Jennifer Roberts

Former Mayor of Charlotte, USA. Proud wife and mother, Charlotte native, long-time community activist.

[Jennifer Roberts @JenRobertsNC]

Thanks, DOGE cuts.

[The Wall Street Journal @WSJ]

A calf in southern Texas tested positive for the New World screwworm, the first instance of the deadly fly-borne parasite detected in U.S. livestock since 1966. https://t.co/DGqls32KmZ

[Patricia 🇺🇸 @1109Patricia]

The real reason is the AI boom. Tech giants like Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon are racing to build massive computing power for training and running AI models, especially generative AI since ChatGPT launched.
It’s an arms race for dominance in the next big tech wave, with trillions projected in spending by 2030.

On the economy: They create short-term construction jobs and bring in property taxes, some counties love the revenue. But ongoing operations employ very few people, often just a handful per facility. Many places give them huge tax breaks, so the net benefit to locals can be questionable, and the surge in power demand is pushing up electricity rates for regular households.

Environmentally: These things are power hogs, U.S. data centers already use about 4.4% of the country’s electricity, and that’s expected to double or triple soon.

They also drink massive amounts of water for cooling, sometimes millions of gallons a day per big site, straining local supplies in places like Virginia or Arizona. A lot of that power still comes from fossil fuels, so it adds to emissions too.
Bottom line: huge for AI progress, mixed bag for the places hosting them.

It’s happening because farmland is cheap, flat, already cleared, and easy to rezone. Developers get huge tax breaks in rural areas, and these spots often sit near power lines and fiber optic cables. A single big campus can eat up hundreds to over a thousand acres, once paved over, that land’s gone for farming forever.

On the water side, it competes directly in dry or stressed areas. A large data center can pull hundreds of thousands to millions of gallons a day for cooling, sometimes rivaling a small town’s entire use. In places like parts of Georgia or Arizona, one facility has taken 10% of the county’s water. That strains aquifers and leaves less for irrigation, especially during droughts.

Nationally, data centers use a tiny fraction of U.S. water compared to agriculture, but locally it’s a real squeeze, farmers feel it first when supplies get tight.

Some feel it’s a deliberate destruction of farmland by building AI infrastructure and diminishing the protection of food production land.

Some states are now talking about steering these projects away

[Rep. Mike Levin @RepMikeLevin]

Let me get this straight.

Howard Lutnick, Trump’s Commerce Secretary, got caught lying about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Democrats grilled him about it and finally got him to agree to testify before the House Oversight Committee.

Four weeks later, Lutnick wrote a $5 million check to the super PAC that funds House Republicans, including members who sit on that committee. Then he showed up for a closed-door interview where, despite pushback from Democrats, no cameras or recordings were allowed.

This is the most corrupt administration in American history and it’s not even close.
https://t.co/KsrdJ5ypQ3

[Millie Marconi @MillieMarconnni]

A British biologist looked at 200,000 years of human history and found that the entire reason humans broke out of poverty was not intelligence, not language, not even agriculture, but one mechanism so simple a 6-year-old could explain it.

His name is Matt Ridley.

He is a zoologist by training, an evolutionary biologist by career, and in 2010 he wrote a book called The Rational Optimist that quietly argued the most important fact about human progress had been hiding in plain sight for the entire history of economics.

Naval Ravikant has been telling people to read everything Ridley has ever written for the last 15 years. The reason is the argument inside this one book.

For 200,000 years, anatomically modern humans walked around with the same brain you have right now. Same skull size. Same neural architecture. Same raw capacity for language, planning, and abstract thought.

For roughly 190,000 of those years, almost nothing happened. Generation after generation lived and died inside the same Stone Age toolkit their great-great-grandparents had used. Then somewhere around 50,000 years ago, the line on the chart of human progress started to tick upward. Then it bent. Then it exploded.

The question Ridley spent years on was the only question that mattered. What changed.

It was not the brain. The brain had been the same for 190,000 years. It was not language, which had existed long before the takeoff. It was not even agriculture, which arrived only 10,000 years ago and was actually preceded by the upward bend, not the cause of it.

What changed was that humans started trading with strangers.

This sounds too small to be the answer. Ridley argues that it is the answer to almost everything. The moment one human exchanged a useful object with another human from a different group, something happened that no other species on earth had ever done.

Two ideas that had developed in isolation came into contact. The flint knapper learned what the spear maker had figured out. The fisherman from the coast learned what the hunter from the forest had figured out. The two pieces of knowledge fused into something neither side could have produced alone.

Ridley calls this ideas having sex. The phrase sounds frivolous and it is meant to. The point is that ideas, like genes, get better when they combine with other ideas from different lineages.

An idea sitting inside one head, no matter how brilliant the head, eventually hits a ceiling. The same idea exposed to ten thousand other ideas does something genes do under sexual reproduction. It mixes. It recombines. It produces offspring nobody planned.

The cleanest proof of this argument is the most uncomfortable case study in the book. Tasmania.

Around 10,000 years ago, rising sea levels cut Tasmania off from mainland Australia. A population of roughly 4,000 humans was now isolated on an island, with no possibility of contact with the rest of humanity. They had the same brains. The same language. The same starting toolkit as their cousins 150 kilometers north. The natural experiment was now running.

What happened next is something no economist or geneticist had ever predicted.

The mainland Australians kept inventing. Boomerangs. Spear-throwers. Fishing nets. Bone needles for sewing fitted clothes. Watercraft with paddles. Their technology compounded slowly across the centuries.

The Tasmanians went the other way. They did not just fail to invent the new tools their cousins were developing. They started losing the tools they already had. Fishing was abandoned within a few thousand years. Bone tools disappeared. Fitted clothing disappeared. They forgot how to make fire from scratch and started carrying lit firebrands from camp to camp instead, relighting their fires from a neighbor's whenever their own went out.

By the time European explorers arrived in the 17th century, the Tasmanians had the simplest toolkit of any human society ever recorded. Their material culture had gone backward for 8,000 years.

The archaeologist Rhys Jones called it a slow strangulation of the mind.

Joseph Henrich at Harvard later proved with formal mathematical models that there was nothing wrong with Tasmanian brains. There was something wrong with their network. A toolkit requires a critical mass of people exchanging skills to maintain itself.

The act of teaching a skill is imperfect. Every generation loses a small percentage of what the last generation knew. If your population is large enough and trading widely enough, those losses get caught and corrected by someone else who still remembers.

If your population shrinks below a certain threshold and stops mixing with outsiders, the small losses compound until entire technologies disappear.

This is the part that should haunt anyone reading this in 2026.

Intelligence is not a property of the individual brain. Intelligence is a property of the network the brain is connected to. A genius in isolation will produce less than a mediocre thinker inside a dense exchange of other mediocre thinkers.

The thing your ancestors needed in order to break out of 190,000 years of stagnation was not better brains. It was better connections between brains they already had.

The implication for any individual is direct and uncomfortable. If you are smart and isolated, you will be outproduced by people half as smart who are connected.

The most successful people in any field are almost never the smartest people in it. They are the ones positioned at the intersection of the most idea flows. They are reading more authors than their competitors. They are talking to more people from more disciplines. They are in the rooms where ideas from different lineages bump into each other.

Ridley ends the book on the line that sounds optimistic but is actually a warning its this "The future will be invented by people who connect ideas, not by people who guard them."

[Jennifer Roberts @JenRobertsNC]

The poor continue to bear much of the tax burden in NC:

https://t.co/y3qz55yWKa

[Jennifer Roberts @JenRobertsNC]

@WhiteHouse Wow. The GOP and party of MAGA is getting desperate I guess.

[Rep. Mike Levin @RepMikeLevin]

There is no world in which this is okay.  

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito did not recuse himself from cases involving Trump’s Treasury Department while his own son was secretly working there as a political appointee and attorney. 

His son's employment was hidden so thoroughly that his name appears nowhere on the Treasury Department website, he has no public resume, and his bar listings are outdated. 

If Alito had recused himself, the secret would have come out. He didn’t recuse himself. 

This is a clear conflict of interest, and the American people deserved to know about it. 

The federal recusal standard is clear: a justice must step aside in any case where there is a reasonable basis to question whether he or she can be impartial. A justice ruling on cases involving the department where his son works fails that test. The Treasury Department sits at the center of some of the biggest legal fights of this administration, and challenges to Trump’s $1.776 billion January 6 slush fund could be headed to the Court next. 

The Supreme Court is the only court in America with no binding code of conduct. That is completely unacceptable, and it has to change NOW. 

Congress controls the Power of the Purse, and therefore the Court’s funding. If the Court will not adopt a binding code of conduct with real recusal review on their own, I support withholding their funding until they do. 
 https://t.co/FV2Tkpz7Dk

[Jennifer Roberts @JenRobertsNC]

Be informed before this fall! Good explanation of several of the amendments that will be on your NC ballot in November:

Bad Constitutional Amendments https://t.co/LIeCiSA3Q9

[Change.org @Change]

Bruce Horne's family has farmed the same land in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, for nearly 200 years. Now, developers want to build a 1.2-gigawatt data center campus on 450 adjacent acres, but his mother never agreed to sell.

More than 63,000 people have signed a petition launched by Horne urging Congress to restrict data centers to industrially zoned land.

Horne says the issue is “not just about preserving our environment” but about “maintaining the very fabric of rural America.”

You can read or sign his petitino here: https://t.co/cYLblzvVui

Bottom 📷: Bruce Horne

#DataCenters #Agriculture #Pennsylvania #Farming #Tech

[Senator Andy Kim @SenatorAndyKim]

I want you to hear straight from me about what happened at Delaney Hall on Monday and what I saw inside the facility.

ICE out of control. GEO Group profiting off of human misery. People living in inhumane conditions.

Let me walk you through it.

[Carolina Forward @ForwardCarolina]

Whenever you post about the Republican politicians who are highly vocal about wanting to punish and murder women who seek abortions, it brings folks out of the woodwork online who are all like "hell yeah, let's make Handmaid's Tale real!" and we should take them at their word.

[Democratic Wins Media @DemocraticWins]

BREAKING: In an incredible moment, CNN just acknowledged that Ken Paxton, the Republican nominee for Senate in Texas has a long wrap sheet, including being prosecuted by Republicans. Republicans are going to regret nominating this crook. Wow.

[Jessica Rojas 🇺🇸💪 @VoicesUnheard]

Virginia residents are breathing emissions from 10,000 diesel generators…and it’s worse inside the buildings.

I received word from a family member with insider knowledge yesterday that due to how hot the water they use to cool down their data centers gets, it actually begins to vaporize, releasing unimaginable concentrated amounts of toxic water treatment chemicals into the atmosphere.

And now The Washington Post has confirmed it: this infrastructure boom is a direct threat to human life. 👇

[Robert Reich @RBReich]

According to new reports, Trump's White House personally ordered the Pentagon to give a $620M loan to a company linked to Don Jr.

Stocks for other Don Jr.-advised defense contractors are surging, amid rumors of more DoD deals.

There's more that you should know about. Watch.

[Carolina Forward @ForwardCarolina]

Facing an all-but-certain "blue wave" election this fall, Republican leaders in North Carolina are scrambling to insulate their policy preferences in the state constitution.

Their proposals include eliminating local control over property taxes in favor of a state takeover, capping personal income taxes, and expanding partisan gerrymandering to the State Board of Education.

Our recommendation: North Carolina voters should reject all of the proposed state constitutional amendments.

[Olena Rohoza @OlenaRohoza]

“AND YOU STILL DARE TO OPEN YOUR MOUTH…”

Sasha Legerman: This is too accurate not to share.

This Australian’s response to Trump’s rant that “NATO does nothing for America” is absolutely devastating:

“Mate. You run a country where 600,000 homeless people will sleep on the streets tonight.

A country where 40% of adults can’t cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money.

A country where insulin costs more than a car payment, and people ration it just to stay alive.

A country where medical debt is the number one cause of bankruptcy.

A country where women die in hospital parking lots because doctors are too afraid of abortion laws to treat miscarriages.

You imprison more of your own citizens than any country on Earth.
More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea.

In the land of the free, 2 million people sit in cages, and a quarter of them haven’t even been convicted of anything.
They’re simply too poor to afford bail.

Your life expectancy is declining. You’re the only developed nation where that’s happening.

Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba’s.

Your children practice active shooter drills between math and English classes while you sell defense stocks to your friends.

Your minimum wage hasn’t changed in 15 years.

Your teachers work two jobs, your veterans sleep under bridges, and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that never attacked you.

And now a convicted criminal — found liable for sexual abuse, defending a pedophile, sleeping with a porn star, and running the biggest dumpster-fire campaign since the Taliban — is thanking you for yet another disaster.

And you call Greenland badly governed?

Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world.
Nobody there goes bankrupt because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because insurance refused treatment.

‘NATO wasn’t there when we needed them.’

When exactly was that, champ?
September 11?

Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU.

Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU.

Australia wasn’t even in NATO, and we still showed up. For twenty years.

And then you left at 2 a.m. without telling anyone and left everybody else to clean up the mess.

You don’t care that a great nation is being terrorized by your friend, and you haven’t shown it a single ounce of sympathy.

So maybe before calling other countries badly governed, take a look at your own backyard, you aluminum siding salesman with a spray tan.

The only thing badly managed in this picture is your damn mouth.

And you still dare to lecture the rest of the world?”

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Finnish scientists trucked in real forest dirt and grass and laid it over the gravel at four daycare yards. They let the kids dig around in it for a month. The blood tests came back with changes the researchers hadn’t expected to see so fast or so clear.

The study ran at ten daycares in two Finnish cities with 75 kids aged three to five. Four of the yards got the forest treatment: about a tennis court worth of soil and grass laid over the gravel, plus planters and peat blocks the kids could dig and climb on. Three others stuck with their normal gravel yards. The last three were daycares where the kids were already visiting real forests every day.

After one month, the variety of bacteria living on the kids’ skin shot up, and the kind that helps train the skin’s immune defenses jumped the most. Their gut bacteria started to look like the gut bacteria of the forest-visiting kids. Their blood showed more of the immune cells whose job is to keep the body from freaking out at harmless stuff like pollen and peanuts, and overall inflammation dropped. The kids on the plain gravel yards showed none of this.

Childhood asthma in the US doubled between 1980 and 1995. Food allergies in kids jumped 50 percent between 1997 and 2011, then jumped another 50 percent between 2007 and 2021. And peanut allergies in one-year-olds tripled between 2001 and 2017.

The Finnish researchers think one of the reasons is simple: kids today don’t get dirty enough. 37 percent of American preschoolers now spend an hour or less outside on a normal weekday. Their immune systems are getting trained in environments stripped of the bacteria humans have always lived around.

Aki Sinkkonen, who led the study, put it in plain words: “It would be best if children could play in puddles and everyone could dig organic soil.” The Finnish government is now helping pay for daycares across the country to make the same changes.

[Jennifer Roberts @JenRobertsNC]

@Trekkie0805 @CLTCityCouncil @DimpleAjmera @Action_NC You mean the staff presentation had bad information ?

[Jennifer Roberts @JenRobertsNC]

At the @CLTCityCouncil meeting about data centers . Staff is proposing May 26 for a public hearing , which must precede any moratorium. Good questions from @DimpleAjmera, and CM’s Johnson, Mazuera Arias, and Mayfield. “There’s a lot we don’t know, but there is a lot we DO know”

[Action NC @Action_NC]

We call on @FIFAWorldCup @CharlotteFC @BankofAmerica to ban @ICEgov @CBP from May 31 game in #cltnc . We call on @CLTgov @MeckCounty to create immigration enforcement free zones @CMPD commit to no collaboration with immigration officials

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

This New York Times piece is worth your time. Here’s what is happening, as simply as I can put it.

Back in January, Trump sued the IRS, an agency he controls, demanding $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns a number of years ago.

IRS lawyers did their jobs. They wrote a memo laying out the defenses that could beat the suit, including the fact that Trump filed too late. His own lawyer was in court when the leaker pleaded guilty in October 2023, more than two years before Trump sued.

The Justice Department never showed up to court. Never argued back. Never used the defenses sitting on their desk.

The judge got suspicious and ordered both sides to explain whether they were actually opposing each other or just colluding. The day before that brief was due, Trump dropped the suit.

Same day, his Justice Department announced a $1.776 billion taxpayer-funded “anti-weaponization fund.” 

Trump gets a formal apology. The IRS agrees to drop any audits of him and his family, even though a 2024 Times report found a loss in an ongoing audit could cost him over $100 million.

The acting Attorney General, Trump’s former criminal defense attorney, picks the five commissioners who decide who gets paid. Trump can fire any of them. Proud Boys and Oath Keepers are not ruled out.

This is the most corrupt thing I’ve ever seen from an American president.

Where in the hell are my Republican colleagues?

https://t.co/La0nlLuz1r