I can hear the humming from here. It is the sound of a million graphics cards screaming in unison, crunching numbers to generate a picture of a six-fingered Pope or to help a college sophomore cheat on an essay about *The Great Gatsby*. It is the sound of the future, and frankly, it sounds like a mosquito stuck in your ear canal right before you die of malaria.

We are currently witnessing a spectacle so profoundly stupid that it almost achieves a kind of majestic beauty. The news, if you can bear to look at it without clawing your own eyes out, is that state and federal lawmakers have finally noticed that data centers are sucking the national power grid dry like a slushie on a hot day. Their brilliant solution? They want these silicon monstrosities to pay "more" for energy.

How much more? Ah, there’s the rub. There is no number. There is no plan. According to the reports coming out of the capital—a place where good ideas go to die and bad ideas go to get funding—there is absolutely zero consensus among governors, lawmakers, and tech executives about what the bill should look like.

Of course there isn’t. Why would there be? You are asking a group of people who couldn’t agree on the color of an orange to overhaul the economics of the electrical grid. On one side, you have the Tech Bros: the Silicon Valley messiahs who believe they are building God in a server farm in Northern Virginia. They view electricity not as a utility, but as a divine right. They demand 24/7 uptime, massive wattage, and subsidized rates so they can keep their stock prices inflated and their AI models hallucinations-free. They look at a coal plant and see "compute." They look at a river and see "coolant." To them, the rest of us—the people who just want the lights to turn on when we flip the switch—are merely legacy hardware.

On the other side, you have the Politicians: the State and Federal grifters who smell money in the water. They don’t actually care about the stability of the grid. If they did, they would have fixed the infrastructure twenty years ago instead of spending that time gerrymandering districts and insider trading. No, they see data centers as a piñata. They want to whack the tech companies just hard enough to get some candy (tax revenue) to fall out, but not so hard that the donors stop writing checks for their reelection campaigns. It is a delicate dance of parasitic co-dependency. The politician needs the tech executive’s money; the tech executive needs the politician’s regulatory moat.

The hilarious part of this report is the admission of "little consensus." It is the understatement of the century. You have Governors desperate for the "jobs" these data centers bring—which, by the way, usually amount to three security guards and a janitor once the construction is finished—fighting against Federal regulators who are suddenly pretending to care about energy consumption. Meanwhile, the utility companies are standing in the middle, shrugging their shoulders and warning that if someone doesn’t pay for new transmission lines, the whole system goes dark.

And who do you think is going to pay? Do you think Amazon or Microsoft or Google will simply absorb the cost out of the kindness of their hearts? Do you think the State Legislature will tax them effectively? Don't be a child. The cost will be passed down to you. It always is. You, the ratepayer, will subsidize the AI revolution whether you want it or not. Your monthly electric bill will climb to match your mortgage so that a chatbot can tell you the wrong recipe for sourdough bread.

This is the intellectual bankruptcy of the modern era on full display. We have built an economy dependent on digital infrastructure that consumes energy like a dying star, yet our leadership class is paralyzed by a complete inability to govern. They hold hearings. They form committees. They draft proposals. They engage in performative squabbling to make it look like they are "fighting for the people" or "fostering innovation," depending on which camera is pointed at them.

But the reality is simple physics. The electrons have to come from somewhere. The wires can only hold so much heat. While the Governors and the Congressmen and the CEOs play their little game of chicken, the grid strains under the load. We are burning fossil fuels at record rates to power the "green" tech revolution, a hypocrisy so rich it should be taxed at 90 percent.

So, let them argue. Let them fail to reach a consensus. It doesn't matter. The only certainty is that the price is going up, the grid is getting less stable, and the people in charge are too busy looting the ship to notice we’ve already hit the iceberg. I’d ask Alexa to explain it to me, but I can’t afford the electricity.