October 22, 2025
Dear editor;
I hope everyone read the poem in the October 16 issue of The Voice, “Our Constitution”.
About two-thirds of the way down, it reads:
“You are the master of your fate—it’s in the book.
“And you can start with this—for here you have a voice;
“Plus this most salient asset—your freedom of choice! “
I used italics for emphasis on what spoke to me. As consumers, we choose. Normally only products most consumers would want (demand), will survive in the competitive marketplace. I would hope that before the internet is 100% in every home, whether mandated or voluntary, people will nip these out-of-control cloud services in the bud.
Perhaps you experienced computer problems Monday, Oct. 20 from Amazon’s cloud service, Amazon Web Services (AWS). The News summarized the problem as “too few companies supporting the technology, or when one goes down, all go down….”
I experienced needing to replace my HVAC system. It turns out Carrier no longer produces furnaces and ACs the old-fashioned way. They all have to be WiFi connected. I was lucky I did not wait any longer; I got the last old-fashioned unit my HVAC provider could get from their warehouse. Is everyone wanting a WiFi-surveilled, oops, a WiFi-controlled furnace/AC?
I bring this up because the news is City of Aurora is giving incentives for low-income renters to receive savings passed on from their landlords participating in a “grant program to get efficient HVAC units”. If given free, of course customers will accept this. In a free-choice situation, would low-income and elderly, especially, be comfortable with all the computer know-how needed?
I hope my fear of surveilled and controlled electricity usage is baseless. I admit I worry about the stressed and vulnerable power grid. I do not feel that WiFi is going to make power outages less scary. In my opinion, grant money to give free or reduced-price HVAC to renters in a program would be more helpful if just given to these same low-income renters (or homeowners) wanting new windows. Windows are about $6,000, I was told; just for the front of a house.
I also experienced another shock over how Artificial Intelligence (AI) may supersede even the critical-choice consumer. Google uses AI and I was shocked at how expert “it” or “they” were for my query about the difference in history between the land redistribution in Hawaii in 1848, and the UN partition plan taking the area from Palestine and forming Israel, in 1948. Here is what AI wrote in its single paragraph essay for my search terms Nakbah similar to Mahele?
“Both were large-scale dispossession of Indigenous people, but they are profoundly different events… Nakbah was a violent and forceful ethnic cleansing and displacement, whereas the Mahele was a legal, yet unjust, land reform (in Hawaii in 1848 under King Kamehameha III) that capitalized on the Indigenous (Hawaii) lack of familiarity with Western land ownership concepts….”
Sincerely,
Mary Goetsch, Aurora