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AOL is discontinuing dial-up internet service after 34 years. Though AOL says the number of dial-up subscribers it has is in the thousands, the US government estimates that about 265,000 people still depend on dial-up Internet. I am more surprised to learn AOL is still around than I am to learn dial up is still around. www.techspot.com/news/1090…

How AI, Healthcare, and Labubu Became the US Economy. “… the US is becoming Las Vegas - but everywhere. We are essentially building a glorified, speculative fantasy while China focuses on the foundational, ‘boring’ work of scientific and technological advancement.” kyla.substack.com/p/how-ai-…

A bleak assessment by Kyla Scanlon. But she ends on a cautiously hopeful note. We have the skills and labor to turn the U.S., and the west, around. We need the will and leadership.

Good ideas are popular: But they’re impolitic. “In democracies, we’re told, politicians exist to reflect and enact the popular will; but the truth is, politicians’ primary occupation is thwarting the will of the people, in preference to the will of a small group of wealthy, powerful people.” Most people around the world support socialism and socialist policies. But politicians don’t represent most people; politiians represent the super-wealthy. Fortunately, the super-wealthy hate each other, which gives the people people opportunity to enact policies that benefit all. By Cory Doctorow pluralistic.net/2025/08/0…

“Super weird to have innocuously added a silly personal anecdote to a post you didn’t realize was super popular… Only to have it cross your dash a week later and find out that like 12,000 people think you’re lying. ¯_(ツ)_/¯” www.tumblr.com/dduane/79…

“…. watching otherwise “progressive” people start to parrot jokes about like “Clanker with a hard R” and “screws will not replace us” and whatnot is like 🫥 “ www.tumblr.com/reverieau…

RFK Jr. wants a wearable on every America. That future’s not as healthy as he thinks. www.theverge.com/analysis/…

Victoria Song talks from personal experience how wearables can lead to obsessive thinking and create more problems than they solve. “My first three years with wearables wrecked my relationship with food.”

Song doesn’t even mention other important issues: RFK Jr. is a malevolent lunatic, possibly more dangerous than even Trump. RFK’s deranged theories about health could potentially kill millions of people. And he wants to put a surveillance device on every American.

I just used the word “deliverables” in an email non-ironically. I feel dirty and not in a good way.

On Reddit: What are some weird things you do at your desk because you WFH and would never do in the office? reddit.com/r/WFH/com…

Me: Nostril excavation. I’m a nose-pickin fiend. Gotta remember to keep my fingers away from my beezer when I’m on a video call.

Masked government-employed thugs harassed and threatened a couple of American citizens for the crime of being brown while driving around looking for places they might want to go camping sometime. www.nbcsandiego.com/news/loca…

The couple, George and Esmeralda Doilez, voted for Trump in 2020 and 2024, and say they are surprised by his extremism.

AI Is Here, and a Quiet Havoc Has Begun. Everyone knows artificial intelligence will destroy a lot of jobs. But not how soon it is going to happen. By Peggy Noonan. www.wsj.com/opinion/a…

Will AI destroy jobs? Automation, in the past, has created more demand for knowledge work. Spreadsheets increased demand for accounting, even though much of the work accountants did was automated away.

Also, we don’t know whether AI can actually do these jobs that are being replaced. All we know is that people doing the hiring are panicking. Like Cory Doctorow says: AI doesn’t threaten your job. Your job is threatened by your idiot manager who thinks AI can do your job.

I am repulsed by AI chatbots' attempts to emulate human behavior, and have all of that switched off in my ChatGPT customization.

Maybe one day we’ll achieve AGI or artificial superintelligence, but I see no reason to believe it’s coming anytime within the next 25 years or so. I view these ideas the way I view other ideas I first encountered in science fiction, like contact with alien intelligence or time travel. Could these things happen? Most definitely. Yes. Absolutely. But we have no reason to believe they will happen anytime soon, or ever.

Meanwhile, I use ChatGPT to suggest passphrases, synonyms, do currency conversions, and suggest article descriptions, headlines, transitions, introductions and conclusions to reports, and do first drafts of the occasional LinkedIn post and business email. And more. I am very happy to do so.

But ChatGPT is not my friend and it’s certainly not my lover.

Dave Winer on ChatGPT5:

The big lie is that they want you to believe this is human. This is a carnival stand imitation of a human. It may be that it’s getting worse, or it’s always been this way and I’m seeing more clearly. It was and is still a miracle, but nothing like what was in the science fiction books.

daveverse.org/2025/08/0…

Dave uses ChatGPT in ways very similar to how I do. He makes heavy use of it, but does not personify it.

This is why wireless is so weird right now. www.fierce-network.com/wireless/…

Is “A Candle in the Wind” or “Highway to Hell” more emblematic of the state of wireless in the aftermath of T-Mobile’s US Cellular acquisition? My colleague Monica Alleven assesses the state of things on Fierce Network.

Unfortunately, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil still holds up, 40 years after its release. “Wildly inventive at every turn, Gilliam’s satirical vision of a cruel and violent bureaucracy rings eerily true of this political moment.” www.theverge.com/film/7193…

The U.S. Air Force will deny retirement pay to transgender service members being separated from the service. This is a disgraceful betrayal of people who pledged their lives to serve their fellow citizens. www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2025/08/0…

Dear Leader did not do military service. He had bone spurs.

Harvard is laying off young researchers and shelving years and decades of work after the U.S. government’s stupid decision to cut funding for research into cures for multiple sclerosis and other neurodegenerative diseases, opioid addiction, cancer, and other afflictions. www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2025/08/0…

But the White House is getting a $200 million ballroom to celebrate glorious Dear Leader.

‘Personality engineering’ puts a human face on telco AI agents. www.fierce-network.com/cloud/per…

My latest on Fierce Network. Amdocs is working with Nvidia on customizing AI customer service agents with human-like characteristics — they have faces and talk — to ensure they effectively represent telco brands. Trials delivered a remarkable 63% reduction in call handling time and a 50% uplift in first-call resolution and customer satisfaction. But AI agents may be facing backlash from consumers.

If you oppose the State of Israel, this post is not for you. coreyrobin.com/2025/08/0…

This quote in particular strikes close to home for me: “The stain of this abomination will forever be on the Jewish people because we have not stopped this.”

Minnie is a medium-sized dog, which means even though she isn’t that great on the leash, it’s OK because I can muscle her into line if she engages in undesirable behavior. I am sure this is not an option when you are a normal-sized woman walking two weimeraners. Even if one of the weimeraners only has three legs.

Our next-door neighbor adopted a three-legged dog, and I saw her walking both of her dogs this morning, and that’s nine legs total. 15 if you count me and Minnie. Both neighbor dogs are Weimeraners, and our neighbor is a normal-sized woman.

For me, like hundreds of millions of men around the world, every other morning I look in the mirror and say to myself, “shit I have to shave again today.”

We gave the cats flea treatments. The doctors say that I will now have to undergo many rounds of surgery and painful physical therapy, but I have a good chance of regaining the use of my shredded arms.

“After Hours” and “Barton Fink” are two movies where the trailers promised lighthearted comedy and I walked out of the theater feeling like I’d been punched in the face.

I’ve been trying out a couple of new web browsers and moving my newsletter subscriptions to different email addresses. The I-am-not-a-robot gauntlet has been brutal.

One day when I was in the third grade, our music teacher, Mrs. Lafayette, had the class compose a song together. Words and music. It was only about 10 seconds and it went like this:

“Early in the morning
Standing by the road
I jumped when I saw a little toad.”

(Then two more lines here with the same beats as the first two. I don’t remember those lines now.)

“Then I caught him nibbling at my sock.”

55 years later, sometimes I catch myself singing that stupid song, inaudibly, under my breath.

I use an app called Lose It to track calories, and I have cottage cheese with lunch nearly every day. I bought a different brand than usual recently, and Lose It lists it as “cootage cheese.” This amuses me to an unreasonable degree.

Cootage cheese.

Cloud-native becomes telcos’ new baseline after supplier upheavals. fierce-network.com Recent industry M&A shook the virtualization market and pushed telcos to rethink their infrastructure strategies. Find out how telcos are adapting and thriving in our latest Fierce Network research report. My latest on Fierce Network.

Here’s something I saw while walking the dog: This pleasing house

Links and ephemera for Monday, 7.28.2025

✪ The Department of Homeland Security is tweeting Nazi propaganda. msn.com

✪ Passkeys won’t be ready for primetime until Google and other companies fix this zdnet.com — I don’t use Passkeys. I don’t quite understand them. I researched them when they first started hitting the mainstream, but have since forgotten what I’ve learned. I fear I could be locked out of my accounts if Apple and/or Google take a dislike to me. Passwords and 2FA are faulty, but they’re devils I am familiar with.

✪ How chat-based LLMs replicate the methods of a psychic con. softwarecrisis.dev

✪ This little boy is why we need live music in public spaces. 

✪ Anthony Bourdain on In-N-Out: “My Favorite Restaurant in L.A.” youtu.be. I like, but do not love, In-N-Out.

Continue Reading →

I had an actual, legitimate wrong-number text just now, followed by a phone call. They weren’t trying to get me to invest in crypto or a pump-and-dump meme stock. They were just trying to reach somebody else and got me instead.

What a refreshing novelty.

I went to Comic-Con yesterday. Here are some photos

More precisely, I went near Comic-Con. I didn’t get tickets. But that’s OK — Comic-Con takes over all of downtown. I like to ride the Trolley in, walk around, people-watch, take photos, look at all the wild decorations and themed attractions studios put up to advertise the big movies and TV shows. I like to rack up the steps. I did 23,000 steps yesterday. A friend came down from Orange County, and it was delightful to see him.

Auto-generated description: A man wearing a hat takes a selfie in a bathroom mirror, showcasing his colorful shirt featuring a surfing dinosaur.

I’m on my way, looking dapper, if I do say so myself, wearing a tasteful shirt.

Auto-generated description: A sunny urban park features palm trees, a grassy area, a walkway, and buildings in the background.

This is not a Comic-Con photo. It’s just a nice scenic photo of the San Diego embarcadero.


Another scenic San Diego photo.

Auto-generated description: A person wearing a red beret, round sunglasses, striped shirt, and suspenders stands outdoors with a hand on their hip.

Auto-generated description: A person wearing a bear hat and casual clothing is walking outdoors near a Penske truck.

Auto-generated description: Two people are walking, one dressed casually and the other wearing a costume with green accents, carrying swords.

Auto-generated description: A person dressed in a bright yellow clown costume with red gloves, green stars, and a colorful wig is standing on a sidewalk.

Auto-generated description: A person in a bright yellow costume with a red cape and white gloves is walking along a waterfront, with a ferris wheel visible in the background.

Auto-generated description: A person wearing a large rooster head mask and holding a baseball bat walks down a sunny street.

Auto-generated description: A person in a pink, frilly costume poses with a smiling man by a waterfront railing.

In past years, there used to be a couple of dozen of these guys hanging out at the trolley stop. Now I only saw two or three scattered around. We used to be a country, I tell ya.

Auto-generated description: A tall building features large advertisements, primarily for Dexter, against a clear blue sky, with food stalls in the foreground.

Dozens of downtown skyscrapers are wrapped to advertise TV and movies. This is just one example.

At first glance, I thought this gentleman, who I saw on the Trolley ride home, was cosplaying. Upon further scrutiny, I think he is just exquisitely fashionable.

Links for today Saturday 7.26.2025

✪ “Resident Alien,” one of our favorite TV shows, is canceled. Son of a bitch! This is some bullshit! deadline.com

✪ Today I learned Ron Goulart wrote a series of mystery novels featuring Groucho Marx as a detective. en.wikipedia.org

✪ “The head of the main UN agency serving Palestinians has said his frontline staff are fainting from hunger, as the number of people dying of starvation in Gaza continued to rise and hopes for a ceasefire faded as negotiations collapsed.” theguardian.com

✪ “A group of far-right Israeli politicians and settlers met in parliament this week to discuss a plan to displace Palestinians from Gaza, annex the territory and turn it into a hi-tech, luxury resort city for Israelis.… Michael Sfard, one of Israel’s leading human rights lawyers, said: ‘This is a plan for ethnic cleansing. Under international law, this would amount to a crime against humanity because deportation is a war crime when committed on a small scale and a crime against humanity when it is committed on a massive scale.'” theguardian.com

✪ “Venezuelan men who were deported by the US to a notorious prison in El Salvador without due process are speaking out about treatment they described as ‘hell’ and like a ‘horror movie’, after arriving back home.” theguardian.com

✪ Immigration agents told a teenage US citizen: ‘You’ve got no rights.’ He secretly recorded his brutal arrest theguardian.com

✪ JD Vance Claims One of Our Worst Traditions as His Own. By Jamelle Bouie. nytimes.com Vance echoes the principles of the Dred Scott decision, which declared that Black people were an inferior race who could never be US citizens.

✪ White House Slams ‘South Park’ After Unflattering Depiction of Trump. hollywoodreporter.com The South Park episode includes a realistic, AI-generated image of a naked Trump showing his micropenis. youtu.be

✪ Ghislaine Maxwell Can’t Help But Notice Interview Room Covered In Plastic Sheeting. theonion.com

✪ Today’s labor market is “less like a ladder, more like a slot machine,” resulting in “zero-sum logic” that is poisoning society, writes Kayla Scanlon. kyla.substack.com

In 1957, the Soviet launch of Sputnik triggered a huge US response. It led to 3x funding for science education, created NASA and DARPA, and created massive investment in talent and infrastructure (and optimism). The US looked at a challenge and said: We can build our way out of this.

As economist Alex Tabarrok pointed out in his piece about the Sputnik moment, that kind of mobilization didn’t happen in 2024 when China’s DeepSeek AI surpassed OpenAI’s GPT-4. The US retreated instead of rallying. We looked at a challenge and say: They must be stealing from us.

This is a shift in how we understand problems and solutions. As Alex highlighted, research shows we’re developing what economists call zero-sum thinking, or the belief that my success requires your failure, that wealth and opportunity are fixed pies to be divided rather than expanded. As Alex explains, zero-sum thinkers “see society as unjust, distrust their fellow citizens and societal institutions, espouse more populist attitudes, and disengage from potentially beneficial interactions.” It’s a form of despair that arises during times of economic uncertainty.”

As Scanlon notes: This is reversible.

✪ The Seeds of Democratic Revival Have Already Been Sown. nytimes.com — I love nearly all of this article — but I am deeply troubled by suggestions we should fail to support our LGBTQ fellow Americans.

✪ “You think you’re the coolest guy in the parking lot and then this guy shows up.” “This guy” being a cat. tiktok.com

✪ Skittles gets a hat. tumblr.com

✪ Prepare Batcopter for immediate takeoff. tumblr.com

✪ By the way, is there anyone onboard who knows how to fly a plane? tumblr.com

"The Stainless Steel Rat" is the GOAT nickname for a fictional hero

He was the hero of the Stainless Steel Rat books by Harry Harrison. His full name is James Bolivar diGriz, aka “Slippery Jim diGriz.” Also good names. Harrison had a good ear for how names sound.

I loved those novels when I was a kid.

I also loved Harrison’s “Deathworld” novel series, whose hero also had a pretty good name — Jason dinAlt.

On the other hand, “Jake Cardigan” is a ridiculous name. He was the hero of the Tekwar novels and TV series, created by William Shatner. Ron Goulart ghostwrote the books.

I think I’m going to stick with the Zen browser. I found it confusing at first, even though I used the Arc browser, which is similar, for months. But I think I have it figured out. I particularly like compact mode, where I can easily use a keyboard shortcut to show and hide the toolbars and sidebars for maximum screen real estate and focus.

I prefer to write in Markdown, but often I have to write in Microsoft Word, and I hate it, because I find myself devoting significant time to managing Word, rather than writing and making formatting decisions.

This morning, I had a block of text that I wanted to format in bullets. Simple, right? I’ve done it a million times. But Word would not let me format that particular block in bullets, and I spent 15 minutes plinking around in the user interface and doing web searches figuring it out.

This is not at all unusual behavior for Word. There are even memes about it.

I’ve been using the Zen browser for a couple of hours. I think I like it, but it’s confusing. I used Arc for a few months a year or two ago. Zen is very similar but different in significant ways. Zen also seems very buggy.

My phone is an iPhone 15 Pro Max — the big one. I think I might be happier with a standard-size iPhone.

The standard-size iPhone doesn’t have the iPhone’s best camera, so I think I’d also like a small camera too.

And I think I’d like an iPad mini, for when I want a bigger screen.

Then I think, why don’t I just set a stack of $100 bills on fire instead?

I’m thinking about trying Firefox or one of its forks for the Mac, iPhone and iPad. Does anyone have experience to share and suggestions? I was looking at Floorp.

A friend told me yesterday that I should take up painting. Later, I was reviewing my to-do list and saw, in the someday/maybe area: “Learn to draw? Take a class?” I have no memory of adding that task, but my to-do software says I added it three weeks ago.

I have not tried to draw anything since I was a pre-teen in art class. I expect if I tried now, the result would be so bad that you would not even be able to figure out what I am trying to draw.

And yet….

I have discovered Skymoth, which automatically crossposts Mastodon posts to Bluesky. My inexorable plan for global domination progresses!

I searched on my own name in an AI chatbot, which I have not done for a while. The chatbot universe has now learned that I am not the San Diego trial lawyer named “Mitch Wagner,” but it still thinks I’m a crossfit athlete with strong rankings in national and regional competitions over several years. (Which, no — I would say I am extremely healthy and fit for a middle-class American my age, but no, I am not a competitive athlete. I have seen photos of that Mitch Wagner with his shirt off, and it is very different from the shirtless me I see in the mirror.)

I was told tonight that I look like the composer Igor Stravinsky.

Is Mastodon "toxic?"

I’ve heard from two people in the past 24 hours who have dropped Mastodon, citing negativity. One said it’s “pretty fucking toxic.”

Meanwhile, I’m focusing more of my blogging and social media on Mastodon (and Tumblr too, but I’m talking about Mastodon today).

I’m taking a break from posting to Bluesky because I don’t get enough activity there to be worth posting to.

And I am taking a break from posting to Facebook — hopefully permanently — because I don’t like Meta and I don’t like the way Facebook operates.

Different people have different experiences, and my social media profile is so low nowadays that if Masto is toxic, I may simply be too small to target.

One of the reasons I chose Masto over Bluesky is that I was able to migrate my account to a server, hachyderm.io that permits posts of up to 2,263 characters. I hate short character limits — 140 characters, 280, 300, 500. I have more than that to say.

Here’s my link page, where you can find my links to Mastodon, Tumblr, etc.

Customizing Grammarly to be less pushy and annoying

I use Grammarly to check grammar and usage in my writing. I find it valuable, but also excessively intrusive. The recent update is more aggressive and annoying about making arbitrary and unnecessary changes.

I decided to read through the documentation and lo! there is a preference page.. I’ve switched off some types of suggestions — for example: “Sound more personable,” “Use word variety,” “Use descriptive, vivid words,” “Rewrite text for improved effect,” etc. This makes Grammarly far less pushy and annoying and more useful,

I am an extremely good writer, but a mediocre proofreader at best. Also, Grammarly is great at cutting out extraneous words. I want Grammarly to focus on those things, not look over my shoulder and make obnoxious suggestions.

I still think Google Glass had the right idea. I mean, augmented reality sounds nice, but I’d be happy with a discreet, unobtrusive little screen in the corner of my vision that shows me turn-by-turn directions and notifications and stuff. Like an Apple Watch for your face. Just that would be great.

A Grand Unified Theory of what's wrong with the economy and why China is beating us up

This post is based on conversations I had on Tumblr and Mastodon yesterday.

Kyla Scanlon is an insightful writer about societal issues from a fresh perspective — Generation Z. She recently appeared on the Ezra Klein Show podcast, in an episode titled, “How the Attention Economy Is Devouring Gen Z — and the Rest of Us. She expands on that theme in her newsletter, in a post entitled: From Dollar Dominance to the Slop Machine

One of the themes Scanlon raises stays with me. It appeals to me a great deal as a Grand Unified Theory of a lot of what’s wrong with the U.S. economy, and perhaps the whole West.

The U.S. is focused on extracting wealth – tearing down – and China is focused on building.

The U.S.’s focus on wealth extraction rather than value creation means all activity is measured as a revenue opportunity. We can’t build affordable housing because families' wealth is tied up in their homes. Initiatives in healthcare, education and the food chain are all measured against their ability to generate revenue. Artificial intelligence extracts the works of millions of creative people and sends the revenue to a few Silicon Valley billionaires. Short-term financial thinking locks us into fossil fuels – though wind and solar are generating wealth and jobs, much of that financial value doesn’t exist yet. And that’s not the point of wind and solar anyway – the point is to avoid burning down the planet.

People are desperate to keep from falling behind economically, and therefore don’t think about long-term threats like Long Covid and climate change.

As a friend pointed out a few years ago: If James Bond went up against a supervillain in real life, the local community would rally around the supervillian. He’s a job creator! Look at how many henchman and crony positions he’s created!

We can’t even enjoy our hobbies anymore without pressure to make money off of them. Why have a hobby when you can have a side-hustle!

Meanwhile, China is building cities, electric cars, solar power and educating engineers and scientists.

This ties in with writing by two bloggers I follow closely, particularly Ian Welsh and also Chris Arnade.

China’s leadership has done terrible things. But they’re pulling ahead of the U.S. because they are investing in the future. They serve the future of China and all its people for the long term. Meanwhile, our leaders are dismantling American greatness and selling it, like the gangsters in “Goodfellas” or “The Sopranos” busting out a business.

The U.S. is becoming a nation of TikTok celebrities, grifters and crypto scammers. Our leaders serve the superrich and have no plans for the future.

But the U.S. slide is not inevitable. We have plenty of smart people here who are working and building, and plenty more eager to join them.

We need elected officials who think about the long term for their communities, the state, U.S. and world. Who think beyond the nexxt election and who work for all the people, not just the super-rich and white people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War.

We’ve probably lost a generation of time. But (paraphrasing a popular saying): When you find yourself at the bottom of a hole, the thing to do is stop digging and start climbing.

I'm shifting things around in my blogging and social media again.

Links and ephemera (memes, vintage photos, illustrations and ads) go on Mastodon, Tumblr and (sigh) Facebook. I’m saving this blog for meatier updates.

It just seems more appropriate and easier to post the links and ephemera in those other places. Unfortunately, that means my newsletter subscribers won’t see those things, at least for now.

Also: I’m taking a break from Bluesky. I feel like I don’t get enough activity there to be worth the expenditure of attention and time.

This is all likely to change again. I am constantly fiddling with my blogging and social setup. In late May, I paused Mastodon entirely and just used this blog, which is hosted on Micro.blog, as my outpost on the Fediverse. This current change reverses that one. I think Mastodon is better for linkblogging and ephemera than Micro.blog is, though Micro.blog is a great blogging platform.

More ideas I’m noodling:

  • Possibly switching from mastodon.social to hachyderm, because hachyderm permits longer posts.
  • Can I figure out a way to keep the links and ephemera in my newsletter without doing significantly more work? Because this isn’t supposed to be work for me — it’s a hobby!

"Hawk Among the Sparrows"

I read this story when I was a little kid — it blew my mind.

My cousin Barry let me borrow a whole stack of Analog magazines from 1968-72, which included this issue, and I devoured them voraciously. That stack of magazines is a big part of my origin story as a science fiction fan.

That stack of magazines is a big part of my origin story as a science fiction fan.

And Barry never expressed much interest in having the magazines back, so I hung on to them. They may be somewhere in my house right now, 50+ years and 2,500 miles from where they started.

Those magazines were how I was introduced to Joe Haldeman — they included several of his early stories, including “Hero,” which became the opening of “The Forever War.” In much later life, Joe and his delightful wife Gay became friends.

Great cover, isn’t it?

How the Attention Economy Is Devouring Gen Z -- and the Rest of Us

I loved this Ezra Klein interview with Kyla Scanlon, a newsletter writer who focuses on the attention economy. The discussion complements one of my greatest fears about the U.S. (and maybe the whole West) — that the economy, politics and society are now built on attention and virality, rather than things that matter — manufacturing, science, infrastructure, etc. It’s all about the retweets.

We’re doing ok now, coasting on past accomplishments, like wealthy spendthrifts living off the wealth of past generations. But it’s coming apart fast.

Donald Trump is, of course, the ringmaster of this circus.

Crypto is the apotheosis of the U.S. economy built on social media virality. Gilded Age robber barons were monsters, but they built railroads, coal and steel mines and factories. They built urban infrastructure. The U.S economy and society today are built on conspiracy theories and digital beanie babies.

This sounds dire — but we can stop this. People and societies have free will. It’ll take a while to dig out of the hole we’ve dug ourselves into. I probably won’t live to see the end of this process. But we need to get started.

My latest on Fierce Network: AI looks like magic, but the real trick is infrastructure — AI requires massive investment in cloud infrastructure, skills, and compliance strategies. Enterprises are balancing performance, cost, and risk as they deploy AI across cloud and on-premises environments. Our new Fierce Network Research report covers how successful enterprises are deploying infrastructure for AI. And get the report here.

JD Vance: Some Americans Are More American Than Others

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo:

“Identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let’s say, of the Declaration of Independence – that’s a definition that is way over-inclusive and under-inclusive at the same time,” Vance said.

He explained that such a definition “would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens who agree” with the principles of the Declaration of Independence, dubbing it “the logic of America as a purely Creole nation.”

By the opposite token, Vance said, conceiving of American citizenship “purely as an idea” would “reject a lot of people that the ADL would label as domestic extremists, even though those very Americans had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War,” he said, referencing the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit that was founded to combat antisemitism and that, among other activities, tracks far-right groups.

“I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong,” he concluded.

My ancestors did not serve in the Civil War. My grandparents immigrated around 1905. I suspect that by Vance’s bullshit standards I don’t qualify as a real American, even though I and both my parents were born here.

It’s a strawman argument to suggest that anybody believes that simply agreeing with the ideals of the Declaration makes a person American. There’s more to it than that. But Vance’s blood-and-soil patriotism is both wrong and traitorous, and it’s particularly shameful that he gave his talk on Independence Day weekend.

The New York Times worked with a racist to generate a fake scandal about Zohran Mamdani

Shockingly, Mamdani, who was born in Uganada to parents of Indian descent, checked both the “Asian” and “Black or African-American” boxes on his Columbia University application in 2009. Supposedly, this was wrong of him to do, even though he is, in fact, both Asian and African-American.

Mike Masnick at Techdirt:

Where’s the lie? Did Uganda move? Is it not in Africa anymore? Are we really going to pretend that America’s racial categories, designed primarily for descendants of American slavery, map perfectly onto the global complexity of human identity?

Also:

But here’s what kills me: they could have written a fascinating story about how a network of racist activists was trying to weaponize hacked university data that revealed nothing particularly interesting to attack a Muslim mayoral candidate. They could have exposed the whole operation. Instead, they decided to become part of it. It’s like if Woodward and Bernstein, upon discovering Watergate, had decided to focus their expose on how the security at the Watergate Hotel was top notch, with an anonymous quote from G. Gordon Liddy.

The Double Standard is Glaring

The Times' decision becomes even more indefensible when you consider their recent editorial choices. They refused to publish hacked materials about JD Vance during the 2024 election and declined to explain why. But when a racist hands them a hacked college application from 2009 that reveals nothing of public interest, suddenly those ethical concerns disappear.

The paper also famously decided not to endorse candidates in local elections–except when it came to Mamdani, whom they specifically urged voters not to rank at all on their ballots. Interestingly, they didn’t issue similar “please don’t vote for this person” guidance about Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former governor who resigned over sexual harassment allegations and has been plagued with scandals from his mismanagement during the pandemic. Apparently checking the objectively accurate box on a college application is more disqualifying than a pattern of sexual misconduct and mismanagement.

Manufacturing Controversy To Justify Bad Journalism

Perhaps most galling is the Times' response to criticism. When readers and media critics pointed out how absurd this story was, an anonymous Times source told Semafor that the controversy proved they were right to publish this:

“The fact that this story engendered all the conversation and debate that it has feels like all the evidence you need that this was a legit line of reporting,” one senior reporter told Semafor.

But that’s not how any of this works. At all. Sometimes the “conversation and debate” is about how you should have known better.

The Times mostly does solid journalism. I subscribe and read it most days. But it also regularly kowtows to racist Republican interests.

Technicians who climb cell towers have dangerous jobs. Now they’re getting a not-for-profit group, “focused on unifying, protecting and advocating for the tower technician workforce,” organized by former tower climber Tommy Schuch. My colleague Tommy Clift reports on Fierce Network: Tower climbing veteran launches Climber Protection Group

Charles Pulliam-Moore at The Verge loves the new Superman movie.. I’m jazzed to see it. I’ve been burned out on superhero movies for years, but I’d love to see somebody breathe new life into the genre. This one seems written for the current political era, emphasizing Superman’s immigrant origins and painting Lex Luthor as a nativist villain.

Text message spam is getting to be a problem for me. I’m thinking of activating the iPhone feature where you can shift text messages from unknown senders into their own inbox, but I do occasionally get an important message from someone not already in my contacts. How do other people handle this?

He’s Ringo. And Nobody Else Is.

Lindsay Zoladz at The New York Times:

Starr then drifted back to a memory of his early days gigging around Liverpool, before he joined the band that he sometimes refers to as “the Fabs.” “When I first started,” he said, “my mother would come to the gigs. She would always say, ‘You know, son, I always feel you’re at your happiest when you’re playing your drums.’ So she noticed. And I do.” He smiled. “I love to hit those buggers.”

Insomnia isn't anything you should lose sleep about

Journalist Jennifer Senior writes at The Atlantic about her own and the nation’s struggles with insomnia: Why Can’t Americans Sleep?.

Like Senior, I have struggled with fierce insomnia, sometimes getting only two hours per night of sleep for several nights a week. It started in 2020 or so. And like Senior, medication has corrected the problem for me. She takes Klonopin; for me, it’s 50 mg of Trazodone, an antidepressant. I take it at bedtime, and I sleep soundly most nights. It hasn’t fixed my insomnia, but it’s reduced to two or three nights a month.

Not only is restored sleep great for my physical and mental health, but I get the added benefit that I can drink as much coffee as I want, whenever I want. It’s coming up on 4 pm right now and I’m thinking of fixing myself a cup now!

I’ve recently become conscious of how often I say, “Cool.” It’s an all-purpose word for me, meaning “OK,” “thank you,” “good-bye,” “that’s good,” etc.

It seems lazy to me to keep hitting that word. I need alternatives.

Candidates:

  • Ave atque vale.
  • Keep the shiny side up and the greasy side down.
  • Get your hands off me you damn dirty apes.
  • You’re damn skippy.

Other ideas?