News / political
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1 min read
Rolling Out the Red Carpet
Read more . . . →You survived. Now the itemised part starts.
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Your Laptop Is a National Security Threat Now
Read more . . . →The Trump administration is considering tariffs on every laptop, gaming console, and server that touches a semiconductor, which is all of them. The pitch is that this will bring chip manufacturing back to American soil. The reality is that a chip fab costs $20 billion, takes five years to build, and employs fewer people than a regional hospital. Your next laptop costs 20% more by Christmas. Intel gets a talking point for its investor call. You get the bill. Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary who used to run a Wall Street brokerage, is the one designing this. His plan ties...
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They Broke the Complaint Box
Read more . . . →The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission voted 2-1 on Tuesday to strip federal employees of their right to a hearing when they file a discrimination complaint. The agency whose one job is to hear you when your boss discriminates against you just voted to stop hearing you. Chair Andrea Lucas called the complaint process “susceptible to abuse.” The abuse she’s referring to is federal workers (prison guards who got groped, FBI agents who got passed over for being the wrong color) asking for their case to be heard by an actual judge. That’s the abuse. People using the system the way...
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Sponsored Content
Read more . . . →NASCAR at least has the decency to put the logos on the outside.
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He Kidnapped the President and Took the Oil
Read more . . . →Trump announced “THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY” yesterday: majority US control of 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan crude, at “no cost to taxpayers.” Quite a deal. All it took was starting a war with Iran that drained the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to its lowest point since 1983, abducting Venezuela’s sitting president and flying him to New York for trial, installing his VP as a compliant “interim leader,” threatening her with the same fate if she didn’t cooperate, and waiting for her to rewrite the country’s oil laws to Washington’s specifications. Free of charge. The reserve is sitting at...
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Market Rate
Read more . . . →Five guys, one lever, and whatever number comes out they all agree to call it “the market.”
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He Renamed the Water
Read more . . . →Donald Trump signed an executive order yesterday renaming Lake Ontario to “Lake America.” The name Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io (“beautiful lake”) and it’s been on maps since before the Declaration of Independence existed. Four hundred years of Indigenous naming, erased because a man who can’t find most countries on a map decided a body of water shared with another country needed a more patriotic brand. The Interior Department has 30 days to update the federal database. Canada is not required to adopt the change. Canada will not. This is what happens when you run out of leverage....
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Public Consultation
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$133 Billion and a Three-Minute Call
Read more . . . →Microsoft posted $133.7 billion in net profit this year. Up thirty-one percent. Then they fired 3,200 Xbox workers, some of them in three-minute phone calls from Montreal. Fifth round of layoffs in three years. The gaming division pulled in $21.8 billion and added two hundred million players. The people who built the games those players showed up for got a call shorter than a cigarette break telling them September is their last month. Hundreds of those workers are CWA union members who just organized and are fighting for first contracts. Microsoft started cutting while negotiations were still open. The union...
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Both Sides
Read more . . . →Cable news finally booked a guest who disagrees with him.
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