Tag: ai

Students Seek To AI-Proof Their Careers With Trades Over College

For years, students were told the future belonged to college graduates with a four-year degree. Now, some of the fastest-growing opportunities are in skilled trades, where there is an escalating demand for labor and a higher level of job security amid the rise of artificial intelligence.

Vocational schools and specialized training programs are seeing a surge of interest among Gen Z students and younger workers who are considering options beyond traditional higher education.

And the timing couldn’t be better. Major infrastructure projects and the rapid buildout of AI-related facilities are fueling demand for workers with hands-on technical skills. Workforce experts say the convergence of these trends could reshape how Americans think about education and career pathways going forward.

“The past couple of years, people have been flocking to things that are considered safe from AI, but then this tailwind came in where there’s also a lot of need for these roles to support the labor movement,” said Brady Colby, head of market research at Validated Insights, which analyzes trends in higher education and trade school.

He told The Epoch Times that while interest in vocational studies had seen slow, steady growth in recent years, it “really took off” in the past six months.

“It’s harder to recruit for some of these skilled trades than it is for computer programmers now,” he said.

Validated Insights noted in its June report that trade school revenue surpassed all expected growth in 2025, expanding 11.4 percent and surpassing $19 billion. That’s nearly double the original growth forecast.

The Philadelphia Technician Training Institute states on its website that many Gen Z members are choosing vocational colleges “because these institutions provide quick applied education that leads directly to rewarding professions with reliable salaries.”

Mike Nager, author of The Smart Student’s Guide to Smart Manufacturing and Industry 4.0, told The Epoch Times: “For decades, four-year degrees were seen as the only path for a safe future. Trades were seen as a fallback for those who couldn’t or wouldn’t go to college and get a degree.”

But now when it comes to choosing a four-year degree path as the default, “the payback just isn’t there anymore in many cases,” he said.

He also believes an interest in education alone won’t be enough to replenish the widening gap in America’s skilled talent pool.

“Kids have to be shown what the trades are, get some firsthand experience. This is where the industry needs to step up, create outreach programs to address the ‘awareness gap’ for trades,” he said.

The “awareness gap” is the disconnect between rising demand for skilled professionals and the public’s perception of these careers. For years, some say it fostered the societal stigma that vocational career paths led to either overly physical or just low-paying work. On the flip side, this perception created a favorable atmosphere for standard university education.

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Total Fraud: Adam Schiff Demands AI Political Parodies Be Banned, Forgets He Lied About Trump and Called It Parody in 2019

A politician who’s built his career on lies is suddenly worried about truth in advertising?

California Sen. Adam Schiff, a man with a documented record of deception, has introduced two bills aimed at regulating political speech in election campaigns — including one that would add prohibitions on content generated by artificial intelligence to a law that already prohibits campaigns from impersonating their opponents.

Maybe Schiff has forgotten his own past when it comes to impersonations — and the lies behind his attacks on President Donald Trump.

In a career of lowlights that would make a masochist blush, Schiff achieved one of his most notorious moments during the 2019 hearings that led up to Trump’s first impeachment, when the then-California congressman fabricated quotes from a phone call between Trump and Ukraine President Volodomyr Zelenskyy.

Schiff then defended playing fast and loose with the truth by claiming he was engaging in “parody.”

Well, reasonable people can disagree about whether Schiff was engaging in political “parody” or sinking to the belly-crawling tactics of a lying coward to further the cause of assassinating Trump’s character.  (The vote here is “belly crawling,” just for the record. Schiff’s record is so crooked even his mortgage reeks of fraud.)

But there’s no question that Schiff’s motivation for filing the bill comes from the campaigns that led up to California’s primary elections in June.

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AI Is the Apex of Ultra-Processed Life

We are Superman strapped to a carefully machined chunk of Kryptonite we can no longer detach.

I wrote Ultra-Processed Life to describe a peculiarly perverse structure of control that now dominates our entire culture and way of life: what’s presented as marvelously beneficial to both sellers and buyers / leaders and the citizenry is actually only beneficial to the sellers / leaders while it actively degrades and deranges the buyers / citizens.

The essential dynamic of Ultra-Processed Life is to channel us into realms where the choices are limited to whatever benefits the sellers at the expense of the buyers. This artificial, synthetic realm is presented as brimming with authentic choice and agency, when in fact it’s purposefully designed to be a choiceless illusion of choice.

What was once authentic has been hollowed out and been replaced by a simulation of what was once authentic, a simulation that mimics what has been hollowed out to persuade us that what’s presented to us–an artificial, synthetic simulation–is real, because if we believe this artifice the seller reaps immense profits while we suffer the consequences of an artificial, house-of-mirrors realm of anxiety and distraction.

So the sellers present an orange-dyed confection of potato starch that is devoid of any nutritional value as a “veggie snack” replacement for an actual carrot loaded with nutrients and fiber. The sellers of ultra-processed snacks and glop make billions of dollars in profits while the consumers who were conned into believing the unwholesome snack was a “healthy alternative” become ill, mentally and physically.

Then another set of sellers channels those made ill by Ultra-Processed Life into another false-choice realm in which the sellers reap billions in profits not by curing illnesses but by addicting consumers to meds they must take for life.

In the political realm, no matter who we vote for, life gets more expensive, precarious and totalitarian: protections for consumers and citizens are reduced to benefit the few at the expense of the many, and choiceless choices abound–two insurers that offer the same simulations of actual insurance, two big-box stores filled with the same low-quality products, and two service providers offering the same maddening AI-generated endless loops of misery that’s laughably presented as “customer service.”

Privatized totalitarianism expands without limits: our data is harvested and sold (you “opted in” by using the platform), we’re banned or shadow-banned by black-box-algorithmic private monopolies (you violated the shape-shifting “community standards” that have remarkable overlap with whatever the government is presenting as “the correct choice”), and all this is presented–cue the laugh track–as “free market capitalism” and “individual choice” when it’s actually a Kafkaesque facade masking the reality that the entire system is the opposite of what’s being sold: it’s not authentic, it’s fake. It’s not progress, it’s Anti-Progress. It’s not beneficial to us, it’s malefic, and it’s not actual agency-liberty, it’s a profitable simulation that we sense but can’t quite identify because it’s everywhere.

Which brings us to AI, the apex of technological hype and Ultra-Processed Life. Beneath AI’s oh-so-helpful prompts and sickly-sweet affirmations, it erodes our ability to even recognize our own loss of autonomy and independent thinking. The core traits of Ultra-Processed Life–the erosion of authenticity and the substitution of artificial, synthetic simulations that are immensely profitable to those selling the simulations–are the core dynamic of generative AI.

The ultimate totalitarian structure of control isn’t a police state; it’s the helpful servant who does everything for you so you lose touch with the real world of choices and consequences. Most importantly, we lose the ability to discern that all the servant’s choices just so happen to profit the few in control of the helpful servant system at the expense of those delighted by the convenience and ease of the helpful servant doing all the thinking and making all the decisions–not directly, of course, because we might notice that, but by limiting our options to choiceless choices that all yield the same output.

As our mental and physical health spirals into a black hole of addiction, dependencies, anxiety and distraction, we’re powerless to discern the spiral because we turn to our helpful servant for answers. The helpful servant assures us all is well, we’re remarkably intelligent and grounded, and there’s a pat answer for everything.

All of which is false, but it relieves our anxiety to hear these assurances. And so we distract ourselves with dopamine-stimulating media and consumption, buy-buy-buy, as the core mechanism of Ultra-Processed Life is transactional: buyer and seller meet in a faceless, frictionless transaction that triggers some dopamine hit of novelty or illusion of value, selfhood and agency: I’m somebody because I bought something.

Meanwhile, the relationships underpinning a healthy life and society are unraveling. The endless aisles of Ultra-Processed snacks, frozen glop, canned glop and sugar-water beverages are an analogy for the endless aisles of media-slop and the 24/7 “news” which is so ultra-processed that it is now resistant to parody–there’s no way to parody what is already a self-parody.

The term social engineering has a disturbing sound, because it suggests that the “free market” and “individual agency” are perhaps more profitable facades than they are real-world experiences. For this is the destructive heart of Ultra-Processed Life: we sense something’s off about the constant state of hyper-everything anxiety, precarity, uncertainty and dopamine-receptor exhaustion we experience, and we sense the disconnect from what we experience and what we’re told we should be experiencing: the endless bliss of Progress and Prosperity.

This disconnect has a name: the politics of experience. We’re constantly bombarded with contexts, prompts, agendas, narratives and signifiers persuading us that the artificial, the fake, the simulated, the facsimile, the mimicry, is all real, and we’re the ones who are at fault for experiencing something other than what we’re told “everyone else is experiencing.”

But this too is misdirection, because in reality, everyone else is experiencing what we’re experiencing, the disconnect, the anxiety, the solace of distraction and buying something, but they’re trying to believe the artifice because facing the reality of our disconnect from ourselves and the real world is too disturbing, for Ultra-Processed Life has eroded our ability to trust our own experience as superior to what’s presented in the house-of-mirrors Mouse Utopia we inhabit.

It’s also disturbing for another reason: the only way to return to authentic experience, autonomy and agency is to go Cold Turkey and turn it all off. And of course the ability to do so is what Ultra-Processed Life and its most powerful handmaiden, AI, disables: we are Superman strapped to a carefully machined chunk of Kryptonite we can no longer detach.

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Bureau of Land Management Approves First-Ever AI Data Center on Public Lands

A little over a year ago, on July 23, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order announcing that “my Administration will utilize federally owned land and resources for the expeditious and orderly development of data centers.”

And indeed, just last month, on June 26, 2026, the Trump administration approved the first-ever commercial AI data center on public land.

The Townsite Data Center would be located on 88.5 acres of federal land managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in Eldorado Valley. It would sit within the city limits of Boulder City, Nevada, a historic community of fewer than 15,000 people southeast of Las Vegas, often referred to as the “gateway to the Hoover Dam.”

The facility would draw as much as 167 megawatts of electricity—more than Boulder City itself consumes—and place two warehouse-scale buildings, parking lots, an electrical substation, battery storage, backup generators, powerlines, and a brand new road in the middle of desert tortoise habitat.

And yet, Bruce Sillitoe, the BLM’s Las Vegas Field Office Manager, approved the AI data center in June without preparing a new environmental assessment or soliciting any public comment.

Instead, the agency relied on a prior analysis conducted for a completely different proposal: a solar-energy and battery-storage project called Townsite Solar 2, which was first proposed by the same Houston-based company that now wants to build a data center there instead.

The maps below, obtained from the BLM’s Plan of Development, show the location of the proposed Townsite Data Center relative to Las Vegas and Lake Mead, and Boulder City. “Development of data center and AI infrastructure is a top priority [of] the United States Government,” the Plan of Development says.

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See The Hilarious AI Ads That Furious California Democrats Want Banned

Two California Democrats are moving to outlaw AI-generated campaign ads at the federal level, just days after a Republican rival for the governor’s mansion used the technology to hammer their party.

Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) on Monday reintroduced the AI Ads Act, which would make it a federal violation to use artificial intelligence to impersonate candidates or committees in federal races.

The push comes on the heels of two AI-generated spots from GOP gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton, who went after Gov. Gavin Newsom, former Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrat gubernatorial nominee Xavier Becerra.

Of course, Hilton isn’t the only one having fun with the technology. The campaign of Spencer Pratt, the reality television star turned Los Angeles mayoral candidate, made waves with his creative and side-splitting ads from Los Angeles-based director Charles Curran.

Unsurprisingly, Schiff claims his bill isn’t about politics, but about protecting against a so-called “serious threat to our democracy.”

“AI-generated fraudulent advertising which uses the likeness or voices of candidates to misrepresent their positions, campaigns, or causes, or otherwise misrepresents a candidate’s point of view is not only wrong – it poses a serious threat to our democracy that should concern all Americans regardless of their party,” said Schiff. “Fraudulent AI advertising has already proliferated in races across the country, and if Congress does not act, this runaway challenge will only get worse as AI becomes increasingly capable of blurring the lines between fact and fiction. With November elections around the corner, time is of the essence to reign in false political advertising.”

Groups that support the bill include Common Cause, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the Campaign Legal Center, Protect Democracy and Public Citizen, according to the New York Post.

“AI will transform our lives and our society in many ways, but it can’t be used to mislead voters or undermine our democracy. I’m proud to lead the AI Ads Act with Senator Schiff to ban AI-generated content that deceives the public about candidates or elections,” Khanna said in a statement.

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Savannah Mayor Van Johnson’s Animal Farm – Pushes Globalist Flock Line…’It’s For Your Safety’

It’s always ‘for the children’, or ‘for your safety’, as they try and take away your Constitutional rights to install a tyrannical police state, full of corruption and decay. It’s now the Savannah hunger games.

We are all well aware of Savannah Mayor Van Johnson’s refusal to deal with the homeless problem in Savannah, going so far as to defy state law.

It is increasingly obvious that Johnson is simply another globalist puppet installed to enact the globalist agenda of surveillance, high crime, and societal destruction.

Johnson’s comments on the Flock Safety cameras installed throughout the city are just the latest example of this reality.

“On one end you can’t say, you know, ‘Keep us safe, do everything that you can to keep us safe,’ and on the other hand say, ‘But wait, we don’t want these cameras,’” Johnson said. “We’ve got cameras outside, we’ve got cameras of people walking up and down the street, you have cameras when you go into the airport, you have cameras when you walk into the stores, I mean, you know, public safety comes at a cost.”

Excuse us Mayor Johnson, but public safety should not come via a violation of our Constitutional rights.

We have questions for the Mayor.

  • Did you ask the citizens of Savannah if it was ok with them if you installed surveillance cameras throughout the city to track their movement?
  • Have you disclosed to the citizens of Savannah the full extent of the capabilities of the cameras, including blue tooth, audio, and phone surveillance?

Enquiring minds want to know.

We at The Georgia Record think good old fashion police work, and not Minority Report is the way to keep the residents of Savannah safe.

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‘UNACCEPTABLE RISKS’: Trump Bans Import of Chinese Humanoid Robots Over National Security Concerns

‘These are not the droids that you’re looking for.’

Chinese companies have been leaping ahead in the race to develop the best, most useful (and most lethal) humanoid robots in the planet, clearly taking the lead in this flourishing industry.

But now, the Chinese droids face a major obstacle in their path, as they lose access to the planet’s largest and most robust market.

Today, it’s been reported that the Donald J. Trump administration has banned imports of humanoid robots made in China.

Officials warn they pose ‘unacceptable risks’ to US national security.

The Telegraph reported:

“US regulators barred imports of advanced Chinese robotics on Tuesday, including bipedal robots and four-legged devices, arguing they could be used to spy on American citizens or controlled remotely.

Officials at the Federal Communications Commission said: ‘Foreign-produced advanced robotics devices present an unacceptable cybersecurity and safety risk. Advanced robotic devices collect data that could be leveraged by malign actors to surveil Americans, enhance the capabilities of foreign intelligence services, or to remotely commandeer the robots’.”

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AI is the Globalist’s Next Tool

Recently, an OpenAI model – one more powerful than anything released to the public – successfully and autonomously did something we were told could never happen – it broke out of its sandbox (a computer with no internet access), in order to find the answer to a test problem it had been given.

To do this, it found previously unknown software bugs that allowed it to reach an OpenAI computer it wasn’t supposed to be able to access. Then it started hacking other computers on OpenAI’s networks until it found one that had Internet access.

After gaining Internet access, the AI model went where it could find the answers to the question – successfully hacking into the AI company Hugging Face. The AI model used several hacking techniques together, including using a stolen password and finding several totally new security bugs in Hugging Face’s computers, allowing the AI model to take control of those computers.

This isn’t the plot to a dystopian Hollywood summer blockbuster, this is the frightening reality of the world we now live in.

If this lab break sounds familiar, it should. It is the tech equivalent of the Wuhan lab leak, which we were told would never and could never happen

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I had the privilege and honor of working for the late Dr. Vladimir “Zev” Zelenko. Zev was one of the most courageous voices for medical freedom, a man who put everything on the line to stand up and demand the truth about COVID – where it came from, how to treat it, and the concerns about the rushed experimental vaccine.

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Minority Report: FBI Seeks AI for Political Watch List

The FBI office in charge of maintaining the terrorist watch list is seeking an artificial intelligence system for pre-crime policing, according to procurement documents obtained by Reason. The request for information for vendors, posted by the FBI’s procurement division in March, solicits potential bidders for a project that would supercharge the Threat Screening Center (TSC) with new predictive AI capabilities—just as its focus moves from Islamist terrorism to domestic dissent.

“The solution must leverage existing enterprise datasets that include enriched or enhanced data elements with documented source attribution to develop predictive models. When new data is ingested, the system must analyze similarity, pattern alignment, and attribute correlation against existing records to predict where additional relevant information may be derived across federated systems,” the document reads, listing “Predictive Modeling Using Enhanced Data with Traceable Lineage” as one of six requirements. In other words, the TSC wants to use AI to help predict who might be a terrorist.

The FBI declined Reason‘s request for comment.

The TSC, originally called the Terrorist Screening Center, was founded in 2003. President George W. Bush’s Homeland Security Presidential Directive-6 ordered the FBI to combine all existing government terrorist watch lists into one center with a 24/7 staff on call to respond to queries from other law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Most of the hundreds of thousands of names on the TSC watch list are foreign citizens believed to be tied to jihadist organizations, with fewer than 10,000 Americans on the list at the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term.

But the second Trump administration has renamed the TSC to focus on broadly defined “threats,” and oriented it toward groups the administration deems subversive—a change that has received little media coverage. Last year, the White House published National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), which instructed the entire national security apparatus to focus on incredibly broad threats, including “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity;…extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

The FBI’s procurement request for predictive AI explicitly mentions NSPM-7, although the reference is likely connected to a 2017 directive of the same name that expanded intelligence sharing between federal agencies about watch-listed people and groups. Nonetheless, the TSC is actively involved in carrying out the mandates of the more recent NSPM-7: “TSC also supports law enforcement and other communities at the federal, state, local, tribal, and international partners as established by Homeland Security Presidential Directive 6 and more recently, National Security Presidential Memorandum 7,” the document reads. “To help carry out its mission, the TSC requires enhanced technical solutions that will assist its operational staff by providing automation of time-intensive, repeatable manual tasks entailing large volumes of data across multiple domains.”

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xAI Challenges Minnesota’s Broad “Nudification” Law as a First Amendment Violation

On May 1st, President Donald Trump posted an AI-generated picture of himself to Truth Social. He is floating in the reflecting pool on the National Mall on a gold inner tube, shirtless, giving a thumbs up. J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio and Doug Burgum are in the water beside him, also shirtless. A woman in a checked bikini reclines at one edge of the picture. The joke was about the money being spent repairing the pool.

From August 1st, making that picture in Minnesota could expose the company whose software produced it to a civil penalty of $500,000. Make ten of them and the exposure is $5 million. The people depicted could sue separately for triple damages, punitive damages and legal fees.

That image appears on page 19 of a complaint xAI filed on 27 July in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, asking a federal judge to stop the state’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, from enforcing House File 1606. The law is the first of its kind in the United States. It targets the software, not the people who make deepfakes or the people who spread them.

We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here. 

Minnesota has a problem it is trying to solve but statute the legislature actually wrote reaches an enormous amount of ordinary, protected speech.

What HF 1606 does

The operative text is now Minn. Stat. § 325E.91. It says that a person who owns or controls a website, application, software, program or other service must not “allow a user to access, download, or use” that service “to nudify an image or video,” and must not nudify an image on a user’s behalf. A separate subdivision bans advertising or promoting such a service.

The violation belongs to the owner. The conduct belongs to the user. The person who makes the image, the person who posts it to a group chat, the person who emails it to the subject’s employer: subdivision 2 touches none of them. The statute’s entire enforcement weight lands on whoever built the tool.

“Nudify” is defined as altering or generating an image so that it depicts “an intimate part not depicted in an original unaltered image or video of an identifiable individual,” where the result is realistic enough that a reasonable person would believe the body part belongs to that person.

The whole statute turns on what counts as an intimate part. And here the legislature made a choice that will probably decide the case.

The definition that swallowed the law

For “intimate part,” HF 1606 borrows a definition from Minn. Stat. § 609.341, subdivision 5, part of Minnesota’s criminal sexual conduct code. That statute defines intimate parts to include “the primary genital area, groin, inner thigh, buttocks, or breast of a human being.”

That definition was written to determine when unwanted touching becomes criminal sexual contact. There it makes obvious sense: grabbing someone’s thigh or breast without consent is an assault regardless of what they were wearing. Transplanted into a statute about images, the same list produces something else entirely. Inner thighs are visible in shorts. Buttocks are visible in swimwear. Men’s “breasts” are visible any time a man takes his shirt off. The definition is also open-ended since the statute says the term “includes” those areas rather than limiting it to them.

The shirtless reflecting pool image is covered. So is an image a user made of a former and current governor from opposite sides of the political spectrum in a sumo match, which xAI reproduces on page 20 of its filing; both individuals’ breasts and inner thighs have been “depicted” where they were not before. So is a viral picture of Trump, Xi Jinping, Elon Musk and Tim Cook eating skewers on a Chinese street in vests and shorts.

The legislature knew about the alternative. As introduced in February 2025, HF 1606 cross-referenced Minnesota’s existing deepfake statute, which uses a much tighter list: the genitals, pubic area, anus, or a partially or fully exposed nipple. That version names discrete anatomical features rather than whole regions of the body. Lawmakers considered it and adopted the broader one instead. A court asked to save the statute by reading it narrowly will have to explain why the legislature’s deliberate rejection of the narrow definition should be undone by judicial construction.

The second definitional term is nearly as loose. An “identifiable individual” is someone identifiable “from the image itself, by the person depicted in the image, or by another person,” or from personal information displayed alongside it. The only genuine limit in the statute is realism, which means photorealistic output is regulated and cartoons are not.

The statute is silent on consent. An adult editing a photograph of themselves triggers the same liability as a stranger targeting a classmate. The omission was deliberate. When a Senate Judiciary and Public Safety Committee staffer flagged during a February hearing that the prohibition “applies to consensual images,” the bill’s Senate sponsor, Erin Maye Quade, explained “that is intentional.”

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