Business
Commentary: The quality that defines the squalor of our business and government leadership — absence of Character
The best lesson I learned during my formative years in journalism came from the editor at my first daily newspaper job, Doug Turner of the late Buffalo Courier-Express.
I had told him that the councilmen at the suburban town I was covering were trying to bully me out of writing a critical story. Turner, who had spent a career covering local- and state-level politicians, replied, “Bully them back. They’ll fold. These guys have no character.”
That moment came back to me a couple of weeks ago, thanks to an online post by Josh Marshall, founder and proprietor of the estimable blog talkingpointsmemo.com. Writing a few days after massive layoffs at the Washington Post, Marshall observed of the paper’s publisher, Will Lewis, and its owner, Jeff Bezos, that their failure “to even show up, literally or figuratively, on a day of devastating cuts epitomizes the profound lack of character and accountability that is so commonplace today within the American elite.”
Our efforts at diversity, equity and inclusion remind and reinforce with everyone at our Company the importance of creating opportunities for all.
— Costco pushes back against attacks on DEI
There was that word again: “Character.”
Marshall put his finger on the flaw that exists among our business and government leaders. It’s the absence of character.
The quality can be hard to define precisely, but we know it when we see it, to paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s personal, subjective test for obscenity in a famous 1964 case. We can also know it by its absence.
Philosophers, ministers, judges, novelists and historians have all taken a crack at defining “character.” Often they search for it in some variety of moral truth (another quality that can be hard to define).
It can encompass steadfastness in the face of adversity, selflessness, self-sacrifice, honesty and integrity in one’s dealings with others. It doesn’t demand to be displayed in public. On the contrary, sometimes it unfolds out of the public eye; self-abnegation can be a reliable marker of character.
Literary masters have grappled with defining character. Tolstoy’s great novels, “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina,” are all about the journeys of his major figures from self-doubt and selfishness to a higher moral plane, not always successfully — he himself was so doubtful about whether he had accurately traced their trajectories that toward the end of his life he disavowed those great works as inadequate.
Faulkner found it in the patient, steadfast Dilsey of “The Sound and the Fury,” and in his greatest novel, “Absalom, Absalom!” he showed how its absence led inexorably to the ruin of Thomas Sutpen.
Character emerges in adversity. A most recent example comes from Ilia Malinin, the American figure skater whose hopes for an individual gold medal in the Olympics, which had been regarded as a preordained inevitability evaporated in a mistake-laden routine. Coming off the ice, Malinin forthrightly congratulated the winner, Mikhail Shaidorov of Kazakhstan, as if to communicate that Shaidorov won the prize from his own efforts, not from Malinin’s failure. The encounter signaled that Malinin will remain a major figure in the sport for years to come.
For us today, the term “character” allows us to avoid unprofitable debate over how to define the current administration. Is it “racist”? “Corrupt”? “Mendacious?” Applying those judgments invites partisan quibbling, because accusations of racism, corruption and lying can be colored by the eye of the beholder. But to say the administration can be defined as a lack of character—the term subsumes all those other judgments, and is much harder to question.
As Josh Marshall observed, abundant examples of the singular lack of character in our national leaders is vividly on display. Let’s take a look.
What’s a better way to describe Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi’s appearance before a House committee last week, during which she tried to evade questions about her failure to release documents related to Jeffrey Epstein’s dealings by finger-pointing at her questioners, keeping her back turned to the Epstein victims in the room behind her and citing the Dow Jones industrial average’s spike above 50,000 as a counterargument to her own inadequacies, as a singular lack of character?
When the preening Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth launched a campaign to demote the retired Navy captain and current Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, a combat veteran and former astronaut, because of Kelly’s reminder to active servicemen that they need not follow illegal orders (a statement Hegseth himself has made) he was displaying singular lack of character — and underscoring Kelly’s own abundance of character.
The people of Minneapolis have displayed remarkable communal character in their relentless and peaceful battle against the government’s incursion into their private life. Who has displayed a lack of character? Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, her henchman Greg Bovino, and other defenders of this openly counterfeit campaign against illegal immigrants in their city.
Congress is a hive of low-character performance, full of individuals who have supplanted their responsibilities to the Constitution and the public interest with flagrant careerism.
Among those at the top of the list is Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), a physician who cast the deciding vote to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of Health and Human Services, despite Kennedy’s history of anti-vaccination activity. Cassidy has never adequately responded to my question about his support for Kennedy.
Facing a tough primary challenge, Cassidy showed recently that his lack of character extends beyond matters of healthcare regulation when he praised President Trump for taking down an overtly racist social media post attacking the Obamas, writing on X, bizarrely, that Trump has “made significant inroads with his outreach in the African American community…. His post sent the wrong message despite how it may have been originally intended.”
In business, who has shown a lack of character? There’s Apple CEO Tim Cook, who gifted Trump with a crystal plaque on a gold base as part of his effort to secure an exemption for Apple from Trump’s tariffs.
Count the corporate executives who have shown their lack of character by bowing to right-wing pressure to abandon their commitments to diversity, equality and inclusion — you know, “DEI.” A notable exception: Costco, which has maintained its diversity programs in the face of partisan backlash, and improved its bottom line as a result. That’s a reminder that one can do well while doing good, a lesson in the virtues of character.
“Our efforts at diversity, equity and inclusion remind and reinforce with everyone at our Company the importance of creating opportunities for all,” Costco said in its 2024 proxy statement, pushing back against a proposed shareholder resolution insinuating that Costco’s DEI program “holds litigation, reputational and financial risks to the Company, and therefore financial risks to shareholders.” (The resolution failed at Costco’s annual meeting last year.)
Then there are the directors and executives of pharmaceutical companies who price their products for maximal profits without caring much about the impact of unaffordability on the patients whose lives depend on those products. Back in the 2010s, for instance, executives at Gilead Sciences pondered how much to charge for Sovaldi, its miracle cure for hepatitis C.
As I reported at the time, they concluded Gilead could make a profit by charging $55,000 per 12-week treatment. But they decided to charge $84,000, which would deliver higher profits from fewer patients.
They refused to offer anything but minimal discounts to big insurers and Medicaid programs, even though they acknowledged that thousands of patients might have to go without the treatments. “Let’s not fold to advocacy pressure … whatever the headlines,” one top executive counseled his colleagues.
As a historical counterweight, consider Jonas Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine, who refused to patent it. Asked by Edward R. Murrow in 1955 who owned the rights to the polio vaccine, he replied, “The people, I would say. … There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”
Recent history provides us with numerous cases of individuals who have shown their character at the cost of their physical and financial well-being. Among the heroes of the civil rights movement in the 1960s were many who lost their lives in the effort, such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers, or suffered severe physical injury, such as the late John Lewis.
I always admired former California Gov. Jerry Brown for his devotion to public service, a true avatar of character. In 2010, when he was running for his third gubernatorial term, his Republican challenger, the business magnate Meg Whitman, placed the firing of thousands of public employees to cut wasteful spending at the forefront of her platform.
Brown could have joined the chorus of critics of government “waste, fraud and abuse” — a perennially popular take for politicians — but he chose the opposite path. These people had devoted their lives to public service, Brown pointed out during a debate with Whitman. They had committed to teaching our children, cleaning up our air and water, holding dishonest businesses to account. That was an expression of character.
Brown, indeed, displayed character throughout his long political career: Fifteen years after serving two terms as governor, in 1998, he ran for mayor of Oakland, surely one of the most challenging and thankless jobs in California politics — and won. He never, ever apologized for being a “politician,” but saw politics as a noble calling.
The search for character among our politicians and business leaders could easily turn into a parlor game — draw a line down a piece of paper, with “Has Character” on one side and “No character” on the other, and compile two antipodean lists. But there’s more at stake than entertaining ourselves.
It was not always so. The 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence knew their expression of character placed them at mortal risk. That’s why the document ends with their mutual pledge of “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” If we are to preserve our republic and our economy, restoring men and women of character to our leadership is an indispensable goal.
Business
Commentary: A surge in Nevada data center construction threatens the electricity supply for 49,000 Californians
Local opposition has blocked or delayed more than a dozen huge data center projects around the country. But these Californians don’t get a vote on Nevada projects that could affect their electricity supply.
Those big data centers being built for artificial intelligence firms are in bad odor nationwide.
Seven in 10 Americans oppose projects in their local communities, according to a recent Gallup poll. More than a dozen, valued at some $64 billion, have been blocked or delayed by local opposition in recent years.
But what happens when the people directly affected by these project plans don’t get a vote?
Data centers did not influence this decision.
— NV Energy, explaining its move to end service to 49,000 California customers. But is it telling the truth?
That’s the quandary faced by 49,000 residents living on the California side of Lake Tahoe, mostly in the city of South Lake Tahoe. The surge in construction of data centers in Nevada is prompting the Nevada utility that supplies 75% of the Californians’ electricity to cut them off next year.
The California-regulated utility that carries the electricity over the state line to their homes and businesses has assured them that it will find alternative sources to protect them from losing service — but hasn’t promised that their rates won’t increase because of the transition.
“It’s like we don’t exist,” Danielle Hughes, the head of a local energy nonprofit and an advocate for the customers, told me. The crisis facing those residents is just the latest in a long line of indignities they have suffered thanks to several unique characteristics of their energy market, Hughes says.
For one thing, they are permanent residents of the community — teachers, firefighters, police, and service workers at the hotels, restaurants and resorts that bring in a tidal wave of visitors every winter. The latter, as well as vacation-home owners and renters, generate seasonal electricity demands that drive up power costs year-round.
That means that the permanent residents are in effect subsizing the visitors, even though they’re lower-income ratepayers than the generally well-heeled vacationers.
Before delving deeper into the issues for the permanent residents, let’s examine the effect of the large-scale data centers being built and proposed in Nevada, and more generally coast to coast.
Nevada has emerged as a prime location for data centers, in part due to the wide open, undeveloped acreage available for construction. More than 60 data centers have sprung up around Reno and Las Vegas, with many more slated to rise in the northern part of the state, according to a survey by the Desert Research Institute, a Nevada nonprofit.
“We’re right at the epicenter for global expansion” of data centers, observed Sean McKenna, a co-author of the report.
The existing data centers consumed 22% of Nevada’s electric generating capacity in 2024, DRI calculated. If all those under construction and on the drawing board are completed, that figure would rise to 35% by 2030. NV Energy, the Nevada utility that provides the electricity for the California side of Lake Tahoe, estimates that the electricity demand for just the 12 projects being planned would come to 5,900 megawatts — nearly three times the generating capacity of Hoover Dam.
That construction frenzy is likely to bring some of the same drawbacks that have provoked local communities to militate against data centers — not only pressure on existing electricity capacity, but also a voracious appetite for water due to the cooling needs of the computerized equipment managing the data for AI applications. Residents in the neighborhoods of data centers have also complained of incessant noise coming from their 24/7 operations.
With global warming driving up temperatures in Nevada’s semiarid and desert zones, they add, residents will find themselves in a contest with data center owners for an already inadequate supply of power in the state. DRI warns: “Local utilities and ratepayers in data center cluster regions like Northern Nevada also risk bearing the costs of subsidizing AI and computing services as power grids expand their infrastructure.”
In many communities, the result has been a vigorous and vocal backlash, including in California. They’ve packed town halls, prompted state and local political leaders to legislate limits on their growth or even to ban them.
That brings us back to the situation around Lake Tahoe.
In terms of its electric utility service, the region has long been an outlier. About 25% of its power comes from two solar farms operated by Liberty Utilities, but the rest comes from NV Energy; the reason is that it’s unconnected with the California transmission grid but accessible via a line from Nevada.
As a result, it falls into the cracks among energy regulators. Because it’s not part of the California grid, the California Public Utilities Commission has only limited jurisdiction over its service, although it has the authority to approve its electricity rates. The Nevada Public Utilities Commission doesn’t oversee the customers’ service at all, because they’re not Nevada residents.
The region is also unusual because its peak energy demand comes in the winter; most of the rest of California peaks in the summer, when air conditioners are on full blast.
Hughes and other residents have maintained that because the CPUC hasn’t modeled electricity demand for their small region, they have been paying for infrastructure that doesn’t serve them.
“We’ve been paying for assets in Nevada,” Hughes says, “without it being tracked by the state of California.”
Liberty does charge permanent residents in the Tahoe area about 2% less than the rate for part-time residents, but the discount should be much larger, Hughes says. Liberty didn’t respond to my request for comment.
Earlier this year, NV Energy informed Liberty that it would no longer serve as its wholesale energy provider after mid-May next year, and urged Liberty to make haste to secure an alternate supplier.
Liberty promised its customers in a recent statement that they “will not be left without service” as a result of the change. “This does not mean the power is shutting off,” Eric Schwarzrock, president of Liberty Utilities, said at a South Lake Tahoe City Council meeting last month, according to the news site SFGate. “Energy companies, utilities, large customers change energy supply frequently.”
Liberty and NV Energy both attributed the change to a preexisting agreement that anticipated that NV Energy would eventually cease providing power to Liberty’s customers, although their interpretations of the deal and the impetus for the change appear to be at odds.
The “long-standing agreements and planning assumptions … date back more than a decade,” NV Energy said in a May 14 statement. That was “well before data center growth became a factor,” the utility said. “Data centers did not influence this decision.”
That is, to be charitable, dubious. How do we know? Liberty said so in a March 6 letter to the California Public Utilities Commission, requesting permission to take “immediate action” to find alternative providers.
The letter stated that Liberty had expected its arrangement with NV Energy to “continue indefinitely.” During their last negotiations for an extension of the deal, however, NV Energy informed Liberty that it would cease serving Liberty on May 31, 2027, with a possible extension to Dec. 31.
“This change of stance by NV Energy was a surprise to Liberty,” the letter said. Liberty ascribed NV Energy’s decision to new “market circumstances” in the latter’s home service region. Among them: “A number of entities are seeking to add large loads such as data centers into the area.”
NV Energy says it will continue serving Liberty’s customers until Liberty secures a new supplier, even if it misses the May 2027 deadline; the ultimate deadline is Dec. 31, 2027, when NV Energy expects to complete its 350-mile Greenlink West transmission line between Las Vegas and the Reno area, part of a $4.2-billion infrastructure upgrade.
Yet that still leaves an open question that should make those customers nervous: How much will they be paying for power?
In its recent statement to customers, Liberty made only the vaguest of promises. “While no utiulity can predict the exact future cost of energy,” it said, “affordability is a primary goal” in its search for new suppliers. “With a competitive bidding process, we aim to find a cost-effective solution for your monthly bill.”
But any new supplier would have to come from outside California, because of the region’s lack of any connection with the state’s grid. And generators in nearby states face their own rising demands from data centers, drought and global warming.
The drawbacks of these massive industrial installations are beginning to be felt by their neighbors, including higher electricity prices and dwindling water supplies. They’re only going to get worse.
new video loaded: Jury Rejects Elon Musk’s Lawsuit Against OpenAI and Microsoft
transcript
transcript
Jury Rejects Elon Musk’s Lawsuit Against OpenAI and Microsoft
Elon Musk had accused OpenAI of “stealing a charity” by attaching a commercial company to Open AI, which was founded as a nonprofit. But a jury ruled that the statute of limitations had expired.
-
“The evidence that Mr. Musk’s lawsuit was an after-the-fact contrivance by a competitor was overwhelming.” “This reminds me of key moments in this country’s history. The siege of Charleston, the Battle of Bunker Hill, these were major losses for Americans. But who won the war? And this one is not over. And to sum it up, I can sum it up in one word: appeal.”
By Meg Felling
May 18, 2026
Five Guys will close two Los Angeles-area locations later this month.
The burger chain announced in a recent state filing that its locations in City of Industry and Whittier will close in late May. An outlet in Merced will also close its doors in late June, and one in Hanford will shut down in early July, according to state court filings.
The burger giant is the latest fast-food chain to shutter locations as the industry struggles with rising labor and real estate costs in the state.
The company cited “financial hardship” as a reason for the closures, according to a filing.
Employers are legally required to submit a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, or WARN notice, to alert employers, state and local officials at least 60 days before major layoffs. The initial notices were submitted in late April and early May.
The chain had steady growth in 2024, but seems to have stumbled in California. It opened 37 new storefronts that year, according to the company’s franchise disclosure document. Yet California stores accounted for eight of the 14 locations that closed that year.
The closures will result in 55 jobs lost across the four locations, according to the WARN notice.
A spokesperson for Five Guys did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Fast food chains have struggled against rising operational costs and increasingly cost-conscious customers.
California’s economic landscape has further complicated business in the state. While aerospace and defense companies have continued to flock to the state, companies in other sectors, including food, have started to bail out.
Five Guys ranked 42 in QSR Magazine’s top 50 U.S. restaurants list for 2026 and the number of locations in the country rose by 2% in 2025.
The chain got its start around 40 years ago in Virginia and now operates over 1,900 locations, according to its website.
The restaurant’s website lists over 85 locations in California, including at least 15 storefronts in the Los Angeles area.
-
Pennsylvania5 minutes agoPennsylvania 14th Congressional District Primary 2026: Live Election Results
-
Rhode Island11 minutes ago12 News/Emerson Poll: Foulkes leads McKee by double-digits in RI gov primary
-
South-Carolina17 minutes agoSouth Carolina Rep. Mace backs freeze on creation of new data centers in home state
-
South Dakota23 minutes ago
One of world’s largest energy storage plants launches in South Dakota
-
Tennessee29 minutes agoTennessee Baseball vs. South Carolina Score, Updates SEC Tournament | Rocky Top Insider
-
Texas35 minutes agoTexas Eats NOW: Crispy Southern Fried Chicken and Endless Asian Buffet Favorites
-
Utah41 minutes agoHere’s where Trader Joe’s will open its first West Jordan store
-
Vermont47 minutes agoStephen Kiernan Author Talk: Pollock’s Last Lover
