Your Browser Might Be Spying On You To Change The Price Of Items You Purchase
Two people could visit the same website at the same time and see different prices, products, discounts, or financing offers.Two people could visit the same website at the same time and see different prices, products, discounts, or financing offers.The Robots Aren’t Taking Over But AI Execs Might Be
The experts say AI is beyond you, then offer a remedy they wrote themselves. Learn how it works, and read the accord with skepticism.Why organized labor hates innovation
In Onondaga County, New York, a union has gone to court to stop an artificial intelligence tool from answering nonemergency calls at the county’s 911 center. The system handles routine calls, roughly a third of the center’s volume, and transfers suspected emergencies to human operators. The county wants to use the technology. The union wants it stopped.
The union contends that the rollout violates its labor agreement. But its lawsuit puts a familiar priority on display: Protect work covered by the contract, even when new technology might improve a public service.
Americans should not have to sacrifice the benefits of invention to preserve yesterday’s job descriptions.
Labor unions exist to defend their members. They owe no comparable allegiance to consumers, employers, or workers who never join. That last group is enormous. Union members accounted for just 10% of U.S. wage and salary workers in 2025 and only 5.9% in the private sector. Yet a union can use its bargaining power to obstruct changes that would benefit everyone else.
American ports offer a more expensive example. The 2025 Container Port Performance Index, which measures vessel turnaround efficiency, ranked only one U.S. port among the world’s top 50: Philadelphia, at No. 48. Meanwhile, the International Longshoremen’s Association has made opposition to automation a central demand.
The ILA’s 2025 agreement with employers at East and Gulf Coast ports delivered a 62% wage increase over six years. It also restricted automation. As Jordan McGillis reported in City Journal, employers must hire another longshoreman for every new semiautonomous crane they install, while fully autonomous cranes remain prohibited.
Better machines could move goods faster and reduce costs for businesses and consumers. The union secured limits on those machines instead. A Congressional Research Service report has also documented long-standing concerns about payroll fraud and organized crime influence involving the ILA on the New York-New Jersey waterfront.
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This struggle predates computers, robots, and artificial intelligence. Some medieval craft guilds protected their privileges by limiting competition and resisting techniques that threatened established trades. American unions have repeatedly followed that example.
When diesel locomotives displaced steam engines, railroads no longer needed firemen to tend boilers. Unions nevertheless fought to preserve those jobs. H.E. Gilbert, president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen, defended that struggle in 1963: “You can always mint more money. But you can’t mint new lives.”
Gilbert cared about the livelihoods of his members. He ignored the workers and families who would gain from cheaper, more efficient rail service. Protecting a job made obsolete by technology does not preserve the wealth that makes employment possible.
In 1971, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union staged a 134-day strike as containerization transformed shipping. The fight centered on jobs, jurisdiction, and work rules as machines replaced much of the labor once required to load cargo. In 1986, Rupert Murdoch moved his British newspapers to computerized printing at Wapping, dismissed 5,500 workers, and faced union picketing for more than a year.
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In each dispute, established workers fought to defend their position against technological change. The gains from new equipment, however, extended well beyond the employers who purchased it. Consumers gained faster service and lower costs; other workers benefited from a more productive economy.
Workers should remain free to join unions and bargain collectively. Voluntary labor organizations belong in a free society. But decades of government intervention have given organized labor legal privileges that can come at the expense of nonunion workers, employers, and customers. Those privileges deserve scrutiny, not automatic deference.
A union has every incentive to protect its members. The public has no obligation to make that protection the governing purpose of an industry or a taxpayer-funded service. The East India Company did not trade in a free market simply because it conducted commerce. Nor does a union bargain in a free labor market when government grants it advantages unavailable to everyone else.
Innovation raises living standards by allowing people to produce more with less. Organized labor can help workers adapt to that progress, or it can try to halt it. Americans should not have to sacrifice the benefits of invention to preserve yesterday’s job descriptions.
Marco Rubio’s spicy Greece speech left out the most crucial ingredient
For policymakers and citizens sick of decades wasted on failed globalist experiments, Marco Rubio’s nationalist speech in Athens on Wednesday was a huge gulp of fresh air. The alternative to collectivist one-world ideology can sound almost embarrassingly obvious: Nations should pursue their own interests, recover confidence in their inheritance, and cooperate from a position of strength rather than dissolution.
Rubio’s setting made the point for him. Speaking at the Pnyx beneath the Acropolis, he traced America’s inheritance through Athens, Rome, Christendom, medieval Europe, and England. He called for the West to recover the ambition, confidence, and national power it once took for granted. His speech made the civilizational case in deliberately grand terms.
Pretending the Eastern Romans never existed — or that they have nothing to tell us about who we really are — leaves us poorer, more arrogant, and less prepared for the trials ahead.
But his civilizational reset could have been stronger and surer. The great omission was the thousand-year span defined not by Athens, Rome, or even Jerusalem, but by Constantinople — capital of the Eastern Roman Empire and guardian of a Roman Christian civilization that survived long after the political West had collapsed.
Its final outposts fell only about three decades before Columbus reached the Americas. For perspective, 30 years ago the Unabomber was arrested, the first Motorola flip phone appeared, and IBM’s Deep Blue became the first computer to beat a reigning world chess champion in a game under standard tournament conditions.
That Byzantium received no real showing in Rubio’s address is hardly surprising. Despite its millennium-long life after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Eastern Empire has endured generations of Western neglect, condescension, and selective amnesia.
There are many reasons. One is that the modern West became preoccupied almost to obsession with its own political development — its revolutions, constitutions, ideological struggles, and repeated attempts to construct an order that could tame human nature without destroying liberty. Somewhere along the way, the East came to seem like the place where history had stalled.
“Byzantium” — no longer “really” Rome in Western eyes — became shorthand for decadence, intrigue, stagnation, and oriental despotism. The important action supposedly moved elsewhere: to the Latin West, where Europe would eventually beat back Islamic power at Tours, Lepanto, and Vienna and narrate the victories as its own civilizational story.
That is an impoverished self-understanding. Excising the Eastern Roman Empire deprives the West of some of the warnings it most needs as it flails through geopolitical waters that seem unprecedented, mostly because we have forgotten so much precedent.
The Eastern Romans spent centuries fighting for survival against great powers on their frontiers. Their long rivalry with Sasanian Persia culminated in a ruinous early-7th-century war that exhausted both empires. Almost immediately, Arab Muslim armies surged through territories Rome and Persia had fought over for generations. Centuries later, Latin Christians inflicted one of Byzantium’s worst wounds themselves when the Fourth Crusade diverted to Constantinople and sacked the city in 1204. The empire was restored in 1261, but it never recovered its former strength.
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The point is not that the modern West owes Byzantium an apology, although some historical humility would be healthy. The point is that civilizations sometimes face grueling, protracted defense requiring a spiritual sobriety to match. Today the West is dangerously tempted by visions of global end-zone dancing — speedrunning the uncool parts of geopolitics in favor of a world-war blitz won by super-duper wonder-weapons.
Some Constantinopolitan emperors knew the temptation. Nikephoros II Phokas, the warrior-emperor who reigned from 963 to 969, won spectacular victories against Muslim powers and reportedly sought church recognition of soldiers killed in those campaigns as martyrs.
The church refused. Patriarch Polyeuctus invoked St. Basil’s Canon 13, which says that although killing in war had not traditionally been treated as murder, soldiers who shed blood should abstain from communion for three years because their hands were not clean. Whatever else one makes of the canon, the answer to Nikephoros was unmistakable: Military victory did not automatically confer holiness.
That is a useful warning against today’s temptation to treat defeating our enemies by whatever means we choose as the height of spiritual purity and moral heroism. It is also a reminder that strong, healthy, independent churches can serve as an irreplaceable counterweight to political rulers who begin to imagine themselves as spiritual authorities and their regimes as godlike powers before which citizens and foreigners alike must bow and scrape.
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And Polyeuctus’ victory points toward something still more important. Spiritual authority does not arise from the top-down power of worldly lawgivers. Holiness begins with people willing to make the difficult purification of their own hearts a lifelong athletic practice — the opposite of the performative, self-flattering spiritual box-checking Jesus decried in the parable of the Pharisee and the publican.
The West would benefit from reordering its sociopolitical habits in that direction — not to weaken itself or retreat into inert obscurantism, but to recover clarity and responsibility at a time of immense division and instability.
Much of today’s turmoil arises from efforts to turn political might, now amplified by astonishing technology, into a new god and a new church with very old stripes. Rubio is right that the West must remember what it is. But Athens and Rome are not enough, and “Christendom” becomes dangerously abstract if we skip the civilization that carried Roman Christianity for a thousand years while the Western world was being remade.
Pretending the Eastern Romans never existed — or that they have nothing to tell us about who we really are — leaves us poorer, more arrogant, and less prepared for the trials ahead.
GM had big plans to move past Apple CarPlay. Drivers had other ideas.
If you don’t buy it, they’re not selling it.
I say this all the time: Consumers have more power over the auto industry than they realize.
For many drivers, CarPlay isn't an exciting feature anymore. It's plumbing. You connect the phone and expect your stuff to appear.
Automakers can announce grand plans for the future. Engineers can decide they’ve come up with something better. Executives can explain why the technology they want to give us is really what we wanted all along. But eventually somebody has to walk into a dealership and buy the vehicle.
If it ain't broke ...
The best example of this at the moment is what's going on with General Motors.
The company recently unveiled the completely redesigned user interface that will debut in the 2027 Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra — GM’s highest-volume vehicles. There are new displays, Google Gemini, Google Maps, over-the-air updates, and plenty of other technology.
There's also Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. And GM says it has integrated both of them more deeply than ever before in its light-duty pickups. CarPlay or Android Auto can occupy a large portion of the screen alongside native truck functions, such as trailering information and vehicle status.
Why is this notable? Because for the past several years, GM has been preparing drivers for a future without Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, making the case that its own built-in software could do the job better.
Best laid plans
In 2023, GM laid out an ambitious plan to move away from Apple CarPlay and Android Auto in favor of its own deeply integrated software, beginning with its new electric vehicles.
There were legitimate engineering reasons for the decision. A native system can communicate more directly with the vehicle, incorporating charging, range calculations, route planning, and other functions that aren't simply being projected from a phone.
Then GM did something automakers don't always do particularly well: It asked customers what they actually wanted.
The result was a dose of reality. GM took a sweeping software strategy and adjusted it to the way people actually use their cars.
Button pushing
GM says the development process for the new Silverado and Sierra interface included customer clinics and ongoing usability testing.
According to Sebastian Bauer, GM’s executive director of human interface design, drivers complained about “hunting for controls,” taking too many steps to accomplish basic tasks, and encountering interfaces that behaved inconsistently.
So GM simplified things.
Frequently used functions, such as climate controls and camera views, were made easier to reach. Key vehicle settings are one tap away. And — an increasingly welcome sentence in any new-car announcement — GM says physical controls remain available for customers who prefer tactile feedback.
And GM had another realization: Most drivers don’t want a new digital ecosystem. They’re perfectly happy with the one already on their phones.
“People really like CarPlay and Android Auto because they’re so user-centric,” GM product executive Mike Wahlstrom said.
That sounds obvious. Apparently it took some customer research to rediscover.
GM says drivers wanted the simplicity of the phone interfaces without losing fast access to the things the truck itself does. So the new system lets both co-exist instead of forcing drivers to bounce completely between one world and the other.
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Phone fans
Automakers increasingly think of cars as software platforms, and modern vehicles certainly need a lot of software. Cameras, driver-assistance systems, navigation, entertainment, climate controls, towing functions — all of it has to work together.
But there's also money in controlling the dashboard.
Software creates opportunities for connected services, subscriptions, and a continuing relationship with the customer long after the vehicle leaves the dealership.
The trouble is that drivers already have their own way of doing all this — using the phone in their pocket.
Our contacts, music, podcasts, messages, maps, and apps already live there. For many drivers, CarPlay isn't an exciting feature anymore. It's plumbing. You connect the phone and expect your stuff to appear.
That makes replacing it a lot harder than simply designing a technically superior dashboard.
Consumer win
Not that GM is giving up on its native software. The new Silverado and Sierra use Google built-in alongside CarPlay and Android Auto. The same underlying interface architecture is designed to expand across electric, gasoline, and diesel vehicles, and GM plans to keep adding capabilities through software updates.
But look at what happened when GM designed the system for the trucks that sell in enormous numbers.
Drivers said they were tired of digging through menus. GM reduced the number of steps. Some wanted real controls. GM kept them. And customers liked Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. GM made them work better with the vehicle rather than asking buyers to choose.
GM can call that whatever it likes. I call it listening to the customer.
Darrell Waltrip’s Illness Is A Reminder Of Just How Dangerous NASCAR Can Be
Waltrip’s health update provides yet another reminder that 'safer' doesn’t mean 'safe.'America’s ‘AI czar’ could revolutionize our form of government
Donald Trump is considering a small handful of candidates for “AI czar” — notionally, a Cabinet-level role overseeing the industry, the technology, and something the president is calling, perhaps in the spirit of Space Force, the “AI Force.”
Trump has not specified much beyond that. Nobody rumored to be under consideration seems especially eager for the job.
Perhaps we don’t need someone with the power of a czar to rule AI. Perhaps we need someone with the authority of a saint to counsel us about it.
Plenty of reasons suggest themselves.
Not quite everything is computer. Many crucial components of America’s good working order still require special and undivided attention of their own. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is no longer being considered because of the importance of his current role. The logic is arguably the same for White House science and technology adviser Michael Kratsios and other potential candidates.
And, as the untimely demise of Czar Nicholas II and his family at the hands of the communists reminds us, a czar invested with enough power and authority can swiftly become a scapegoat or blood sacrifice of the highest order.
Which brings us to the momentous possibilities unsealed simply by creating a high office called AI czar.
Polls show most Americans think democracy is doing poorly. For a growing share across the political spectrum, that is not necessarily a bad thing.
Two in three respondents say a democratically elected government is highly important to our national identity, a staggering drop from 80% just five years ago. Just shy of half of Americans under 30 say democracy is either not that important to our national identity or not important at all.
Many Americans, of course, remain firmly committed to democracy. That includes plenty who regard it, in Churchill’s famous formulation, as the worst form of government except for all the others.
Abandoning it would also appear to require scrapping the Constitution and repudiating the Declaration of Independence.
However far we have strayed in 250 years from those founding documents, the right to vote and the core freedoms protected by the Bill of Rights still command strong majority support. Plenty of younger Americans are open to rewriting the Constitution, but a national convention for that purpose remains broadly unpopular.
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Then comes the practical problem: Americans cannot remotely agree on who ought to rule them, much less what a formally post-democratic America should look like.
Many people ready to walk away from democracy, or convinced that it is unsalvageable, stop short of demanding regime change when they contemplate the obvious alternative: another, still more horrible civil war.
Now add AI.
Its arrival and incorporation into the highest levels of government under a czar of its own throw our fundamental regime questions into unusually sharp relief.
Many Americans feel viscerally that AI is moving too fast. Many also regard the staggering decline and decay of the past decade-plus as an unacceptable alternative to moving fast.
Yet the people trying to pump the brakes or reverse course command nothing like a popular majority.
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) have proposed banning artificial superintelligence, pausing some advanced AI development until a new federal regulator writes safety rules, and imposing penalties of up to 20 years in prison for certain violations.
Whatever one thinks of the underlying risks, that approach is likely to feed a post-democratic counterreaction against efforts to place technological development under increasingly centralized political control.
Meanwhile, much of the AI-safety world gives normal Americans the ick for reasons of its own: the prevalence of nerd-orgy ethics, for one, and the baffling insistence in some quarters that rational thought requires assigning the existence of future shrimp, bugs, or cyborgs moral weight comparable to — or greater than — your own life and the lives of everyone now drawing breath.
For reasons like these, some on the right daydream about an actual Caesar who could, as a last resort, clean America’s house and put it back into fighting trim.
Others imagine something less deliberate: The system collapses under the weight of its dysfunction, a process of elimination begins, and a Caesar-ish figure emerges from the gong show to take control at a stroke.
That “-ish” is important.
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Our circumstances and our talent pool differ so radically from those of the late Roman Republic that betting everything on the miraculous appearance of a Julius or Augustus seems far-fetched.
Even grown in a lab, Czarborg would be only a simulation of the genuine article — more Frankenstein than Constantine.
Speaking of Constantine, the record of Roman caesars, Russian czars, and German kaisers should cure anyone of the idea that concentrated power reliably produces competent or benevolent rule. Plenty of mighty rulers did far more damage to their countries and their people than good.
But Constantine, like Nicholas II, also points toward another category entirely: Caesars and czars can become saints.
Some will object that sainthood is itself a dubious title, especially when bestowed on rulers.
The more interesting difficulty is that genuinely saintly rulers, like genuinely saintly people, are not measured by their ability to deliver merely mortal justice or merely worldly happiness.
Divine justice and divine happiness are different things. Christ’s reception and punishment in Jerusalem should permanently unsettle anyone looking to godly leaders for uncomplicated worldly deliverance.
Which leaves us with the most counterintuitive possibility raised by something as powerful as AI.
Perhaps we do not need someone with the power of a czar to rule it. Perhaps we need someone with the authority of a saint to counsel us about it.
Steve Deace: The TRUTH about why men have become so passive
Men have always found reasons to avoid difficult fights — but today this has gotten worse, and it’s not exactly their fault.
The biggest problem with men these days, Todd Erzen of the “Steve Deace Show” explains, is that “they keep finding reasons not to fight in a culture where there are fights everywhere.”
“You’re not supposed to just randomly do it because it’s your style, your thing. You’re supposed to do it because the Lord identifies good and evil, and you are a servant of the good,” he continues.
“You must, as a man, vanquish evil,” he adds.
However, BlazeTV host Steve Deace points out that even in Genesis 3, “There’s not a whole bunch of guys preemptively looking to take on evil.”
“The opposite is often true. We wait until we’re cornered. We wait until we’ve suffered enough,” he explains.
“So that’s not new. That’s not unique,” he adds.
And even the founding fathers were not prepared to attack the “first time their God-given rights were violated.”
“They spent 10 years thinking about it, talking about it, negotiating it. Then when the redcoats start putting armed soldiers in their homes and calling it the ‘Quartering Act,’ they’re like, ‘You know, guys, we might be at a point of no return here,’” Deace says.
“I promise you, we’re not the first generation of men late to the party. That’s been every generation of men. Every single one,” he continues.
“We’re sinners,” he adds.
What is new, however, Deace explains, are the phones that never leave our hands.
“It’s these phones. We have never had at our instant disposal more opportunities to dissuade us from our priorities than the current technology of this world provides,” he says, adding, “Now that is what is new.”
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JD Vance to Steve Deace: AI must serve people — not the other way around
As artificial intelligence rapidly transforms the economy, Americans are asking whether the technology is moving faster than the public can keep up — and BlazeTV host Steve Deace wants their questions answered.
So Vice President JD Vance is doing just that.
“A lot of our audiences around the country, Mr. Vice President, kind of feel like this is kind of being thrust on them, and they haven’t had time to breathe,” Deace tells Vance, noting that in contrast, even the internet “slowly rolled out phase by phase.”
“It didn’t in just 10 minutes just take everything over,” he continues. “And I think a lot of people feel like AI is. Like nobody wants China to dictate this technology to us. At the same time, you know, people do care about land use and making sure they’re heard, and are we building these things for jobs that will actually go to Americans?”
“Can you give us some clarity on this at all?” Deace asks.
“So first on the data center thing, my view is that the political backlash to the data center thing is fundamentally about local control, which obviously we love. As the president of the United States has said, these are important engines of the economy, but they have to be done in the right way,” Vance says.
“And I think the most important way to ensure that they’re done in the right way is for people to follow the Trump administration’s taxpayer protection pledge,” he explains, pointing out that in communities where data centers are building their own power sources, there’s less political backlash.
“When you, on the other hand, have a data center that’s tapping into the pre-existing grid where people see their power bills go through the roof, that’s a real problem,” Vance says. “I don’t want a data center built if it means that local residents are going to have to pay higher electricity costs.”
As for AI in general, Vance explains that the principle he applies is that “technology exists to serve the human person and the human person of course exists ultimately to have a relationship with their creator.”
“I don’t think that we can see technology as the end, and I think that we have to make these technology tools subservient to human operators,” he says.
“And so where I get a little worried is when I see the technology companies come out and say, ‘We’ve lost control. We can no longer control these tools.’ And that brings me to my final point, which is the solution to these problems is to hold the tech companies accountable,” he continues.
“Not to give them regulatory protection and allow regulatory capture,” he adds.
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