News / political
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1 min read
Ghost Stories turns 12. It still sucks.
Read more . . . →12 years ago today, Coldplay released Ghost Stories. It still sucks. Chris Martin processed his divorce from Gwyneth Paltrow by making the most expensive sad playlist of all time — eleven tracks of bedroom heartbreak produced to arena scale. The album went number one in 30 countries. That’s not a vindication, that’s a diagnosis. Gwyneth got the better deal. Here’s what you should have been listening to in 2014: Aphex Twin – minipops 67 [120.2][source field mix] — Richard D. James came back from 13 years of silence and immediately made everyone else irrelevant Caribou – Can’t Do Without You...
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1 min read
The Big Beautiful Bill Is Working — If You're Already Rich
Read more . . . →They called it the One Big Beautiful Bill. Cut nearly a trillion dollars from Medicaid — the healthcare program covering the poorest Americans — and handed it back to billionaires as tax cuts. Signed on July 4th. Nothing says freedom like stripping healthcare from 16 million people so the top 10% can pocket an extra $13,600 a year. Now the enforcement is live. Nebraska started Medicaid work requirements on May 1st. The paperwork is complicated by design — miss a form, lose your coverage. People who ARE working are getting cut because the bureaucracy is built to fail them. And...
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1 min read
Your medication is a national security threat, apparently
Read more . . . →Trump just slapped 100% tariffs on patented pharmaceuticals. Not generic drugs — those are conveniently exempt. Patented ones. The cancer treatments, the specialty biologics, the drugs that exist because no generic alternative does yet. It kicks in July 31st for some companies and September 29th for the rest — right in time for your prescription costs to spike as the weather cools. The national security justification is real, in writing, in the presidential proclamation. The idea that your rheumatoid arthritis medication threatens American military readiness is the kind of logic that sounds like satire until you remember we’re fully in...
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1 min read
Two Courts Down, Still Searching for a Legal Tariff
Read more . . . →The Supreme Court said Trump’s tariffs were illegal. Then a trade court struck down the replacement tariffs too. Now the administration is launching “forced labor” investigations into 58 countries — the EU, Canada, Brazil, basically anyone who trades with America — as the next legal vehicle to reimpose the same tariffs under a different statute. This is not economic policy. It’s a man running out of courtrooms. While the lawyers scramble, 98,000 manufacturing jobs have vanished since the tariff push started. The factories are not roaring back. The towns built around those jobs are not roaring back. What is roaring...
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1 min read
LIRR Workers Are on Strike and Good for Them
Read more . . . →3,500 Long Island Rail Road workers walked off the job at midnight, shutting down the country’s busiest commuter rail for the first time in over 30 years. The MTA offered 9.5% over three years. The workers asked for 16% over four years to keep up with inflation. Everyone’s going to tell them they should feel bad about this. The MTA runs on a $21 billion annual budget. It took a full service shutdown to get wages taken seriously. These workers went thirty years without striking, kept the trains running through the pandemic and every fare hike that followed. The city...
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1 min read
PayPal Fired 20% of Its Staff and Called It a Tech Comeback
Read more . . . →PayPal’s new CEO walked in the door in March, fired 20% of the staff, and announced the company is “becoming a technology company again.” As opposed to what? The 23,800 people who showed up every day and ran one of the world’s biggest payment networks — what were they operating, a nail salon? The framing is built to make you forget there are people in the number. 4,760 of them. When a new CEO says the company is “becoming” something it used to be, the implication is that the existing workforce was the problem. That they de-teched it somehow. That...
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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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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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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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