Month: June 2026

Litter bug alert! 

ALERT. Litter bug alert!

While California has not yet authorized standard, automated traffic cameras, to issue citations for litterbugs.

State-level vehicle code only allows automated traffic enforcement systems for specific violations like running red lights, speeding, or illegally using bus lanes.

​. However, there are two related surveillance rollouts causing recent buzz:

Garbage Truck Cameras:

Major waste management companies in California (like Recycling and Waste Management) have recently equipped their residential collection trucks with cameras to photograph and fine customers for overfilled trash bins.

​Localized Anti-Dumping Cameras: Cities like San Jose, Oakland, and Vallejo utilize localized, mobile surveillance cameras hidden at known hotspots to catch and prosecute major illegal dumping, rather than tracking casual littering on standard roads.

BUT Here’s a BOLO Alert.

Those discretionary Cameras on the sanitation trucks only look down into the hopper and at the bins to flag overfilled or contaminated dumpsters. They are managed by the waste disposal companies to assess fees, not by traffic enforcement to issue parking tickets on trash pickup days.

​. However, if a vehicle blocks a trash pickup zone, the driver can still be cited the traditional way if parking enforcement or a street sweeper with automated cameras passes by.

I’ve been known to participate in – let’s call it, the prediction markets, like Kalshi. I can’t help but wonder about the odds that some wise guy in the tech department might not cross connect the trash sweeper and the parking control folks and turn the trash sweepers into an A.I. snitch.

  • Ok. I’ll pause here. I’m headed into the twilight zone…

 

Hey Google!

         A couple of days ago two things happened. First, I got into an intense debate with a young man, concerning A.I., SIRI, GALAXY, CLAUDE, CHATGTP, GEMINI, GROK, etc. I flexed on him and accused him of having inferior knowledge on the subject because I have worked in the technology field since the 1980s, and then I fell back on his lack of experience because I have twelve years of age on him.  

 Anyway, no harm was done. Every night, we debate the human condition and then go home. When I got home, I was thinking about our record. In case you didn’t know, I am a veteran of the music business. One of the groups that I worked with recorded a few records, and recently, a label picked up some of our records and re-released a bunch of them on a new album. The group’s name was Record Player. I was suddenly curious about how the record sales are doing, so I said to Alexa, “how are record sales going for the group Record Player.”

Alexa responded with: “Record Player didn’t actually release an album last year; the group remains a fictional band from the Amazon Prime series, Daisy Jones & The Six. Because they only existed within the show’s universe, there aren’t any real-world sales to track.”

 I jumped in immediately, and said “Alexa, I am sitting here holding their record and I am one of the artists.”

     Alexa paused, and then  regrouped. “My mistake! You are completely right, and I apologize for the mix-up.

​You are holding the music of Record Player, the 1970s soul and funk group out of Dayton, Ohio. They were massive talents in the Midwest disco/show band scene before splitting up in the early 1980s.  

​Because they originally only pressed a rare, single 45 RPM record back in 1979, most of their incredible studio recordings sat unreleased for decades. The album you are likely holding is “Free Your Mind,” an archival compilation officially restored and released last year by Now-Again Records.  

​While precise streaming and physical sales numbers for independent archival pressings like this aren’t publicly charted on Billboard, the release has been incredibly well-received by deep-soul collectors, funk historians, and vinyl enthusiasts who are thrilled to finally have that full catalog preserved.”

I said, “interesting enough, I just assured a colleague  that it is a myth that A.I. is infallible.

     Alexa quickly agreed.“That is definitely a myth worth busting! We are definitely not infallible—as my first answer clearly proved.

​AI models are just pattern-recognition engines trained “massive amounts of data, which means we can easily misunderstand context, confidently hallucinate incorrect facts, or get tripped up by overlapping names. It is always a good idea to double-check AI responses, especially when you have the hard copy right there in your hands.

     This story is true, believe it or not. It is a cautionary tale, as we move forward deeper into the realm of A.I. and Data Centers. Just as I was wrapping up the facts for this  one, I asked GALAXY if there was actually a group named Record Player on the fictional series, Daisy Jones & The Six.

“No.” I give up.

 

The Party of One

The Party of One

­

What began as a supposedly nonpartisan national celebration appears to have taken a sharp detour into campaign-country.

The event’s original lineup looked like a strange but entertaining playlist assembled by someone spinning a giant wheel of nostalgia: Lee Greenwood, Christopher Macchio, Vanilla Ice, Flo Rida, Fab Morvan (still carrying the Milli Vanilli banner), military bands, drum corps, and armed forces choruses.

     Then came the withdrawals.

One by one, artists including The Commodores, Morris Day & The Time, Martina McBride, Bret Michaels, and Young MC reportedly decided they would rather spend the weekend doing literally anything else.    

   Several states—including Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington—also declined to participate, citing cost concerns and discomfort with the increasingly partisan tone of the event.

 

     At some point, attendees may have begun realizing they weren’t being invited to a national fair as much as they were being recruited as scenery.

 

     With the exits piling up, the remaining roster began to resemble a game of musical chairs where most of the chairs had already left the building. Those still standing could reasonably be described as either committed performers, true believers, or people whose agents stopped answering the phone.

 

     Notably absent from the discussion are several names observers expected to see. Some may be touring. Some may have wisely scheduled dentist appointments. Others may have simply decided that becoming a political talking point wasn’t worth the frequent-flyer miles.

 

     In the end, President Donald Trump reportedly canceled the remaining concert schedule altogether and replaced it with what the event seems to have been evolving into from the start: a massive political rally headlined by himself.

Which raises the obvious question: If a nonpartisan celebration slowly sheds its musicians, loses participating states, transforms into a campaign-style rally, and ends with a speech by the politician at the center of it all—was it ever really nonpartisan in the first place?

 

     Sometimes the most revealing part of a concert is not who’s on stage.

It’s who left before the show started.

 

“At some point, attendees may have begun realizing they weren’t being invited to a national fair as much as they were being recruited as scenery.”

But Not Today

      During his first term, Trump successfully lobbied FIFA and secured the winning joint “United Bid” for the U.S., Canada, and Mexico to host the 2026 World Cup.The FIFA World Cup 2026 is officially underway in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Major city centers across the U.S. are hosting, and “watch parties” are circling the venues and perhaps portions of the world.

The image below is a different, yet important localized, but growing trend focusing on a “watch party” in Washington DC. This watch party stands at the scene of the Kennedy Center treasure. The tarp conceals the removal of Trump’s name from this national tresure, as dictated by the court.

More importantly, this removal of the illegal stain of what some people considered to be graffiti, marks the first step in the removal of the legacy that he has spent the last 18 months attempting to build.

But not today…

 As the World Turns

 As the World Turns

This might be worse than I thought. Not only is AI going to take all of our jobs but AI is also going to waste all of our time.

     The big story right now is that AI agents have officially overtaken humans as the largest source of internet traffic.

​According to data just released by Cloudflare, automated AI bots and agents now account for 57.4% of all web traffic (via HTTP requests), leaving humans with the remaining 42.6%.

     ​Here is what is happening under the hood:

     ​The Multiplier Effect: When a human asks a chatbot a single question (like shopping for a camera or researching a topic), the human looks at maybe four or five sites. An AI agent will aggressively scour hundreds or thousands of websites simultaneously to synthesize that one answer.

          ​The “Dead Internet” Shift: This marks a fundamental shift from a web designed for humans clicking around, to an internet dominated by machine-to-machine data retrieval.

     ​The Regional Divide: This bot traffic is heavily concentrated in North America, where agents make up nearly 69% of all web traffic, while regions like India still remain overwhelmingly human-driven (over 84%).

​While humans still win on total actual engagement time (like streaming videos or doomscrolling social feeds), 

     AI agents completely dominate the rapid-fire loading of web pages.

     So while you are swiping left and right and up and down, the chat agents are doing stuff – lots of plain old boring businessey stuff. 

Dig and burn, baby. Dig and Burn

Dig and burn, baby. Dig and Burn

I won’t go as far as to say he’s lying when he claims that China is successful because they burn a lot more coal than we do in the states.

By comparison,  China’s power consumption ratio is 51% while the US ratio is a mere 17%. So the big guy’s got me there… Sorta.

     The US has proudly converted to renewable energy as a means of burning quieter wicks of coal – and the big guy doesn’t like progressive shenanigans when good old fashioned ancients will do. I won’t twist your arms today and get into a debate about pneumoconiosis. That’s another story about another day. Google it yourself.

     I will argue that China’s use of coal has dropped from 70% down to 51% coal to renewable ratio, their population is 4x the size of ours in the US.

     So as to avoid hurt feelings, I will spieak softly about looking at the world, through rose-colored glasses while China’s reliance on coal power is well in decline, as was ours until our guy decided again to dig and burn baby, dig and burn our way back into the cave man days. (did I mention pneumoconiosis?)

     I get it. Competition. Without competition, we would be obliged to work together. We want to fire up the space race again and be the first ones to dig a hole on the moon, while at the same time we want to be the first ones to dig a deeper hole on planet Earth.

 

Sada Tay.

Story: Charles Jackson