News / political
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1 min read
They Investigated a Women's College for Having Too Many Women
Read more . . . →A women’s college admitted trans women for a decade and nobody cared. Then they invited Admiral Rachel Levine to give a commencement speech. A conservative legal group filed a complaint. Now the Department of Education is opening a Title IX investigation into Smith College for violating women’s rights — by admitting women the administration doesn’t recognize as women. Title IX was written to stop universities from discriminating against women. The Trump administration is using it to make women’s colleges decide which women count. Smith, Wellesley, and Mount Holyoke are all in range. The law that opened doors is now being...
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1 min read
Poilievre Called Carney 'Badly Educated in Economics'
Read more . . . →Pierre Poilievre decided his strategy this week was to question Mark Carney’s economic credentials — calling him “very badly educated in economics.” This is the man who has a PhD in economics from Oxford, ran the Bank of Canada through a recession, and then ran the Bank of England through Brexit. Poilievre’s plan after losing three byelections back to back was to walk into Parliament and tell the PhD economist he doesn’t understand economics. Carney walked into Question Period for their first face-off since the majority win and looked like someone who’d heard the insult coming and couldn’t wait. “One...
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1 min read
The Tariff Refund That Isn't Coming
Read more . . . →The Supreme Court killed most of Trump’s tariffs. The government owed $166 billion in refunds. They built a portal and said everyone would get their money back. Two-thirds of eligible importers couldn’t log in when it launched. Small businesses spent hours on hold with Customs and got no answer. Trade experts are now telling anyone who’ll listen that the government will probably just keep tens of billions it’s legally required to return — not out of malice, just attrition. The application process is complex enough that most small claims will time out or get buried, and nobody’s going to prison...
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1 min read
Happy Small Business Week
Read more . . . →During National Small Business Week, the people in charge want you to think about the heroic small business owner grinding away at their dream. What they don’t want you to think about is the Joint Economic Committee data they dropped at the same time: small businesses with fewer than 10 employees have been shedding jobs for 13 straight months, and the losses in 2025 were 4.5 times worse than during the actual pandemic. Not a little worse. Four and a half times worse. The tariffs that were supposed to save American business are eating the businesses they were supposed to...
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1 min read
Higher Power Turns Five (The Skip Button Is Still Working)
Read more . . . →5 years ago today, Coldplay released “Higher Power.” The only higher power involved was the skip button. It’s a song about reaching for god, or love, or the cosmos — pick one — but what it actually sounds like is a SoulCycle instructor’s Spotify playlist. Chris Martin squeezed into auto-tune like a man trying to prove he can still fit into his high school jeans. The lyrics are what you’d get if you asked a fortune cookie to write stadium rock and then dipped it in Bono. Here’s what you should listen to instead — what 2021 actually sounded like:...
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1 min read
$725 Billion for AI, Severance for Everyone Else
Read more . . . →Coinbase just fired 700 people — 14% of its staff — and CEO Brian Armstrong described it as “building an intelligence, with humans around the edge.” Humans around the edge. You’re no longer a worker. You’re a decorative border on a product. Big Tech collectively committed $725 billion to AI this year — Amazon $200B, Microsoft $190B, Meta up to $145B — while burning through 80,000 workers in Q1 alone. Human salaries are the one cost flexible enough to cut fast enough to fund the buildout. Oracle made workers train the AI that replaced them. Not as a metaphor. They...
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1 min read
Zuckerberg Laid Off 8,000 People to Pay for Servers
Read more . . . →The number is $135 billion. That’s Meta’s AI infrastructure spend this year — Zuckerberg just raised the forecast again because apparently $115B wasn’t enough silicon for the guy who already owns your attention span. To cover the difference, he’s cutting 8,000 employees starting May 20, plus cancelling 6,000 open roles. Fourteen thousand positions, gone. Meta posted record profits last quarter. The budget isn’t tight — the priorities are. He told them at a company town hall. To their faces. “The layoffs are a direct consequence of the AI budget.” The company restructures into AI “pods,” which sounds like a sci-fi...
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1 min read
Roaring back: 98,000 manufacturing jobs gone since the tariffs hit
Read more . . . →The promise was simple: slap tariffs on everything, factories come back, workers win. Trump said it enough times it started to sound like gravity. Twelve months in, the U.S. has shed 98,000 manufacturing jobs. Not some. Ninety-eight thousand. Since April’s tariff escalation alone, 72,000 more. The factories aren’t roaring back. The workers are just gone. He just announced 25% tariffs on EU cars and trucks. More factories coming, supposedly. Except supply chain managers surveyed by CNBC are now reporting double the layoffs compared to last year — 32% reporting job cuts, up from 16% in April. The tariffs didn’t bring...
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The Ghost of Spirit Airlines
Read more . . . →Spirit Airlines is gone. Not “restructuring,” not “emerging stronger” — actually gone. Yellow planes parked in the Mojave, gates absorbed by Delta and United, flight attendants told to file unemployment claims via a QR code on the breakroom wall. The closest thing America had to a working-class national carrier just bled out in bankruptcy court while everyone pretended this was inevitable. It wasn’t. The DOJ blocked the JetBlue merger to “protect competition,” which sounded reasonable right up until competition turned out to mean letting hedge funds peck at Spirit’s bones for two years until the carcass collapsed on its own....
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Jack Dorsey Fired 4,000 People and Called It Innovation
Read more . . . →Jack Dorsey laid off 40% of Block’s staff — 4,000 people — and told the world it was because of AI. Said the business was strong, profits were up, growth was good. Just… didn’t need those people anymore. Specifically didn’t need the policy team. Specifically didn’t need DEI. Fascinating which roles the machines replaced first. Here’s the part that should make you furious: he then went on record saying most companies are “late” and will make similar cuts within the year. He turned a mass firing into an industry announcement. A roadmap. Every CEO in America now has their script...
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