The insurance industry is throwing some serious shade at GM right now.
Relative to its numbers on the roads, the Camaro ZL1 had a whole-vehicle theft rate 39 times the average for all vehicles. […] On top of the high horsepower that makes the Camaro an attractive target, a technical glitch seems to have created new opportunities for thieves to steal it, according to news reports.
Thieves can steal modern vehicles by cloning the owner’s key fob with an electronic device. Ordinarily, they need access to the fob to copy it. But some media outlets have reported that thieves are able to clone the key code for newer Camaros by accessing the on-board ports that technicians use to retrieve diagnostic codes and monitor data about fuel economy, emissions and other aspects of performance.
For all the times I’ve said the AI hype is way too overheated, I also dislike extreme cold. Where did all the balance go?
Fortune’s latest breathless reporting about a “tragic” AI market reads like buzzword bingo: insert “bubble,” add some dot-com references, quote a longtime insider skeptic, and call it analysis. But this lazy framing completely misreads the history it quotes and fundamentally misunderstands what’s actually happening.
The author leans too heavily on dramatic language (“tragic,” “underwhelming”) and seems to conflate stock valuations with technological viability. Insert nails on chalkboard.
The article follows the all too familiar template of gathering concerning quotes and market data without deeply examining whether current AI adoption patterns actually resemble historical bubbles. He said, she said, where’s the critical thinking?
Let me show what I mean. The dot-com crash wasn’t just a market correction—it was a techbro fraud filter. It cleared out companies sponging investors with marketing-oriented science fiction while preserving the real infrastructure that became the backbone of our digital economy. The Web won. The internet didn’t fail; the ruthless extractive speculation around it did.
Today’s AI situation is fundamentally different. Companies aren’t betting on hypothetical future revenue—customers already are operationally dependent and paying for AI as a service. Once you’ve integrated AI into your assembly lines like steam-powered machinery, you face a simple economic reality: pay for the AI and pay to clean up its mistakes, or pay the higher costs of reverting to manual processes.
This isn’t speculation anymore. It’s infrastructure, and like all powerful infrastructure, it demands safety protocols.
Calling AI a bubble because some stocks are overvalued is like calling the steam engine a bubble after factories have already been retrofitted with boilers but haven’t installed proper safety systems. Sure, some companies are overpaying, some investments won’t pan out, and some operations will catastrophically fail like an entire factory burning to the ground. But we’re well past the “will this work?” question and deep into the “how do we deploy this at scale without killing all the workers?” phase.
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, clearly describing the reality of American industrialization, should be required reading in computer science degrees.
Sinclair wrote The Jungle to expose worker exploitation and advocate for labor rights, but the public was horrified by food contamination instead. The government responded with the Pure Food and Drug Act to protect consumers from tainted meat, while largely ignoring the workers who were being ground up by the same system.
Sinclair wanted to show how capitalism was destroying human beings, but readers fixated on their own safety as consumers rather than the systematic dehumanization of workers. The government gave people clean food while leaving the fundamental power imbalances and dangerous working conditions intact.
The AI parallel is unmistakable: we’re so focused on whether AI stocks are overvalued (protecting investors) that we’re missing the much more serious question of what happens to the people whose lives and livelihoods get processed through these systems without adequate safeguards.
The real regulatory challenge is less about market bubbles and more about preventing algorithmic systems from treating humans like they are contaminated byproducts of the industrial technology boom Sinclair exposed.
And just like 1906, we’re probably going to get consumer protection laws (maybe some weak-sauce transparency requirements) while the fundamental power dynamics and safety issues for the people actually affected by these systems get ignored. It’s the same pattern again: worry on Wall Street about the symptom that scares the powerful, ignore the causes that harm the powerless at scale.
We’re seeing the consequences of rushing powerful automation into critical systems we depend on without adequate safeguards, like the industrial equivalent of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory disaster, where really bad algorithmic decision-making functions like the doors that don’t open in a fire.
Fortune’s bubble talk, complete with cartoon analogies about Wile E. Coyote, reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of technological adoption cycles. When automation becomes operationally essential, market corrections don’t reverse the underlying transformation—they reset the price of admission and, hopefully, force better safety standards.
The real story is how AI slowly moved from experimental to indispensable as a 1950s concept dismissed in the 1980s before exploding in the early 2010s. Do you know what else followed that exact slow 30 year cycle?
Cloud computing.
The 1950s time-sharing concept reached explosive adoption in the 2010s, just like AI is doing now. A generation from idea to infrastructure in both cases, except one of them was rebranded. Calling the cloud a bubble today would be absurd.
Similarly the AI bubble predictions will age as poorly as Oracle saying there was no cloud, Sun Microsystems claiming there was no privacy, or IBM declaring there was no future for personal computing.
It’s not just a tech pattern to watch, it’s how human societies adopt transformative technologies for infrastructure across generational timescales.
MAR-A-LAGO — The spa attendants have reported today that Pentagon officials have announced a major reallocation of military resources, pulling back support for democracy defense operations to prepare for what is being called “their most critical military anti-democratic campaign since 1877.”
In the 1870s, Northern politicians began retreating from a commitment to protect Black rights and lives, culminating in the withdrawal of troops from all Southern state houses in 1877. In response, racial terror and violence directed at Black people intensified and legal systems quickly emerged to restore racial hierarchy: white Southerners barred Black people from voting; created an exploitative economic system of sharecropping and tenant farming that would keep African Americans indentured and poor for generations; and made racial segregation the law of the land.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, sipping a cocktail while wrapped only in a towel, confirmed to his masseuse that the Army Tactical Missile Systems previously earmarked for Ukrainian freedom fighters now will be redirected to support “Operation Blow Hard,” a comprehensive military campaign against democratic processes in America: “After careful consideration, we’ve determined that the greatest threat to American security is not foreign autocracy, but domestic democracy. While Ukraine can wait for freedom, Chicago’s democratic institutions pose an immediate and existential threat to a very particular set of national interests. A little lighter, and more on the right shoulder, by my anti-semitic tattoo.”
The operation, developed by Pentagon policy undersecretary Reaper Colby, implements a color-coded threat assessment system rating democratic activities on a scale from white (attending town halls) to Black people voting. Sources confirm that Chicago has been designated “Code Black” due to its historically “dangerous and high concentration of Black civic engagement.”
When asked about abandoning Ukraine while President Volodymyr Zelensky faces Russian aggression, Pentagon spokesperson Colonel Buzzsaw Mitchell stated: “President Zelensky will have to understand that America’s commitment to democracy is conditional. We can’t fight Russian dictatorship abroad while democracy runs rampant at home. Think how easy the fight gets once America sides with bad guys.”
The move has drawn praise from Pentagon historians, like military analyst Dr. Robert E. Lee, who noted the strategic precedent. “This recalls the brilliant 1877 Compromise. Just as we successfully withdrew federal protection from Southern democracy to protect white nationalism, we’re now withdrawing international democracy support against tyranny to focus on domestic pacification for tyranny.”
Ukrainian officials expressed confusion at the policy shift. “We thought Americans supported democracy,” said one Ukrainian defense minister. “Apparently they only support it when it’s not actually happening.”
The Pentagon’s new “Democracy Containment Doctrine” officially classifies civic participation as an invasion, a Category 4 security threat, above natural disasters. Military planners estimate that full democratic suppression in Chicago will require the same resources previously allocated to defending Ukrainian sovereignty.
General Butch Rodriguez, who will lead the Chicago operation, explained: “It’s really a question of priorities. Do we want to waste missiles helping Ukrainians vote freely, or use those same resources to ensure Americans can’t? The choice is obvious.”
Operation Blow Hard is scheduled for a soft launch in September, with advance units reportedly scouting locations for “democracy denial zones” around polling sites and city council meetings.
A recent study by Simmrin Law Group claiming to identify “states where Americans face the highest risk of false crime accusations” perfectly demonstrates how statistics can be weaponized to punish transparency and reward cover-ups. The analysis gets everything backwards, celebrating states that likely ignore wrongful convictions while demonizing those actually working to fix them.
Statistical Flaws
The study ranks Illinois as the “worst” state because it has 1,050 exonerations per 100,000 prisoners. But this completely misses the point: exonerations don’t create wrongful convictions—they correct them.
States with high exoneration rates aren’t generating more false accusations. They’re finding and fixing the mistakes that every justice system inevitably makes. Meanwhile, South Carolina’s “impressive” rate of just 28 exonerations per 100,000 prisoners likely indicates a broken system that leaves innocent people to rot in prison. Can you guess how “impressive” North Korea’s rate is?
Exoneration Rates Are a Canary
When Illinois leads in exonerations, it demonstrates:
Robust post-conviction review systems that actually work
Transparency and accountability in acknowledging mistakes
Resources dedicated to justice, including active innocence projects
Legal frameworks that allow prisoners to challenge wrongful convictions
A justice system willing to do the hard work of correcting errors
Compare this to states, like North Korea or Myanmar, with virtually zero exonerations. Are we really supposed to believe their justice systems never make mistakes? Or is it more likely they lack the mechanisms, resources, or political will to find and fix them?
Crime Statistics as Parallel
This backwards analysis mirrors the flawed thinking around crime statistics. Higher reported crime rates often indicate:
Communities that trust police enough to report crimes
Better police response and documentation systems
Thorough investigation practices
Transparent record-keeping
Lower crime rates might just mean people have given up calling for help, or that incidents go unreported and undocumented.
The Big Bad Scandal
The scandal isn’t that some states find wrongful convictions—it’s that others apparently don’t even look. They expect corrupt political rewards for burying the truth and incarcerating innocent people.
When external forces intervene in high-crime areas based purely on statistics without understanding the underlying dynamics, they often undermine the very systems working hardest to address problems transparently.
Sending military troops into high crime areas to “help” police is autocratic theatre to undermine local communities and destroy any independence left in sovereign authorities.
Data Should Not Be Tortured
Using the study’s own sources from the National Registry of Exonerations, we should be asking:
Why do some states have virtually no mechanisms for post-conviction relief?
What systemic barriers prevent wrongfully convicted people from proving their innocence?
How many innocent people remain imprisoned in states that rarely exonerate anyone?
Bottom Line
A justice system’s quality shouldn’t be measured by how few mistakes it admits to making, but by how effectively it finds and corrects the mistakes it inevitably does make. States like Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts aren’t failing their citizens—they’re actually serving them by maintaining systems robust enough to catch and fix errors.
The states we should really worry about are those with suspiciously pristine records who apparently never make mistakes worth correcting. Every seasoned auditor knows a book with too few errors is being cooked.
What we see in the study is Illinois has the most integrity and South Carolina has the least integrity. The original study inadvertently revealed to the trained professional eye which states are actually doing the work versus which ones are just sweeping problems under the rug to use mass incarceration as a racist political weapon.
This analysis is based on data from the Simmrin Law Group study using National Registry of Exonerations data:
…analyzed data on total prisoners as of June 2024 alongside exonerations recorded from 1989 to the present. The data was normalized to calculate the number of exonerations per 100,000 incarcerated individuals in each state.
Ironically, Simmrin Law Group’s reported recommendations for stronger public defense, prosecutorial accountability, and rigorous forensic standards all describe exactly what Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts have been doing. The study bizarrely attempts to smear states that follow the study’s own advice.
If you think low exoneration rates are good, you’re celebrating the justice systems of dictatorships. And if you send armed federal troops into “high crime” areas, you’re undermining police by switching to authoritarian approaches to justice.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
