Steve Fernlund and The Long Way Home

The first line from the Mick Herron novel "Real Tigers” hit home for me last week. "Like most forms of corruption, it began with men in suits."  The book has nothing to do with hyperscale-class data centers like the one proposed for Hermantown. Still, after seeing video of citizens (just some real people) filling city council chambers Monday, October 26, and disrupting the planned votes to let Google move forward with its really huge project, Herron’s quote seemed apropos.  Of course, since the project's inception was hidden from the public under cover of a large, Twin Cities-based commercial builder, not the project’s end user, and papered over with enough non-disclosure agreements to support a small legal practice for a year, we don’t know if any of the players were in suits. The non-violent, though loud, disruption of council meetings is a positive, healthy sign of folks exercising a fundamental right of citizenship. But for too many people in the city government ...

 In 1964, the Supreme Court was trying to define a legal threshold for what constitutes "hard-core pornography" or obscenity that the First Amendment would not protect. In that effort, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart wrote about defining porn, “But I know it when I see it.”  Corruption is like pornography for most of us. We know it when we see it.  Every politician, in every election campaign, promises to get rid of Waste, Fraud, and Abuse, the three legs of corruption’s stool. Once voters cast their ballots and go back to living their lives, they stop paying attention. And those elected to end corruption scramble to wet their beaks in a swamp they can't drain, trading contracts and favors to build power and privilege. It’s not restricted to one political party. Consider how many politicians leave public service with a nest egg of cash and merchandise far larger than what they started with. On October 19, I read an article published by The Atlantic titled “How Corrup...

In less than two weeks, this never-ending election campaign season will end.  As someone who consumes political news like I drink cups of coffee in the morning, I decided long ago who would get my vote. Ads and flyers are wasted on me. But special interests invest so much money to buy space on the airwaves, the interwebs, and in mailers for one reason. Name Recognition.  Campaign lawn signs, swag, and mailers reserve the largest, boldest font for the candidate's last name. For a serious candidate, especially when challenging an incumbent, name recognition is a candidate's single most critical asset. They don’t need to know diddly squat about how government works as long as their name is well known. In local races—such as county commissioner, school board, city council, or state house representative—voters fill out the ballot having sparse information about the candidates. When voters see a list of unfamiliar names on a non-partisan ballot or a lesser-known legislative race, th...

As a younger business owner, I found that the latest technology helped us build a growing, sustainable operation. Fax machines helped us eliminate error-prone issues that arose when we transmitted information over the phone. One of our customers, a Fortune 500 company in the Twin Cities, adopted voicemail, which made scheduling periodic sales calls more efficient. Email and Electronic Data Interchange sped up business processes. I adopted the BlackBerry phone, which let me carry email and voicemail in my jacket pocket.  If I thought about Artificial Intelligence (AI) then, I believed I would be moldering in my grave before I’d have to think about it.  But when the writing demons took over, I found that spell checkers that caught spelling, punctuation, and grammar errors were probably AI. Now, even cars use AI to track our location, keep us in our lane, automatically dim our high beams, and even parallel park.  Mathematician and computer scientist John McCarthy coined the ...