From The MIT Press.

American Progress Was an Optical Illusion

A story about the history of New Mexico, on July 4, in the London Review of Books.

Before 1776

Ok I’ll say it. American needs to stop letting these private companies monetize our privacy.  From The Next Web.

The CEO of America’s most powerful surveillance company spent $200 million on places nobody can find him

What could go wrong?  According to Oracles financial statements (via Gizmodo):

overbuilding, customer defaults, excess leases, stranded capacity, credit risk, power shortages, GPU shortages, site shortages, permitting delays, construction delays, contractor failures, zoning fights, environmental rules, water limits, grid strain, fixed-price contracts, volatile power costs, supplier delays, shipping disruptions, tariff shocks, export controls, geopolitical instability, obsolete hardware, service outages, security flaws, AI errors, biased outputs, copyright exposure, privacy risks, patchwork regulation, compute restrictions, cross-border limits, weak adoption, competitor advances, legal liability, and reputational damage

Oracle’s Data Center Warning Is a Worst-Case Scenario for the Whole AI Boom

I’m guessing it’s more than just cooking oil.  From The Guardian (UK).

US cooking oil market shrinking due to Ice pressures on Latino households, Mazola owner says

Seems the US has returned to the Spoils System of the Andrew Jackson era.

Not sure how much attention this anniversary gets in the rest of the country but here in Albuquerque it’s been a sorta big deal.  From The Conversation.

As Route 66 turns 100, what is it that we’re actually celebrating?

It’s often advised that if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. It’s also advised not to speak ill of the dead.  I’ll ignore both of these in the special occasion of the deaths of Alan Greenspan and Lee Raymond.

Greenspan was the long time chair of the federal reserve and presided, more ignominiously, during the Bush Administration.  Both Bushes I suppose, but mostly the younger Bush.

Bush started his administration with the biggest tax cuts in US history, all for big corporations and the wealthy.  Then came 9/11 and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And Katrina.  All of this was paid for by debt, papered over by low interest rates, supplied by Mr Greenspan.  This only delayed the inevitable by blowing a massive real estate bubble.

Once Republicans were shown the door by voters in 2008 the plug was pulled and a very predictable crash in the housing market, banking and eventually other financial markets followed.  This has become known as The Great Recession.  This was predicted as early as 2001 and flags raised by observers across the spectrum, including Congressman Ron Paul, a fellow follower of crank economist / philosopher Ayn Rand.

By the time the bill came due, Greenspan had quietly retired.  The ensuing cleanup was mostly a gift to the banking industry with ordinary Americans left paying the price.  The subsequent bad economy also served to hamstring the recently elected Democrats, including Barak Obama, from doing, well, just about anything.

I also heard the former head of Exxon, Lee Raymond,  also passed away.  During his tenure his company profited massively from Bush’s wars in the Middle East. He was also a champion denier of climate change.  The world is an increasingly warmer place, with more erratic weather, because of Dr Lee Raymond.  In the long run his destructive influence  may even rival that of Alan Greenspan.

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan dies at 100

Longtime Exxon CEO Lee Raymond’s legacy of climate denial and misinformation lives on

An article originally in Spanish from The Baffler.  About the piping of natural gas from fracking in Texas across Mexico to the Pacific coast for export to Asia.  Even if you don’t care about gas pipelines in Mexico the information on the impact of fracking is worth the read.

Terminal Velocity

When you look up our house on Google Maps it comes up with “is on wrong corner”.  Not sure what this means or who tagged our house this way, but I haven’t been able to change it.  A friend suggested we just start referring to our house as “Casa Esquina Equivocada”.