Old Man Pondering

Gambling is a funny thing, because everything in life is a gamble. You roll the dice every morning you back out of the driveway—that the other fellow will stop at the red light, that the deer won’t jump the fence on the curve by the creek. You gamble when you pour your second glass of bourbon, when you bet on Sunday’s football game, when you hire a man on a handshake. Any time you stake something—money, time, reputation—on an outcome you can’t guarantee, you’re gambling.

After my recent post on the NFL with the kind of cold-eyed calculations most folks reserve for their taxes—I realized something. Most people don’t understand that there’s a world of difference between placing a smart wager and just throwing money at a hope. They treat gambling like a lottery ticket bought on a whim, not like a carefully weighed risk.

The smart ones sit down with the numbers first. They read the spread, check the injury reports, analyze the statistics, and only then do they weigh the risk against the payoff. If the math says bet, they bet. If it says pass, they pass, and they don’t look back. The dumb ones operate on something else entirely—a hunch, a grudge, the fact that their uncle once met the quarterback’s cousin. They’ll throw money at a long shot without knowing the odds, chase a loss with a bigger wager to get even, and have no more clue about their actual chance of success than a man guessing at the weather. This is where I explain why

“Gambling is a tax on the stupid!”

I never place a wager online. I only bet at retail establishments, and I’ll tell you why. I understand the appeal of online platforms—the convenience, the instant action, the fact that you can lay down money from your couch without ever pulling on a pair of shoes. That’s precisely the trouble. For anyone with an addictive streak who just wants “action,” or for those who let emotion do their forecasting, online betting makes it too easy to ignore every sensible rule of gambling. Lose a first-half bet? They can fire away on the second half before the halftime show ends. A fantasy player stinks up the first quarter? They’ll chase it with another player who catches their eye, right then and there.

A smart gambler doesn’t bet with his gut; he bets with his head. I run the numbers, study the matchups, and maybe place a handful wagers all week—never more. That’s why I only gamble in person. It forces a pause, a moment of consideration between the thought and the action. On your phone, it’s too easy to chase a loss or double down on a dumb hunch before you’ve even taken your next breath.

Ever wonder why the online casinos and sportsbooks advertise like there’s no tomorrow, flooding your screen with “risk-free” bets and deposit bonuses? Don’t. They’ve already got you—hook, line, and sinker. They don’t just skim a little off the top; they take a cut of every single dollar you wager—the vig, the house edge, the built-in profit margin that makes their business a license to print money. U.S. sportsbooks, which were practically nonexistent a few years back, are on track to clear nearly $200 billion in profit this year alone. They aren’t built on winners; they’re built on the steady, stupid losses of people who think they can beat a system designed from the ground up to break them.

So, take it from a man who’s placed successful bets his whole life, though they may have been in a few hushed, carpeted quiet backrooms: intelligent gambling is a cold calculus. It has nothing to do with the hot rush in your chest when your team scores, the blind loyalty to a hometown jersey, the desperate need to feel the action in every quarter, or the foolish belief that luck is a strategy. It is the opposite of a tax on the stupid; it is a discipline for the clear-eyed.

Such is the life of successful gamblers, unless as my good friend once said, “I just have to place a bet on my neighbor’s horse”, and you can afford to lose.

In July, I posted an article titled “AI Data Centers: A Path to Innovation,” arguing that the power demands of these facilities—often criticized for their environmental impact—were justified by the long-term societal gains. My friend, a former insurance salesman who still thinks broadband is a type of hearty bread, left a comment “elitist tech nonsense.” My neighbor, with strong opinions about everything from zoning laws to cloud storage, avoided messaging me for a month. And one relative, who thinks an algorithm is something you do for asthma—shook her head and said, “You don’t read the bible, so you don’t understand.” I expected it. When you’ve spent seventy-four years dismissing non-data-based opinions like some people throw out their diet coke cans every other Friday, you learn that not everyone wants to drink what you’re pouring.

Today, a flock of world leaders are convening to pontificate on the future of AI. Just a couple weeks ago our own congressional representatives huddled in those mahogany-paneled chambers to do the same. Watching these hearings is a special kind of farce—like observing a colony of ants debating whether an El Niño will flood their anthill. They scurry across C-SPAN screens, waving reports they clearly haven’t read, using terms like “algorithm” and “neural network” with the shaky confidence of a man trying to recall a foreign language he studied fifty years ago. You can almost see the sweat beading under the studio lights as they nod gravely at explanations they don’t understand, each one more out of their depth than the last.

To even entertain the idea of halting AI development is an act of such profound, wilful ignorance that it borders on malice. It’s the modern equivalent of a caveman trying to outlaw the wheel because he’s afraid it might roll over his foot and ruin the hunting economy. AI won’t just improve society; it will redefine it. The only thing better than today is tomorrow, because tomorrow we get to build it.To stand against the development of AI is to stand on the shore and scream at the tide.

It is an act of such profound, self-congratulatory ignorance that it borders on the pathological. These are not philosophers; they are children smashing clocks because they cannot fathom the hour. They prophesy job loss and societal collapse with the same hysterical certainty as a medieval zealot pointing to a rat plague and declaring it God’s wrath. Let them wail. History will record them as the fools who tried to un-invent the sun because they feared the shadow it cast. The future is not a threat to be mitigated; it is a frontier to be claimed. And it belongs to those with the courage to look into the coming dawn and not flinch.

The last century tore the world from the grip of steam and ink. We swapped horse-drawn carts for contraptions that drive themselves, telegraph wires for a web of light that connects a billion voices at once. We conquered the sky with jet engines and plucked miracles from mold—penicillin pulling millions back from the brink. Handwritten letters gave way to pocket-sized supercomputers; life expectancies once cut short at fifty now stretch comfortably into the eighties. Humanity didn’t just advance—it leapt from one kind of existence into another.

A man born in the 1920s could expect to see about fifty-four birthdays. I know this because I’ve outlived that average by two full decades, and the actuarial tables now grant men like me nearly eighty years. Back then, childhood was a gamble—one in three children didn’t live to see fifteen. You’d walk through a cemetery and see small stones everywhere, whole families halved by fevers we now shrug off with a course of antibiotics and vaccines. We’ve traded graveyards for graduations.

The future of AI and human development is magnificent. I see it plainly: cures for cancer that we could never have imagined, treatments tailored to the individual patient the way a suit is tailored to a man’s shoulders. I see methods for dealing with climate concerns that go beyond anything we’ve sketched out—carbon pulled from the air at costs even small nations can afford, weather models that read a hurricane’s intentions a week in advance. I see uses in chemistry that will improve and extend life to levels we haven’t dared to dream of, molecules designed by machines that test a thousand hypotheses an hour instead of a dozen a year. I see travel into the cosmos, real travel, not just flags on moons, delivering mineral wealth and knowledge back to Earth on scales that rewrite what it means to be rich. And I see the elimination of scarcity—not the promise of it, the actual end—through advances in nutrition, food production, energy, and health that make hunger as obsolete as the hand-cranked washing machine.

AI, which so many view as some alien oracle, is at its core a pattern-finding engine. It sifts through digital mountains—every published text, every weather pattern, every market fluctuation, every diagnostic image—and finds the hidden connections. I’ve spent a lifetime doing a pale imitation of this with statistics and algorithms, hunting for truth in spreadsheets and box scores. But where my methods were like panning for gold with a teacup, AI operates like an industrial dredge—it can process the entire river at once. Its capacity isn’t just larger; it’s of another kind entirely, seeing correlations form in real-time across continents of data.

Is it dangerous? Of course. So was splitting the atom. So was sequencing the genome. Every leap forward carries the shadow of its own misuse. But you don’t avert danger by stopping progress; you outpace it. Halting AI development here would be like grounding the Wright Brothers Flyer because it only stayed airborne for twelve seconds—a fearful, small-minded refusal to recognize that elsewhere, others are already designing engines that will darken the sky.

Life is the slow, daily calibration between the heart’s stubborn gravity and the hard, unyielding ground of fact. I’ve stood at enough hospital bedsides and fresh graves to know that sooner or later, you have to let go of what you feel and pick up what is. Again, the only day better than today is tomorrow. We all need to start living our lives knowing that simple truth.

Such is life.

Yesterday I had a little fun and blogged about the NFL predictions for the first week of the season. That apparently shook loose a few readers who’d been hibernating since last Thanksgiving, because my inbox promptly coughed up the political equivalent of “Okay, smart guy, what about the midterms?” As if forecasting whether the Giants cover the spread is somehow less serious than predicting which geriatric windbag will win a congressional seat in Florida. Nevertheless, here’s what this crusty, data-obsessed “Independent” sees barreling down the pike.

I vote my conscience, not my party—a habit that’ll stick until they nail my coffin shut. I like a balanced budget and personal accountability as much as the next Kentuckian, but I can’t stomach the hypocrisy, the performative outrage, or the parade of blowhards who wouldn’t know honesty if it bit them on the behind. Guess that’s just how the cookie crumbles.

Anyway, the Republicans are kicking off their mid-term convention—a spectacular waste of time and donor money. It brings to mind a hive of agitated bees, each convinced their own buzzing is a symphony while everyone else’s is just noise. Both parties operate inside their own sealed ecosystems, but Republicans in particular seem convinced that Trump’s gravitational pull within the party somehow bends the entire country toward him. It doesn’t. While they’re busy parading his endorsed primary winners—products of an insulated process—Independents and Democrats see the landscape for what it is.

Trump’s Independent Voter disapproval rating has jumped from the low 40s to the low 60s in just two years—a fifty percent climb that should set off alarm bells for anyone who reads a poll like they read a box score. That kind of shift doesn’t happen without cause. It’s a flashing warning sign the party is choosing to ignore, pointing to his support inside their own primaries as though that’s the same thing as winning a national election. It isn’t.

Conservatives’ favorite economic talking point is a house of cards. They love to point to this summer’s market highs and say, “See? Trump’s policies are working—you ought to thank him for your 401(k).” But here’s the reality: the market’s up 23% over the last two years, which averages out to 11.5% annually since he took office. What they don’t mention is that in the decade before Trump, the market climbed 133%—that’s 13.3% per year. Claiming credit for a trend that was already rolling is classic political theater, and any independent with a calculator sees right through it.

I’ve watched the numbers long enough to know a trend when I see one. Trump’s grip on the party hasn’t fortified it—it’s fractured it, like a tree struck by lightning that looks solid until you lean against it. Based on the data, I see Democrats controlling the house by a margin that’s practically a foregone conclusion at this point. The Senate will be tighter—a coin toss leaning ever so slightly—but given the momentum and the sheer weight of independent voters breaking left, I’d bet my last dollar they take that too.

Well, I bet you never thought that Independents were that important, did you? Well, they are and their ability to swing an election is significant. Republicans are facing the political equivalent of betting against the spread because you like a team’s colors. That’s a big mistake that will only be realized after the fact because you can only ignore the data, the trends, and the cold hard math staring you in the face so long. You end up holding a losing ticket and wondering how everyone else saw it coming.

Such is life.

Sixty-seven years ago my grandmother dealt me into my first hand of penny poker, and the itch never left. Every fall since I started this blog I’ve put out my NFL picks for the season, and I’ll say this: leaning on the numbers rather than the gut has kept me on the winning side of things eight out of the last nine years.

My concern lately is that AI handicapping tools will erode whatever advantage I’ve built up, given how many people are starting to lean on them. I did some digging into how one of these programs actually works, and found it treating things like 3rd down conversion rate as a cornerstone metric—which struck me as funny, considering Seattle sat at 19th in that column just last season. The way I see it, these tools are essentially laundering opinion as data, just at a scale that makes it look like something more.

Regular readers know I’ve spent years breaking down strategies to beat the sportsbook’s cut—the vig.

The Hidden Costs of Sports Betting: Unraveling the Vig – Old Man Pondering

This time around, I’ll start from the ground up: moneylines, point spreads, and how they translate to win probability. It might feel like second nature to a stats-obsessed mind like mine, but I know these concepts can tie newcomers in knots.

There’s no single right way to break down a game—some bettors live and die by trends, others by matchups or injury reports. My approach has always been to start with win probability and work outward from there, converting my estimates into the language of spreads and moneylines until I find a gap worth betting into. Tomorrow night’s Seahawks-Patriots opener is a useful illustration. I have Seattle at 63% to win the game. The book is currently offering Seattle -3.5 at -104, New England +3.5 at -118, a Seahawks moneyline at -176, and a Patriots moneyline at +148.

So, betting Seattle -3.5 means you lay $104 to win $100. Taking New England +3.5 requires $118 to win that same hundred. The straight moneyline on Seattle demands $176 for a $100 return, while backing New England outright pays $148 on a $100 wager. These are just the standard ratios—you can bet any amount, and the payout structure scales proportionally.

Let’s translate those moneylines into probabilities. For a favorite, you divide the moneyline by itself plus 100, then multiply by 100. So for Seattle at -176: (176 / (176 + 100)) * 100 ≈ 63.7%. Since my own estimate sits right at 63%, there’s no edge here—the house and I see eye to eye. No bet.

The Giants are my best bet this weekend. New York comes in as a +128 underdog, which the book is pricing at roughly 44% to win—but I have them at 63%, a gap wide enough to drive a truck through. Yep, John Harbaugh as the new coach and Jaxson Dart having a season under his belt, will make a difference. On the spread, I’ve got them winning by 4.5 points, and the book is spotting them 2.5, which means I’m picking up an extra two points of cushion on top of an already favorable line. When the numbers line up like that—edge on the moneyline and edge on the spread pointing the same direction—you pay attention.

Now, the Giants are an upset longshot—a bet you make with your head, not your chest. The Jaguars and Chargers are a different story. Jacksonville is sitting on a defensive line that has quietly become one of the better units in the league, and Los Angeles has a quarterback playing with something to prove. Both teams are being underpriced in ways the books will correct by next week. Get there first. Good luck.

As expected, my article on myths, cults, and religions shook loose a fair number of responses. Several readers wanted to know what I actually believe, which tells me they had some difficulty reading past the parts that stepped on the toes of whatever they were raised to hold sacred. Fair enough. Rather than simply share beliefs, I thought I’d do something more useful: tell you what seventy-four years of living, losing, and eating very well has actually taught me.

I learned that opening my eyes to another dawn was a gift no currency could purchase. It meant another opportunity to love differently, to correct a mistake, to start over, to taste or see or feel something I never had. If you can draw a full breath, recognize a face, or feel the warmth of another’s hand in yours—do not dismiss your life as mundane. The small graces you overlook today may be the very things you ache for tomorrow.

I learned that even when the world narrows to a hospital bed or a quiet farmhouse at dusk, the simple act of choosing to lift a glass of Kentucky bourbon or turn a page in a book means the ink hasn’t dried. You might not be able to change the weather, but you can still set your own course.

I learned that money could buy a king’s mattress, silk sheets, and a solid oak bedframe, but it cannot purchase the quiet grace of a mind at ease. I have lain awake in New York hotel penthouse suites, listening to the hum of the city that never sleeps because I couldn’t, while on my worst nights back on the farm, exhaustion pulled me under as soon as my head touched the pillow. If you can close your eyes tonight without rehearsing regrets or dreads, you already possess a fortune that billionaires barter their souls for.

My scars are not proof of defeat, but a map of where I have been. They remind me that pain happened—and I walked on anyway, and I stopped paying interest on sorrows that had not yet come due. Anxiety is a tax on moments you will never live, paid in the currency of the present.

I no longer overlook my wife’s hand finding mine during a film she has already seen twice, just to feel the contact. I no longer overlook the grandchildren who fall asleep against my shoulder. I no longer overlook the dog who repositions herself against my leg each time I shift in the chair. My greatest blessings had faces and names and phone numbers I already had memorized. I was simply too busy dialing other numbers to notice them standing in the room.

I learned that a man doesn’t need to see the whole staircase to take the first step, though I did fall down one not long ago and broke my humerus into 6 shattered pieces. I’ve stood at crossroads in life where the fog was so thick I couldn’t see ten feet ahead—no map, no signpost, just the weight of my own shoe soles on pavement. The bravest things I ever did was to take steps without a map—moving across the country multiple times, buying that racehorse, asking a woman to dance, having our 5 children, planting an oak sapling I know I will not live to see mature.

I learned that I had hurried through a thousand mornings—the steam rising from my coffee mug, the particular way the light fell across the kitchen table at 6 a.m., I missed the weight and warmth of a fresh biscuit in my hand, I never paused to savor. I missed the half-finished sentences my wife began over dinner, the stories I meant to return to tomorrow, which became conversations we never had.

Before I start petitioning the universe for a better parking spot or a winning lottery ticket, I now take a breath and do a quick inventory. Lungs: still inflating. Heart: still thumping away, if slightly out-of-tune. Family: miraculously hasn’t disowned me yet. The sun came up again this morning. You see, you don’t need a lightning strike or a Publisher’s Clearing House van to find meaning; it’s usually hiding in plain sight, right between your mismatched socks and that half-eaten bag of chips you forgot about. So maybe stop sprinting for a second. Look at what’s right in front of you. It’s probably more interesting than your phone.

Because someday, you may realize that what you were desperately searching for was there all along—in the creak of the back porch screen door, in the smell of coffee already made when you came downstairs, in the dog’s tail, in the hand that found yours in the dark.

I have spent a long time around people who confuse confidence for credibility. I have sat in rooms where a man with a firm handshake and a laminated chart convinced a roomful of otherwise sensible adults that he had located the truth, and I have watched those same adults nod along because the chart had a legend and the man had a title.

What I trust is narrower and harder to fake: numbers gathered over time, tested against themselves, reviewed by people with professional incentives to find the holes in them. Religion does not meet that standard, and neither does the rotating cast of outrage that fills the average news cycle. But here is the part that tends to make people uncomfortable—a study with a sample size of forty, published once, confirmed by nobody, waved around as settled fact, is not science. It is a rumor with a footnote. The difference matters enormously, and in my experience, almost nobody can tell you what it is.

Throughout history, the gleaming veneer of proclaimed science has paved roads to ruin with the best of intentions. It is a grim parade of white coats and peer-reviewed journals leading the faithful toward cliffs they could not see, armed with data that was elegant, persuasive, and catastrophically wrong. Such is my fear with current “scientific trends” like GLP-1. Two of my daughters today take it, and they have even suggested their 6 foot 4 inch 250 pound 74 year dad give it a try because it works for them.

You see, the bottle said Bayer. It said non-addictive. It said for children, right there on the label, and the pharmacist nodded when it was bought. They gave it to the babies for coughs, and they quieted down. Unfortunately, the active ingredient was initially heroin or diacetylmorphine.

They worked calomel into the baby’s gums with their fingertips because the screaming has gone on for three days and the powder is what the doctor gave them. It was mercurous chloride.

They switched from lard to Crisco because it was a product of modern science. The same hydrogenation process that gave it its clean white solidity produced trans fat, which was not banned until a century later.

Elsewhere, a chemist needed a liquid solvent for a new drug and reaches for diethylene glycol because it dissolves the compound cleanly. The paperwork does not yet require him to ask what it does to a kidney. Over one hundred people die, the majority of them children, before the bottles are recalled.

The doctor lite a Camel in the surgery. The advertisement for it ran in the Journal of the American Medical Association, showing a man in a white coat holding a chart in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Down the hall, nurses brought new mothers a tray after they’ve nursed, offering an array of cigarette packs—Lucky Strike, Chesterfield, Pall Mall—while the infant dozes in a clear-sided bassinet beside the bed.

At the army induction center, a sergeant handed cartons of cigarettes to boys telling them it’s good for the nerves, part of a balanced field ration.

I used to hear the low growl of the truck before I could see it, a slow-moving tanker trailing a thick, sweet-smelling fog that settled over our Carpentersville Illinois lawns and sidewalks. My buddies and I would run behind it, laughing, our arms outstretched as we chase the cloud. The chemical mist would cling to our skin and clothes, leaving a faint powdery residue we rarely thought to wipe away. Little did we know the man who discovered DDT received the Nobel Prize for his discovery.

During the years during which I was born and growing up as a child they gave pregnant wives thalidomide for nausea, and the bottle promised restful sleep and safety. Then mothers started counting fingers and toes as more than ten thousand children were born with horrible defects caused by the drug called “remarkably safe” by pharmaceutical companies.

My father was prescribed OxyContin for his back, because the clinical literature was clear, and fewer than one percent of patients develop dependence—it said so right there in the package insert. The company later pleads guilty to criminal misbranding.

They gave other fathers Vioxx for their knees because the gastric profile is cleaner than ibuprofen and the doctor read the trials. Then it was pulled from shelves in September of 2004, and the FDA’s own safety officer goes before the Senate and estimates that somewhere between eighty-eight thousand and one hundred and thirty-nine thousand Americans suffered excess cardiac events during the five years it was on the market.

Science, based on what? Short term, incomplete and questionable studies? Each tragedy came with the full weight of institutional authority: the embossed letterhead of a professional society, the dense columns of a peer-reviewed journal, the calm certainty of a man in a starched white coat holding a pointer before a detailed chart. The people who followed instructions were not slow; they were doing what any reasonable person does—deferring to qualified experts. They placed their trust in the systems society had built to separate signal from noise.

So now I wonder which of today’s assurances, printed on glossy paper and delivered with a firm handshake, will my great-grandchildren one day read aloud in a tone of bewildered horror?

And people wonder how I learned to always demand to see the core longitudinal data before acknowledging truth. Such is life.

Let me tell you something that is going to irritate a significant portion of my readership, and frankly I am looking forward to it. The collective meltdown—pun absolutely intended—over AI and data centers has reached a pitch I can no longer ignore. This is not a new phenomenon. When the cotton gin arrived, people lost their minds. When the automobile showed up, there were serious, published arguments that traveling faster than thirty miles per hour would cause the human brain to liquefy. We survived both.

The script never changes. Step one: new technology emerges. Step two: someone announces it will eliminate all jobs. Step three: someone else announces it will destroy all life. Step four: a movie comes out. I submit as Exhibit A the 1979 masterpiece of unhinged filmmaking, The China Syndrome, which had the spectacular timing to premiere almost simultaneously with Three-Mile Island and single-handedly convinced an entire generation that nuclear reactors were essentially slow-motion apocalypse machines. The United States has been paying for that cinematic hysteria ever since and literally fell decades behind other countries.

For the record: nuclear energy is among the cleanest power sources available to us. Nobody died at Three Mile Island. And a reactor cannot—I want to be very deliberate here—melt downward through the continental crust, navigate several thousand miles of liquid iron, and surface in Guangzhou. That is not how reactors work. It is also not how gravity works, or distance, or the earth.

Every generation gets its own monster under the bed, and the monster is always a new machine or technology. The fork, when it first appeared on European tables sometime around the eleventh century, was condemned by clergy as an affront to God, who had thoughtfully provided fingers for exactly this purpose. I would like to point out that the fork won that argument, and we have all been better fed for it.

The list of subsequent monsters is long enough to be its own data set: indoor plumbing, the telephone, the washing machine, the television, the personal computer, the laptop, nuclear power, solar panels. Each one arrived to a reception of genuine, documented hysteria. Each one was going to hollow out the workforce and leave civilization a smoking ruin. Each one instead created industries, expanded economies, and generated more employment than it displaced—outcomes that were perfectly visible in the data and perfectly invisible to anyone too busy catastrophizing to look.

Which brings me to AI, and to data centers specifically, a subject on which I am not speculating. I have been inside these facilities. I know the decibel ratings, the cooling systems, the energy inputs and outputs, the footprint on surrounding neighborhoods. I know this because in the early 2000s I oversaw the construction of one from the ground up. It ran without incident. The sky remained in place. The people nearby remain alive and to my knowledge, happy.

You’ve got to hand it to the New York governor: her AI data-center ban is like watching someone try to slap a mosquito with boxing gloves—utterly absurd and hilarious. New York boasts 132 data centers for a population of 20 million? Meanwhile, Texas with 461 and Virginia with 603, pay roughly half of New York’s eye-popping 29-cent-a-kilowatt-hour energy rate. Texas and Virginia also have had the largest energy increase in load (largely driven by data centers) but somehow have had the smallest rate increases. Ever wonder why? It’s not rocket science—unless the rocket landed in Albany.

Now, don’t get me wrong: data centers shouldn’t sprout like mushrooms next to your kid’s soccer field. Thoughtful planning is essential—nobody wants a row of servers blocking the sunset or turning the neighborhood into a hum-and-neon nightmare. But let’s be real: to compete with data-hungry nations like China, we’ll need thousands—no, tens of thousands—of these digital warehouses, because logic beats melodrama every time. China is rapidly expanding its data center infrastructure with a massive $295 billion, nationwide initiative and their infrastructure policy coordinates the needs of data centers with renewable energy buildout across eight official computing hubs and ten data center clusters.

The loudest objections to data centers tend to be about energy consumption, water use, and noise. These are the same objections raised against every significant business development in modern history—the Walmart, the distribution hub, the bakery that runs its ovens at four in the morning. City and county planners are not ignoring these concerns. They are running the same cost-benefit calculation they have always run and arriving at the same conclusion they almost always arrive at: that a business which pays for its water, pays for its power, employs people, and contributes to the tax base is, on balance, an addition to a community rather than a subtraction from it.

And while we’re on the subject of head-scratching opposition, let’s talk about the AI naysayers. They treat artificial intelligence like a runaway toaster that’s about to overtake humanity yet have zero clue how it actually works. AI is just a supercharged version of the problem-solving code we’ve been writing since punch cards were cool. It’s more creative than the thousands of algorithms already in place designed by human brains, but from cancer research to traffic flow to energy optimization, AI’s potential is enough to make virtual gaming look like a kid’s bike.

Fast forward 50 years, and people will snoop through history books and laugh—hard—at the anti-AI data center riots, just like we today chuckle at folks who once protested forks, telephones, computers, or nuclear energy. The data-center boom and AI revolution will spark fresh commerce, lower taxes, slash energy bills, and spawn jobs we haven’t even dreamed up yet. Heck, I just sent my grandson a link to become a certified AI engineer—because why wouldn’t you steer the next generation toward unstoppable future-tech?

Of course, the media will keep churning out melodramatic myths about “killer robots” and “server jungles.” But trust me: when reality bites, it bites in gigabytes, not gossip. So, to my conservative and liberal friends who roll their eyes at progress—give it a moment. Open a science journal, talk to a real engineer, or just wait fifty years and enjoy the show. You’ll be glad you did—unless you’re still trying to ban forks.

It’s important to call things as you see them, but the real challenge is seeing them accurately in the first place. After seven decades of study and research, observing how easily people are swayed by manipulation, I’ve come to a decision: it’s time to share undeniable facts. AI and the need to build data centers is simply inevitable!

The truth should always hold weight!

Last April, the man who holds the office of Secretary of Defense—and who had by that point taken to calling that office the War Department and himself its Secretary of War, as though the renaming of a thing changes what it does—announced via social media post that the United States military would no longer mandate flu vaccination for its service members.

The post read: “The War Department is once again restoring freedom to our Joint Force. We are discarding the mandatory flu vaccine requirement, effective immediately.”

None of that had anything to do with freedom, or with science. The CDC—the agency whose entire reason for existing is to know—estimated that the previous season’s vaccine had kept 12,000 people alive and 180,000 out of hospital beds. The Secretary of War had just made the most tightly quartered workforce in the country more vulnerable to a virus that kills tens of thousands of Americans in a slow year. He called this a restoration of freedom.

Freedom is a word that explains nothing on its own—it fills the space where a reason should be and asks you not to look too closely. The real motivation, I suspect, was older and more stubborn than any political instinct: the myths. The flu shot gives you the flu. Healthy people don’t need it. One dose lasts forever. The flu itself is no worse than a bad cold.

Of course, the myths don’t survive contact with the data. Millions of tested subjects confirm that the sore arm and low-grade fever some people experience after vaccination are ordinary immune responses, gone in a day or two. Healthy people do suffer serious complications from the flu—and more to the point, they carry and spread it. The virus mutates, which is why last year’s dose doesn’t cover this year’s strain. And those deaths and hospitalizations I mentioned are not rounding errors.

Now two months later, at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas where only 2 out of every 5 recruits took the vaccine, a flu outbreak affecting nearly 160 troops was concentrated in an Air Force Basic Military Training wing where recruits share sleeping quarters and dining facilities by design. Worse yet, they are still trying to determine the cause of one death and two others are currently hospitalized.

This was not a surprise. It was a prediction, and the data made it months in advance. The relationship between vaccination rates and outbreak risk in close-quarters populations is not a matter of opinion or interpretation—it is arithmetic. You put unvaccinated people in bunks and mess halls and you wait. The waiting is the only variable.

The pattern holds whether the subject is DUI laws, vaccine policy, or the educational system: the moment individual freedom becomes a mechanism for distributing harm to people it stops being freedom in any meaningful sense. A word that explains everything explains nothing. And a policy built on mythology rather than evidence does not fail by accident—it fails by design.