Lee Feagin

Daring Fireball: ‘The Insider’

All this Sturm und Drang surrounding 60 Minutes has me thinking about a re-watch of The Insider, Michael Mann’s great 1999 movie. Letterboxd’s synopsis: “A research chemist comes under personal and professional attack when he decides to appear in a 60 Minutes exposé on Big Tobacco.” It’s a great movie, and feels apt AF at the moment. Here’s the original segment on 60 Minutes, which ran an entire half hour.

What’s going on today is like if — instead of getting shady, threatening, and litigious — the tobacco companies had just purchased CBS, purged the staff at 60 Minutes, and hired a bunch of pro-cigarette stooges to replace them.

Spot on.

Candy cigarettes…who even knew they still made these?!

Tony Gilroy Accepts Award for Andor: “Fuck the Empire!”

Now that Andor has been out for a while, showrunner Tony Gilroy is free to speak his mind on what the show was all about. I mean, it was pretty clear to the audience, but now he can say his piece.

Love this, too.

As it pertains to AI, I really feel like Dr. Ian Malcom.

Three Ways to Get Paid – Jason Zweig

Linking this here for the future. No reason.

Scott Pelley Accuses CBS News Boss of ‘Murdering’ ‘60 Minutes’

CBS News faced a fresh wave of turmoil on Monday after Scott Pelley, the “60 Minutes” correspondent, laced into the show’s newly hired executive producer during a staff meeting and accused Bari Weiss, the network’s editor in chief, of “murdering” the longstanding Sunday news program.

Love to see this. Individuals, journalists specifically, standing up and telling the truth.

I see no lie.

This blind guy just walked in with a set of golf clubs over his shoulder. And now I have questions.

Seen at the grocery store:

What?!

Why So Many Control Rooms Were Seafoam Green

Now, looking at the interiors of the Manhattan Project control rooms and plants, the broad use of Light and Medium Green makes sense. One mistake and mass devastation could have occurred within these towns. Birren writes, “Note that most of the standards are soft in tone. This is deliberate and intended to establish a non-distracting environment. Green is a restful and natural-looking color for average factory interiors. Light Green with Medium Green is suggested.”

Fascinating information about something we don’t really think about (unless we’re trained to think about it). Hospitals are the same way. Here’s an example control room following Birren’s suggestions:

Looks normal to me. It probably looks normal to you. But it’s normal because of his influence. Well done, sir.

Treasury Department confirms steps taken to put Trump on new $250 bill | AP News

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Thursday that his department has prepared the design for a $250 bill featuring President Donald Trump, anticipating the passage of stalled legislation in Congress to put the president on a new denomination of legal tender.

Totally normal behavior.

I cannot seem to type-spell notification consistently. It’s like a brain-to-muscle block or something. I even misspelled it typing it out here.

“Love defies logic,” said the logical thinker.

Todd Vaziri on Mastodon:

What a dreadful place we are in where a mega billionaire says something like “You could double the taxes I pay, and it’s not gonna help that teacher in Queens. I promise you.” and not be shamed by the culture and the people around him into making a public apology the very next day.

Couldn’t agree more. And yet, here we are.

Nothing says honoring fallen American soldiers than having those 10x extra state patrols out there on the roads setting speed traps.

Switching to water from now on. This is ridiculous.

Watching “Doc Hollywood” for the 452nd time.

Two things:

• Hard to believe this movie was released 35 years ago!!
• Julie Warner played a pivotal role in this 11 year old’s life.

After the rain.

Greg Knauss on Mastodon:

The rapidly-increasing percentage of my day spent ensuring that whatever product or service I’m interacting with isn’t actively trying to fuck me is exhausting.

We are no longer customers or clients or citizens or even human. We are exploitable marks, turnips to be bled dry and discarded.

I don’t mean this to apply just to tech — it’s everything, from cable providers to oil companies to the stock market to (and inspired and led by) the President of the United States.

We live in a grift culture, where the only thing that matters is how much you have to be cheated out of.

Yep, yep, yep.

Beyond Plastics Tracked Starbucks’ ‘Widely Recyclable’ Plastic Cups. None Ended Up at a Recycling Facility. — Beyond Plastics - Working To End Single-Use Plastic Pollution

Between January and March 2026, Beyond Plastics placed 53 Bluetooth-enabled trackers inside single-use polypropylene cold cups and dropped them into in-store recycling bins at 35 Starbucks locations across nine states and Washington, D.C. Of the 36 trackers that returned usable data, none pinged from a recycling facility. Instead, the cups traveled to landfills, incinerators, waste-transfer stations, and material recovery facilities.

Can’t say I’m surprised.

Watched “All the President’s Men” for the first time last night. The 1970’s era of filmmaking sits in stark contrast to today. The picture quality, the color palette, the light (or lack thereof), the sound mixing, just to name a few.

But the thing that stood out to me was the following screenshot:

Why are there just cars parked perpendicular to the parking spaces? What kind of madness is this?

Wow, do I not know my U.S. geography! Atlanta is 7th on this list!

Speaking of the Braves, I came across this Instagram post from Dale Murphy today and thought I’d share…

I’ve been thinking a lot about Bobby Cox and the impact he had on my career and my life. It’s not a new thought—| always credit him for saving my career because well… he did.

Bobby was so loyal-he gave guys every chance he possibly could to succeed. He didn’t panic. He was patient. I never saw frustration come out as anger with him. I still remember him yelling encouragement to guys from the dugout when they were up to bat. They couldn’t always hear him…but everyone in the dugout could. I think that encouragement was for our benefit-knowing he’d be yelling the same things to us when we were at the plate.

Bobby always had your back. If you were on his team-you were his guy. If not, you weren’t. It was as simple as that. You might remember that game when I was with the Phillies and Bobby told Tom Glavine he had to even the score and throw at the next guy up to bat. Glav checked the lineup card and said, “Bobby, it’s Murph!” It didn’t matter to Bobby. We were friends of course. And a short time before that I had been one of his guys-but not anymore. I always admired Bobby for that—he was a players manager in every sense of the word.

You can still see Bobby Cox’s influence throughout the Braves organization today. As one of those who was fortunate enough to play for him, I will always feel lucky that our paths crossed in Atlanta, Georgia, all those years ago and blessed to have known him and be able to call him a friend.

RIP to one of the best-Bobby Cox.

I love that we have Murphy as one of the “good guys” of baseball representing Atlanta. My dad tells me when I was really little (in the 80’s), I woujd always talk about him while we watched the Braves on TBS.

• 2021: Won World Series
• 2025: Finished next to last

Talk about a tale of two responses to a bad start.

The Film That Explains Contemporary America - The Atlantic

My colleague David Frum once wrote about the Trump era, “When this is all over, nobody will admit to ever having supported it.” I thought about that a lot while watching The Sorrow and the Pity, which showed how true it was in France. But the documentary is ambiguous on what a society should do about that. One old guerrilla says that he knows that informers continue to live around him. He cannot forget the betrayals, but he also doesn’t seek revenge. Ophuls makes a case that remembering what happened is essential, but he leaves for viewers to decide whether it’s more important to effect justice or to simply coexist with those who see the error of their ways, even if they do not admit it.

This will be the hardest part for me. I already know that.

Because I know these people. I work with these people. I live amongst them.

I don’t know that I will ever forgive them.

Ever.

The quiet grief of adult friendship

And perhaps this is why adult friendship feels increasingly radical. It resists the transactional logic modern life rewards everywhere else. Because a real friend offers something profoundly rare: unoptimised presence. Family is structured by blood. Marriage by institution. Work relationships by utility. Friendship survives purely through mutual choosing. Nobody has to stay. And yet some people do.

Despite impossible schedules and emotional fatigue, some friends continue returning. They send memes during meetings. They remember your important dates. They call you out-of-the-blue. Not because it is convenient. But because somewhere, beneath all the exhaustion adulthood imposes, they still consider your inner life important. Sometimes it is simply the stubborn decision to keep returning to people despite the world constantly training you to prioritise everything else.

When I was younger, and this topic came up, I must admit that I kind of rolled my eyes a bit. It seemed like “olds” bemoaning some nostalgic past that may or may not have actually existed.

At almost 46, however, I am seeing things very differently. Feeling the loss of that connection more than I ever have.

StanChart CEO seeks to reassure staff over ‘lower value human capital’ comment | Reuters

Standard Chartered (STAN.L), opens new tab CEO Bill Winters sought to assuage staff concerns on Wednesday, a day after saying that the ​bank will cut thousands of jobs over the next four years as it ‌moves to replace “lower-value human capital” with technology.

I mean, he could have said “human scum”. How ungrateful are you, people?

How to deal with your kid leaving • Buttondown

Our children should know that we had lives before them, during them, and after them. If for no other reason than they need role models of how to live a life. Which gets lived until the very end.

I love every part of this post. My oldest will be a senior in college this year. My youngest is off to Europe for the summer (after his college freshman year) in about 48 hours.

Shit gettin’ real.

Kleptocracy - Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance

Here’s the bottom line. Donald Trump wants to take $1.8 billion dollars of money that taxpayers like you and me have paid to the government, and he wants to give it to his most hardcore followers, the people who stormed the Capitol on January 6. Trump calls them victims of Joe Biden’s weaponization of the Justice Department. It’s corruption. Corruption in plain sight. Trump is going to give his supporters taxpayers’ money.

The sad thing is I’m not surprised by this at all. Not even a little bit.

When everything is bad, nothing is bad. People get desensitized. They can no longer keep track of it all. It’s all so awful that none of it gets processed anymore.

Yep.

Japan’s Tourism Troubles Are Being Fuelled By Social Media Assholes

In none of those examples were the size of the crowds of tourists the problem, or even their general behaviour. The vast majority of people were fine! The problem was the tourists with their phones out shooting themselves for a video or taking endless selfies, blocking crowds, barring entrance to stores and just generally getting in everyone’s way in the most annoying way possible. I know simply blaming TikTok and Instagram and YouTube Shorts for so many flashpoints is an overly-simplistic explanation, but also, from everything I saw in my two weeks (where other kinds of rude or offensive behaviour outside the occasional jerk were rare), it was kinda true.

I’ve said it before. Social media is, in and of itself, a menace.

Minnesota to ban prediction markets like Kalshi, Polymarket : NPR

The new state law makes it a crime to host or advertise a prediction market, which it defines as a system that lets consumers place a wager on a future outcome, like sports, elections, live entertainment, someone’s word choice and world affairs.

Honestly, I agree with this. It’s not good for society.

DOJ announces nearly $1.8B fund to compensate Trump allies | AP News

The Trump administration announced Monday the creation of a nearly $1.8 billion fund to compensate allies of the Republican president who believe they have been unjustly investigated and prosecuted, an arrangement that Democrats and government watchdogs derided as “corrupt” and unconstitutional.

I’m sure glad we have no wasteful spening happening in the federal government these days.

Can’t complain if you don’t do your part.

Of the many things he’s done, this fucker has further emboldened racists.

This is at a publicly, nationally televised baseball game. And they had no qualms about it. In fact, they were proud of it.

We Are Eating Our Own Seed Corn – SQLServerCentral

Here is the deeper problem, and the one that should give even the most enthusiastic AI advocates pause.

The AI systems that are replacing junior workers did not emerge from nothing. They were trained in decades of human-generated work: code committed by junior developers learning on the job, documentation written by entry-level technical writers, support transcripts from help desk analysts in their first year. Every iteration of AI that handles “routine” technical work is drawn on a reservoir of human expertise that was built, painstakingly, by people doing exactly the jobs we are now eliminating.

What happens when that reservoir stops being replenished?

Not the first person to say this, but it bears repeating. Again and again and again.

Daring Fireball: AI Is Technology, Not a Product

The idea that AI agents “will have already figured out where [we] need to go, and the car will be waiting without the friction of a request” strikes me as pure fever dream high-on-the-hype fantasy. I’m just going to step outside a restaurant when I’m done eating a meal and a ride-share is going to be there, waiting for me, without my having hailed it? Every time? And I’m going to find this pleasing, not creepy? And ride-share drivers are going to respond to all these requests, because the requests will never be wrong? And this is going to happen, somehow, without my carrying a phone with me? And this is going to happen in the next four years? I don’t think I’d want this even if it were plausible, but it doesn’t sound plausible.

Nailing it.

That moment you realize you’re way too old to be walking through a mall.

U.S. Set to Drop Charges Against Indian Billionaire Accused of Fraud - The New York Times

The reversal came after the Indian billionaire, Gautam Adani, hired a new legal team led by Robert J. Giuffra Jr., one of President Trump’s personal lawyers and the co-chairman of the prominent firm Sullivan & Cromwell.

Mr. Giuffra’s efforts on Mr. Adani’s behalf culminated in a previously unreported meeting last month at the Justice Department’s headquarters in Washington, according to people familiar with the meeting. Mr. Giuffra ticked through about 100 slides outlining why prosecutors lacked basic evidence, as well as the jurisdiction even to bring the case, one of the people said.

Another slide also made an unusual offer: If prosecutors dropped the charges, Mr. Adani would be willing to invest $10 billion in the American economy and create 15,000 jobs, echoing a pledge he had made in the wake of Mr. Trump’s election.

Fraud = bad. Bribes = good. Got it.

I’d love to go back to my year 2000 self who was sitting in his database course at Georgia Tech and say “Normal form is great, even preferred, but NOT always practical in the real world. It’s ok.”

Having a stored procedure run for 6-7 seconds on principle alone when it could run in less than 1 second is just asinine.

What happens if you’re both?

I’ve never been to a graduation where I or someone I know wasn’t graduating. There’s a first time for everything!

Utah is not jazzed about a potential AI data center

Plans to build an AI data center that will span 40,000 acres in northwest Utah were approved by county commissioners last week, despite protests from thousands of local residents who believe the project will wreak havoc on the local environment and increase energy costs.

Voices don’t matter anymore. People don’t matter anymore. Only money.

I’m convinced that Waymo’s just drive around the city as we sleep. On the way back from the airport this morning around 5:45am, there were two in front of me at the stoplight. And one behind me. And three at the cross street stoplight.

Judgement Day is coming.

Just going to leave this here…

The city of Atlanta, especially Atlanta sports, owes a great deal to these two men. Fitting statement on both Ted Turner and Bobby Cox.

2 Letters from Steve | David Gelphman’s Blog

But until the product was officially released I could not show it to anyone without permission from Apple management. There was no way I was going to take the iPad with me unless Steve personally approved it.

One from way back (in 2013), but someone linked to it recently, and I loved reading it. Heck, I probably read it 13 years ago, but don’t remember. Small acts of kindness can go a long way. We should all remember that. We should all strive to live up to that.