News / political
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1 min read
Pay to the Order Of
Read more . . . →Amount left blank. Date left blank. Photo op fully funded. Six smiles, one giant cheque, and the only thing written on it is a promise to write something later. The cameras got what they came for. The line item did not.
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Twenty-Five Years and a Beer Ban
Read more . . . →Twenty-five years ago today, US airspace shut down and 38 planes carrying 6,500 people dropped into Gander, Newfoundland, a town of about ten thousand that wasn’t expecting any of them. The people of Gander emptied their fridges, opened their churches, dragged cots into community halls, and took care of complete strangers for days. They didn’t negotiate terms. They didn’t send an invoice. They just did it, because that’s what you do when your neighbor’s house is on fire. Today, on the anniversary of that, the president of the United States is banning Canadian beer. Canadian rye whisky. Canadian motorcycles. Canadian...
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1 min read
Twenty-Four Million and a Straight Face
Read more . . . →Wynn Resorts pocketed $2.22 billion in profit last year. Their Encore casino in Boston cleared $237 million on its own. CEO Craig Billings collected $24 million in compensation. And last week, 1,350 housekeepers, cooks, valet drivers, and cashiers walked out because the company decided a $10-an-hour raise spread over three years was asking too much. Three dollars and thirty-three cents a year. Then the company offered to fund their healthcare coverage out of that raise, so the raise just pays for what they already had. A $24-million man looked at his $237-million casino and told the people who clean the...
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1 min read
Your Face Is a Performance Review
Read more . . . →There is a nine-billion-dollar industry being built around technology that reads your face at work and decides whether you’re happy enough to keep your job. Emotion AI (cameras and software that analyze your expressions and tone of voice, and in some cases the electrical activity of your actual nervous system) is already deployed in hiring, training, and performance reviews across the country. Your employer can run a sentiment check on your face during a meeting the way they run a spell check on an email. Independent research found the tech is about 50 percent accurate. A coin flip. They built...
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1 min read
Fifty-Three Cents
Read more . . . →The government started tracking how much of the economy goes to workers in 1947. In seventy-nine years of data, it has never been lower than right now. Labor’s share of GDP just hit 52.8 percent. Corporate profits, in the same quarter, hit $4.8 trillion. Both are records. One of them gets celebrated on earnings calls. The other one is you. Twenty years ago, workers took home almost 65 cents of every dollar the economy generated. Now it’s 53 and dropping. Wages since 2019 are up 3 percent adjusted for inflation. Profits are up 50. That’s not a rounding error. That’s...
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1 min read
The Loneliness Is the Product
Read more . . . →Andrew Tate pulls in a hundred and eighty-four million dollars a year from a single subscription platform selling online courses to young men about how to get rich. The business model writes itself: find a twenty-year-old who feels like the world left him behind, tell him it’s women’s fault and the system’s fault and everyone’s fault except the people charging him $49.99 a month, then sell him a subscription. A new report from Reset Tech calls the manosphere what it actually is: a multibillion-dollar grift economy. Not a movement, not a philosophy. A sales funnel that runs on male loneliness...
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1 min read
Small Potatoes
Read more . . . →Eighteen American soldiers are dead and the president called it small potatoes. That’s a direct quote. Donald Trump sat in the Oval Office on Thursday and said the war he started with Iran is “small potatoes” because only eighteen Americans died. He compared it to Vietnam, the logic being that because fewer people died than in a war that killed fifty-eight thousand over twenty years, this one barely registers. Eighteen is a rounding error. Eighteen is within the margin of acceptable loss. He delivered this with the same energy you’d use to explain why you’re not tipping. Those eighteen people...
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1 min read
Net Zero
Read more . . . →One plastic tree, forty thousand stumps, and a press release calling it a milestone.
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Twelve and a Half Percent Is an Answer
Read more . . . →Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives held Chicoutimi-Le Fjord with 34.1% of the vote twelve months ago. On Monday the riding voted again. They got 12.5%. Third place. Behind the Bloc. That’s not a bad night at the polls. That’s the kind of number you see when a party stops existing in a region. Twenty-two points gone in a year, and the Conservative response is to demand Carney cancel a gas tax increase. All three byelections went Liberal with over 50% of the popular vote. Carney didn’t squeak these out. Nobody came remotely close. The Conservative share dropped in every single riding, including...
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The Child Was Infrastructure
Read more . . . →The US military bombed a wedding in southern Iran on Monday. Five dead, including a child. Sixty-eight wounded, fifty of them women and children. The Pentagon called it a strike on Revolutionary Guard infrastructure. The infrastructure was a family home in Kuhestak where people were celebrating a marriage. The guests were infrastructure. The child was infrastructure. Central Command released a statement about “IRGC assets.” An asset, in Pentagon English, is whatever was standing where the missile landed. This is the third time a US strike in this war has hit a civilian gathering. In Minab they hit an elementary school...
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