Technology

They Needed an Issue

Watch the Diner, Watch the Memo N.B. This morning: Watch the Diner. I wrote this morning that you watch the diner. The chain wants a smoking ban and a living wage. Six months later the independent shop is a parking lot and nobody passed a bill titled Kill the Diner. They passed public health. What Washington did today is name the chain. Over one weekend the frontier labs asked the country to slow down. Monday morning Chuck Schumer demanded a classified briefing for every senator on “unchecked AI.” Before nightfall Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Kamala Harris were speaking from the…

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Watch the Diner: The Regulatory Capture of the AI Health Code

The Restaurant Chain Wants a Smoking Ban and a Living Wage Who Writes the Health Code? I have never believed a tool decides a people. I said that when the argument went to orbit. I said it when the argument came down to a pad and a hearing. I will say it again in a room every town already knows. Two weeks ago the question on the pad was the hall. Neighbors. Load. A ledger and a vote. Creaturehood was the measure then because particular people still have to live there after the ribbon. This month the same men are selling…

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Compute and Creaturehood

Data Centers Have Neighbors Compute will find a home. The only live civic question is whether the neighbors are treated as creatures or as throughput. I have never believed a tool decides a people. I said that when the argument went to orbit. I will say it again with the argument on the ground. The demand for compute is not a zoning category. It is load. It will clear. It will clear on a brownfield with its own generation, on a river that still has surplus power, behind a posted payment in lieu of taxes, in the next county that wants…

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The Future is Now

Politics on the Ground, Compute in Orbit I’ve never been a futurist, much less a maximal one. But Elon Musk has shown me that, in the words of the late George Allen, the future is now. Allen did not mean the distant horizon had arrived on schedule. He meant he refused to treat the present as a waiting room. He traded future draft picks for veterans who could win games immediately because he rejected the idea that the important results belonged to some later, more convenient decade. The motto was operational. It still is. I have spent years treating artificial intelligence…

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American Families Gain Ground

How Trump’s H-1B Crackdown Is Delivering Discounts for American Families and Breathing Room in the Job Market From the parks and school drop-off lines in east Plano to the new-build subdivisions stretching through Frisco, Prosper, and Celina, the rhythm of daily life in Collin County has shifted noticeably in recent months. For Sale signs linger longer. Conversations at neighborhood gatherings carry a different tone. The rapid cultural and linguistic changes that defined the post-pandemic boom years have slowed, replaced by something more measured: a suburban rebalancing long overdue. The New York Post and Bloomberg captured it sharply in early June 2026:…

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Value is King

Why AI’s Job Apocalypse Talk Is Fading as IPOs Approach Sam Altman and Dario Amodei spent much of the past year warning that AI would gut white-collar employment. Now, as their companies pursue potential trillion-dollar IPOs, both are publicly walking back those dramatic predictions. A Fortune article captures this shift, framing it as humble, evidence-based updating. From where I sit, it looks more like classic narrative smoothing driven by financial incentives. AI is a neutral tool—like a gun, an axe, or a shovel in the old Shane analogy. It becomes good or bad based on the character and incentives of those…

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The Mental Health Crisis of AI Transition

AI Is Training Your Replacement: Start Training Yourself to Leave At Meta this week, thousands of employees sat at their desks, fingers flying across keyboards, mouse clicking through workflows, while invisible software recorded every movement. The Model Capability Initiative (Meta’s aptly named tracking program) logged keystrokes, cursor paths, clicks, and occasional screen snapshots. All of it fed into training AI agents meant to replicate those very tasks. Meanwhile, an internal directory refreshed with the quiet dread of knowing that on May 20, roughly 8,000 colleagues (10% of the workforce) would receive the layoff email. Some cried in the shower before work.…

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AI Doublespeak Is Collapsing

Graduates See What the Elites Won’t Admit In April, I wrote that AI is a tool, Marian: channeling Alan Ladd’s Shane to remind everyone that technology itself is morally neutral. A gun, an axe, a shovel: it becomes good or bad based on the character and incentives of the person wielding it. That piece pushed back against fatalistic UBI talk and the notion that AI would simply “wipe out” work rather than transform it through markets, adaptation, and human ingenuity. This follow-up is necessary because the people holding the tool are currently engaged in a glaring contradiction that cannot last. Big…

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Mark Cuban’s Realistic AI Take

Why the Next Job Wave Belongs to Integrators, Not Wizards Mark Cuban has seen technology shifts before. He built a career explaining personal computers to businesses that had never touched one. In August of 2025, he called the next wave with characteristic bluntness. Now in 2026, his words have proved prescient. Mark Cuban on the next big job students should focus on:Most companies don’t know how to implement AI, especially small businesses.“Companies don’t understand how to implement AI right now to get a competitive advantage… learn to customize a model, walk into a company, show… pic.twitter.com/Cwl6yGBand— TBPN (@tbpn) February 15, 2026…

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Transformed, Not Wiped Out

The Real Story of AI and Entry-Level Work Yesterday we talked about AI as a tool, no better or worse than the character and ingenuity of those who wield it. Guns don't kill people, axes don't chop wood by themselves, and AI won't magically "wipe out" half the entry-level jobs in tech, law, consulting, and finance. Yet here we are again, watching the same dramatic warning from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei make the rounds on X: 50% of those roles "completely wiped out" in 1–5 years. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei: “50% of all tech jobs, entry-level lawyers, consultants, and finance professionals…

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