter.com/35dhEKvojL
— Our Wisconsin Revolution (@OurWisconsinRev) December 3, 2025

City officials had told attendees not to speak out of order during the meeting, and Le Jeune acknowledged that she and others had spoken out of turn at times.

But she told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that she had been surprised by the police officers' demand that she leave, and by the eventual violence of the incident, with officers physically removing her from her seat and dragging her and two other people across the floor.

The two other residents had approached Le Jeune to protest the officers' actions.

"I never expected something like that to happen in a meeting. It was very strange," she told the Journal Sentinel. "Suddenly this police chief showed up in front of me, and all I was thinking was: 'Wait, what is going on? Why is he interrupting her speech? ... It felt like [police] were kind of primed tonight to pounce."

State Sen. Chris Larson (D-7) said that "police should not be allowed to violently detain a person who is nonviolently exercising their free speech. This used to be something all Americans agreed on."

William Walter, executive director of Our Wisconsin Revolution, filmed the arrest and told ABC News affiliate WISN, "I've never seen a response like that in my life."

"What I did see was a lot of members of the Port Washington community who are really frustrated that they're being ignored and they're being dismissed by their elected officials," he said.

AI data centers, he added, "will impact you. They'll impact your friends, your family, your neighbors, your parents, your children. These are the kinds of things that are going to be dictating the future of Wisconsin, not just for the next couple of years but for the next decade, the next 50 years."

After Le Jeune's arrest, another resident, Dawn Stacey, denounced the Common Council members for allowing the aggressive arrest.

"We have so many people who have these concerns about this data center," said Stacey. “Are we being heard by the Common Council? No we’re not. Instead of being heard we have people being dragged out of the room.”

“For democracy to thrive, we need to have respect between public servants and the people who they serve," she added.

Vantage has distributed flyers in Port Washington, which has a population of 17,000, promising residents 330 full-time jobs after construction. But as CNBC reported, "Data centers don’t tend to create a lot of long-lasting jobs."

Another project in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin hired 3,000 construction workers and foresees 500 employees, while McKinsey said a data center it is planning would need 1,500 people for construction but only around 50 for "steady-state operations."

Residents in Port Washington have also raised concerns about the data center's impact on the environment, including through its water use, the potential for exploding utility prices for residents, and the overall purpose of advancing AI.

As Common Dreams reported Thursday, the development of data centers has caused a rapid surge in consumers' electricity bills, with costs rising more than 250% in just five years. Vantage has claimed its center will run on 70% renewable energy, but more than half of the electricity used to power data center campuses so far has come from fossil fuels, raising concerns that the expansion of the facilities will worsen the climate emergency.

A recent Morning Consult poll found that a rapidly growing number of Americans support a ban on AI data centers in their surrounding areas—41% said they would support a ban in the survey taken in late November, compared to 37% in October.

---

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

thelastaxolotl [he/him]

2025-12-05 23:36:45

As AI Data Centers Disrupt US Cities, Wisconsin Woman Violently Arrested After Speaking Out

cross-posted from: news.abolish.capital/post/1191…

Public opposition to artificial intelligence data centers—and the push by corporations and officials to move forward with their construction anyway—were vividly illustrated in a viral video this week of a woman who was arrested after speaking out against a proposed data center in her community in Wisconsin.

Christine Le Jeune, a member of Great Lakes Neighbors United in Port Washington, spoke at a Common Council meeting in the town on Tuesday evening. The meeting was not focused on the recently approved $15 million "Lighthouse" data center set to be built a mile from downtown Port Washington—part of a project developed by Vantage Data Centers for OpenAI and Oracle—but the first 30 minutes were taken up by members of the public who spoke out against the project.

As CNBC reported last month, more than 1,000 people signed a petition calling on Port Washington officials to obtain voter approval before entering into the deal, but the Common Council and a review board went ahead with creating a Tax Incremental District for the project without public input. The data center still requires other approvals to officially move forward.

"We will not continue to be silenced and ignored while our beautiful and pristine city is taken away from us and handed over to a corporation intent on extracting as many resources as they can regardless of the impact on the people who live here," said Le Jeune. "Most leaders would have tabled the issue after receiving public input and providing sufficient notice. But you did nothing, and you laughed about it."

Le Jeune spoke for her allotted three minutes and went slightly over the time limit. She then chanted, "Recall, recall, recall!" at members of the Common Council as other community members applauded.

Police Chief Kevin Hingiss then approached Le Jeune while she was sitting in her seat, listening to the next speaker, and asked her to leave.

She refused, and another officer approached her before a chaotic scene broke out.

Last night, the Port Washington Police Department used excessive force to arrest a woman for speaking up against the Vantage data center.

We are thankful that this local advocate is safe, and we condemn the Port Washington PD’s actions in the strongest possible terms. SHAME! pic.twitter.com/35dhEKvojL
— Our Wisconsin Revolution (@OurWisconsinRev) December 3, 2025

City officials had told attendees not to speak out of order during the meeting, and Le Jeune acknowledged that she and others had spoken out of turn at times.

But she told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that she had been surprised by the police officers' demand that she leave, and by the eventual violence of the incident, with officers physically removing her from her seat and dragging her and two other people across the floor.

The two other residents had approached Le Jeune to protest the officers' actions.

"I never expected something like that to happen in a meeting. It was very strange," she told the Journal Sentinel. "Suddenly this police chief showed up in front of me, and all I was thinking was: 'Wait, what is going on? Why is he interrupting her speech? ... It felt like [police] were kind of primed tonight to pounce."

State Sen. Chris Larson (D-7) said that "police should not be allowed to violently detain a person who is nonviolently exercising their free speech. This used to be something all Americans agreed on."

William Walter, executive director of Our Wisconsin Revolution, filmed the arrest and told ABC News affiliate WISN, "I've never seen a response like that in my life."

"What I did see was a lot of members of the Port Washington community who are really frustrated that they're being ignored and they're being dismissed by their elected officials," he said.

AI data centers, he added, "will impact you. They'll impact your friends, your family, your neighbors, your parents, your children. These are the kinds of things that are going to be dictating the future of Wisconsin, not just for the next couple of years but for the next decade, the next 50 years."

After Le Jeune's arrest, another resident, Dawn Stacey, denounced the Common Council members for allowing the aggressive arrest.

"We have so many people who have these concerns about this data center," said Stacey. “Are we being heard by the Common Council? No we’re not. Instead of being heard we have people being dragged out of the room.”

“For democracy to thrive, we need to have respect between public servants and the people who they serve," she added.

Vantage has distributed flyers in Port Washington, which has a population of 17,000, promising residents 330 full-time jobs after construction. But as CNBC reported, "Data centers don’t tend to create a lot of long-lasting jobs."

Another project in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin hired 3,000 construction workers and foresees 500 employees, while McKinsey said a data center it is planning would need 1,500 people for construction but only around 50 for "steady-state operations."

Residents in Port Washington have also raised concerns about the data center's impact on the environment, including through its water use, the potential for exploding utility prices for residents, and the overall purpose of advancing AI.

As Common Dreams reported Thursday, the development of data centers has caused a rapid surge in consumers' electricity bills, with costs rising more than 250% in just five years. Vantage has claimed its center will run on 70% renewable energy, but more than half of the electricity used to power data center campuses so far has come from fossil fuels, raising concerns that the expansion of the facilities will worsen the climate emergency.

A recent Morning Consult poll found that a rapidly growing number of Americans support a ban on AI data centers in their surrounding areas—41% said they would support a ban in the survey taken in late November, compared to 37% in October.

---

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

From Soaring Energy Prices to Climate Threat to AI Bubble, Experts Warn Against Data Center Buildout

“Tech giants are cutting backroom deals with utilities and government officials to build massive data centers at breakneck speed, while passing the costs onto working families," said the author of a new Public Citizen report.

^{stephen-prager (Common Dreams)}

Amidst the growing economic and social crisis that plagues the working people, the Movement for Struggle in Neighborhoods, Villages and Slums (MLB) has consolidated itself as one of the main expressions of popular organization in the urban peripheries of Brazil. Born from the heart of the poor and exploited people, the MLB shows, in practice, that only organized struggle can achieve victories and confront the power of the rich and the governments that serve them.

Since its founding, the movement has demonstrated tireless combativeness in defending the right to decent housing, urban land, and the city for those who live and work in it. In every occupation, every assembly, and every street action, the MLB reaffirms its position of class independence, refusing to bow before the interests of the bourgeoisie or false electoral promises.

In the urban occupations that are flourishing in dozens of cities, the MLB (Movement for the Struggle for Housing) transforms the abandonment and misery imposed by capitalism into spaces of resistance and solidarity. Where there were once vacant lots and abandoned buildings, today communities full of life, hope, and political awareness sprout. There, the people learn, in practice, the true meaning of popular organization and collective power.

More than fighting for housing, the MLB builds popular power. In its ranks, men and women of the people take the destiny of their lives into their own hands, discuss politics, decide collectively, face evictions and repression, and remain steadfast in the struggle for a new society, free from the exploitation of man by man.

In a country where unemployment, hunger, and eviction are weapons of social control, the MLB stands as a symbol of resistance and hope. Its strength lies in the unity and combativeness of the poor people, who no longer accept living on crumbs.

Full Article

cross-posted from: hexbear.net/post/6952498

Amidst the growing economic and social crisis that plagues the working people, the Movement for Struggle in Neighborhoods, Villages and Slums (MLB) has consolidated itself as one of the main expressions of popular organization in the urban peripheries of Brazil. Born from the heart of the poor and exploited people, the MLB shows, in practice, that only organized struggle can achieve victories and confront the power of the rich and the governments that serve them.

Since its founding, the movement has demonstrated tireless combativeness in defending the right to decent housing, urban land, and the city for those who live and work in it. In every occupation, every assembly, and every street action, the MLB reaffirms its position of class independence, refusing to bow before the interests of the bourgeoisie or false electoral promises.

In the urban occupations that are flourishing in dozens of cities, the MLB (Movement for the Struggle for Housing) transforms the abandonment and misery imposed by capitalism into spaces of resistance and solidarity. Where there were once vacant lots and abandoned buildings, today communities full of life, hope, and political awareness sprout. There, the people learn, in practice, the true meaning of popular organization and collective power.

More than fighting for housing, the MLB builds popular power. In its ranks, men and women of the people take the destiny of their lives into their own hands, discuss politics, decide collectively, face evictions and repression, and remain steadfast in the struggle for a new society, free from the exploitation of man by man.

In a country where unemployment, hunger, and eviction are weapons of social control, the MLB stands as a symbol of resistance and hope. Its strength lies in the unity and combativeness of the poor people, who no longer accept living on crumbs.

Full Article

thelastaxolotl [he/him]

2025-12-05 23:39:30

A personal tribute to the Movement for Struggle in Neighborhoods

Amidst the growing economic and social crisis that plagues the working people, the Movement for Struggle in Neighborhoods, Villages and Slums (MLB) has consolidated itself as one of the main expressions of popular organization in the urban peripheries of Brazil. Born from the heart of the poor and exploited people, the MLB shows, in practice, that only organized struggle can achieve victories and confront the power of the rich and the governments that serve them.

Since its founding, the movement has demonstrated tireless combativeness in defending the right to decent housing, urban land, and the city for those who live and work in it. In every occupation, every assembly, and every street action, the MLB reaffirms its position of class independence, refusing to bow before the interests of the bourgeoisie or false electoral promises.

In the urban occupations that are flourishing in dozens of cities, the MLB (Movement for the Struggle for Housing) transforms the abandonment and misery imposed by capitalism into spaces of resistance and solidarity. Where there were once vacant lots and abandoned buildings, today communities full of life, hope, and political awareness sprout. There, the people learn, in practice, the true meaning of popular organization and collective power.

More than fighting for housing, the MLB builds popular power. In its ranks, men and women of the people take the destiny of their lives into their own hands, discuss politics, decide collectively, face evictions and repression, and remain steadfast in the struggle for a new society, free from the exploitation of man by man.

In a country where unemployment, hunger, and eviction are weapons of social control, the MLB stands as a symbol of resistance and hope. Its strength lies in the unity and combativeness of the poor people, who no longer accept living on crumbs.

Full Article

A personal tribute to the Movement for Struggle in Neighborhoods

Alberes Simão | A Verdade Nov. 13, 2025 | Translated from Portuguese for the Red Phoenix | Brazil– Thanks to the example of the Movement for Struggle in Neighborhoods, Villages and Slums, the…

^{The Red Phoenix}

Hi all, I'd like some help with setting up Linux for gaming, I'm not a new user but I'm not expert either, I've been having problems with my current setup, before I had Bazzite 42 which worked perfectly, however I was afraid things would eventually break over with that layering thing, since I use some things like Pale Moon which has a dependency that needs to be layered (IIRC it was libdbus), MEGAsync, ZeroTier and Kvantum, all of which have to be installed to the system, so I switched to openSUSE TW (both distros using KDE Plasma 6 on Wayland session), which was been working excellently so far... well, except for one thing:

For some backstory and context (you can skip this paragraph): the computer I've been running these distros on is a GIGABYTE G5 MF with 16GB of RAM, which I bought back on May/2024 and it had winblows 11 Home, it was my fault not knowing I should've chosen a laptop with AMD hardware instead (I don't exclusively use it for gaming and sometimes travel with it but that's besides the point), but it's served as a lesson for next time and winblows was used for some time after tweaking it... until I had enough of it, because even with the patches people make to reduce telemetry, the way it's now just doesn't feel at home and any more trustworthy than 7 or XP both of which I've grown up with, so I've been hoping to have this laptop run any Linux distro, so long as I can game in it.

Anyway, the G5 MF ships with a big troublemaker Made in Nvidia™, it's has an RTX 4050, and in it I play a variety of things on and off my Steam library, but at least one game has been giving me serious problems every time I hit almost an hour after playing ever since I switched to openSUSE: Wuthering Waves (or WuWa for short), it lags gradually - it starts fine for a couple of minutes where it runs fluently before the lag kicks in and becomes worse and worse the more I play (on occasions it even hangs the system so I have to force a restart), although while the lag is there, it seems to happen primarily when I try to move the mouse regardless of the situation (if I'm in dialogue or exploring, but it's the worst when fighting), and during cutscenes where they always play slowly and voices go out of sync.

I tried everything I could think of as well, changing settings in game as well as launch options, DirectX version (11 or 12), and Proton forks, but the gradual lag still persists (this didn't happen in Bazzite).

Currently, these are my launch options for the game:
STEAMOS=1 STEAMDECK=1 PROTON_USE_NTSYNC=1 WINE_GSTREAMER=1 VK_DRIVER_FILES=/usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/nvidia_icd.x86_64.json PROTON_DLSS_UPGRADE=1 PROTON_NVIDIA_LIBS_NO_32BIT=1 prime-run gamemoderun %command% -dx12.
I found via ProtonDB (which I've been using to get different launch options from fellow Nvidia users) that adding that VK_DRIVER_FILES variable lets me run the game on the dGPU, otherwise it refuses to and runs on integrated, this wasn't required when I had Bazzite.

Another problem this laptop has is that [Secure Boot] is always active and I don't know how to disable it (mainly because there doesn't seem to be a way and I didn't find any info) otherwise I'd have long done it, also, my understanding about it is vague so I'm afraid of touching anything and bricking the machine, but I'm not looking to replace the machine yet since it still works great.

About [Secure Boot], here's the related settings I found in the BIOS settings, but I forgot one more option and it's like a boot list with two entries about openSUSE, one has "secureboot" on the name and the other doesn't, if it helps I'll add a picture of it to that album.

Worse, I don't have many distros I can pick from, as they must include support for [Secure Boot] out of the box so I can boot into the OS.

The drivers are installed and should be signed though since the game is offloaded every time I run it, here's some more info from commands I thought I'd add.

So here's the options I'm pursuing:
1) Stay on openSUSE, if there's any fix to the gradual lagging.
2) Switch to another distro while also trying XFCE on X11, I'd love to use Ksnip for my screenshotting needs while I'm at it, but Wayland is annoying with the portal thing because Ksnip isn't native and that's like the only thing I hate about Wayland from experience, so Spectacle is the closest best alternative for me wherever I end up stuck with Wayland and I'm satisfied with it. I'm kinda thinking about Fedora but I'm concerned about the possible use of AI even with their proposals/rules. Otherwise I've read XFCE is lightweight so it could maybe help?
3) Just go back to Bazzite: perhaps the most suitable choice despite being based on Fedora, but if it works the best for my use case, then I guess I'll have to keep it as my daily driver.

Any other ideas on what I could try would be appreciated as well (so long as it's not coming back to winblows), or just possible fixes so I don't have to do distro hopping would be great, and if any info is missing I'd be glad to add it, just let me know what I should run on the command line, thanks for any help in advance.

With OpenAI’s memory upgrade, ChatGPT can recall everything you’ve ever shared with it, indefinitely. Similarly, Google has opened the context window with “Infini-attention,” letting large language models (LLMs) reference infinite inputs with zero memory loss. And in consumer-facing tools like ChatGPT or Gemini, this means persistent, personalized memory across conversations, unless you manually intervene.

The sales pitch is seductively simple: less friction, more relevance. Conversations that feel like continuity: “Systems that get to know you over your life,” as Sam Altman writes on X. Technology, finally, that meets you where you are.

In the age of hyper-personalization — of the TikTok For You page, Spotify Wrapped, and Netflix Your Next Watch — a conversational AI product that remembers everything about you feels perfectly, perhaps dangerously, natural.

Forgetting, then, begins to look like a flaw. A failure to retain. A bug in the code. Especially in our own lives, we treat memory loss as a tragedy, clinging to photo albums and cloud backups to preserve what time tries to erase.

But what if human forgetting is not a bug, but a feature? And what happens when we build machines that don’t forget, but are now helping shape the human minds that do?