News / political
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1 min read
Walmart cut 1,000 corporate jobs and pretended it wasn't about AI
Read more . . . →Walmart is the largest employer on earth and they just cut about a thousand corporate jobs in product, design, and tech. The internal memo was co-signed by the exec who runs “AI acceleration.” The memo somehow forgot to mention AI. They called it “platform consolidation,” which is the new corporate way of saying we bought software that does your job and we’re hoping you don’t read the news. The tell is what they’re still hiring for. Cashiers. Stockers. Warehouse pickers. The salaried middle gets the slide deck and a flight to Bentonville if they want to reapply for their own...
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1 min read
LinkedIn cuts 900 jobs on a 12% revenue quarter
Read more . . . →LinkedIn had 12% revenue growth last quarter. They also just fired 900 people. The official reason is AI restructuring. The new CPO told employees they want “smaller, faster, more agile teams” that lean harder on AI tools. Translation: business is great, but cutting staff is how you tell investors you’re being futuristic. LinkedIn’s own AI hiring products are already pulling in $450 million a year. That money didn’t go to the people who built them. Harvard Business Review ran the numbers on this wave. Ninety-five percent of companies running AI-driven layoffs are seeing no measurable profit return. Zero. They’re not...
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1 min read
Trump's Tariffs Killed More Small Business Jobs Than COVID Did
Read more . . . →The math is in. The smallest American businesses — fewer than 10 employees — lost 4.5 times more jobs in 2025 than they did during the entire pandemic year of 2020. No lockdowns. No virus. Just Trump’s tariffs running for 13 straight months. 292,000 jobs gone from businesses that can’t offshore, can’t lobby, can’t absorb a 145% cost shock and survive it. The Joint Economic Committee broke it down by sector. Leisure and hospitality — restaurants, hotels — down 48,000 jobs and 15% of revenue. Small manufacturers down 38,000 jobs and 11% of revenue. These aren’t abstract numbers. These are...
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1 min read
They Fired the Humans. The AI Still Doesn't Pay.
Read more . . . →They had a story about this. AI transformation. The robots would do the work, profits would climb, shareholders would cheer, and the humans — well, the humans would figure it out. It was always a tidier story for the people who write the memos than for the people who receive them. Gartner just studied 350 companies — all over $1B revenue, all running AI tools — and found that the ones cutting the most workers saw no better return than the ones that kept people. Zero correlation. The study dropped May 5. The layoffs kept coming anyway. 38,000 jobs gone...
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1 min read
They Investigated a Women's College for Having Too Many Women
Read more . . . →A women’s college admitted trans women for a decade and nobody cared. Then they invited Admiral Rachel Levine to give a commencement speech. A conservative legal group filed a complaint. Now the Department of Education is opening a Title IX investigation into Smith College for violating women’s rights — by admitting women the administration doesn’t recognize as women. Title IX was written to stop universities from discriminating against women. The Trump administration is using it to make women’s colleges decide which women count. Smith, Wellesley, and Mount Holyoke are all in range. The law that opened doors is now being...
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1 min read
Poilievre Called Carney 'Badly Educated in Economics'
Read more . . . →Pierre Poilievre decided his strategy this week was to question Mark Carney’s economic credentials — calling him “very badly educated in economics.” This is the man who has a PhD in economics from Oxford, ran the Bank of Canada through a recession, and then ran the Bank of England through Brexit. Poilievre’s plan after losing three byelections back to back was to walk into Parliament and tell the PhD economist he doesn’t understand economics. Carney walked into Question Period for their first face-off since the majority win and looked like someone who’d heard the insult coming and couldn’t wait. “One...
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1 min read
The Tariff Refund That Isn't Coming
Read more . . . →The Supreme Court killed most of Trump’s tariffs. The government owed $166 billion in refunds. They built a portal and said everyone would get their money back. Two-thirds of eligible importers couldn’t log in when it launched. Small businesses spent hours on hold with Customs and got no answer. Trade experts are now telling anyone who’ll listen that the government will probably just keep tens of billions it’s legally required to return — not out of malice, just attrition. The application process is complex enough that most small claims will time out or get buried, and nobody’s going to prison...
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Happy Small Business Week
Read more . . . →During National Small Business Week, the people in charge want you to think about the heroic small business owner grinding away at their dream. What they don’t want you to think about is the Joint Economic Committee data they dropped at the same time: small businesses with fewer than 10 employees have been shedding jobs for 13 straight months, and the losses in 2025 were 4.5 times worse than during the actual pandemic. Not a little worse. Four and a half times worse. The tariffs that were supposed to save American business are eating the businesses they were supposed to...
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Higher Power Turns Five (The Skip Button Is Still Working)
Read more . . . →5 years ago today, Coldplay released “Higher Power.” The only higher power involved was the skip button. It’s a song about reaching for god, or love, or the cosmos — pick one — but what it actually sounds like is a SoulCycle instructor’s Spotify playlist. Chris Martin squeezed into auto-tune like a man trying to prove he can still fit into his high school jeans. The lyrics are what you’d get if you asked a fortune cookie to write stadium rock and then dipped it in Bono. Here’s what you should listen to instead — what 2021 actually sounded like:...
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$725 Billion for AI, Severance for Everyone Else
Read more . . . →Coinbase just fired 700 people — 14% of its staff — and CEO Brian Armstrong described it as “building an intelligence, with humans around the edge.” Humans around the edge. You’re no longer a worker. You’re a decorative border on a product. Big Tech collectively committed $725 billion to AI this year — Amazon $200B, Microsoft $190B, Meta up to $145B — while burning through 80,000 workers in Q1 alone. Human salaries are the one cost flexible enough to cut fast enough to fund the buildout. Oracle made workers train the AI that replaced them. Not as a metaphor. They...
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