Hello and welcome to Wednesday, June 24, 2026. I’m glad you’re here for our daily visit. Today is St. Jean Baptiste Day, which is a big deal in Quebec. It’s also National Pralines Day.
1509: Henry VIII is crowned King of England in Westminster Abbey, London.
1795: The U.S. and Great Britain sign the Jay Treaty, the first U.S. extradition treaty.
1853: President Franklin Pierce signs the Gadsden Purchase, buying 29,670 square miles (76,800 square km) from Mexico for $10 million, now southern Arizona and southern New Mexico.
1889: Butch Cassidy commits his first bank robbery with Warner and two McCarty brothers at the San Miguel Valley Bank in Telluride, Colo.; they steal about $21,000, equivalent to about $735,000 today.
1902: Target Corporation is founded by American businessman George Dayton as Goodfellow Dry Goods in Minneapolis.
1922: Adolf Hitler begins a month-long prison sentence for paramilitary operations; he rails against the ‘Jewish sell-out’ of Germany to the Bolsheviks.
1948: Republican National Convention in Philadelphia nominates N.Y. Gov. Thomas E. Dewey.
1964: FTC rules health warnings must appear on all cigarette packages.
1977: Crystal Gayle releases best-selling album We Must Believe in Magic, featuring the worldwide hit, “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue.”
Birthdays Today Include: Justice John Archibald Campbell, Supreme Court (1853–61); Henry Ward Beecher, clergyman and orator; Jack Dempsey, boxer; Billy Casper, pro golfer; Arthur Brown, British rock singer and songwriter (The Crazy World of Arthur Brown – “Fire”); Jeff Beck, Grammy Award-winning rock guitarist (Yardbirds, 1965-66; Jeff Beck Group, 1967-72); Colin Blunstone, British rock singer-songwriter (The Zombies – “She’s Not There,” “Time Of The Season”); George Pataki, politician (N.Y. governer [R], 1995-2006); Mick Fleetwood (Fleetwood Mac); Patrick Moraz, Swiss progressive rock keyboard player (Yes, 1974-77; The Moody Blues, 1978-91); and Curt Smith, rock bassist and vocalist (Tears For Fears – “Everybody Wants To Rule The World,” “Shout”).
If today is your birthday, too, have a great one.
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Been meaning to write about this for a long time. What finally goaded me into it was a news story from John Solomon’s “Just The News”, written by Christina Park:
Only a small percentage of U.S. voters who oppose data centers live near one, a new poll by a consulting firm that counsels leading AI labs and tech startups found.
The poll, conducted by Milltown Partners, which surveyed more than 6,500 registered U.S. voters nationwide, suggested that Americans are not opposed to data center building projects as much as to what they represent. As first reported by Axios, the backlash comes from a broader anxiety about an AI future that many Americans do not want but will have to pay for.
Then we get to the real rub — and it’s buried in the details that most “reporters” on the subject will conveniently skip right past:
The poll also oversampled voters in states that currently have data center projects, including California, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Texas.
Most people who opposed data centers did not live near one, with only 8% of respondents who opposed them saying that they know of one or more data centers in their area. This suggests that most voters are not strictly opposed to data centers but may be concerned with the pace and the terms of construction, according to Axios.
According to the findings, 38% of respondents said that they would support a data center close to their home, while 34% would oppose it.
This is going to seem like I’m leaving the subject behind, but I’m not. Not even close. Let me tell you a story for the purposes of establishing an argument.
Near where I used to live, outside of Rochester, N.Y., sat a plot of land belonging to Kodak — yes, the picture folks. These are the people who held the technology of digital photography in their own hands and chose to sit on it. In 1975, Kodak engineer Steve Sasson invented the digital camera. Rather than championing it, Kodak’s leadership shoved it in a drawer. They feared digital photography would cannibalize their film sales, and that short-term thinking blinded them to the long-term benefit of being pioneers in the digital space. These days, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who doesn’t have some form of electronic photography on their person. Sasson landed on his feet rather nicely. Kodak, meanwhile, landed on its face.
Back in the day, we had three biggies around here — Kodak, Xerox, and Bausch and Lomb. Kodak dominated Rochester as the largest employer in the area, running several manufacturing sites, including the now largely demolished Kodak Park. Physical film was once just too profitable to evolve beyond.
The trouble with that logic? Things change.
Bausch, where my Dad used to work, along with my mother and brother, is a shell of what it used to be. Xerox is still around, though most of its manufacturing and R&D is now offshore. It too is a mere fraction of what it used to be. What was once the mighty Xerox Tower, where I used to work, still dominates the Rochester skyline, but it’s now Innovation Square. The owners removed the Xerox Logo from the building back in 2005 and started leasing space.
And so it went for Kodak. Most of the buildings at Kodak Park are now a memory. The site, at least what’s left of it, is now called Eastman Business Park. Kodak abandoned the old Elmgrove plant west of Rochester altogether after squeezing barely 15 years of productive service out of it.
Distribution centers and small businesses now occupy those old buildings where workers used to manufacture camera parts and even whole cameras, like the Disk Camera. (Remember those? No? That’s fine, almost nobody does today.)
Just within the last couple of years or so, Amazon swooped in, knocked a couple of those buildings down, and built its own facility from scratch. This new 208,000-square-foot plant runs on heavy, and I mean heavy, automation — pallets of everything you impulse-bought from your phone at 2 a.m. when you should have been sleeping, moving around without a human hand touching them. The power demands rival those of a data center, which is no small thing. I’ve had a fair amount of personal experience with such warehouse operations. It’s fascinating to watch the system work.
There was some advantage to Amazon coming into my old neighborhood, which used to suffer with a fragile, hiccup-prone power grid that blinked out every time a thunderstorm looked at it sideways. When Amazon came knocking, the local power company finally got religion and invested in hardening the grid to keep its shiny new mega-customer happy. We had already bought a generator to survive the frequent outages. Since Amazon moved in? Not a single failure. The generator just sits there, collecting dust like a forgotten gym membership. It fires itself up every Wednesday just to let its presence be known.
The new plant — scaling to roughly 45 football fields — now employs a bit over 1,000 people in good-paying jobs. The property tax bill on the place, as you’d expect, is enormous, which keeps residential taxes in the area lower. The complaints from the surrounding neighborhood center predictably on traffic and the sheer scale of the operation, though plenty of residents mix those gripes with genuine appreciation for the economic benefits.
Now compare that to the Just The News report, where the loudest opposition comes from people who don’t even live anywhere near one of these facilities. They have no dog in this fight — not even a distant bark. They’re angry and mostly fearful about vibes, really. Very little in their objections is tangible. They’re fearful about an AI future they don’t like the smell of. And the poll is happily amplifying that anxiety as though it carries the same weight as the opinions of people who actually wake up next to one of these things every morning.
The reality is, of course, that it doesn’t. But that doesn’t stop the people in government from treating such complaints like it does. When, after all, is government ever really connected with reality?
Questions get raised about the promised jobs, as happened with Elmgrove. The fears about that project were, of course, unfounded — noise, water use, etc.
At the center of it all, though, the real complaint generator at the root of all these objections is fear. These folks are not worried so much about the buildings, even the size and scope of the things. They’re worried about the technology-driven change that those projects represent. Fear is a natural reaction to change like that.
I point out to you, though, that’s the very same fear that killed off Kodak. There’s a single word that describes something that doesn’t change.
Dead.
OK, look, it’s certainly true that not all new tech works out. I’ve always been something of a technology geek, so I suppose I’ve seen my share of tech failures. Electric cars, for example, which turned out to be the New Coke of the automotive world. Video disks. (No, not DVDs; I mean the huge things that RCA marketed years ago.) Betamax.
There are growing pains, too, as there are with any kind of change, good or bad.
Then again, as demonstrated by Kodak, keeping the old tech is often seriously problematic. Consider the tech changes that have come to your personal life. Would you rather watch things on your big flatscreen or on your older tube TV with half the resolution and over twice the power consumption? Do you prefer three, maybe four available channels to watch, or the vast list of things we have available now?
You’re reading this piece right now, this very second, because you accepted change, enough that you have a PC and/or a smartphone. Remember the fear when the Bell network was broken up? Phone bills went down like a meteorite. Long distance? What’s that, anymore? Tech improvements eventually resulted in the fact that you now carry more computing power in your pocket, every one of you, than they had on board for our moon shots, along with a fine camera, the quality of which was unimaginable back when Kodak decided against change.
All I’m saying here is that, for the sake of our future, we shouldn’t be allowing fear and the fear mongers to be making the choices for us.
Thought of the Day: Ponder the dissonance involved with people in a gated community eating free-range chickens.
VIP members: As always, hit the heart and speak out on today’s topic because your involvement makes a difference.
Have a great midweek, my friends. Hope to see you here again tomorrow.
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