It’s Free for ALL Friday! Each week I keep track of some of the off-the-path things I've found, and work extra-hard to make sure you never hit a paywall, using my own subscriptions, gift links, and other (legal) hocus-pocus.
He Earns $33 an Hour as a Costco Cashier. Now He’s a Millionaire.
A long-tenured employee shows how Costco’s strategy of paying well and retaining workers has created genuine wealth for ordinary staff
Tony Barzar started working for Costco’s predecessor, Price Club, in 1986, gathering carts in the parking lot at $5.85 an hour. Over nearly four decades, he has worked his way through various positions—early-morning stocker, greeter, and finally cashier—at the Tucson warehouse. His pay and benefits reflect his value to the company. He earns $32.90 an hour, and the holdings in his 401(k) have boosted his retirement savings to over $1 million, he said.
His Costco-sponsored healthcare has a regular visit co-pay of $15, and a specialty visit co-pay of $25, well below the national average. In 2009, Barzar’s family bought a three-bedroom, two-bath house with a pool, and they have been able to travel to Europe twice over the past decade.
Long-tenured workers like Barzar are Costco’s secret weapon. They are reliable and experienced, able to speed shoppers through a checkout line and serve as mentors to newer workers, passing down the company’s unique culture, Costco executives say.
“Many thousands” of Costco’s U.S. hourly workers have over $1 million in their 401(k) accounts, said Gary Millerchip, the retailer’s chief financial officer.
Link: Wall Street Journal (Multiple reporters)
People Keep Sneaking Into an Empty IBM Campus. This Town Has Had Enough.
A vacant architectural landmark has become a magnet for urban explorers, and the small New York town is running out of patience
A sprawling 1980s complex designed by the late I.M. Pei’s firm sits on a hilltop in Somers, New York, ringed by woods, its distinctive pyramid features visible from nearby Interstate 684.
After IBM sold the property in 2016 for $31.75 million, the 723-acre campus sat largely empty. In recent months, however, the long-vacant site has become a magnet for so-called urban explorers—people who prowl abandoned malls, hospitals, power plants, amusement parks, factories and any other disused structure they can breach.
The global “urbex” phenomenon isn’t new, but it’s been turbocharged by artsy videos on Instagram and TikTok that spur others to create their own posts, luring still more curiosity seekers. Social-media images of the old IBM campus show dystopian scenes: busted windows, tossed rooms and graffitied walls. But they also give eerie glimpses of conference rooms and cubicles unchanged since IBM left a decade ago, as if employees had fled the daily grind one day and never returned.
Since February, state police have arrested 48 people for trespassing on the property, many from nearby towns; 30 were teenagers. One man in his mid-20s faces felony charges; police allege he had a loaded 9mm gun and took a Sony camera and power strip among other souvenirs.
“If somebody gets hurt and they’re trapped in there, now it’s additional resources for us, and I have to worry about officers getting hurt,” a local police chief said. “And why? Because somebody wants to walk through an empty building.”
Link: Wall Street Journal (Scott Calvert)
Once Unimaginable, Publishers Are Preparing to Opt Out of Google Search
For decades the lifeblood of online media, Google traffic is now so degraded that major publishers are considering the unthinkable: blocking the search engine entirely
Last week, Cloudflare, the content delivery network that hosts roughly one-fifth of the websites in the world, gave Google an ultimatum. Beginning Sept. 15, all new websites signing up for Cloudflare, as well as all the customers on its free tier, will have the default settings in their bot management protocol set to block “multi-purpose crawlers” on any webpage that has ads.
This means that any crawler that scrapes for both search indexing and AI training will be turned away at the door, unless the site owner decides otherwise.
“We’ve been clear about what we want,” said Cloudflare chief strategy officer Stephanie Cohen. “We want a technical solution that allows you to be discoverable without having to give your content away for free.”
The primary, unnamed target of this action is Google, which infamously uses one crawler to both index sites and train its AI models.
USA Today Inc., which encompasses not just USA Today but a nationwide network of news sites, is weighing its options on the matter, according to CEO Mike Reed. The company has responded to declines in search traffic by bolstering audience from other sources, like newsletters, social media, and events. Its traffic has remained relatively stable in recent years, hitting its goal of 1 billion pageviews every month.
Still, its monetization strategy going forward as it relates to AI will come from licensing agreements; Google, unlike its hyperscaler peers or pure-play AI firms, has not struck any licensing deals with any publishers. As a result, USA Today Inc. is prepared to delist from Google in the next six to twelve months, according to Reed.
Link: Adweek (Multiple reporters)
What Happens if China Hacks the US Water Supply?
Insurance executives played out a mass cyberattack scenario and discovered the nation’s infrastructure defenses are dangerously fragile
Joshua Corman, a former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency strategist, stood at the front of a conference space high above Times Square to narrate a role-playing game simulating a catastrophic cyberattack on US water utilities.
The scenario: hackers have disrupted 5,000 water utilities across the United States.
Corman was serving as dungeon master for a few dozen insurance executives set up in six teams, the only participants who could make decisions about how to respond to the unfolding crisis. A full 24 hours of in-game time had passed since the initial breach, and a second round of devastation was beginning to materialize.
Food refrigeration systems were failing at cold storage warehouses. Water-dependent drug and chemical manufacturing had been bottlenecked, leading to insulin shortages. Data centers’ cooling systems were failing, causing outages of cloud services. Most critically, 2,000 hospitals were without water, hampering patient care and in some cases leading to evacuations as HVAC systems shut down.
Most China-watchers in the cybersecurity world agree that this particular threat has already been developing for years.
In May 2023, Microsoft, the National Security Agency, and CISA all announced the discovery of a group of hackers working in service of the Chinese military [who] had broken into the networks of critical infrastructure facilities across the continental United States and the US territory of Guam, hitting targets related to everything from manufacturing to telecommunications to the electric grid.
Link: Wired (Andy Greenberg) Backup: https://archive.ph/Bw0H8
Inside the Tense Final Hours of Graham Platner’s Campaign
A Maine Democrat facing assault allegations refused his advisers’ pleas for a conciliatory exit, instead unleashing a scorched-earth attack on party leadership
Graham Platner, a Maine Democrat whose anti-oligarchy messaging had generated significant excitement on the left, went down swinging—even as several of his closest advisers urged him not to.
Just two days after POLITICO reported that a woman had accused Platner of sexually assaulting her in 2021, his team debated how to proceed in private. Multiple confidants pleaded with Platner Wednesday to strike a “conciliatory” tone in the announcement terminating his Senate campaign, according to two people close to his team with knowledge of the internal discussions.
But the progressive bucked their advice and made it a condition of dropping out of the race that he get free rein to assail establishment Democrats and blame them for the ignominious end to his rapid political rise.
Shortly after 8 p.m. Wednesday, the oysterman released a defiant, emotional social media video in which he continued to deny the allegations against him. He blasted the “corporate media system and the political establishment” for acting as “judge, jury and executioner.”
And he railed against Washington Democrats for ripping the rug out from under him.
Platner’s fiery 11-minute missive now stands as the capstone to an improbable campaign that overpowered staunch establishment opposition but collapsed as prominent Democrats—including the party’s powerful campaign arms and the candidate’s biggest backers—swiftly abandoned ship.
Link: Politico (Chris Sommerfeldt, Lisa Kashinsky, Will Steakin, Jessica Piper)
The Canadian Who Steered Europe Away From the U.S.
A former Bank of England governor became prime minister and positioned Canada as Europe’s hedge against American isolation
Mark Carney, the first prime minister born in Canada’s Northwest Territories, was an unlikely radical in Trump’s political universe—an alumnus of Harvard, Oxford and Goldman Sachs who became the first foreigner to run the Bank of England.
His rise to the Canadian prime minister’s office last year coincided with a fundamental shift in American-Canadian relations. Just two days after assuming office, Carney traveled not to Washington—a conventional first stop for a new Canadian prime minister—but to France.
Standing alongside Emmanuel Macron at Paris’s Élysée Palace, he called Canada “the most European of non-European countries.” Over a private lunch, the two leaders animatedly exchanged ideas on how France and Canada could help each other dial down their reliance on America.
Carney would have to try again to bring British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on board in November, when they headed to the G-20 in South Africa. The U.S. was boycotting in protest of what Trump had called “white genocide,” which gave Carney more time with Macron, Finland’s Alexander Stubb, and Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, all of whom shared his perspective.
Starmer was still cautious; the West had to salvage its relationship with America, he told Carney.
“We don’t have a relationship to keep!” Carney replied.
Link: Wall Street Journal (Multiple reporters)
Big Tech Is Now Targeting Native American Land for Massive Data Centers
As the AI infrastructure boom accelerates, Indigenous nations face pressure to host massive data centers on tribal land, pitting economic desperation against a historic pattern of exploitation
The Caddo Nation, located an hour west of Oklahoma City, has struggled since its casino closed in 2017. Bobby Gonzalez, the Caddo chairman, described the tribe’s financial situation bluntly: “We’re not poor. We’re broke.”
Yet even facing such pressures, some tribal leaders are cautious.
Tracy Newkumet, a former Caddo tribal council member, emphasized what she saw as non-negotiable: “I could live without a cellphone,” she said as she prepared for the Caddos’ traditional turkey dance, “but not without water”—highlighting concerns about data centers’ massive water and energy consumption.
The dizzying expansion of data centers to power artificial intelligence has communities in Republican and Democratic states feeling blindsided. That division may be even more palpable on Native lands, where outside exploitation has a long and ugly history and where technology companies see a chance for rapid development that gets past the red tape impeding projects elsewhere.
Link: New York Times (David W. Chen, photographs by Tamir Kalifa)
Thanks for reading and have a great weekend. See you in the comments!
This data center demand is out of control!
More fascism:
“Times Journalists Subpoenaed as Trump Escalates Pressure on Media”
“The Justice Department is seeking to compel testimony from reporters who wrote about the new Air Force One. The Times called the move a “brazen act.”
The subpoenas — which seek to force the reporters to testify before a federal grand jury in Manhattan on Wednesday — were an extraordinary escalation in President Trump’s efforts to threaten and intimidate independent news organizations.
In some cases, the subpoenas were delivered by federal agents who showed up at reporters’ homes.“
- NYT
6. Controlled Mass Media
Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.