Indie Bookstores Making a Comeback? YAY!!!

I cannot remember a time in my life when I didn't love books.

When I was really little - pre-reader - those books were mostly Golden Books. When my mother went shopping "downcity" (which was Worcester for downtown), she would always bring home a couple of them for us to share. They were magical! The stories well-told, the illustrations brilliant. I have a few Golden Books on my bookshelves, and just picking up, say, The Tawny, Scrawny Lion, and looking at the cover fills me with immense joy.

Then there were library books. Once a week, my father took us to the Main South Branch of the Worcester Public Library, where you could check six books out. Once I could read, this supply was augmented by Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew books, bought for fifty cents a piece at the Woolworth's in Webster Square Plaza. Then there were our book club books - Vision Books with their lives of saints, and the Landmark series focused on history.

Once I outgrew these sorts of books, I was still a library regular, but was also reading the grownup books my parents got from the Book of the Month Club and the Literary Guild.

But once I got to high school, I started frequenting an actual bookstore.

The commute to my high school required a bus transfer downcity. And downcity was where Ephraim's Bookstore was located. 

I adored Ephraim's. Other than being encased in an MRI, shopping at Ephraim's was the most claustrophobia-inducing experience of my life. But what a pleasure to browse for required non-textbook reading and for stumble-upons. I still frequented the public library. But if I had a few bucks extra, it was a tossup whether to buy a record album or drift over to Ephraim's.

In college, there was the campus bookstore, but it was more fun to take the Red Line over to Harvard Square and shop at the Harvard Co-op and the Harvard Bookstore.

Fast forward a few years, and my bookstores of choice became the Barnes and Noble and the Borders in downtown Boston.

This was pre-Internet, and I didn't spend a nanosecond worrying about whether B&N and Borders were putting indie bookstores out of business. When it first opened, Barnes and Noble was a revelation, an out-of-this-world experience. So many books, so little time. I remember standing in line, waiting to check out, already diving into my purchases. I remember being proud of carrying my books home in a Barnes and Noble bag. 

During this period, I also bought a lot of books at Wordsworth in Harvard Square, especially when I worked near The Square. Harvard Bookstore was also a favorite. But once I no longer worked near The Square, getting there was an every-couple-of-months schlep.

A trip to Worcester to see my mother always meant a trip to the Tatnuck Bookseller. This store - which opened well after I fled Worcester - was just terrice, and it also had a super restaurant. 

Closer to home, Barnes and Noble closed and Borders became my go-to. For years, I made weekly stops at the Borders on the corner of Washington Street and School, and especially loved their bargain table, with its half-priced paperbacks. I cried when that Borders closed. 

Off and on, throughout the years, I'd semi swear-off book buying and do most of my reading via library books. (I'm mostly back on, but I'm currently in a library lull working my way through my backlog of bought books.)

But bookstores are always going to be at much my thing as libraries are. 

Once B&N and Borders decamped, I started going to Trident, a wonderful indie on Boston's Newbury Street, where I am a frequent flyer buyer. I think it's 10% off the next purchase after earning $100 points, but I may be mistaken. I don't really care. I'd shop there anyway. I love grazing, Trident - like Borders once did - has an excellent mark-down table, and the folks who work at Trident are very helpful. Ask someone where a certain book is, and they'll walk you there and find it on the shelf.

Porter Square Books is another great local indie, but they're further afield than Trident, which remains my bookstore boo.

Admittedly, I do occasionally order a book on Amazon if I absolutely have to have it overnight for some reason, and it's going to take a week or so for Trident to get it in. 

But - honestly, I swear to God - I mostly buy books at Trident.

I know that the Internet (i.e., Amazon) put a lot of indies out of business. Among the victims: Wordsworth and Tatnuck.

But others, like Trident, have not been crushed and continue to thrive. 

And there's new indie kids on the block, too:

About 422 new indie bookshops opened in 2025, according to the American Booksellers Association, a 31% rise from 2024. Countless independent restaurants, coffee shops, fitness centers, movie theaters, clothing stores and other small businesses also continue to thrive even in this era of ever-bigger retailers, fast-casual restaurants and massive e-commerce platforms. (Source: The Guardian)

What's behind this resurgence in indie bookstore (and other small businesses)? 

The reasons are obvious.

At least they're obvious to Gene Marks, who wrote the article I'm citing here. 

• The US is big - population and geographic - and diverse. Plenty of people out there want something that caters more to their particular wants and needs.
• Big businesses may scale efficiency, but "small businesses scale relevance." Barnes and Noble might not carry the quirky author from a small, independent press that only a few people are interested in. But Trident just might. 
•  We have an entrepreneurial spirit in this country. "For the past few years, there have been between 400,000 and 500,000 new business applications filed every month!" Obviously not all of them are for indie bookstores, but there certainly are a ton of folks who want to be their own boss. 
• A lot of people prefer to work for smaller businesses. The pay and benefits may be less than what big business can offer, but they're less bureaucratic, they're friendlier. Working in a small business, you're less of a cog in the wheel. 
• Small businesses have closer ties to their communities. 

So a lot of folks are deciding that, although they may pay a bit more for products sold in smaller, local businesses, it's worth it. These days:

Consumers don’t just tolerate small businesses – increasingly, they choose them as a reaction against big corporations. 

I haven't sworn entirely off Amazon for books or for anything else. It's just too convenient. And a lot of times, what I'm looking for is nowhere to be found nearby. Generally, I do try to find something in a local non-chain store - I have a great indie drugstore and a great indie hardware store in my neighborhood, just around the corner. If they don't have something I need, I'll turn to Amazon. (I recently tried to get the knee brace my PT recommended at my indie drugstore. Alas, they didn't carry it, so I had to resort to Amazon.)

But I've very much pared back on book-ordering on Amazon. 

Once I make some more headway with my backlog of books, off to Trident I go!

Yay indie bookstores!!!

 

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Image Source: Your Magazine

Sure, it's flattering, but...

When it comes to states, I'm an absolute homer. Yes, I can imagine living in other places - elsewhere in New England, New York (NYC), Illinois (Chicago), Minnesota (Minneapolis), the PNW. But that's about it. (Not counting Canada and Ireland.)

I ❤️MASSACHUSETTS. (I'm not sure the emoji is emojing, but that there, between I and MASSACHUSETTS is supposed to be a red heart.)

In fact, if I had to make a choice between my home state and the US or A, I'm going with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, any old day.

Funny, I don't have a ton of sympathy or affection for Robert E. Lee - a sadist, a racist, who took up arms to defend slavery - but I kinda sorta get why he chose to stick with the Commonwealth of Virginia. That was his state, bro. 

It's not that I don't at least small-l love the United States. Despite some crackingly inglorious chapters in our history; despite the gun nuttery, the racism, the parochialism, the numb-nut Know Nothing-ism that we haven't yet been able to outgrow; despite the wrecking ball that's being taken our country - there's an awful lot here to truly like and admire. Maybe even love. The Constitution. The Bill of Rights. The genius of the Founding Fathers (flaws and all). The inventiveness, the openness to innovation. The breathtaking sea-to-shining-sea beauty. And especially what I feel has (up to now) been one of the absolutely best aspects of America: the ability to take in a whole slew of "others" and let them assimilate their way into becoming bona fide Americans. 

On behalf of my Irish immigrant great-grandparents and my German grandparents and mother, of thee I sing, baby!

But, oh my Massachusetts...

Still, I have to laugh when I see an analysis from something called the Visual Capitalist that rates Massachusetts the best state in the whole wide world. Or at least in the whole wide USA.

Using data from WalletHub, which evaluates 51 metrics across affordability, economic opportunity, safety, and health, this map ranks all 50 U.S. states by quality of life.

...Massachusetts tops the ranking thanks to a combination of high incomes, leading healthcare access, and a dense network of top universities. (Source: Visual Capitalist)

Yes, yes, yes. We rich! We got great hospitals! We got good schools!

Yes, yes, yes. We have a high standard of living. (Some of us, anyway.)

But, but, but...We're also one of the costliest states to live in, so it's a good thing we have those high incomes. Even someone pulling down six-figures is not likely to find affordable housing in the Boston area, that's for sure. (And let's not get into the weather sitch. I happen to enjoy the four seasons, but maybe that's just me.)

Indeed, the "study" acknowledges that affordability is a problem:

...the bottom quartile of the list [shown below] contains many of the nation’s most “affordable” states. This creates a “livability paradox”: states with the lowest costs often rank poorly overall, as weaker healthcare, safety, and economic mobility offset their affordability advantages.

The state rankings are shown just below. The numbers (rounded) are the scores based on a number of metrics, which seem to favor Massachusetts. Or sort of favor Massachusetts. Because if I were going to pick a first-runner-up to Massachusetts, it sure wouldn't be Idaho. 

Idaho? Maybe it's affordability that gets them a heartbeat away from the #1 ranking, which I guess they will move into if for whatever reason, Massachusetts is unable to fulfill its duties... Like if we secede and become a Canadian province or Irish county. 

Idaho? Land of preppers, of right-wing zealots, of a ban on flying the Pride flag on government property. That Idaho? 

New Mexico comes in 50th, but I'd rather live there than in Idaho. 

1 Massachusetts 60.2
2 Idaho 60.2
3 New Jersey 59.8
4 Wisconsin 59.7
5 Minnesota 58.7
6 Florida 58.5
7 New Hampshire 58.2
8 Utah 57.9
9 New York 57.9
10 Pennsylvania 57.9
11 Wyoming 57.9
12 Iowa 56.2
13 Maine 56.2
14 Virginia 56.2
15 Montana 55.2
16 North Dakota 54.6
17 Illinois 54.6
18 South Dakota 54.1
19 Colorado 53.6
20 Nebraska 52.9
21 Vermont 52.7
22 North Carolina 52.3
23 Kansas 52.2
24 Connecticut 52.1
25 Rhode Island 52.1
26 Ohio 51.6
27 Georgia 51.6
28 Missouri 51.2
29 Indiana 51.2
30 Michigan 51.1
30 Arizona 51.0
32 California 50.5
33 Delaware 50.0
34 Maryland 49.8
35 Hawaii 49.4
36 Washington 49.2
37 Kentucky 47.5
38 Texas 47.2
39 Oregon 47.2
40 Tennessee 47.0
41 Alabama 47.0
42 West Virginia 47.0
43 Oklahoma 46.3
44 South Carolina 45.7
45 Nevada 44.6
46 Alaska 44.2
47 Mississippi 43.5
48 Arkansas 42.1
49 Louisiana 40.6
50 New Mexico 39.7

I would, of course, not be particularly comfortable living in a red state, so that colors my thinking. And I'm quite sure that there are plenty of folks who would hate living in a blue state. 

Anyway, it's flattering to have my feelings that Massachusetts is a great place to live confirmed. (Helps that we bought our condo 35 years ago...) In this case, flattery does get you somewhere.

But when it comes to the greatest place to live, the standards are somewhat subjective. 

Still,  I'm only human. Massachusetts? I like it. I love it. Can't get enough of it.

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Image Source: Gallopade

"I coulda went through college..."

Many years ago - make that many decades ago - I went to an introductory Scientology session with my late (and hysterically funny) friend Mary Beth. We were college girls with nothing to do on a Friday night and thought that checking out Scientology, and Dianetics (the ideas underlying L. Ron Hubbard's "religion") might be good for a few laughs.

Indeed it was.

At that time (late 1960's), in that place (Boston), tickets to free Scientology introductory sessions were handed out on on the streets, so we grabbed a couple and went for it. The sessions were held in a non-descript building on Boylston Street, up one flight of stairs, in a non-descript room furnished with a bunch of folding chairs and a table/podium set up in the front.

I'm not 100% sure, but I believe the guy running the show - the evangelist? the salesman? - was named John. I can picture him as vividly as if I'd seen him yesterday. He was blandly good looking, with thick, jet-black hair, and wearing a grey suit.

John explained the concepts underlying Scientology, which was that you needed to get "clear" of whatever was holding you back and advance to become an Operating Thetan, which had multiple levels. None of this was free, of course. If memory serves, it cost a few thousand bucks to get on the OT ladder. 

To demonstrate how getting clear worked, John asked for a volunteer to test out the Scientology e-meter, a little contraption that "audited" someone, measuring how they reacted to the mention of certain words. The device looked like a couple of Donald Duck Juice cans attached a black box that resembled a car battery, only smaller. The person being "audited" gripped the handles (i.e., the Donald Duck Juice cans) and the dial registered the impact of those certain words on the auditee. In the case of the volunteer, the word "mother" caused the needle to jump wildly. A miracle!

With "mother" identified as the root cause of the volunteer's personal and professional failures, the volunteer was encouraged to sign up to get "clear" of "mother." He politely declined. 

The audience was, not surprisingly, full of skeptics, and John told us that, because he was a Scientologist, he was able to detect "hostility" in the crowd. Some of that hostility, of course, emanated from me and Mary Beth. We were nearly falling off of out folding chairs laughing. And we weren't the only ones. I don't think it took any Scientology to accurately read the room.

John then went on to brag that, "if I'd of had Scientology, I coulda went through college in three months."

It's been many a moon since I've thought about my Scientological experience, but it came to mind when I read a recent Boston Globe article on how some online learners are racing through college and achieving their degrees in a matter of months, rather than the traditional four-year snail's pace.

For those trying to grab a credential as quickly as they can and save a lot of money while they're at it, a near insta-degree is a very good thing. 

But some question whether you can learn as much in three months as you do over the course of four years. 

Personally, I'm sure that even without Scientology, I coulda went through college in fewer than four years. Obviously, if I had time to fart around taking in a Scientology session, I could have been taking a few more credits. But back then, there was less of an urgency to finish up, less need for speed. College was less expensive, and we all accepted the wisdom of taking your four-year time to get your bachelor's degree. (And, of couse, for young men, college meant a deferment from the draft and a visit to the rice paddies of Vietnam. Ain't no one wanted to accelerate that process.)

But the times, they are a-different. College costs more. A lot more. There's more pressure on to study something that will produce an obvious and immediate payback, career-wise. A lot more. There's more pressure to avoid lolling around reading great books, thinking great thoughts, bullshitting the night away. 

Supporters of the [breakneck degree] approach tout it as an affordable, convenient way for people to earn credentials they need for their careers. Others, including some online students and academic officials, expressed concern about what the super-accelerated students are missing, and whether a quick path devalues degrees. (Source: Boston Globe)

I get the need for speed, the demand for affordability. But I'm with those who think that the "super-accelerated students" are missing out on something. Mostly what they're missing out on  is going deep on a topic, doing a lot of reading, thinking about what your paper is going to be about, researching that paper - and going down paths that perhaps don't yield much, yet are still learning experiences. There's talking to your professors. There's hanging with the other students in your class. There's working on a project - solo or with others. For the STEM courses, there's also lab time, computer time. 

Things take time. Learning builds on learning. 

I'm sure there are plenty of courses of study that don't require all that much study, all that much time. Maybe they cover checklist items that, once checked, lead to a credential. Sort of like the quickie online security courses a client of mine required everyone to take in order to keep using their internal systems. 

I'm all for older learners getting some credit for whatever OTJ experiencal learning they've acquired. If you can demonstrate competency - by, say, taking the math test - without having to show up for sections, go for it. Great if these online degree schools accept all legit credits from other colleges, even if it's three years worth, and still confer a degree. And I'm all for being able to earn your degree while juggling work and family responsibilities. I'm all for affordability. But I'm also for Marjorie Hass has to say:

“We want diplomas that mean something,” said Marjorie Hass, president of the Council of Independent Colleges, which represents more than 600 liberal arts colleges and universities. “I would prefer to have some of these degrees called something other than a bachelor’s.”

Could I have went through college more quickly than I did? Sure. There is no doubt whatsoever that I wasted plenty o' time. But am I glad I had the time to read, think, learn, explore, run into dead ends, munge around with my ideas? Absoltutely!

I'm all for education for all. So YES to online education. Just let's not pretend that truncating the time it takes to earn a college degree is always going to translate into the full equivalent of a four-year, slow-paced degree. (Or a two-year, slow-paced degree.)

Respectfully, Maureen Rogers BA, MS

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Image Source: Court Street Press

The Aptly Named SantaCon

I'm not 100% certain that Boston has SantaCons - a pub crawl where runners/drinkers wear Santa outfits and raise money for charity. But I'eve certainly seen the Santa-garbed pub crawlers doing their December buzzing around town.

I'd say it looks like fun, but to me it actually doesn't. Even if I were 50 years younger, this sort of event is way too extraverted to be my jam. I'm more the make-a-donation and/or show-up-and-actually-do-something to an actual charity kind of gal, without running around like a maniac, let alone shaking friends and family down for a donation. And this doesn't even take into consideration that the idea of pouring beer down my gullet and running to the next watering hole to that I can pee is beyond fathoming. Me? I just don't go pub-to-pub a-wassailing

But, hey, great that folks are thinking "charity" rather than just obsessing about Christmas shopping, wrapping, cookie-baking, and decorating.

Unfortunately, the NYC edition of SantaCon has been running something of a Grinch con.

On its website, the organization bills itself:

...as “a charitable, nonpolitical, nonsensical Santa Claus convention that happens once a year to fund art & spread absurdist joy.” (Source: NY Times)

Participants buy official badges - the price in 2025 was $17 - and the take goes to local charities like City Harvest, the City Parks Foundation and the Flatbush Development Corporation. But some of the proceeds have, grinchedly, made their way into the NYC event organizer's pockets. (In addition to the badge money, SantaCon NYC gets a cut of the action from the bars for whatever the crawlers consume along their merry and none-too-bright way.)

The lead organizer of SantaCon NYC, an annual Christmas-themed bar crawl that is both beloved and reviled, took more than half of the nearly $3 million the event raised for charity over five years, federal prosecutors said on Wednesday.

The organizer, Stefan Pildes, used his position as the president of the nonprofit that runs SantaCon to illegally divert the money into a separate company to finance “personal ventures,” and spent “hundreds of thousands of dollars” on “extensive renovations to a lakefront property in New Jersey, luxury vacations in Hawaii, Las Vegas, and Vail, extravagant meals and a luxury vehicle,” according to an indictment.

Santa, Baby, whatever happened to being nice rather than naughty? And that naughty could end up with Stefan Pildes ending up with 20 years in prison.

Not everyone loves SantaCon NYC.

The sight of people wearing red and green and slumped over in doorways is a not-uncommon sign that the holiday season is in full swing.

The comedian John Oliver once described SantaCon as “a terrifying combination of binge drinking, public urination and trauma to small children that decades of therapy will never manage to reverse.”

But plenty of others say the SantaCon brings joy to the world. There are the inevitable "meet cute" stories of couples who got together on the run. And then there's the charity angle. (There are allegations of some dubious financial activity on SantaCon NYC's part, including involvement with cryptocurrency and the Burning Man festival. Quite a combo!)

Pildes has set up a couple of other organizations adjacent to SantaCon NYC, and funds flowed among those orgs, funding Pildes personal professional/creative efforts and diverting pay for the property renovations, concert tickets, vacations, meals and luxury vehicle, prosecutors said.

Pildes is pleading not-guilty.

We'll see whether he'll be having himself a merry little Christmas. And whether he'll be having it up and over the river.

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Image Source: SantaConNYC

Baby Geniuses

A month or so ago, I saw an article in Mother Jones on genetic tinkering to produce more intelligent babies. One of the reasons that the tech bro geniuses are so enamored of pursuing mo' smarter babies is that they hope that one of those mo' smarter babies will grow up to solve the problem of "figuring out how to ensure AI doesn’t eventually destroy humankind."

I can certainly see folks wanting to edit out bad genes that result in disorders that would make their offsprings' lives nasty, brutal, and short. Or cause a longer-term disorder. Who wouldn't want to keep something dire and deadly like ALS or Huntington's Disease from striking their children when they're hitting their prime?

But as much as I don't want to see blue eyes disappear - and the good news is that they probably won't - the idea of poking and prodding a zygote to make sure the bébé has bébé  blues, well... I'm not thinking that it's such a good idea.

Not to mention fine-tuning those little zygotes to make them brainier. 

Ah, no. Better to invest in better nutrition, better education, better parenting, better libraries, a better environment to help make sure that all children are in a position to be brianier without noodling around with their DNA. 

And as the tech bros seem to amply demonstrate, there's no guarantee that superior intelligence - nurtured or natured - translates into superior integrity, decency, and goodness.  

Isn't it disturbing enough that Elon Musk has 14 children and counting because he wants to make sure that there's plenty of him dog-paddling in the gene pool. (Wanna bet that the Musk offspring he spends the most time with turn out to be chips off the old weirdball. And the ones protected from close encounters of the any kind with their sperm-daddy turn out to be okay normies.)

Mostly, however, what I'm here to say is that, IMHO opinion, pretty much all babies are geniuses, their little baby brains going a mile-a-minute: absorbing information; communicating; learning, learning, learning. 

Think about it. 

Babies recognize their parents' voices, their touch, their smells. From the jump, without language, they can communicate their needs, their pain, their contentment, their joy, their preferences. (Spit out those nasty carrots!) 

They figure things out. 

Sure, they start crawling backwards - duh! - but pretty soon they realize that, in order to get their mitts on that stuffed Bluey, they need to move forward. Onward, baby genius! Onward!

But to me the biggest indication that babies are natural born geniuses is that they can categorize. 

I'm not sure that if someone put me - an educated adult - in front of a Great Dane, a Chihuahua, a Snoopy cartoon, and that stuffed Bluey, I would immediately understand that they are all dogs. 

Yet those baby genius brains are whirring, whirring, whirring. Yes, yes, yes! Great Dane, Chihuahua, Snoopy cartoon, stuffed Bluey. They are all DOGGY!

So let's hear it for baby geniuses. And stop trying to splice the DNA sequence to create one. 

Go baby genius!

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Image Source: Getty/iStock

Data Labelers Unite! (LFG!)

It will come as no surprise to anyone that AI, along with its tremendous potential to (along with the occasional good thing) wreck the environment, break all and every social compact, destroy the economy, and out and out kill people (e.g., encouraging young people to kill themselves; identifying deadly mushrooms as edible (oops!); mistakenly targeting schools for bombing (collateral damage, anyone?) is also responsible for worker exploitation in Africa.

AI work is a major part of the Kenyan economy, where many Kenyans labor as content moderators and data labelers. 

Data labelers train, refine, and moderate the outputs of AI tools made by the largest companies in the world, yet they are wildly underpaid and haven’t benefitted from the runaway valuations of AI companies.  (Souroce: 404 Media)

A lot of this data labeling involves "annotating what [is] happening in every frame" of a porn video. Kenyan workers are also helping train up AI sexbots, providing the human element in raunchy and just-plain-sad talk sessions with all the lonely people who rely on the Internet for sex and companionship. The actual human workers are, of course, putting themselves out of business, given that the goal is to improve the verisimilitude of sexbots, obviating the need for any human involvement. More money for the AI tech bro masters of the universe! Yay!

It will come as no surprise that the work that the data labelers and other AI-adjacent workers are ill-paid and work under dreadful conditions. Given the content of their work, which involves "horrific content," many end up suffering from insomnia, PTSD, and sexual dysfunction in their actual human-to-human, skin-to-skin, honest-to-god real human lives. 

But those Kenyan workers now have an organization behind them, the Data Labelers Association, which works:

...to organize workers to fight for better pay, better mental health services, an end to draconian non-disclosure agreements, and better benefits for a workforce that often earns just a few dollars a day. Data labelers train, refine, and moderate the outputs of AI tools made by the largest companies in the world, yet they are wildly underpaid and haven’t benefitted from the runaway valuations of AI companies.

It will come as no surprise that the treatment of Kenyan workers is seen as an updated, teched-up version of the exploitation of African laborers by the imperialist companies that pillaged (and continue to pillage) the continent for its wealth of natural resources. Move over DeBeers and Exxon-Mobil. Today they've got company: "it's Apple, it's Meta, it's Gemini." It's Sam Altman. It's Elon Musk. 

All part of the AI hype cycle:

...the promotional messaging and institutional ideology that casts artificial intelligence—particularly so-called “superintelligence”—as “inevitable” and destined to bring historic “transformation.”...

AI hype is the next chapter in the colonial playbook. It reframes the exploitation of African digital workers as “innovation” and is a tool of power wielded by profiteers of colonial extractivism in the digital age. It functions as a carefully crafted cover story by disguising appropriation in the language of “progress.” (Source: Tech Policy)

The Tech Policy article linked above is worth a full read. Sure it's lefty-ish, but it raises important issues around AI.

Declaring AI inevitable is how hype becomes colonial power. The rhetoric of inevitability, in particular, stages hype as a manifest destiny, stripping away the possibility of refusal or alternative futures. 

All the hype about AI's transformative capabilities and its inevitability, with some occasional kneejerk BS thrown in on how AI is going to benefit everybody, is creating an environment where AI will be seen as inevitable and not worth resisting. We'll passively just sit here and let the tsunami wash over us and only then will we realize that it didn't exactly benefit everybody.

Will our coin-operated polity ever be able to hit the pause button, take a deep breath, and figure out how to get our hands around the AI beast? 

I pinball around between 'God help us!,' 'Glad I'll be dead," and 'LFG.'

Today I'm feeling pretty Let's Fucking Go. Don't exactly know what this will entail, but it's got to be before it's too late. 

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Image Source: Tech Policy

Colonel Mustard Did It

Is it just me, or do certain things confer an aura of value and goodness?

I observed this in business, when I realized that if you priced your product above the competition, purchasers - at least some of them, at least some of the time, at least for a while - assumed is was better than the competition.

In much the same way, I have found that it's harder to figure out whether an actor with a posh British accent is any good or not than it is to figure out an American bad actor.

And speaking of bad actors, it's always a bit surprising to me when someone with a severe disability turns out to be a criminal. C.f., the quadriplegic cornhole champion who's facing murder charges in Maryland. (He's claiming self-defense.)

Thanks to a similar halo effect, it goes against my grain when someone running an offbeat, homespun sort of business engages in bad business behavior. So I just don't expect the owner of New Hampshire's Old Dutch Mustard Co., a small family-owned business that's been around more than 80 years, to be a river-polluting lout and no-goodnik.

But last month, having pled guilty in February 2025, Charles Santich was sentended to 18 months in a federal stir "for knowingly polluting the Souhegan River." He was also hit with a $250K fine, and his company was levied an additional $1.5M.

That's a lot of mustard and vinegar...

Anyway, Old Dutch has been skirting environmental requirements since the 1980's, and their bad behavior finally caught up with them.

“Throughout years of repeated civil and administrative attempts to encourage Santich and his company to follow the law, Santich lied to state and federal authorities and even purposefully built the illegal infrastructure needed to pump his manufacturing waste into New Hampshire’s waterways, pushing his employees to help him violate the law,” [US Attorney Erin] Creegan said in a statement.

She said the pollution left waterways with fewer fish and impacted homeowners and people who use the river for recreation. (Source: Boston Globe)

Santich ordered employees "to pump acidic waste water and stormwater through an underground pipe leading to the Souhegan River so he could save on shipping costs," and threatened to fire them if they didn't comply. Santich regularly submitted false documents to regulators, blocked the EPA from getting info on his company's practices, and directly lied to inspectors. When NH state folks found that waste water from Old Dutch smelled suspiciously like vinegar. Inspectors got a search warrant and sleuthed out the illegal discharge pipe.

Shame on Charles Santich, ya bum ya! And his company has the (vinegar and) gall to brag about their environmental bona fides:

A tree farm continues to be planted on the [company] property. Old Dutch maintains the tree farm as a way to show care for the environment.

Some care for the environment! 

To my knowledge, I haven't used any Old Dutch products. My vinegar - white and apple cider - is Heinz. My mustard is French's (yell0w), Gulden's (brown), or Maille (whole grain pommery). But Old Dutch products are often private labeled or used by food services, so I may have consumed their wares somewhere along the line. I like to support small local companies, but not this one. You best believes I'll be BOLO-ing. 

Meanwhile, all I have to say is:

It Was Old Dutch Mustard,With an Illegal Discharge Pipe, in the Souhegan River.

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Image Source: Reddit Boardgames forum