They Updated Grok. It's Very Eager to Please

They Updated Grok. It's Very Eager to Please

The folks at Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, are “excited” to introduce a new version of their flagship model. Grok 4.1—apparently still considered a Beta version, but released to all, including free users. 

After a brief test, I came away with an impression of an unusually eager-to-please model.

Trump White House ballroom demolition work sparks anger

Trump White House ballroom demolition work sparks anger


White House calls Trump ballroom demolition work furor ‘manufactured outrage’
Published Tue, Oct 21 202510:39 AM EDTUpdated Tue, Oct 21 20254:57 PM EDT

Spencer Kimball@spencekimball
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Key Points
Workers began demolishing parts of the White House’s East Wing to prepare for the construction of a ballroom.
The Treasury Department warned employees not to share photos of the East Wing as excavators tear down parts of the building.
President Donald Trump has said he and private donors will finance the cost of the 90,000-square-foot, $250 million ballroom.


Workers demolish the facade of the East Wing of the White House on Oct. 20, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Kevin Dietsch | Getty Images


The White House on Tuesday dismissed anger over the demolition of parts of the building’s East Wing to build a new ballroom at the behest of President Donald Trump.

“In the latest instance of manufactured outrage, unhinged leftists and their Fake News allies are clutching their pearls over President Donald J. Trump’s visionary addition of a grand, privately funded ballroom to the White House,” the White House said in a statement.


The White House called the ballroom “a bold, necessary addition that echoes the storied history of improvements and additions” by prior presidents.

Photos of construction workers tearing down parts of the building went viral online Monday, triggering public anger over the planned 90,000-square-foot, $250 million ballroom.

“You probably hear the beautiful sound of construction to the back,” Trump said during a Rose Garden event Tuesday. “That’s music to my ears. I love that sound. Other people don’t like it. I love it.”

In July, Trump said that construction of the ballroom “won’t interfere with the current building.”

“It’ll be near it but not touching it, and pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of,” Trump said of the White House at the time.


The Treasury Department has told staff not to share photos of the East Wing, a spokesperson confirmed to CNBC on Tuesday. The department is located next to the White House, and has a clear view of the demolition work.

“Carelessly shared photographs of the White House complex during this process could potentially reveal sensitive items, including security features or confidential structural details,” the Treasury spokesperson told CNBC.

“Out of an abundance of caution, we have urged our employees to avoid sharing these images.”

The Wall Street Journal first reported Treasury’s message to employees.

“Trump’s billionaire ballroom. This is a disgrace. Welcome to the Second Gilded Age,” Rep. Darren Soto, D-Fla., tweeted Monday, above a photo from The Washington Post showing the demolition work.

Trump has said that he and private donors will finance the construction of the ballroom.

Comcast, the current parent company of CNBC, was on a list of top donors to the ballroom’s construction. It is unclear how much Comcast and other donors contributed. CNBC will spin off from Comcast before the end of this year under a new parent company Versant.

 

Prop bets become ground zero for betting backlash

Matthieu Delaty/Getty Images

Real bets from last year’s Super Bowl: How many yards will Patrick Mahomes have? What songs will Kendrick Lamar perform? Will Travis Kelce’s mom show some skin? “Prop bets”—wagers on specific events within a game—can be silly or downright ridiculous, but, according to the Wall Street Journal, they’re a major driver of gambling revenue…along with being a major source of heartburn for sports leagues. Easier to fix: Since prop bets often only involve one player—rather than a whole team—they’re easier to rig. For example: NBA players Terry Rozier and Jontay Porter are accused of leaving games early to make sure their stats stayed below a certain level, having tipped off bettors beforehand. Cleveland Guardians pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz were recently indicted for telling bettors when they would throw certain pitches. Leagues are trying to quell controversies and prevent similar scandals so fans don’t lose faith in the integrity of the sports and direct their eyeballs elsewhere. The NBA is considering changing how players report injuries, and the MLB is working to limit bets on individual pitches. Harder to fix: But changes can be a tough sell to sportsbooks, which use prop bets to incentivize users to place higher-paying parlays, which include multiple bets (and more chances to lose). Big picture: Americans bet close to $150 billion on sports last year and the sports betting industry netted a record $13.7 billion, according to the American Gaming Association.—BC

$2 billion name change

 

Prime number: $2 billion name change

Bill Clark/Getty Images

People who’ve changed their last name after getting married know that it can be a painstaking process with a lot of paperwork. But at least it doesn’t cost more than the GDP of the Solomon Islands. President Trump’s directive to change the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War will cost up to $2 billion, NBC News reported, citing senior congressional staffers. The change is a lot more complicated than the average rebrand: Thousands of signs, placards, letterheads, and other items at US military bases around the world need to be replaced. All of the department’s digital code—including for external sites and internal, classified systems—must be rewritten. The move comes as Trump has pushed to cut back federal spending and Secretary of Defense War Pete Hegseth has said he plans to cut thousands of jobs at the Pentagon. The Trump administration has already changed the department’s website and social media to reflect the new name, but it won’t become official until Congress approves it.—AE

$7.4 billion Purdue Pharma and Sackler opioid settlement

 

Bankruptcy judge approves $7.4 billion Purdue Pharma opioid settlement. The judge said he would sign off on the deal next week, which will allow the OxyContin-maker to exit bankruptcy and settle lawsuits over the opioid’s impact against the company and the Sackler family that owns it. The decision on the latest plan comes after the Supreme Court rejected an earlier version because it let the Sackler family entirely off the hook for future opioid-related claims, even though some plaintiffs had not agreed to the settlement. In the new version, the Sacklers will contribute up to $7 billion over 15 years, and creditors who do not consent to the deal can still sue in civil court.

Quebec since 1995: decline or progress?

by Luc Godbout, Suzie St-Cerny 
Originally published on Policy Options
October 30, 2025

(Version française disponible ici)

The 30^th anniversary of the Quebec sovereignty referendum provides an ideal opportunity to look back at the evolution of several socioeconomic and public finance indicators.

Our research team at the Chaire de recherche en fiscalité et en finances publiques (CFFP), took this opportunity to paint a picture of the progress made and the persistent challenges that shape the lives of Quebecers.

This exercise does not claim to be exhaustive: the choices presented reflect our areas of expertise and the availability of statistical data.

A declining demographic weight

Over the past 30 years, Quebec's demographic weight within Canada has continued its downward trend, falling by 2.7 percentage points from 24.6 per cent to 21.9 per cent.

Statistics Canada data show that population growth in Quebec between 1995 and 2024 accounted for only 16 per cent of Canada's population growth. This proportion is slightly higher for natural increase (19 per cent) than for net migration (15 per cent). In other words, Quebec's population grew more slowly than in the rest of Canada, mainly due to lower net migration.

A narrowing gap in living standards

Quebec's share of the Canadian economy also declined by 1.5 percentage points over the same period, but to a lesser extent than its demographic weight, reflecting a slightly greater relative increase in wealth in Quebec than in the rest of Canada.

Since 1995, Quebec's real GDP per capita has grown by 42 per cent compared to 34 per cent for the rest of Canada, narrowing Quebec's unfavourable GDP per capita gap from 18 per cent in 1995 to 13 per cent in 2024.

Employment growth, especially among women

The employment rate for 15- to 64-year-olds in Quebec has not only caught up with Canada as a whole, but has now surpassed it. While it lagged by 4.2 percentage points in 1995, it now exceeds the Canadian rate by 2.6 points. Consequently, the unemployment rate for this same group, which was initially higher in Quebec, is now below the Canadian average.

The decline in unemployment has been more pronounced in Quebec, with a drop of 6.1 percentage points, compared to 3.1 for all of Canada. As with other indicators in this analysis, these differences would be even more pronounced if we compared Quebec to the rest of Canada rather than to Canada as a whole, whose statistics are influenced by developments in Quebec.

This catch-up, like the positive gap in employment rates in 2024, is even more pronounced among women. The development of low-cost childcare services, launched in 1997, and the introduction of the Quebec Parental Insurance Plan in 2006 have contributed significantly to this trend. It should be noted that these two programs subsequently inspired Canadian public policy.

A more egalitarian Quebec...

Quebec’s Pay Equity Act passed in 1996 is one of several policies that have facilitated greater participation by women in the labour market and contributed to greater equality.

For example, the ratio of women's average hourly earnings to men's, which was already higher in Quebec in 1997, increased more sharply in Quebec (6.8 points) than in Canada as a whole (5.8 points), widening Quebec's lead.

In addition, the Institut de la statistique du Québec (ISQ) also showed that the ratio of hourly wages for mothers compared to fathers among parents whose youngest child was under 6 years of age in 2023 was significantly higher in Quebec (90 per cent) than in Ontario (82 per cent).

Quebec’s 2002 adoption of the Act to Combat Poverty and Social Exclusion should also be underlined. Several indicators highlight the progress made. Whether the social assistance rate, the after-tax low-income rate or after-tax inequality indicators, Quebec’s improvement has outpaced that of Canada.

The social assistance rate, which was higher in Quebec, is now lower than in Canada, showing an improvement of seven points in Quebec compared to 4.3 points for Canada as a whole.

When it comes to the percentage of the population living below the low-income cut-off level, the trend is similar: Quebec once had a higher rate and now has a lower rate. While the Canadian rate has remained virtually stable, Quebec has seen an improvement of 3.8 percentage points. Finally, in terms of inequality, Quebec was and remains less unequal than the rest of the country. The indicator even declined slightly in Quebec, while it rose slightly in Canada.

... but among the most heavily taxed

Government finances are heavily influenced by demographics, the economy, and the labour market. However, one key factor in comparing public finances is the tax burden, i.e., the weight of tax revenues collected by all levels of government (federal, Quebec, municipalities, Quebec Pension Plan) in Quebec's GDP.

This rate is higher in Quebec than in Canada as a whole. In addition, the CFFP’s taxation report, Bilan de la fiscalité au Québec, shows an upward trend between 1995 and 2023, from 37.5 per cent to 39.7 per cent. For Canada, the rate is stable for these two years (34.6 per cent and 34.9 per cent).

Ranked among a selection of countries (G7, Sweden, and the average of advanced OECD economies), the tax burden in Quebec remained in^4thplace for both years, while Canada fell from 6^th to 8^th place out of 10.

Rising health care spending

Focusing on the largest portfolio in terms of weight, health and social services expenditures accounted for 36 per cent of Quebec government spending in 1995-1996, and it rose to 41 per cent in 2024-2025. Public accounts show a similar trend for all provinces.

Data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information and the OECD allow us to compare the weight of public and private health spending in the economy for a selection of OECD countries. This share has increased everywhere, but more in the United Kingdom (5.4 percentage points), Japan (4.6), the United States (4.2), and Sweden (4.1) than in Quebec (3.5). Quebec has thus moved from fourth to second place for the highest share, while Canada as a whole has remained in the same position.

Change in budget balance

Another distinctive feature of Quebec is worth noting: the Balanced Budget Act, passed in 1996 in the wake of the 1995 referendum to strengthen Quebec's financial credibility. Despite revisions and two suspensions since its introduction, it remains an important anchor.

As a percentage of GDP, Quebec's budget balance has improved from -2.2 per cent in the 1995-1996 fiscal year to -1.2 per cent in 2024-2025, or -0.8 per cent before payments to the Generations Fund. For all provinces and territories combined, this ratio has improved from -1.4 per cent to -0.5 per cent.

Looking at the budget balance for all levels of government in Quebec, Statistics Canada data show an improvement in Quebec's balance, from -10.2 per cent of GDP in 1995 to -2.8 per cent in 2023. For Canada as a whole, this ratio went from a deficit of -5.2 per cent of GDP to a surplus of 0.1 per cent. On this basis, the improvement in the balance is greater in Quebec (7.2 points) than for Canada as a whole (5.6 points), even though a deficit remains.

Among select OECD countries, Quebec moved from the largest deficit to sixth place while Canada moved from sixth to the top spot.

Net debt declining

Another fiscal anchor for Quebec is the Act to Reduce the Debt and Establish the Generations Fund, passed in 2006. This Act has also been revised several times and, together with the Balanced Budget Act, has helped reduce the debt burden.

In 1997, Quebec’s net debt represented 45.8 per cent of GDP, well above the provincial average (29.1 per cent), and this remains the case in 2023 (38 per cent vs. 28.7 per cent). However, while the total net debt burden of the provinces has remained stable, Quebec's net debt burden has decreased, illustrating the effect of the laws.

Considering the net debt of all levels of government and public agencies in Quebec, including a portion of the federal debt, the 2023 ratio comes to between 52.5 per cent and 56.6 per cent of GDP, depending on whether the federal debt is apportioned by population, GDP, or tax revenue. This is the sixth highest net debt out of ten jurisdictions. For all levels of government in Canada combined, the figure is 14.4 per cent the second-lowest net debt overall.

The picture is very different when compared to 2001. While Sweden reduced its net debt by 22.4 percentage points, four countries saw this ratio increase by more than 50 points (France [51], the United States [59.7], the United Kingdom [61.2], and Japan [61.5]). Quebec, for its part, reduced its net debt, moving from third to sixth place among the group – a notable improvement. It should be noted that the IMF’s methodology for calculating Canada’s figure has changed, making comparisons over time impossible.

Vigilance remains essential

Looking back, we can see how far Quebec has come in terms of certain indicators. But what about the future? Demographic changes, including an aging population, continue to exert significant pressure on economic variables and public finances, more so than elsewhere in Canada.

Then, from a social perspective, the progress made is undeniable. However, we must remain vigilant, as further progress remains to be made, particularly in terms of housing and homelessness. Finally, the environmental challenge, which has not been addressed so far, remains crucial. Quebec has distinguished itself with its cap-and-trade emissions system, but some recently announced policy directions appear to undermine the anticipated progress.

In conclusion, while measuring the positive evolution of a number of indicators is certainly a useful exercise in taking stock of the progress made, it must above all fuel our determination to set new targets and continue to move forward.

Looking back, Quebec has clearly made significant strides on a number of indicators. But what lies ahead? Demographic shifts, particularly population aging, continue to put substantial pressure on economic variables and public finances – more so than elsewhere in Canada.

From a social perspective, progress has been undeniable. Yet vigilance is still required, as further gains remain to be made, especially in areas such as housing and homelessness.

Finally, the environmental challenge, not addressed until now, remains a crucial one. Quebec has set itself apart through its cap-and-trade emissions system, but some recently announced policy directions appear to be weakening anticipated progress.

Taking stock of positive trends across key indicators is indeed a useful exercise. But above all, it should strengthen our determination to set new goals and continue moving forward.

This article first appeared on Policy Options and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Venice Interactive Guide: Multi-language search eBook : Richardson, RG: Amazon.ca: Kindle Store

Venice Interactive Guide: Multi-language search eBook : Richardson, RG: Amazon.ca: Kindle Store

Venice Interactive Guide - Interactive city guide
Author: R.G.Richardson
All city guides now include:
Restaurant Guide
Beverage Guide
Career Guide
Real Estate Guide
This is a live interactive search guidebook with 13,300 presets that search for everything about your city. Pick and click on the icon, never goes out of date! Interactive internet pages!
You can search for events, jobs, spirits, restaurants, banks, hotels, transportation, shopping, apartments, condos, and sports. Find everything that is happening in the city!
In the guidebook, you look in the index of what you want to search and then you click on the button next to it and you instantly have your search items displayed.
All guides search in 10 languages.

Since 2003
eComTechnology ©2023
Assign Centre, ISBN Division
Library and Archives Canada
Author R.G. Richardson

Elon Musk’s Grokipedia contains copied/ripped from Wikipedia pages | The Verge

Elon Musk’s Grokipedia contains copied Wikipedia pages | The Verge

Elon Musk’s Grokipedia contains copied Wikipedia pages


Some of Grokipedia’s pages say that content is ‘adapted’ from Wikipedia.
by Jay Peters


Oct 27, 2025, 5:46 PM PDT


6464Comments (All New)


Image: Grokipedia

Jay Peters


is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.


xAI’s Grokipedia, its Wikipedia-like online encyclopedia, is now live. The similarities go deeper than expected.


Grokipedia’s design is pretty basic right now; like Wikipedia, the homepage is mostly just a big search bar, and entries resemble very basic Wikipedia entries, with headings, subheadings, and citations. I haven’t seen any photos on the site yet. Wikipedia lets users edit pages, but it doesn’t appear that users can currently do that on Grokipedia; a big edit button at the top only appeared on a few pages for me, and when I clicked the button, it only showed edits that had already been completed without specifying who is actually suggested or made the changes, and I wasn’t able to suggest changes of my own.


Entries also claim that Grok has fact-checked them — a controversial idea, given how large language models tend to make up false “facts” — and how long ago the “fact check” happened.

Screenshot: Grokipedia


However, despite Elon Musk promising that Grokipedia would be a “massive improvement” over Wikipedia, some articles appear to be cribbing information from Wikipedia. At the bottom of the page for the MacBook Air, for example, you can see this message: “The content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.” In some cases, the cribbing goes farther than a rewrite: I’ve also seen that message on pages for the PlayStation 5 and the Lincoln Mark VIII, and both of those pages are almost identical — word-for-word, line-for-line — to their Wikipedia counterparts.


“Even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist,” Lauren Dickinson, a spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that operates Wikipedia tells The Verge. You can read Dickinson’s full statement in full at the end of this article.

Image: Wikipedia (left), Grokipedia (right)

Image: Wikipedia (left), Grokipedia (right)


It’s not the first time xAI’s AI has been caught pointing to Wikipedia; last month, in response to an X user pointing out that Grok cites Wikipedia pages, Musk said that “we should have this fixed by end of year.”


Not all Grokipedia articles are based directly on Wikipedia ones, and some will be controversial.


While both sites have articles on climate change, for example, Wikipedia’s page points out that “There is a nearly unanimous scientific consensus that the climate is warming and that this is caused by human activities. No scientific body of national or international standing disagrees with this view.”


In Grokipedia’s entry, meanwhile, the word “unanimous” only appears in one paragraph: “Critics contend that claims of near-unanimous scientific consensus on anthropogenic causes dominating recent climate change overstate agreement due to selective categorization in literature reviews.” It suggests that the media and advocacy organizations like Greenpeace are “contributing to heightened public alarm,” and are part of “coordinated efforts to frame the issue as an existential imperative, influencing public discourse and policy without always grounding in proportionate empirical evidence.”


According to a ticker at the bottom of the homepage, Grokipedia has over 885,000 articles; Wikipedia currently maintains around 7 million English pages. However, this is an early version of Grokipedia — it has a v0.1 version number on the homepage.

RelatedWikipedia is under attack — and how it can survive


Here is Dickinson’s full statement:



We’re still in the process of understanding how Grokipedia works.

Since 2001, Wikipedia has been the backbone of knowledge on the internet. Hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, it remains the only top website in the world run by a nonprofit. Unlike newer projects, Wikipedia’s strengths are clear: it has transparent policies, rigorous volunteer oversight, and a strong culture of continuous improvement. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, written to inform billions of readers without promoting a particular point of view.

Wikipedia’s knowledge is – and always will be – human. Through open collaboration and consensus, people from all backgrounds build a neutral, living record of human understanding – one that reflects our diversity and collective curiosity. This human-created knowledge is what AI companies rely on to generate content; even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist.

Wikipedia’s nonprofit independence — with no ads and no data-selling — also sets it apart from for-profit alternatives. All of these strengths have kept Wikipedia a top trusted resource for more than two decades.

Many experiments to create alternative versions of Wikipedia have happened before; it doesn’t interfere with our work or mission. As we approach Wikipedia’s 25th anniversary, Wikipedia will continue focusing on providing free, trustworthy knowledge built by its dedicated volunteer community. For more information about how Wikipedia works, visit our website and new blog series.

The hidden humans powering the AI economy | CBC News

The hidden humans powering the AI economy | CBC News

The hidden humans powering the AI economy
Why artificial intelligence needs humans to function


Nora Young · CBC News · Posted: Nov 06, 2025 1:00 AM PST | Last Updated: November 6


Listen to this article
Estimated 6 minutes

As AI models advance, they will require more specialized training — meaning companies may soon no longer need many of the very humans who helped make them what they are today. (Unsplash)

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Since January, Tina Lynn Wilson of Hamilton, Ont., has been freelancing for a company called DataAnnotation.

The 45-year-old says she loves the work, which involves checking responses from an AI model for grammar, accuracy and creativity. It calls for analytical skills and an eye for detail — and she also gets some interesting projects, like choosing the better of two samples of poetry.

“Because it is a creative response, there would be no fact-checking involved. You would have to indicate … what the better reply is and why.”


The work Wilson does is part of a huge, yet not well-known, network of gig workers of the emerging AI economy. Companies such as Outlier AI and Handshake AI hire them to be "artificial intelligence trainers, contracting with large AI platforms to help them train their models.

Some data annotation work is poorly paid — even exploitative, in other parts of the world — but there's a broad range of jobs in training, tending to and correcting AI. It's labour the tech giants seem to prefer not to talk about. And as models advance, they will require more specialized training — meaning companies may soon no longer need many of the very humans who helped make them what they are today.
WATCH | Why your next job interview could be with an AI bot:




Your next job interview could be with an AI bot
May 28|
Duration2:10Companies are using AI hiring bots to screen, shortlist and talk to job candidates. Advocates say the technology frees up human workers from tedious tasks, but some applicants say it adds confusion to the process, and there are concerns about HR job losses.
Human expertise

We often hear that today's generative AI is trained on vast amounts of data to teach it how human ideas typically go together. Sometimes called pre-training, that’s only the first step. For these systems to produce responses that are accurate, useful and not offensive, they need to be further refined, especially if they're going to work in narrow fields in the real world.

This is called fine-tuning, and it relies on human expertise. It's basically gig work: done on a per-assignment basis, without guaranteed hours. The Canadian AI trainers we spoke to made about $20 an hour, though some more specialized work can pay around $40. Still, inconsistency can be a problem.

"You cannot rely on this as a main source of income," said Wilson, who described her work as that of a generalist. Many other annotators consider it a side hustle as well, she said.

Tina Lynn Wilson has been freelancing for a company called DataAnnotation since January, and says she loves the work. (Submitted by Tina Lynn Wilson)

Reinforcement learning from human feedback is a type of fine-tuning that relies on people evaluating AI outputs.

Wilson’s work involves evaluating how “human” an AI response sounds.

“This is especially true for voice responses,” she said. “‘Is this something a human would like to hear?’”

So, when ChatGPT or Claude sounds uncannily human, that's because humans have trained it to be so.

"It's still the output of a software product," said Brian Merchant, a tech journalist specializing in labour and digital technology. "You need quality assurance of the output of a commercial, for-profit, software product.”

Brian Merchant, a tech journalist specializing in labour and digital technology, says firms typically want to show their product 'feels magical, feels powerful, feels like it’s the future.' (Jaclyn Campanaro)


Outlier AI has more than 250,000 active contributors across 50 countries, said Fiorella Riccobono, a spokesperson for Scale AI, its parent company. Eighty-one per cent hold at least a bachelor’s degree, she said. The company was not able to provide Canada-specific numbers.
A possibly changing market

There are signs that the market for this work is changing, with less demand for the generalized labour that people like Wilson do. Scale AI recently laid off generalist workers in Dallas, according to Business Insider, in a shift toward more technical training. Meanwhile, newer, more advanced models, like that by Chinese firm DeepSeek, have automated the reinforcement process.

"Demand for contributors with specialized knowledge and advanced degrees has grown significantly as AI systems become more complex,” said Riccobono.

Eric Zhou, 26, was one of these specialized workers. After studying materials and nanoscience at the University of Waterloo, he freelanced for Outlier AI part time for about a year. There, he assessed prompts and AI responses about undergrad-level physics and chemistry, and corrected answers.

26-year-old Eric Zhou freelanced for OutlierAI for a year, assessing prompts and responses delivered by its models. (Submitted by Eric Zhou)

"It's very fun work if you're just doing the science questions,” he said. “So that problem-solving part, I really enjoyed."

He found, however, that tasks could take more time than the company allotted, so a job listed as $20 for an hour of work could take longer, with no additional pay.

There seems to be no shortage of Canadians working in specialized fields and looking to supplement their income improving AI, including a number of Zhou’s friends.

That means workers feel they can constantly be replaced, he said.
How artificial intelligence could improve global health
Online romance scammers may have a new wingman — artificial intelligence
‘Digital sweatshops’

Still, AI as a whole relies on a global supply chain throughout the training process, much of which is outsourced to workers in lower-wage countries. This can mean fine-tuning data, but a lot of the work is in data labelling, which can be gruelling.

The number of people employed in this field are estimated to be in the millions. Companies have been accused of exploiting lax labour laws in regions like East Africa and Southeast Asia.


"There are a variety of what you could call digital sweatshops in anywhere from the Philippines to Kenya, where workers are essentially transforming these data sets into products that can be used by AI,” said James Muldoon, co-author of the book Feeding the Machine, about human labour and hidden costs of powering AI.

James Muldoon is the co-author Feeding the Machine, a book about human labour and the hidden costs of powering AI. (Submitted by James Muldoon)

He says the tasks can be brutal, as he found in field work in Kenya and Uganda, where people worked up to 70-hour weeks for just over a dollar an hour, under conditions he called “really appalling.”

While many of the annotators had ambitions to work in the tech sector more meaningfully, he said they found themselves stuck doing “really boring, excruciating” tasks.

AI companies typically don’t focus on the human labour that powers automation. Merchant, the tech journalist, says these firms typically want to show their product “feels magical, feels powerful, feels like it’s the future.”

“Very rarely do you have a job that's completely taken over by machinery, especially in industrial settings,” he said.

“What you usually have is a technology that can get you part of the way.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR


Nora Young

Senior Technology Reporter

Nora Young is senior technology reporter with CBC News. Her technology show, Spark, aired on CBC Radio One for 17 seasons. She is author of The Virtual Self. Her favourite technology is her bicycle.

Stop worrying about your AI footprint. Look at the big picture instead.

Stop worrying about your AI footprint. Look at the big picture instead.
MIT Technology Review · 4 hours ago
by Casey Crownhart · Climate change and energy


Picture it: I’m minding my business at a party, parked by the snack table (of course). A friend of a friend wanders up, and we strike up a conversation. It quickly turns to work, and upon learning that I’m a climate technology reporter, my new acquaintance says something like: “Should I be using AI? I’ve heard it’s awful for the environment.”

This actually happens pretty often now. Generally, I tell people not to worry—let a chatbot plan your vacation, suggest recipe ideas, or write you a poem if you want.

That response might surprise some people, but I promise I’m not living under a rock, and I have seen all the concerning projections about how much electricity AI is using. Data centers could consume up to 945 terawatt-hours annually by 2030. (That’s roughly as much as Japan.)

But I feel strongly about not putting the onus on individuals, partly because AI concerns remind me so much of another question: “What should I do to reduce my carbon footprint?”

That one gets under my skin because of the context: BP helped popularize the concept of a carbon footprint in a marketing campaign in the early 2000s. That framing effectively shifts the burden of worrying about the environment from fossil-fuel companies to individuals.

The reality is, no one person can address climate change alone: Our entire society is built around burning fossil fuels. To address climate change, we need political action and public support for researching and scaling up climate technology. We need companies to innovate and take decisive action to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Focusing too much on individuals is a distraction from the real solutions on the table.

I see something similar today with AI. People are asking climate reporters at barbecues whether they should feel guilty about using chatbots too frequently when we need to focus on the bigger picture.

Big tech companies are playing into this narrative by providing energy-use estimates for their products at the user level. A couple of recent reports put the electricity used to query a chatbot at about 0.3 watt-hours, the same as powering a microwave for about a second. That’s so small as to be virtually insignificant.

But stopping with the energy use of a single query obscures the full truth, which is that this industry is growing quickly, building energy-hungry infrastructure at a nearly incomprehensible scale to satisfy the AI appetites of society as a whole. Meta is currently building a data center in Louisiana with five gigawatts of computational power—about the same demand as the entire state of Maine at the summer peak. (To learn more, read our Power Hungry series online.)

Increasingly, there’s no getting away from AI, and it’s not as simple as choosing to use or not use the technology. Your favorite search engine likely gives you an AI summary at the top of your search results. Your email provider’s suggested replies? Probably AI. Same for chatting with customer service while you’re shopping online.

Just as with climate change, we need to look at this as a system rather than a series of individual choices.

Massive tech companies using AI in their products should be disclosing their total energy and water use and going into detail about how they complete their calculations. Estimating the burden per query is a start, but we also deserve to see how these impacts add up for billions of users, and how that’s changing over time as companies (hopefully) make their products more efficient. Lawmakers should be mandating these disclosures, and we should be asking for them, too.

That’s not to say there’s absolutely no individual action that you can take. Just as you could meaningfully reduce your individual greenhouse-gas emissions by taking fewer flights and eating less meat, there are some reasonable things that you can do to reduce your AI footprint. Generating videos tends to be especially energy-intensive, as does using reasoning models to engage with long prompts and produce long answers. Asking a chatbot to help plan your day, suggest fun activities to do with your family, or summarize a ridiculously long email has relatively minor impact.

Ultimately, as long as you aren’t relentlessly churning out AI slop, you shouldn’t be too worried about your individual AI footprint. But we should all be keeping our eye on what this industry will mean for our grid, our society, and our planet.

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

Where might Andrew live on the Sandringham estate?

Where might Andrew live on the Sandringham estate?

Where might Andrew live on the Sandringham estate?
12 minutes ago
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Ben Hatton & Maia Davies
Getty Images, York Cottage, Alamy, Oliver's Travels
Anmer Hall, York Cottage, Park House and Gardens House are all on the estate - but not all of them are available


Newly stripped of his "prince" title, Andrew is moving from his Windsor mansion, Royal Lodge, to the Sandringham estate in Norfolk, it is understood.

Formal notice was given to surrender the lease at the Royal Lodge on Thursday, and the move will take place as soon as possible.

The historic, sprawling estate covers approximately 20,000 acres (8,100 hectares) with 600 acres (242 hectares) of gardens.

It was bought as a private country retreat for the future Edward VII when he was Albert, Prince of Wales in 1862, and has since been passed down from monarch to monarch.



The estate itself covers several residential villages and hamlets, and includes nearly 10,000 acres (4,000 hectares) of farmland.

The main building - Sandringham House - is thought to have more than a hundred rooms, including a ballroom.

It remains a country retreat for the Royal Family and is where they traditionally gather at Christmas.

Sandringham is a private estate - not an official royal residence - and it is understood the King will be privately funding Andrew's accommodation there, and that it will not be directly funded by the taxpayer.

The Palace has not yet said exactly where on the estate Andrew will live, or when he could move.

But royal sources have said it will not be immediate, and instead be "as soon as possible and practicable".

Here is a look at some of the options on the estate.

York Cottage
Alamy


Originally known as Bachelor's Cottage, York Cottage is about a quarter of a mile from the main house.

It has its own set of stables and kennel buildings, according to Historic England, and overlooks one of two man-made lakes on the estate.

There were reports ahead of Prince Harry's marriage to the Duchess of Sussex that the pair might have been gifted the use of York Cottage by Elizabeth II for use as a country home, but no such plan was ever confirmed and the move never materialised.

It has reportedly been used as an office and accommodation for staff in recent years.
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Virginia Giuffre's family speak to BBC: "She'd be so proud"

Park House
Brendan Beirne/Shutterstock


The birthplace of Diana, Princess of Wales and her childhood home, Park House was rented by the Spencer family for many years.

In 1983 it was gifted to Leonard Cheshire, a disability charity, which used it to run a 16-bedroom hotel for the disabled, their carers and family.

The charity planned a £2.3m refurbishment before the pandemic hit, but announced in 2020 it would not go ahead with the proposal and said instead that it was working with the Sandringham estate to exit the lease.

Gardens House
Oliver's Travels
Gardens House was put on the market as a holiday let over the summer


Another option is the Gardens House, which was once the residence of the head gardener on the Sandringham estate.

The Edwardian house has six bedrooms and three bathrooms - and is one of two properties on the estate available to the general public as a holiday let.

It was put on the market in July at a weekly price of £4,110. It is not unusual for royal residences to rent out property to holidaymakers - with eight cottages and lodges available for hire at Balmoral Castle in Scotland.

Wood Farm
Shutterstock


This is one option that is understood to have been ruled out.

The farmhouse, described as "small and intimate" by former housekeeper Teresa Thompson, has strong associations with Andrew's parents.

His father, the late Duke of Edinburgh, chose the secluded property as his permanent home when he retired from public life in 2017.

He and the late Queen already regularly stayed there in preference to opening up Sandringham House when it was just the two of them.

Anmer Hall
Getty Images


Anmer Hall was gifted to the Prince of Wales and Catherine, Princess of Wales as a wedding present by the late queen in 2013 - so this may be an unlikely choice.

They spend much of the school holidays in the 10-bedroom, Grade II*-listed house, which is about 2 miles (3km) east of the main Sandringham house.

The Georgian property dates back to about 1802, but some parts are much older - and it has formed part of the Sandringham estate since 1898.

 

Prime number: College students double down

Nick Iluzada

Major news out of US colleges: More students than ever are opting for a second major. Now that learning to code doesn’t guarantee a high-paying job, college students are double-majoring to help their resumes stand out. Based on a Hechinger Report analysis of federal data, the Washington Post reports: Nationwide, ~12% of graduates earned more than one credential in the 2023–2024 school year, compared to just 6% a decade earlier. It’s happening at elite universities, private colleges, and massive state schools. Between 2014 and 2024, double majors spiked 334% at Harvard, 317% at Belmont University, and 169% at the University of California, San Diego. And with the prospect of a super-tight job market for new grads looming, many appear as strategic about what subjects to study as they are about how to fit in three different parties on opposite ends of campus in the same night. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where double majors are up 25% over the decade, almost 60% of computer science students who take on a second major pick data science—a field where the Bureau of Labor Statistics expects to see a growth of high-salaried jobs.

Terminator Trump Must Be Toppled Now | The Tyee

Terminator Trump Must Be Toppled Now | The Tyee


Terminator Trump Must Be Toppled Now
Clearly unfit for office, he deserves to be impeached. Before it’s too late.

Michael Harris YesterdayThe Tyee

Michael Harris, a Tyee contributing editor, is a highly awarded journalist and documentary maker.Our journalism is supported by readers like you. Click here to support The Tyee.

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Ground him. Protesters march with a giant inflatable Donald Trump in Los Angeles on Oct. 18. Photo by Ethan Swope, the Canadian Press.


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Trump’s fit of pique decision to “terminate” trade talks with Canada and boost present tariffs by 10 per cent is typical of this thin-skinned tyrant with a perverse appetite for retribution.

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Seven million of his own citizens recently rejected his power-grabbing tantrums when they filled streets to march and shout, “No kings!”

And now, keying off Trump’s Canadian ad tantrum, the Wall Street Journal has mocked the president for claiming “he’s not ‘a king,’ but on tariffs he is acting like one, and without a proper delegation from Congress as the Constitution requires.”

Prime Minister Jean Chrétien has it right. Donald Trump is a grave threat to democracy who disregards the rule of law while engaging in “blackmail on a daily basis.”

Indeed, given the gravity of Trump’s transgressions against freedom and brutal policies on health care, immigration, and international law, it has become clear that the man who would be king should be removed from office as unfit to be president. Before it is too late.

Normally an American politician would take notice that his acts have sparked mass protest in all 50 states. In fact, Trump has got the whole world on edge. That’s why the No Kings rallies spilled over into Canada and Europe.

Trump’s response? He posted an AI-generated video of himself flying a jet-fighter over Times Square in New York, dropping feces on protesters. This stupendous vulgarity was posted on the president’s personal Truth Social account.

Trump couldn’t have registered his utter contempt for his own citizens more blatantly. Or showed more graphically why he is totally unfit to occupy the Oval Office.

That said, his response was perfectly in keeping with the basis of Trump’s burgeoning tyranny. Either you are for him, no matter what he says or does, or you are the enemy. There is no such thing as legitimate opposition in Trumpworld, just falling in line or getting traduced and, if possible, crushed.

That’s why Trump called the No Kings protest the “Hate America Protest.”

That’s why he threatens to lock up mayors and governors who resist his policy of sending the military into their cities and states to deal with non-existent emergencies.

That’s why he constantly links Americans exercising their constitutional right to peaceful protests to communism, terrorism, and Hamas. That’s why, like Richard Nixon, Trump has an enemies list.

Upending the rule of law

Before democracy fails, there is an intermediate step that any would-be dictator like Trump must take: the dismantling of the rule of law. The supreme law in the U.S. is the Constitution. Though he swore an oath to uphold it at his inauguration, Trump has since worked assiduously to upend it.

Most journalism south of the border refers to this process as Trump’s “norm breaking.” The euphemism is wholly inadequate to describe what is really going on. Trump is not norm breaking, he is law breaking.

Just as he did as an elected official when he tried to subvert the will of the American people by asking Georgia’s Secretary of State to “find” him 11,780 votes so he could win an election he lost.

Just as he did when he pardoned all the violent protesters from the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

Just as he did as a private citizen when he was found guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records to hide his antics with a porn star.

Or when New York Attorney General Letitia James found the Trump company guilty of long-standing tax fraud.

An autocrat and his loyalists

Consider some of the other profound transgressions that sycophants in his own party have allowed to take place in Trump’s second term without raising so much as a whimper.

The U.S. system of governance is based upon the separation of powers between the executive, legislative and judicial branches. Trump has violated the checks and balances of that arrangement at every step of the way. He sees himself as the Big Kahuna directing everything.

A case in point. Trump has usurped Congress’s power of the purse, as guaranteed by Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution.

The president, at his whim, has frozen or “paused” billions of dollars of funding already passed by Congress. That is illegal under the 1974 federal Impoundment Control Act, which expressly forbids the executive branch from delaying funding already approved by Congress.

Trump violated the Constitution when he usurped the power of Congress to impose tariffs. He even declared a false emergency in order to give him the power to bring in a series of draconian tariffs that hurt not only close allies like Canada, but his own citizens. The U.S. auto industry is on track to pay $10 billion by the end of October as a result of Trump’s auto tariffs on Canada and Mexico.

Under the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, public figures, including the president, aren’t supposed to profit from holding office.

According to reporting by David Kirkpatrick of the New Yorker, Trump and his family have raked in $3.4 billion since he took office in 2017.

That includes $28 million from merchandise sales, including the infamous USA Bible, Trump hats, shirts and sneakers. And then there was that free jumbo jet from Qatar, and billions of dollars from Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia.

Trump is currently using the government shutdown to pursue other actions that have no basis in law. The president and his head of the White House Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, have set out to conduct mass firings in the public service. A federal judge recently issued a temporary injunction against those illegal firings.

The administration has even tried to withhold pay for public servants who have been furloughed during the government shutdown. The is also flatly illegal under the Employee Fair Treatment Act, which Trump himself signed into law in 2019.

Trump has also trampled on the basics of the justice system, directing his attorney general and others to investigate and prosecute his perceived political enemies.

After getting rid of Erik Siebert, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia who wouldn’t deliver political indictments on demand, Trump appointed his own former lawyer to the post to “get things moving.”

Never mind that Lindsey Halligan had zero prosecutorial experience. Never mind that she was a slavish Trump loyalist.

Halligan advanced Trump’s agenda on request, indicting former FBI director James Comey, New York District Attorney Letitia James, and former national security advisor turned Trump critic, John Bolton. Trump has now identified others he wants prosecuted, including former CIA Director John Brennan, for what he calls “political crimes.”

Destroying checks and balances

It is notable that one of the key provisions of the so-called Project 2025 document, in which the Heritage Foundation laid out the legislative priorities of the second Trump term, was to change the relationship between the DOJ and the White House.

The separation of those powers was to be replaced by a new arrangement, with the president directing his justice officials as if they were just any other political staffers.

It has not been enough for Trump to bend all government employees to his will. The autocrat who wants to have his face on a $250 bill to mark America’s 250th anniversary, also wants to harness, humble, and humiliate the media.

That project started with a spate of legal actions by Trump against the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CBS, and ABC. Trump went on to end public funding for the public TV and radio networks PBS and NPR based on their allegedly “biased” reporting.

Under his inept and unqualified secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, journalists have been asked to sign a document agreeing to publish only those stories that are Pentagon-approved.

Forty to 50 journalists representing all the major agencies turned in their badges rather than comply. As Nancy Youssef of The Atlantic put it, “To agree not to solicit information, is to agree not to be a journalist.”

Trump’s take? “The press is very disruptive in terms of world peace,” he bloviated to reporters at the White House. “The press is very dishonest.” Strange words coming from the man who told over 30,000 lies during his first presidential term alone, according to the count by the Washington Post.

Trump has done most of his damage to democracy and the rule of law inside America.

There is ICE, his army of thugs in masks, without identification or warrants, who scoop up brown and Black people for instant deportation.

There is Trump’s cynical attempt to control the judiciary through the power of appointment, a strategy that has produced a docile and dutiful Supreme Court. That court has since empowered Trump’s drive to grossly expand the powers of the executive branch.

There is also Trump’s punitive use of the federal purse, in which the president has withheld billions in funding from jurisdictions he sees as unfriendly, such as New York.

But Trump has not limited his disregard for the Constitution and the rule of law to domestic politics. He is also wreaking havoc on the international scene.

Without any war powers approval from Congress, the President has ordered the military to blow up several vessels from Venezuela and Colombia, which he claims were carrying drugs destined for the United States. At least 36 people have been killed in those strikes.

These attacks have been carried out without any legal authority, or any evidence proving that the people aboard the vessels were the ’narco-terrorists” that Trump claimed they were. As a result, Colombia has accused Trump of murder and critics say these lethal attacks amount to war crimes.

In addition to the summary execution of suspected drug dealers, Trump has also publicly confirmed that he has approved covert operations within Venezuela by the CIA.

Now that he is also moving assets from the U.S. Southern Command into the area, Venezuela is worried that Trump is planning an invasion. The country has asked for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council over Trump’s military actions in the Caribbean.

Impeach before it’s too late

Given that Trump’s iconoclastic demolition of American values, democracy, and the rule of law have taken place in less than a year of his second term, the question must be asked. Can Americans afford to trust the electoral process to get rid of this tyrant?

Sadly, the answer is no. That’s because Trump’s unscrupulous regime has already taken steps to undermine the country’s system of free and fair elections.



Carney’s Caught in a Bad Gangster Movieread more

This is the president who told Texas to come up with five more Republican seats by re-districting. Other Republican states have also been asked to resort to gerrymandering or redistricting to add more seats to the Republican column ahead of next year’s mid-term elections.

Impeachment and Article 25 are draconian steps, not to be taken lightly. But given what is on the line — a dictator in the White House — it is more than justified. Trump, after all, wants to call all the shots, like a king or an emperor.

James Madison, the most quoted Founding Father of America, said it best in the Federalist Papers back in 1788.

“The accumulation of all powers — legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many… may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

Trump has brazenly announced his intentions. Now the question is what, if anything, Americans are prepared to do about it.


Read more: Politics

Sherbrooke chooses Bibeau

Sherbrooke chooses Bibeau

Sherbrooke Record · 17 hours ago

by Matthew Mccully · Municipal

By Bryan Laprise

Local Journalism Initiative

 

Less than two hours after polls closed on election night, Nov. 2, Marie-Claude Bibeau was projected as the winner of the Sherbrooke mayoral race. Bibeau previously served as the member of parliament for Compton–Stanstead and held several ministerial roles in Justin Trudeau’s government.

According to the latest data from the Elections Quebec website, Bibeau won with 47.14 per cent of votes—some 27,550 votes—, with an advance of 10,019 over her closest competitor, Vincent Boutin, who finished with 30 per cent of votes. He was followed by Guillaume Brien with 6,754 votes (11.56 per cent). Raïs Kibonge, leader of Sherbrooke Citoyen, outgoing mayor Évelyne Beaudin’s party, finished with the least number of votes; some 6,607 (11.31 per cent).Bibeau celebrated her victory at Siboire Microbrasserie in downtown Sherbrooke, surrounded by family, friends, her team and supporters. A few minutes before 10 p.m., she gave her celebratory speech.“Thank you to Sherbrookers who trusted me, it’s a great privilege that you’re giving me. It comes with a lot of responsibilities, but I won’t let you down,” she said, in her opening remarks.

She proceeded to thank the other three mayoral candidates for their campaigns, with whom a “campaign of ideas” was led, with all four candidates offering different visions for Sherbrooke. According to Bibeau, the Sherbrooke municipal election campaign was a great example of democracy and of respect of each other’s ideas, creating an example for others to follow. Bibeau congratulated all the district councillors who were elected, saying she is excited to work with all of them.

“As I repeated many times over the campaign, I will be the mayor of all Sherbrookers over the whole territory—a mayor that will work hard with her municipal council to reinstate a sense of belonging and pride [in citizens] from one end of the city to the other,” stated the elected mayor.

First elected to the federal government in 2015 under the Liberal banner, Bibeau has been involved in politics ever since, keeping her MP seat through the 2019 and 2021 elections. Prior to this entrance into politics, she had been involved in many cultural organizations, such as being the director of the Musée de la nature et des sciences de Sherbrooke and being co-owner of the Camping de Compton.

She attributed part of her victory to this history of involvement. “During the last 10 years, I’ve built trusting relationships with the people of the region, which I believe were helpful. Before those 10 years of politics, I already had 25 years of experience as an entrepreneur and as a manager as well,” Bibeau said. “I have quite a good network regionally—nationally as well.”

Bibeau had the support of her partner, Bernard Sévigny, who served as the mayor of Sherbrooke from 2009 to 2017. While he explained that all of Bibeau’s engagements were her own, he did answer some of her questions, especially when it came to the feasibility of initiatives, providing a few guideposts. “When she was making an engagement, she knew it was possible and realistic.”

“I think that from now own, Sherbrooke will be well served,” Sévigny added. “I know Marie-Claude well, I know how she does things, and I think that people will appreciate her way of doing things, her way of working with all citizens, partners and institutions. It’s her strength and I think people will see what she’s capable of.”

Part of Bibeau’s campaign included not making specific engagements based on hard numbers. Bibeau explained that this direction was taken to favour working with the municipal council and out of a necessity to see facts. “I need to hear from experts, I want to make real consultations and also speak with the stakeholders. I can do that in a quite expeditious matter,” she said. Being able to hear everyone’s perspectives and figuring out what could be a good consensus is one of her strengths, according to her.

During an interview with The Record after her speech, Bibeau outlined that her first priorities will be to meet with all the individual councillors to better know them, their experience, knowledge and expertise. “I believe one of the key elements to have a good team spirit is to make sure everyone is in their element,” she explained.

She chose to run as an independent to favour collaboration. Meeting with councillors works towards her main campaign promise of solid leadership and collaboration within the council, with the city’s employees and other local organizations.

Within the coming weeks, the first big undertaking will be working on and tabling the next municipal budget, which must be approved before Christmas.

Some of the main concerns of Sherbrookers which will be part of her work within the municipality over the coming years is focusing on municipal responsibilities “starting with roads” and water infrastructure including the water treatment plant. Other areas to work on are homelessness, climate change and sustainable mobility.

“We must work together. The best idea doesn’t have to come from the mayor. It can come from everywhere, I don’t care,” she expressed playfully. “I believe in collective intelligence, and I think we have to put all our resources together to face these challenges.”

The Republican Plot to Destroy Education Research

The Republican Plot to Destroy Education Research

Elon Musk and the Trump administration have gutted the Institute of Education Science.


by Chris Lewis

October 16, 2025



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Five Buck Photos/Getty Images



The Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.

Good data drives good decision-making, and education is no exception. The data provided to researchers from independent research organizations, public-private partnerships, and other institutions helps teachers, administrators, and lawmakers make good decisions about how to approach schooling.
Expand

That’s why it is critical to highlight the Trump administration’s assault on public data at the Department of Education—just one part of its war on public education in general.

In February, Elon Musk and his DOGE team cut a total of 89 contracts worth $881 million from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the research and data arm of the department. This obscure organization is critical in ensuring that schools from K-12 to college are funded and competitive, and that students are getting financial aid. The contracts were for vendors that helped the institute collect essential data, including the effectiveness of transition support for young people with disabilities and common education standards (which includes common vocabulary data and tools to help education stakeholders).

A 2002 product of the Bush administration, the point of the IES is to improve education outcomes in the United States by providing high-quality data and analysis for state and federal governments. As the New America foundation puts it, IES’s role is to research what works. The institute has four major research arms: the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the National Center for Special Education Research, the National Center for Education Research, and the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance. Each performs a pivotal role in education data gathering for stakeholders.

Related: Trump’s Education Department cuts funding allocated to minority-serving institutions

NCES, for example, collects and reports information on student performance and achievement based on standardized test scores, as well as the literacy level of adults. Its data is used by a host of different parties, from researchers to legislators, to understand and improve enrollment, benchmarks, and the performance of educational initiatives. Factoring everything from student performance to teaching techniques to administrators into the data helps inform financial aid, basic needs gaps, and many issues that students face. The data provided by NCES is used by lawmakers to help make decisions on district funding allocations. Without it, there are no reliable, objective metrics to help determine schools’ needs.

The data provided by IES also helps elevate student populations that would otherwise be entirely ignored. Take student parents, people trying to balance getting an education with raising a child. The GAINS for Student Parents Act requires public colleges to give student parents information about services and resources, as well as adjusting costs of attendance and net price valuations to include dependent care. IES data helped elevate an almost entirely invisible population of students that faces unique problems; there aren’t national political organizations for student parents, so lawmakers would have been fairly oblivious to this population’s needs without this data.

Read more from the Revolving Door Project

And the numbers here are not small. According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, undergraduate students who are either parents, guardians, or pregnant while in college make up nearly one-fifth of the student population. They don’t have the institutional support offered to non-parent students, and often work more than 40 hours a week between both work and school, because financial aid is typically not enough to live on. A comprehensive picture of these students only exists due to data collected through the IES’s National Postsecondary Student Aid Study.

In short, IES is a vital partner to schools, districts, policymakers, and researchers. In theory, it is a nonpartisan entity, merely conducting research and providing the resulting data to anyone, and hitherto its value has been recognized by Democrats and Republicans alike.

But no longer. As Musk’s assault on the agency shows, education of any kind is now a partisan issue. The Trump administration is refusing to publicize data that bear on the needs of marginalized people because American conservatives are now dead set against the very idea of public education of any kind. The cuts to IES are just one part of this effort.

Currently, IES can barely function. Due to the 1,300 layoffs at the Department of Education under Education Secretary Linda McMahon—a woman who, not coincidentally, is so comically ignorant she confused AI with the A1 steak sauce—IES has a mere 20 federal employees left. According to The Hechinger Report, there are only three people left to do the work of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, NAEP, which is the common measure of K-12 achievement through standardized tests. Ultimately, the layoffs will result in less and lower-quality data that can be provided to stakeholders to help ensure student and teacher success.

Good education requires data that helps educators personalize instruction, make adjustments to the rigor of the curriculum, and overall ensure that students are learning. Administrators use good data to help build out smart reforms or set specific goals for their students or teachers. The assault on this research and data agency is yet another example of the administration’s disregard of the material consequences of its wrongheaded fight against expertise.

While forcing prestigious universities such as the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard to bend the knee gets the most attention from the mainstream media, what Trump is doing to IES will have a far broader and deeper impact on American schools. If he and McMahon have anything to say about it, in the future only wealthy white people will have access to a quality education in this country.