I am a little over three weeks out from my knee surgery and although my recovery seems to be going well, I received some frustrating news. They told me last week that it could be up to 6 months until I am able to get back on a bike. I, of course, immediately challenged both my PT (who is really great) and the PA (who is not as great). Neither were willing to deviate from the recovery protocol, but I remain determined to be back on two wheels well before September. - Kumar

It has been a challenge for me to force my Luddite inclined brain to directly engage with the far reaching impacts of AI, but specificity always helps me engage. When I read this piece from Ideastream about lawyers being fined for filing cases with errors generated by AI tools, it took me a few days to reason out what is so troubling.

The article clearly lays out the concerns for lawyers who are facing an increase in fines because they are ultimately accountable for the veracity of their files, regardless if their AI tools led them astray. The issue isn’t so much about whether or not AI should be used in legal cases, but how our very unprepared and overstretched legal system will handle the deluge of cases that AI is making easier to file.

As AI makes it faster, simpler, and cheaper to file legal cases and in a society that is already egregiously litigious it is hard to not assume this could lead to an inundation of lawsuits filed that could further bog down every level of the legal system. Think of the Trump Administration’s approach of overwhelming immigration courts and swamping the Supreme Court’s emergency docket as examples of how constantly suing and filing appeals is a strategy to keep opponents on the defense. There are many other dynamics and implications at play but I am not feeling optimistic about the judicial system’s ability to handle this significant shift.

Both major parties already have their presumptive nominees chosen, Dr. Amy Acton who is running unopposed in the Democratic primary and Republican Vivek Ramaswamy who is facing a handful of relatively unknown challengers. Unsurprisingly they are both honing in on affordability in their messaging campaigns with direct attacks on each other’s ideas.

Ramaswamy, an early backer of the “abolish property taxes” campaign, has since back tracked slightly instead to saying he will ‘“bring down property taxes in this state immediately, eventually down to zero.”’ [Statehouse News Bureau] Since then he has shared another hollow plan of reducing income tax to zero in the state. His new tagline tries to obfuscate the clear tradeoff between gutting funding for public services and affordability: “Lower costs. Bigger paychecks. Better schools.”

Dr. Amy Acton, who served as the Director of the Ohio Department of Health under Governor DeWine during the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, recently shared a significantly contrasting set of priorities around affordability. Although Dr. Acton’s proposals do not include specifics on property taxes she mentions a host of other more targeted programs including: “child tax credits of between $500 and $1,000 a year, as well as a refundable tax credit for lower-income families…require more transparency in insurance and healthcare pricing and crack down on surprise billing…enhanced energy production of ‘"the lowest-cost and cleanest sources of energy readily available."‘

House Bill 15, passed in April, 2025 was hailed by many in the state for changes in how utilities file rate cases, encouraging more power generation, and the elimination of scandal ridden coal subsidies among other things. As reported by the Ohio Capital Journal, the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio (PUCO) chair, Jennifer French, recently briefed Ohio Senators on the results of the bill.

In French’s briefing she touted the significant growth in energy generation, sharing that more gas fired power generation facilities have been applied for in the past year than in the past 20+ years. French said that 2,755 megawatts of gas fired power generation has been applied for in the past year. She also tried to paint utility scale solar as a winner since she became chair, sharing that over 7,000 megawatts of solar has been approved since 2021.

Yet, there remain significant hurdles for utility scale solar in Ohio, with the Ohio Power Siting Board (OPSB) continuing to reject a significant number of projects, primarily because of local opposition. Many have called into question the legitimacy of OPSB’s approval criteria for solar projects especially when there is no similar set of provisions for non-solar or wind utility scale installations. [Ohio Capital Journal]