Me starting my public comment at town meetings:

"Long time listener, first time caller, love the show."

"I love that you have these open mic nights."

"Hello, it's me, the public."

It's leopard slug season!

Second reading, found a typo.

On a first read, the proposed and advertised data center ordinance in Lower Salford Township (2026-07) seems pretty good actually https://www.lowersalfordtownship.org/media/3076/packetaug4_5.pdf
#LowerSalford #DataCenter #Pennsylvania

@vees I'm pretty proud of a mini-zine I made recently that's kind of part of https://stefanbohacek.com/blog/resources-for-keeping-the-web-free-open-and-poetic/, which I am also proud of.

Okay I'm a teacher. So let me explain this to you in as simple a way as I can.

Let's say I want to buy a cake. But not just any cake. A specialty cake for my nieces quinceañera. A cake like that costs at least $100 bucks. But I don't have $100 bucks. What do?

Well, I could save up to buy the cake. But that might take a long time and by then her quinceañera would be long over and gone. I could go take out a loan for the $100 bucks. But I don't want to take out a loan because it might make my credit look bad to have that much debt. So what's the solution?

Well if I'm particularly creative and not overburdened by an abundance of morality, the solution is easy. I make another me. A special me. A me designed for one purpose only - to saddle with debt.

So I create another Lana. A legal fiction. Let's call her Twona. Twona's only purpose in life is to get a bunch of credit cards and then cakes for my niece's quinceañera. Twona gets a MasterCard and a Visa, and puts $50 on each. When the cake arrives, Twona gives me the cake, and keeps the debt. And if the IRS or the banks ever come calling asking pesky questions about how I managed to afford a special quinceañera cake, I can legally and truthfully tell them I do not have any quinceañera credit card debt.

And you may be asking why the credit cards would do this. Why just give Twona those lines of credit, knowing that she was just going to buy a quinceañera cake with it. It's not like they can repossess a giant 5-tiered specially cake with "Congratulations Niece on Your Quinceañera" written on it in bright pink fluffy icing. No one would ever buy that from them. It's worthless as a repossessed asset. And the reason is that I signed an agreement with MasterCard and Visa saying that if they ever had to come collect on the debt, that I would pay them a certain amount of interest on the debt for the next 100 years.

So let's recap.
- I got: the cake, and no record of debt on my financial documents
- Twona got: the debt
- The credit agencies got: promise of residual income for the next century

Congratulations, now you understand how all these enormous data center buildings in rural places are being funded. Just take the quinceañera numbers and multiply them by 10 orders of magnitude. Meta and Amazon and Oracle and the rest of the tech companies are set to invest almost a trillion dollars in AI buildout just this year alone. And none of it is going on their financial documents. Because technically, none of them have taken out any loans. The loans are being held by shell companies created specifically for this purpose, with names like (I am not making these up) Beignet and Sopaipilla. These shell companies own the debt. And in return, Meta gets to build a $27 Billion dollar specialty data center building in the middle of rural Louisiana. And then Beignet rents that building to Meta. Nobody except Meta will ever use that building. It exists for one purpose only. But legally, Meta does not carry the debt on constructing it. Beignet does.

And the big burning question here is why. Why would Meta do this?

The reason is because if Meta had that debt on its own books, $27 billion dollars of debt looks like exactly what it is - the biggest financial gamble in the history of modern finances. Bigger than the housing bubble of the late 2000s. Bigger than the dot-com bubble of the 1990s. Bigger even than the stock market bubble of the roaring 1920s. And we all know how well that one went.

So what's the fallout here? Nobody knows. What I'm saying is that you, the public, are not getting the full story. It's being deliberately hidden from public view. But now that you know it exists, you know what to look out for. This is a bubble. And when it bursts, there will be almost no warning. And some people stand to lose everything.

SERankingBacklinksBot is crawling my site in order of string length followed by alphabetical order and it is... disconcerting.

@vees For the "this was a lot of work and some people have said it was useful" category, I'm probably most proud of my Web Assembly primer.

https://ragman.net/musings/wasm-primer/

For the "this make me laugh everytime" category, I love the 1D Mario Game I made for Weird Web October:

https://ragman.net/wwo24/dimensions/

@vees I'll give you

https://khleedril.org/blog/2026-01-24--fundamental-arithmetic.html

because writing it was eye-opening.

Try to become someone who's fun to teach things to.

@vees Here's my take on voting on content.

https://readbeanicecream.codeberg.page/posts/2026-06-20.html

But I also write about slow technologies, plain text, digital Minimalism, and digital self reliance. Oh and Pandoc and Asciidoctor. Feel free to link to whatever interests you. Thanks!

Family to sue after woman released from ICE custody froze to death.

Daphy Michel, from Haiti, was dropped off in Pittsburgh in 20F temperatures wearing summer clothes:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/02/ice-death-pittsburgh-daphy-michel-haiti

Sharpie S-Gel 0.5 may have overtaken Pilot Precise v5 Rolling Ball as favorite pen.

@vees this could use a pass for updating, but I do like this page on my otherwise straightforward/cv-ish personal website https://christa.town/resources/sf-green-volunteering.html

Fire: VEHICLE ACCIDENT at HEFLIN RD; UPPER SALFORD; 2026-08-03 @ 12:16:22-Station:STA78; #Salford #UpperSalford #MontCoPA

Hey #indieweb reply with the page(s) you're most proud of from your personal site and if I think its awesome too I'll link it up either on my link blog or in the context where it fits in my pages about software, civics, local interest, and purpose.

So the AI business “model” is:
1. NOT HIRING 📉 juniors to create human candidates for the specialists & experts with work experience.
2. BURNING OUT ☢️ mid-level engineers, hardware (prices rising), infrastructure consumed unsustainably (water & electricity) to make everyone “addicted” to AI-LLM word & sentence calculator.
3. PUSHING OUT 📉 experienced senior-level engineers who advise & set tech strategy for “the business”.

This is the “Kodak” & “Boeing” business downfall case studies combined.

DOD is not letting trans service members attend their own separation hearings unless they conform with Whiskey Pete's notion of their gender.

www.nytimes.com/2026/08/03/u...

My JBL Onbeat Micro phone speaker dock is over 15 years old and I still use it regularly.

About a week ago it started making a rattling sound with music. It wasn't cable related so I kinda wrote it off as busted.

Then yesterday I stood in the store in front of a shelf of Bluetooth speakers with $60 price tags, so I came home and opened the 5 Phillips screws on the bottom and pried the mesh off.

A few pieces of stray plastic immediately fell on the table and it sounds perfect again.

RE: https://universeodon.com/@memeorandum/117031857881376372

fuck this