News / political
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2 min read
Microsoft Fired the People Who Make Your Games. On a Three-Minute Call.
Read more . . . →Microsoft just deleted roughly 3,200 jobs out of Xbox — about a fifth of the whole division — closed or spun off a handful of studios, and in Montreal it fired a dozen unionized developers at Bethesda over a three-minute video call where they weren’t allowed to ask a single question. Sit with that for a second. Not the 3,200. The three. The people who built the worlds a lot of us disappeared into for a thousand hours — Doom, Fallout, the games that got some of us through a couple of bad winters — got less time to absorb...
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1 min read
They're Boiling You Slowly So You Don't Notice
Read more . . . →The New York Fed just described, in polite economist language, a scam being run on you in real time. Companies are done eating Trump’s tariffs. They’re passing the cost to you — but not all at once, because a sudden jump would make you angry and paying attention. Instead they’re doing it a few cents at a time, month after month, a strategy the Fed’s own people call “trickle up.” Corporate America has a friendlier name for it internally: boil the frog. Turn the heat up so gradually the frog never jumps out of the pot. You’re the frog. The...
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1 min read
One Day Out, Four Days Locked Out
Read more . . . →Four thousand nurses at Brigham and Women’s walked off the job for exactly one day. Mass General Brigham locked them out for four. Read that again: you protest for a single shift over pay and staffing, and management’s answer is to bar the doors and tell you to come back Sunday. That’s not a labor dispute anymore, it’s a punishment, and it’s the clearest confession of who these people actually are that you’ll get all year. Here’s the part that should make your teeth hurt. The hospital says the nurses’ ask — roughly 7% over eighteen months, and please stop...
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1 min read
Parachutes turns 26 and it still sucks
Read more . . . →26 years ago today, Coldplay released their debut album Parachutes. It still sucks. This is the record people reach for when they want to argue the band was good “before they sold out,” which is the whole con — Parachutes wasn’t a promising start that curdled later, it was the finished blueprint for two decades of beige. Chris Martin already had the formula bolted down: strum four chords, aim the falsetto at the cheap seats, and mistake sounding sad for having something to say. “Yellow” bought the beach house and “Trouble” still leaks out of every coffee shop, but the...
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1 min read
Poilievre Congratulated the Man Who Just Left Him
Read more . . . →Pierre Poilievre just watched a fifth MP walk out of his caucus, and his response was to thank the guy. Mark Carney appointed Conservative MP Richard Martel — a sitting member of Poilievre’s own team — to the Senate this week, and Martel took the red chair and left. Four Conservatives before him crossed the floor straight to the Liberals; Martel just got the seat handed to him by the Liberal prime minister instead. Poilievre reportedly found out minutes before it went public. Then he put out a statement wishing Martel well, hoping he’d “continue the fight for affordability, growing...
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1 min read
He Cut 4,000 Jobs and Called Them 'Heads'
Read more . . . →Marc Benioff went on a podcast and explained, out loud, in his own voice, that he cut Salesforce’s customer support team from 9,000 people down to 5,000 “because I need less heads.” Heads. Not workers, not colleagues — heads, the word you use for cattle, applied to the people who used to pick up when your software ate itself at 2am. He replaced 4,000 of them with AI agents and mentioned, like it was a fun fact, that support costs dropped 17 percent. Four thousand livelihoods rounded down to a line item, and the man delivering the news couldn’t even...
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1 min read
A 'Nonprofit' With $18 Billion Sent Untrained Nurses to the Nursery
Read more . . . →A “nonprofit” hospital chain sat on $18 billion in cash and decided the place to save money was the room with the newborns. Ascension’s nurses at Saint Agnes in Baltimore walked out this week because management has been floating med-surg nurses into the postpartum unit — nurses who don’t have the training to care for a baby in its first vulnerable hours — rather than hire the people the floor obviously needs. The union’s phrase for it was “trying to save pennies by shifting people around.” Pennies. On $18 billion. And the money is right there. Ascension cleared $608 million...
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1 min read
Volkswagen Lost China. 100,000 Workers Get the Bill.
Read more . . . →Volkswagen wants to cut up to 100,000 jobs and shut four German plants — the biggest restructuring in the company’s 89-year history, roughly one in seven of everyone who works there. The sites on the chopping block, including Zwickau, Hanover, Emden, and Audi’s factory in Neckarsulm, employ more than 45,000 people between them. And the reason a worker in Emden is about to lose the thing his whole town is built around? Management got beaten in China. BYD and the other homegrown brands ate VW’s lunch, sales in its single biggest market fell 20 percent in one quarter, and the...
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1 min read
You Pay $900 More So a Guy With Three Houses Can Pocket $66,000
Read more . . . →They finally put a number on it, and the number is $900. That’s what the middle 60 percent of American households will pay extra in 2026 once you add up Trump’s tariffs and the tax bill he signed — $900 out of your pocket, this year, for the crime of being in the middle. Now here’s where the $900 went. The richest one percent are getting an average net tax cut of $66,000. The top tenth of one percent — the yacht tier — clears roughly $200,000. So you handed over nine hundred bucks and a guy who owns three...
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1 min read
Chevron Bought a $53 Billion Company. The Bill Went to 8,000 Workers.
Read more . . . →Chevron is cutting up to 8,000 jobs — a fifth of its people — to save $3 billion. Keep that number in your head, because two months ago the same company closed a $53 billion deal to swallow Hess, and this year it’s shovelling $20 billion into share buybacks, five billion a quarter, like clockwork. So the math was never tight. Chevron has never had more money to move around. It just decided the cheapest place to find three billion dollars was the payroll, and CEO Mike Wirth called it “stronger long-term competitiveness,” which is executive for “you, specifically, are...
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