Operation Wetback, the Sequel
Yet another reboot that nobody asked for
This week, we’re talking:
Operation Wetback 2.0 is cruel and ineffective — but history could’ve predicted that 🪖📉
Google drops $32B on cloud security darling Wiz, betting big on AI-era defense. 🤖🧨
Liberals champion clean energy, transit, and housing—so why are blue states failing to build them? In their new book, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue that bureaucracy and process are strangling progress, handing the future to the right. 🚧⚡
Nvidia’s big bet on synthetic data—scaling AI with AI-made training sets. But if models keep eating their own output, do they eventually starve? 🤖🔄
The new administration just fired the last two Democratic FTC commissioners — teeing up a Supreme Court showdown that could dismantle the very concept of independent agencies. 🔥⚖️
A federal judge just used Star Trek’s Data to explain why AI can’t hold copyrights. 🚀🖖
The war on “lazy bureaucrats” isn’t new—it’s a classic tactic of power grabs and political purges 🔥📜
The tech bro who’s biohacking immortality—and silencing anyone who sees behind the curtain. 🧬🤐
The U.S. is ditching globalism—trade, immigration, and foreign aid are collapsing. What happens when the world stops looking our way? 🌍🚪
Careless People portrays Zuckerberg as a clueless cult leader, Sandberg as a manipulative boss, and Meta as a company that thrives on chaos. The book is so damning that Meta tried (and failed) to gag the author. 💀📖
My Take:
My wife is an immigrant. I come from immigrant stock. I work in the tech industry—63% of which is run by immigrants.
Lin-Manuel Miranda wasn’t just looking for a good rhyme when he said we get the job done.
That's a personal take; here's the business one:
The current administration’s deportation plan is a mess. That’s not a political assertion, it’s an evidence-based fact.
They’ve based their entire strategy on Eisenhower’s 1954 crackdown—Operation Wetback (yes, that was the actual name). The trouble is, it didn’t work. It was cruel, chaotic, and ineffective. Thousands of U.S. citizens were mistakenly deported just for looking Mexican. And after all the bluster and brutality? The economy still relied on immigrant labor, just like it does today.
We need immigrant labor to build housing and infrastructure. We need immigrant labor to grow food. We need immigrant labor to keep Silicon Valley at the heart of innovation. That’s why business leaders in real estate and agriculture and tech are already pressing the administration to back off. They know who butters their bread.
We need comprehensive immigration reform. Instead, we’re getting cruelty and ineffective antics.
This effort will bring standoffs, more tariff threats followed by herky-jerky suspension of tarrif threats, and fear—fear meant to reach documented and undocumented immigrants alike. But the fundamental problems with our immigration and asylum system? Still broken.
Markets will wobble. Politicians will grandstand.
But immigrants? They’ll do what immigrants have always done in this country—keep making it hum.
My Media Diet:
Google to acquire cloud security startup Wiz for $32 billion after deal fell apart last year
“Becoming part of Google Cloud is effectively strapping a rocket to our backs,” said Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport after walking away from a $23B offer just last year. At the time, he cited antitrust and investor concerns — and said Wiz would go it alone and aim for a $1B revenue IPO… Fast forward to now: the IPO window still hasn’t opened, and there’s growing optimism that a Trump administration will be more M&A-friendly. Google, sitting on $96B in cash, just made its largest acquisition ever — in a move that may have more to do with geopolitics and regulatory timing than pure product synergy.
The Long Nap of the Lazy Bureaucrat by Charlie Tyson via The New Yorker 🔥📜
The morality of work was crucial to the Soviet Union’s revolutionary effort. The 1936 Soviet constitution quoted St. Paul’s dictum, 'He who does not work, neither shall he eat.' Later in the century, idleness was criminalized. The Soviet Union’s 1961 law outlawing 'social parasitism' mostly targeted tramps, beggars, and prostitutes (as well as poets like Joseph Brodsky)—not bureaucrats. But the message was clear: if you’re lazy, you’re not with the program. The glorious future of the nation depends on everyone laboring at a fast pace, with no time to slow down and question what’s happening.
Judge disses Star Trek icon Data’s poetry while ruling AI can’t author works by Ashley Belanger via arsTECHNICA 🚀🖖
To support her vision of some future technology, Millett pointed to the Star Trek: The Next Generation character Data, a sentient android who memorably wrote a poem to his cat, which is jokingly mocked by other characters in a 1992 episode called 'Schisms.' Data 'might be worse than ChatGPT at writing poetry,' but his 'intelligence is comparable to that of a human being,' Millett wrote. If AI ever reached Data levels of intelligence, Millett suggested that copyright laws could shift to grant copyrights to AI-authored works. But that time is apparently not now.
Nvidia Bets Big on Synthetic Data by Lauren Goode via Wired 🤖🔄
Put another way, if you feed the machine nothing but its own machine-generated output, it theoretically begins to eat itself, spewing out detritus as a result. Experts worry that, in the not-so-distant future, AI companies won’t be able to gorge as freely on human-created internet data in order to train their AI models. Synthetic data in theory could provide an easy solution. But a July 2024 article in Nature highlighted how AI language models could 'collapse,' or degrade significantly in quality, when they’re fine-tuned over and over again with data generated by other models.
We’ll miss globalism when it’s gone by Dylan Matthews via VOX 🌍🚪
The 2016 race also scrambled the politics of trade. Bernie Sanders’s stronger-than-expected challenge to Hillary Clinton led her to come out against Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership, an anti-China trade pact that she passionately advocated for as secretary of state; she clearly saw in the strength of Sanders, and Trump, evidence that trade restrictionism had become a political imperative. Clinton’s eventual loss due to Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania led to a folk understanding among professional Democrats that not passing protectionist measures to help Rust Belt states would be electoral suicide. This never made any sense; the shock of competition from China and elsewhere did hurt these places, but it’s long since over and no policy measures could ever bring manufacturing employment in Detroit back to where it was in 1970. But this conclusion meant that both parties were running away from open trade simultaneously, and as a result, the US as a whole has retreated from free trade over the last decade.
How Bryan Johnson, Who Wants to Live Forever, Sought Control via Confidentiality Agreements 🧬🤐
One was an unusual ‘opt-in’ document… employees had to attest they were OK with Johnson’s wearing ‘little and sometimes no clothing/no underwear’ and hearing ‘discussions of sexual activities, including erections.’ They also had to agree that Johnson’s behavior was not ‘unwelcome, offensive, humiliating, hostile, triggering, unprofessional or abusive.’
The book Facebook doesn't want you to read by Chris Taylor via Mashable 💀📖
Careless People made waves on publication, thanks to Wynn-Williams' filing a whistleblower complaint with the SEC, her accounts of sexual assault (which Meta denies), and a portrait that makes founder Mark Zuckerberg look like a clueless cult leader. Then Meta made even more waves with the highly unusual step of going to an arbitrator, claiming Wynn-Williams' disparaging the company broke her severance contract. (What is this, Lumon Industries?)
Firings of Democratic Commissioners Leave FTC In Flux and Tee Up Revisiting of Humphrey’s Executor via Kelly Drye
The biggest question isn’t just whether the FTC can function with two Republicans and no Democrats — it’s whether the Supreme Court will overturn Humphrey’s Executor, the 1935 decision that protects agencies like the FTC, SEC, FCC, and NLRB from being dismantled by presidents at will. In Humphrey’s Executor, the Court ruled that Congress could create expert-led agencies whose leaders are insulated from political firings — but SCOTUS has been chipping away at that logic ever since… Justices Thomas and Gorsuch already want to toss the precedent. If this case makes it up the ladder, they may get their wish… and the era of independent oversight in American government could come to a quiet, court-sanctioned end.
Buzzings from the Hive:
Rembrand named one of the 10 most innovative augmented and virtual reality companies of 2025
Ketch launches Progressive Consent, transforming user privacy choices into integrated, value-driven experiences—boosting trust, engagement, and first-party data collection
