News / political
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2 min read
They Voided 30,000 People's Stock, Then Handed The New CFO $26 Million Of It
Read more . . . →This spring Oracle fired up to 30,000 people, most of them by early-morning email, and booked something like $2.1 billion in restructuring costs to do it. The number that matters isn’t the headcount, though — it’s the fine print on how they were cut loose. Under Oracle’s severance terms, anyone laid off lost their unvested restricted stock the instant they were terminated. Whatever stock had already vested, you kept, sitting in your Fidelity account. Everything you’d been promised and hadn’t yet crossed the finish line on simply evaporated the moment HR hit send. Workers on Blind and TheLayoff started comparing...
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2 min read
They Threatened Him, Interrogated Him, Then Fired Him — But Sure, The Timing Was A Coincidence
Read more . . . →On Tuesday the Fifth Circuit handed down its ruling in the Starbucks union case out of Sylmar, California, and you have to read it twice to believe the shape of it. The court looked at what the company did to a worker named Untaran during the 2022 organizing drive and agreed, on the record, that Starbucks broke the law. It agreed a manager illegally threatened him over the union. It agreed he was illegally interrogated about it. The judges signed their names to all of that. And then the same worker got fired, and the court turned around and said...
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1 min read
He Set The Fire, Then Showed Up With A Hose
Read more . . . →On Tuesday Trump stood inside the Mack Trucks plant in Macungie, Pennsylvania, and told the workers he’d saved them. “I imposed a 25-percent tariff on medium and heavy-duty trucks so that Mack Truck could do very well with this factory,” he said, on camera, surrounded by people who still remember what happened in early 2025. Because that’s when Mack warned it might cut up to 350 jobs at this exact plant, and blamed the tariff chaos coming out of his own White House for the call. About 170 of them got laid off. Roughly 150 were eventually recalled, which the...
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1 min read
92% Voted To Stop Building Their Own Replacements
Read more . . . →Hyundai wants 25,000 Boston Dynamics Atlas robots on its own assembly lines by 2028 — the humanoid kind, the ones in the viral clips doing backflips. The company that owns Boston Dynamics plans to build 30,000 of these a year, and most are headed straight for the factories where actual humans currently work. So this week 39,668 of those humans voted, and 92% of them said: strike. They are being asked, very politely, to spend the next two years assembling the machines that will assemble their own pink slips, and they declined. What they want instead is almost quaint. A...
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1 min read
Make Them Sell At A Loss
Read more . . . →There are more than four thousand finished condos sitting empty in Metro Vancouver right now, a 76 percent jump in a single year, in a city where people can’t find a place to live. The buildings are done. The lights are off. Developers put them up as investments, the bet went bad, and now they sit dark while families double up and rents keep climbing. This week Mark Carney and David Eby walked out with the fix: up to $3.2 billion over ten years to slash developer charges in half and convert 2,200 of those empty units into affordable homes....
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1 min read
Ubisoft Kept The Jewels And The Family Name
Read more . . . →Ubisoft just cut another 380 people. The Winnipeg studio is dead after eight years, Belgrade is gone, and the Rainbow Six team in Montreal lost 120 heads in one swing. That’s the sixth round of layoffs in a single calendar year — sixth — and the official reason is a €1.5 billion loss and a cost-cutting plan that runs all the way to 2028. They say it like there’s no money anywhere in the building, like the doors are about to close, like everybody’s just got to understand. Except there was money. Last fall Tencent wired €1.16 billion in cash...
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1 min read
The Tariff Refund Only Flows One Direction: Up
Read more . . . →So the Supreme Court finally struck the tariffs down, 6-3, and ruled that Trump never had the authority to impose them in the first place. Good. Except the customs agency already collected about $133 billion before anyone made him stop. That money came out of the country one checkout line at a time — the average household paid somewhere north of a thousand bucks last year, manufacturing shed tens of thousands of jobs, and the whole thing was sold as toughness. Now a court has confirmed it was illegal the entire time. You’d think the obvious next step is giving...
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1 min read
feelslikeimfallinginasleep: Two Years Later
Read more . . . →Two years ago today, Coldplay released “feelslikeimfallinginlove.” A song title with no spaces, like they tried to register a domain name and gave up halfway through. It still sucks. This was the lead single off Moon Music, the moment Chris Martin decided the band’s real problem was too many spaces in the track titles and not enough four-on-the-floor thump lifted off a 2014 festival main stage. It’s the sound of a man who heard dance music once, through a wall, and tried to rebuild it from memory. The title was honest about one thing, just not the verb they picked....
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1 min read
They Bought The Stock, Not The Workers
Read more . . . →Meta cut roughly 8,000 jobs this year — about ten percent of a division — and dressed it up the way they always do: getting disciplined, freeing up resources for the AI bet, tough choices nobody wanted to make. Except in the same stretch of months the company authorized another forty billion dollars to buy back its own stock, and burned through more than seventeen billion of it in a single quarter. So the money was there. It was sitting right there the whole time. It just wasn’t earmarked for the people who got walked out by security. Here’s what...
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1 min read
The Layoffs Didn't Even Work
Read more . . . →They told you the robot was coming for your job. Eighty percent of companies deploying AI cut workers this year, and a Gartner study of 350 firms just confirmed what anyone with a calculator already suspected: the cuts didn’t boost returns at all. The companies that fired the most people got nothing for it. No productivity miracle, no margin bump, just a smaller payroll and the same balance sheet. They torched 184,000 jobs this year chasing a number that never showed up. And here’s the part that should make you throw something. Sam Altman — the guy selling the robot...
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