Because sometimes things just need to be said….
Newsworthy items that need my commentary.
It took a farmer with a camera, not a regulator, to catch a $17 billion Microsoft deal running dozens of gas generators without an air permit. Here’s the story. A company called DataOne is building a giant AI data center in Vineland, New Jersey, for the Dutch firm Nebius, which supplies computing power to Microsoft …
The Federal Reserve raised interest rates on September 16. Sixteen days later, the government told us employers added 29,000 jobs last month, when economists were expecting something closer to 85,000 or 90,000. That’s the timeline. Make of it what you will, but I’d make of it this: somebody pulled the brakes right before the car …
Until today, a used car buyer in California had no legal right to change his mind once the paperwork was signed. You could return a toaster, but a $30,000 car was yours the second you initialed the last page. That changed this morning. California’s CARS Act, SB 766, took effect October 1, and it gives …
A senior Ticketmaster executive wrote that the company would turn a “blind eye” to ticket brokers breaking its rules “as a matter of policy.” That email is now Exhibit A in a federal case, and on Monday a judge said the case can go ahead. Here’s the setup. The FTC and seven states sued Ticketmaster …
Here’s a fun fact about your electric company: the government promises it a profit. That’s a promise, not a chance. That’s how regulated utilities work. Nobody else is allowed to string wires to your house, so the state lets the monopoly earn a set return on what it invests, and a regulator signs off on …
Oracle is building a $165 billion AI data center in the New Mexico desert. This week it sent out a legal notice covering itself in case that never actually happens. The project is called Project Jupiter, Oracle’s piece of the Stargate buildout with OpenAI and SoftBank. The plan is 2.45 gigawatts of power coming online …
Amazon wants you picturing a robot walking your coworker to the parking lot with a cardboard box. That’s not really what happened. Since October 2025, Amazon has cut roughly 30,000 corporate jobs in two waves — 14,000 last fall, another 16,000 in January. CEO Andy Jassy told employees back in a June 2025 memo that …
Southwest Airlines spent decades selling you exactly one thing no other airline would: free bags. It showed up in every commercial and every earnings call, unchanged for years. Then in May 2025, Southwest killed it. The reaction was instant and confident. Fitch Ratings warned that adding bag fees risked “eroding Southwest’s competitive strengths relative to …
Book a flight from an iPhone, in a hotel lobby, at midnight, after refreshing the same search four times because the price keeps changing, and Delta might quietly decide you look desperate enough to pay more. Sounds like a conspiracy theory. It isn’t anymore. It’s the subject of a congressional inquiry with an actual deadline. …
Stanford researchers just spent months studying how people actually talk to AI chatbots, and the takeaway is blunt: the lonelier you already are, the worse an AI companion tends to make you feel. Not better. Worse. Researchers in Stanford’s Diyi Yang lab surveyed more than a thousand people who use Character.AI and dug through 244 …
Somewhere between the three-ring binders and the “suggested donation” for classroom supplies, back-to-school shopping quietly turned into one of the more stressful line items on the family calendar, and this year it’s worse than usual. New numbers out this month show families planning to spend less on the actual shopping trip than they did last …
Black Lives Matter is an exceptionally important in this country – in the world as it gains (finally) some real momentum in the Summer of 2020. The potential for change seems real – the right people are saying the right things and even starting to do the right things. Has the idea of defunding the …