This isn’t spin. It’s seasoned analysis.
Different Industry; Same Old Barrio
I've seen this neighborhood before. Not just in Denver, but in San Diego, where we called it Barrio Logan. Railroad tracks. Abandoned industrial buildings. A few businesses trying to hang on. Freeways cutting through neighborhoods where working people raised their...
The Parallel Roads to Artificial Intelligence
Newton's apple, David Hume, Yann LeCun and the limits of machine intelligence Isaac Newton supposedly watched an apple fall from a tree and began thinking about gravity. Whether the story happened exactly that way is open to debate. Newton himself recalled...
Thirteen Thousand Years of Killing, and Now We’re Teaching Machines
Human beings have been killing one another for so long that archaeologists have to dig through thousands of years of dirt just to find the evidence. And wouldn't you know it, we're still at it. More than 13,000 years ago, along the Nile in what is now Sudan, people...
The AI Data Center, the Missing Water Agreement and a Federal Lawsuit
Imperial Valley's controversial AI project has already produced lawsuits over water rights and environmental review. Now a federal civil rights case raises another question: What happened to a water agreement the city said it was preparing? The City of Imperial,...
Russian Diesel, Iranian Drones and the Fine Art of Not Connect the Dots
Washington has discovered a remarkable new approach to foreign policy: Fight one country, do business with its military partner, and hope nobody notices the connection. An editor once told me I connect dots. I always figured that was the job. Trouble is, sometimes the...
The Lincoln Came Home And So Did a Piece of My Childhood
Twenty-six years after I boarded the USS Abraham Lincoln with a cameraman, I watched her return to San Diego. Then something appeared in the harbor that took me back another 57 years. Some things about San Diego never leave you. The smell of salt water. The morning...
San Diego Was Always Ground Zero
President Donald Trump said something the other day that caused an uproar in California. Talking about Iran and the price of war, Trump said: “They can take out a city. Let ’em take out Los Angeles. Let ’em take out San Diego.” San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria fired back....
How Dive Bars Power the Cloud – Audio
Two seemingly ordinary stories — a bartender helping a customer set up his first smartphone and a neighborhood dive bar increasingly connected to the digital world — reveal something much larger about America’s demand for data centers. Smartphones, streaming music,...
Words Matter
I learned something about words a long time ago. When you see the word “could” in a news story, add two words to it: Or not. The same goes for “may.” May happen. May not. That isn't a lesson in grammar. It's a lesson in journalism. CBS News gave us a fine example the...
Who Put the Cameras There?
Solar panel left that powered a Flock camera at 25th and Orange Ave. in Fort Pierce, Fla. Well, this is comforting. St. Lucie County went looking for license-plate cameras along its roads and discovered something you generally hope your government already knows: There...
The White House Has Renamed AI. Everybody Clear?
There are times when Washington solves a problem nobody knew we had. This week it was artificial intelligence. Apparently, AI needed a better name. President Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring that the executive branch will henceforth call Artificial...
America May Be Running the Wrong AI Race
There is an old American habit that goes something like this: If somebody says the Russians are ahead, build a missile. If somebody says the Chinese are ahead, build a data center. Preferably one the size of Rhode Island. We are now spending astonishing sums of money...
Folks, It Still Ain’t About the Data Center Building
Back in June, I wrote a column called “Folks, This Ain’t About the Data Center Building.” The argument was pretty simple. Everybody was staring at the big windowless building going up outside town. I thought people were looking at the wrong thing. The real story was...
Texas Was Bigger on Paper
Texas Was Never Too Small. The Map Was. I was born a few blocks from the Alamo, my family has been in San Antonio since the 1700s, and somewhere along the way I majored in American history and later became an investigative reporter. So when an old map of Texas doesn't...
A Million Data Center Satellites? Do the Math
My recent excursion into putting data centers in space brought an interesting fellow into my orbit. His name is Shubber Ali. He has been involved with the space industry since the 1990s, when he managed KPMG's space consulting practice. For nearly 20 years, off and...
Isaac Cubillos
This isn’t journalism for the polite table.
This is truth with grit under its nails and dirt on its boots.