AI

In late 2025, Dallas City Council approved a contract with a company called City Detect to mount AI-powered cameras on sanitation trucks. The pitch was simple. Trucks already drive every residential street in the city on a regular schedule. Put two cameras on each one, let computer vision scan for illegal dumping, high weeds, and graffiti, and you get a monthly visual survey of every parcel in Dallas without hiring a single new inspector. ...

I want to step away from the usual format of this blog for one post. No records request, no lawsuit filing, no city council agenda item. Just something I’ve been chewing on for a while now, and a conversation tonight that finally put it into words I could write down. The pattern under the pattern If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you’ve seen the shape by now. Flock cameras. Zencity scraping social media sentiment. Cell-site simulators bought with forfeiture money. Kyle Bass and a private equity firm trying to pull billions of gallons out of an aquifer an entire region depends on. Data centers justified as a national necessity while they draw down water and power with almost no local say in the matter. ...

Texas spent the last few years marketing itself as the place AI companies go to build without friction. Cheap land, a deregulated grid, and a governor who called the state the “epicenter” of AI. That pitch just hit a wall. On August 3, 2026, Governor Greg Abbott ordered the Public Utility Commission of Texas and ERCOT to conduct a full audit of every data center currently working its way through the state’s grid interconnection process. Until that audit wraps up, no new data center gets approved to connect. That single directive touches roughly 1,800 projects and 474 gigawatts of power requests, more than five times the grid’s all-time peak demand. ...