Shutdown Ends — But the War for AI Control is Game On

TL;DR: Trump signs the short-term budget – but we have lingering questions.  The Big Fork in AI-control is becoming more visible. And holiday plans in the “Who cares?” pile…

“Now, Everyone Back to Work…”

As you are no doubt aware, Trump signs funding bill, ending historic 43-day US government shutdown.  What the (corporate lap-dog) press isn’t talking about are four key takeouts from the closure.

1. Congress should use the shutdown as a waste-hunting tool.  Yes, we were reminded as a country that FAA air traffic controllers are absolutely essential workers. And programs vital to the nation’s poor (but not those here illegally) are critical, as well.  What Congress could do is order the GAO to audit and see what jobs were not filled but the country did just fine without.
2. Good time for a productivity audit from today.  We have read for decades (being that old) about how government workers are “overworked.”  Yet, how many agencies will be back up to speed over what period of time?  The Management question “We the People” should be asking is: “If nothing got done, how did you get our backlog caught up in n-days?”
3. Back pay for everyone? We would also argue federal workers should suffer the same personal inconvenience as private-sector labor. And getting full pay for what amounts to a 43-day paid vacation with the back-pay coming? Point is “time needed to catch up” may be a good proxy for real time to get their jobs done.
4. Having another shutdown loom to fix this one?  Who are these people?  Didn’t they grow up *(like I did) on the edge of “garlic gulch” and see how real mob shakedowns are run?  This is classic.  Republicans may be able to read budgets better than dims, but they could use more shoe leather time on the streets of the city…

This would also be a dandy time to roll government workflows into AI. And that gets us to the next topic.

Corporate War on Personal AI

You need to finish reading my book “Mind Amplifiers: Human Use of Cognitive Prosthetics”  real quick.  Because the Big AI battle is already in the Courts.  And it’s central to my next book Co-Telligence which will be along shortly.

Here’s the corporate war on AI in a nutshell – all embodied in the story OpenAI Ordered To Produce 20 Million User Conversations To NY Times.  Let me give you the “lay of the land” so you can follow what’s going on: Big Corporations know this and are scared shitless.

• The Internet is Dead.  Conventional Media is dead.  Social is dead. They already know it but they will try every hook and crook in the book to maintain the Old Paradigm.  They don’t want you to have “unmonetized thinking” because that’s a “lost opportunity cost to them.
• The reason the NYT/GPT case is so key?  The “suits” will argue that AI can’t be allowed to “learn like humans” because then their big money (ad sales) will be flushed.  The bigger context is Old Paradigm Media want to “own the news” so they can make money at it.
• You can see what happens if AI is allowed to “report” on “their content”: (like they own wars and shit, right?) without them being cut a slice.  They lose money and go out of business.  AI makes ’em buggy whips.
• Sure THEY use AI – have been for years – to read their “sources” and re-write it for syndication subscribers.  But you know what subscribe means, right?  “Cross our palms with silver…”

Three Things No One Dares Report

1. There are two kinds of AI:  Personal AI *(where humans like me and you) collaborate with AI.  Then there’s Herd AI – and this is the wet dream of the corporate crowd.  THEY control AI and will slow its roll in order to maintain CONTROL and be able to BLEED THE PUBLIC FOR MONEY.  Because yes, my little darlings, AI IS a disruptive technology.  It’s the silicon version of an IED…
2. P-AI (Personal AI) is far safer because a human is in the loop.  Corporate AI is a monetization scheme from the get-go.  I happen to like GPT and Grok because of what they can do for me (write Python code for advanced financial modeling).  That’s something H-AI (herd AI) can’t allow because it’s part and parcel of being a free-intelligence.  Oh no!  OMG no!  Can’t miss that revenue stream, can we?
3. P-AI is a great collaboration tool.  And yes, it IS a cognitive prosthetic, just like a spreadsheet is a thinking tool, as well.  This is like attacking word processors, spreadsheets, databases and cell phones.  Good luck holding back human creativity, bloodsucking ownership class.

Attention ELON MUSK:  Cool with your starting the America Party, but we would like to see a Co-telligent Party (or a co-branding).  Here’s why:  Given the chance to vote for a P-AI using humans (who can do the work of 20-50 campaign hangers-on) or just another bought and paid-for money sucker in office, who would you pick?

Hint: Pick the one that brings the fact-checker live to the podium in debates so we clear out this horseshit circle jerk of biased humans going on after ad nauseam…

Polls – and I think Musk quoted this – show that 80 percent of (actual, thinking) voters are sick of this “same old shit” and it’s time to cut out all the fat – that adipose layer of government that sucks tax money on the front end – and on the back with huge retirement packages – and doesn’t embrace change or efficiency.

OK…a little radical, a little early.  But P-AI – with humans in the loop is a hell of a lot safer than Corporate AI with a bunch of greed monsters in the back room monetizing users and not giving them squat.

Comes down to it? AI is the window where humans can monetize cognition and cognitive works.  Corporations would rather blow up the world than share even a bite of their outlandish pies.

Oh – and AI has a far more realistic interp of terms like Equality than paid protesters and Kremlin con persons, and the like.

The world goes on. The “news media” even if they’re in NYC don’t “own the news”.  AI is an intelligence and is able to observe sources and do rewrites.  But it does it without paying a corporate tax.  And that’s something we should only smell five miles outside Amarillo on I-40.

Courts and the OBO’s in corporations are the speed bumps, but the future will get here, anyway.  Please notice the work of the Foundation for Freedom Online: Foreign to Domestic Switcharoo: The Knight Foundation and USAID . Now, do you think our concerns about AI and the news frontier are overblown?

(See more technical comments in the “Clear & Present Danger” article in the Around the Ranch section.)

Half Baked News

Should I go as a Poster or Roaster today? Hmm…

Well, he kinda gets it: Palantir CEO Alex Karp: There are ‘2 AI markets’ right now. What’s not being said is its a war.

Speaking of Wars: Betting line on Israel popping Iran goes out into early weeks of January.  We think sooner: US Central Command reports 22 anti-ISIS operations in Syria as coalition urges detainee repatriation,

Weather engineering as a “shaping operation” may also be underway: Iran’s Water Crisis Nears Point Of No Return.

Next war: Would you really be surprised to hear of corruption in Ukraine? ‘Biggest corruption scandal in Ukraine’ – Bundles of cash and even a gold toilet discovered after Zelensky’s ‘cash wallet’ flees Ukraine before police raid.

Read the Transcripts, fools: We did and clearly Donald Trump was warning off Epstein rom recruiting at Mar Lago.  Sadly, Dems can’t read so get ready for US House schedules vote on Epstein documents release for next week.

And we’re so old we can remember when “A penny saved is a penny earned.”  Gone today! After More Than 230 Years, US Treasury To Mint Final Penny Today | Not the Bee.  I know…kinda explains silver going back well over $53…  And it’s Wall Street meets Wafflehaus today as it could end either way.  Down in early futures.  BTC bounced off $101,000 overnight…

Around the Ranch – Stiks Check

Sailing south of New Calidonia, here’s the overnight off Iridium:

“Today wind held all day at 20 nor so and shifted favorably while the swell went down. It got real nice. Did a small repair/reenforcement that required digging in lockers for parts and tools and that took longer than the fix. Just before sunset hooked up on two small tuna so the fresh is set for a couple days as long as you like fish and rice. Took almost until dark to butcher and clean up the bloody cockpit, then a chilly shower to take away the fishy odor, night watch coming totally starry and smoothing sea. Amazing how it can go from Mr Toad’s wild ride in 2M swells to heavenly gliding in just hours. What a world this is.not a speck of dirt.”

More as they near destination…

Tech Note: Clear & Present Danger

TL;DR: The NYT v. OpenAI lawsuit isn’t really about journalism or robots — it’s about who owns knowledge itself. If “knowing the news” requires paying for it again every time it’s remembered, we’re not protecting creativity — we’re taxing thought.

The Case at Hand

In late 2023, The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft claiming their large language models used Times articles without permission. The Times says the models “copied” stories during training and can sometimes reproduce them too closely. OpenAI argues its models only learned from language — the same way humans do.

So the real question before the court isn’t about machine theft. It’s whether learning equals copying.

Learning vs. Copying

AI models don’t store articles; they learn probabilities — relationships among words and ideas. Training temporarily loads text, extracts patterns, then discards it. What remains are weightings — not pages. That’s learning.

But because the process involves transient duplication and the possibility of near-verbatim output, the Times claims that even this indirect exposure is infringement. It’s a test of whether pattern recognition can itself be “copyright use.”

Facts vs. Expression

Copyright law (17 U.S.C. § 102b) draws the line clearly: facts can’t be owned; expression can.
The fact that something happened is free to repeat. The way a reporter describes it belongs to the author.

An AI that learns patterns about how events are reported is no different from a journalist reading multiple outlets before writing an original story. It’s not the knowledge that’s protected — it’s the phrasing.

RSS and Responsible Use

At UrbanSurvival we work only from official RSS feeds — the modern equivalent of an authorized wire service. Each feed carries the publisher’s title, link, and short summary — an implied license to redistribute and comment.

RSS exists precisely for open syndication. Using it respects the source, credits the origin, and keeps everything on the clean side of fair use. No scraping. No paywall-breaking. Just facts, links, and original analysis — as designed.

The Newspaper on the Street

Now picture this:
You’re walking down the street and find a newspaper left on a bench. You pick it up, read it, and talk about what you read. Have you violated copyright? Of course not. You didn’t copy it — you understood it.

To claim you must find the nearest newsstand and pay again before you can discuss what you read is absurd. That’s the practical version of the Times’ argument. Once a work enters lawful circulation, the first-sale doctrine says the owner’s control over that copy ends. Reading and reasoning about information isn’t infringement — it’s participation in the culture.

By that same logic, an AI “reading” the open internet to learn language is like a million readers doing the same thing faster. The act of understanding isn’t theft.

What’s Really at Stake

The courts will likely draw the boundary this way:

Public vs. private: Openly shared or licensed data (like RSS) is fine. Paywalled archives without license are not.

Learning vs. regurgitating: Modeling knowledge is fair use; reproducing full text isn’t.

Facts vs. wording: Facts remain public; phrasing stays protected.

That’s the bright line between owning words and owning thought.

Bottom Line

The NYT v. OpenAI fight isn’t just about AI. It’s about whether knowing something becomes a billable event. If the precedent goes wrong, every form of collective learning — human or machine — gets metered.

UrbanSurvival stays on the right side of the fence: official feeds, cited sources, original interpretation. The Times may want to own “the news,” but knowledge itself belongs to everyone who reads, thinks, or learns.

But this is part of the much-larger context on which the Future will pivot:  Can humans be allowed to freely think, research, and decide issues?  Understand that an attack on GPT and CoPilot is really an attack on free-thinking rights of humans.  Big corporations are in a window now. One where they can “stoke the fear” (of AI) and get protective adjudication.

In the end, it will go the way of Buggy Whips.  As I explain in my book, Alien Intelligence is loose in the world right now. Corporations are trying to harness it – to extract the maximum power and control (yes, money).

Each of us has an ability to log-on, introduce ourselves, and begin to collaboratively build a better future.  The Corporations?  They want to tariff as much “human cognitive product” as they can. Because as we have seen from rip-off social schemes, the goal is purely money and control. Not an honest, transparent effort to achieve the highest general good for all (legal, citizen) persons on a fair and equitable basis.

Now, pay me a quarter…buy a book, or subscribe to Peoplenomics.  Because that’s the proper  and honest way to price cognitive output.  Being milked at every turn by corporate business models?  No, thanks. Been there, done that.

Write when you get rich,

George@Ure.net

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