A.I. NIMBYs

Plus: Bitcoin tolls at the Strait, Trump vs. MAGA, inflation rises, and more...

Data center backlash. It appears likely that Maine will temporarily ban data centers. State legislators gave a thumbs up to bill text that would prohibit new construction on data centers in the state until November 2027. The bill is set to pass in the next few days.  

Not surprisingly, tech companies and the local business community oppose the measure—and with good reason. "Things are going so fast. There's a race against other countries," Glenn Adams, who has built data centers in multiple states, told CNBC. "If Maine says 'no,' we're saying no to all these companies, to potential developers and investors, and they can quite quickly go somewhere else."

From Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) to Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.), there has been a fair amount of high-profile backlash against data centers recently. Populists on the left and the right are lining up to make data centers and artificial intelligence a political punching bag. 

Breaking Points' @esaagar says AI companies are "fighting against a very, very big force" in the US.

"There's this rising populist tide against the data center movement. And against Abundance-style assurances from politicians and companies."

"Something is happening. The tide… pic.twitter.com/pe3ocJbDuP

— TBPN (@tbpn) April 9, 2026

But the opposition is mostly incoherent. As Christian Britschgi wrote for Reason earlier this year, there are a lot of good reasons to like data centers. Among them, they tend to bring economic growth and high-paying blue-collar jobs. 

And of course, they also power artificial intelligence, which is useful for an astonishingly large number of tasks, from research to coding to instructions and advice on how to do just about anything. 

For example, A.I. can help you and your neighbors organize a campaign to ban data centers. 

I promise I am not making this up. 

This week, The Wall Street Journal published a story about an Ohio woman who, each night, "logs onto Chat GPT and asks it to help her in her fight to stop a data center from being built just steps away from her home." The woman is part of a cohort of anti-data center activists using the tool to help them organize against new data center construction, one of whom told the WSJ, "I'm using the beast to beat the beast." I think that means the beast is winning. 

Strait crimes: Iran is demanding that oil tankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz pay tolls—and the country wants them to pay in cryptocurrency. 

Ships intending to pass through the strait must email Iranian officials about what cargo is being transported, at which point they will be informed about the toll, an Iranian official said, according to The Financial Times. The toll is equivalent to $1 per barrel of oil. 

There's been some skepticism about the report from the crypto community, but The Wall Street Journal confirmed similar details in a separate piece. The WSJ notes that Iran already has a $7.8 billion "crypto economy." That economy, however, is mostly state-controlled: "The IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps], Iran's strongest political and economic force, as well as its proxies, accounted for more than half of the country's crypto activity, according to Chainalysis."

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump is not happy about reports that Iran is charging for access to the strait.

I very much agree that governments should not charge fees and levies for international trade and commerce. Maybe there's a lesson there for Trump. 

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Scenes from Washington, D.C. There are no good options in the city's mayoral race, which primarily pits council member Kenyan McDuffie against Democratic Socialist Janeese Lewis George, also a Council member. 

I've been up and down and up and down on Bowser for years but have finally reached the conclusion that the core problem in DC government is that the Council is (to put it politely) totally insane. https://t.co/OxJKhNmsHb

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) April 9, 2026

My plan is to leave DC for Virginia before the next mayor is sworn in, or shortly after at the very least.

DC is incredibly vulnerable. It has the following major defects:

1. An incompetent and corrupt government that does not provide basic services effectively

2. A… https://t.co/n3gXenwrZX

— Dean W. Ball (@deanwball) April 10, 2026

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QUICK HITS

• The Artemis II mission, which took four astronauts further from Earth than any humans before them, is scheduled to splashdown this evening.
• A new Consumer Price Index report shows rising inflation.
  

  BREAKING:

  CORE CPI RISES JUST 0.2%. HEADLINE RISES 0.9%

  Economists had expected a 0.9% (MoM) increase in headline and a 0.3% increase in core.https://t.co/5a5gic2Aba

  — Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) April 10, 2026

• Trump vs. MAGA influencers:
  

  JUST IN - Trump calls Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Megyn Kelly, "Low IQ… stupid people… nobody cares about them, they're NUT JOBS, TROUBLEMAKERS." pic.twitter.com/PMdTbd8sfB

  — Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) April 9, 2026

• You may have heard that college grads are downwardly mobile. By and large, that's a myth. 
• The Massachusetts Legislature is working on what looks to be the country's strictest law concerning kids and social media.
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation is leaving X.
  

  🚨 BREAKING: The FBI has successfully extracted deleted Signal messages from a suspect's iPhone via notification storage, the place where all your notifications are stored for up to one month.

  Notification storage stores data from all messaging apps, it's a big flaw in iOS. But… pic.twitter.com/dOeOljJDX0

  — International Cyber Digest (@IntCyberDigest) April 9, 2026

• Video games are big business…at the movies. Super Mario Galaxy is making big bucks at the box office. There's a Legend of Zelda movie on the way. And next month will see the cinematic return of Mortal Kombat: 

I grew up with these games. Which means I'm old enough to remember when the original game, and its supposed influence on kids, was a matter of great concern for Congress. Now it's just nostalgic camp.