News / political
-
1 min read
Pierre Poilievre, Unity Guy
Read more . . . →The same guy who spent years farming western alienation for votes is now flying to Alberta to ask everyone to calm down. Pierre Poilievre, who built his brand on “Ottawa doesn’t care about you,” is campaigning for Canadian unity ahead of an October referendum on whether the province should pursue separation. He didn’t see the irony. Or he did and is counting on you not to. This is what grievance manufacturing produces. You tell people for a decade that the federal government is the enemy, that climate policy is a personal attack, that elites on Bay Street and in Ottawa...
Subscribe →Weekly digestOne email per week with the tracks worth your time. No spam, no Coldplay. -
1 min read
Work Requirements Don't Create Jobs. They Create Paperwork.
Read more . . . →Nebraska just became the first state to tell poor people they need to file monthly paperwork proving they work 80 hours to keep their health insurance. Miss the form or confuse DHHS’s bureaucracy — coverage gone. Not because you stopped working. Because you failed a government quiz while sick and broke. This is what “work requirements” actually are. Not a ladder, not a job program — a filter. The Urban Institute says Nebraska alone will kick 25,000 people off Medicaid from this. The CBO found that work requirements will strip coverage from over 5 million Americans by 2034 and produce...
Subscribe →Weekly digestSundays. One email. Zero ballads from white guys in beanies. -
1 min read
No Tax on Overtime. Also No Overtime.
Read more . . . →The Big Beautiful Bill is bragging about “no tax on overtime.” Zero percent tax on overtime pay — a real thing they announced as a worker win. What they didn’t announce, in the same breath, is that the Department of Labor just proposed a rule making it dramatically easier to call your employees “independent contractors.” Independent contractors don’t get overtime. They don’t get minimum wage. They don’t get workers’ comp or unemployment. There’s no tax on overtime when there’s no overtime to tax. This isn’t an accident. The rule rolls back Biden’s 2024 contractor classification protections — the rule that...
Subscribe →Weekly digestWhat you missed this week, minus the corporate emo. -
1 min read
The $1.8 Billion Thank-You Note
Read more . . . →While the government cuts Medicaid for 12 million people, it’s apparently flush with cash for the important stuff: $1.8 billion in taxpayer money to compensate Trump’s MAGA allies who claim Biden’s DOJ wrongfully targeted them. Mike Lindell gets a check. Enrique Tarrio, former Proud Boys leader, gets a check. Pardoned January 6 rioters, a check. The kid who needs their insulin stays screwed. There’s also a White House ballroom in there — $220 million buried in the same reconciliation bill that stripped SNAP to the bones. A room for parties, a room for dancing. The Senate parliamentarian blocked that piece,...
Get the tee →Support the blogSome shirts are statements. This one is a verdict. -
1 min read
Viva la Vida turns 18 and it still sucks
Read more . . . →18 years ago today, Coldplay released “Viva la Vida.” It still sucks. The Wikipedia-history crowd absolutely ate this one up. Chris Martin whispered vaguely about kings and castles over a string section he definitely didn’t write, and the entire planet decided it was profound. It’s not. It’s a pub quiz answer dressed as an anthem — three minutes of someone else’s history lesson, and the world called it the song of the year. The Grammys agreed. The Grammys are also frequently wrong. It took Brian Eno to make Coldplay sound this expensive, and they still ended up in court over...
Get the tee →Support the blogMade for people who left the room during Yellow. -
1 min read
Record Profits. Fire the Measurers.
Read more . . . →Cloudflare posted record revenue last quarter — $639.8 million, up 34%, best quarter in the company’s 16-year history — then fired 1,100 people. Twenty percent of the company, out. CEO Matthew Prince needed a word for these people, so he invented one: “measurers.” Accountants, auditors, middle managers, legal. The people who make sure the company doesn’t eat itself from the inside. Gone. Prince and his co-founder insisted this wasn’t a cost-cutting exercise. It was the “agentic AI era.” They released a statement so thick with future-speak it barely registers as English. The stock dropped 24% after the announcement — Wall...
Get the tee →Support the blogIf you wear this and someone hugs you, that's a real friend. -
1 min read
Speed of Sound turns 21. It still sucks.
Read more . . . →21 years ago today, Coldplay released “Speed of Sound.” It still sucks. It’s Clocks. Same piano arpeggio, same key, same Chris Martin emoting at you with his whole face like he’s about to say something important and then doesn’t. They had one formula, got scared to leave it, and repackaged it. The marketing team worked harder than the songwriters on this one. Here’s what you should have been listening to in 2005: Chemical Brothers – Galvanize — Q-Tip rapping over a drum machine in a song that actually has forward motion Pendulum – Tarantula — DnB that makes your chest...
Get the tee →Support the blogLooks like Helvetica. Sounds like a closing argument. -
1 min read
China got Boeing planes. You got a $1,500 tax bill.
Read more . . . →The whole sales pitch was that China was going to pay. Not you — China. Tariffs were going to force them to capitulate, manufacturing was coming home, and American workers were going to win big. What actually happened: tariffs hit 145%, the US shed over 100,000 manufacturing jobs, small manufacturers watched their profit margins drop 24%, and the average household is out $1,500 this year in higher prices. Not China. You. So Trump flew to Beijing. First US president to visit China in nearly a decade. He came back with soybeans and Boeing planes. China agreed to buy American agricultural...
Get the tee →Support the blogThree words. One opinion. Cotton. -
1 min read
The Factories Were Going to Roar Back
Read more . . . →Trump said the factories would come roaring back. He said it a lot — roaring back, coming back, bigger than ever. Seventy-two thousand manufacturing jobs gone since Liberation Day, and the Whirlpool plant in Iowa runs with 1,300 workers now. It had 3,000. The rest are in Mexico. That’s the part nobody’s saying straight: the tariffs were supposed to stop companies from offshoring. Whirlpool heard that, did the math, and offshored anyway. John Deere took $300 million in tariff costs and handed out layoff notices in Illinois and Iowa. Because that’s how it works — the tariff hits the company...
Get the tee →Support the blogWhat if your laundry was also a personality? -
1 min read
Fired on a Promise
Read more . . . →A Harvard Business Review survey of over 1,000 executives found something that should probably be front-page news: companies aren’t laying off workers because AI replaced them. They’re laying off workers because AI might replace them someday. That’s the deal now. You didn’t lose your job to a machine — you lost it to a PowerPoint slide about a machine. 113,863 workers in tech and adjacent industries are out in 2026 so far. 819 a day. Meanwhile CFOs are privately admitting AI layoffs will run 9x higher than what they’re telling the public. The productivity gains they promised haven’t materialized —...
Get the tee →Support the blogShips in 3–5 days. The outrage ships immediately.
