The Cost of Doing Business
A.R. Moxon
Jun 7, 2026
A modest proposal: Abolish the death penalty for humans. Institute it for corporations
In the small town of Saline, MI, the governor of my state stood next to a man who says he wants to sell human intelligence back to humans as if it were on a meter, and smiled for the cameras. The governor’s name is Gretchen Whitmer, and she’s done some good things in Michigan, but she’s certainly also done this. The fellow who wants to meter human intelligence is named Sam Altman, the rather alarming billionaire CEO of OpenAI, which is the company behind ChatGPT, which is one of the more influential AI large language models. And AI is a tool that does a lot of things, including run on massive water-gulping data centers that pose significant environmental risks and livability challenges to any people living there, whether they pronounce “saline” as sah-LEEN or the normal way.
Michigan’s got a lot of water, as you might have heard. Holy shit it’s all over the place here. Whitmer’s predecessor was a guy named Rick Snyder, and he had a pretty bad track record when it comes to water. You may have heard about the ways he abandoned the entire city of Flint (whose population just so happens to be mostly Black) to suffer the toxic effects of toxic water the state under his government sent through their soon-to-be-corroded pipes. He was charged with criminal negligence for that one, though the judge dismissed the charges. Maybe you heard about how he licensed Michigan’s aquifer to Nestle for $200 a year (not $200 thousand, not $200 million, no—two hundred smackers), which Nestlé uses to extract 576,000 gallons every day. Nestlé is a corporation infamous among opponents of child slave labor for highly credible accusations of utilizing child slave labor—a practice for which they faced a lawsuit which was blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court. It's also a corporation whose former board chairman once announced that he thought the idea that water is a human right to be an extreme one, and would be much better managed by public corporations like Nestlé, perhaps because they understand the proper application of slave labor. If you’re somebody whose body needs water, this sort of thing might interest you whether your state’s aquifers were sold away by Rick Snyder. (Governor Whitmer campaigned on reversing this situation, but while she has done other good things for the state, she did not do that.)
Anyway, the people of Saline MI did not want significant environmental risks and livability concerns, so they voted down the data center. “Voting” is the way the people express their collective will, in case you didn’t know. It makes sense to me that you wouldn’t want significant environmental risks and livability challenges, so that vote makes sense to me.
What happened next is sort of funny, if you find infuriating things funny. OpenAI sued the city of Saline, because they knew that Saline didn’t have the budget available to fight them in court, while OpenAI easily could afford it as part of the cost of doing business. And so Saline did not fight in court, and now they get a data center, and all the significant environmental risks and livability concerns, and also the fifteen jobs that it will eventually bring to run it in offset of however many jobs it will eradicate, and they also get the governor of their state, who won in part on promises to protect Michigan water, wielding a groundbreaking shovel in a photo op that to my eye looks like like nothing more than a bunch of corporate executives digging the mass grave of some Nestlé child slaves, and smiling about all the new jobs while ignoring the rest.
It seems the voice of the people is nothing next to the desires of a single man who by any rational observation seems driven by a desire to consume humanity.
much more at
https://www.the-reframe.com/the-cost-of-doing-business/
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