News / political
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1 min read
They Fired You and Blamed the Robot
Read more . . . →Almost six out of ten companies now admit they frame layoffs as “AI-driven” when the real reason is financial. Straight up. Into a survey. Block fired forty percent of its workforce and the stock jumped twenty-four percent the same day. Dorsey posted $2.87 billion in gross profit that quarter. Cloudflare axed eleven hundred people — a fifth of the company — while reporting record revenue up thirty-four percent. These aren’t companies in trouble. These are companies doing better than ever who figured out Wall Street pays you more per share when you have fewer employees. Meta’s internal memos said the...
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The Economy Lost 23,000 Jobs and Unemployment Went Down
Read more . . . →The U.S. economy shed 23,000 jobs in July and the unemployment rate went down. Not a typo. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday that payrolls went negative and the rate “improved” to 4.1 percent, because 264,000 people left the workforce entirely. Stopped looking, stopped being counted. Labor force participation is at 61.4 percent, lowest in five years. The rate didn’t improve. The pool just got smaller. This is the number they’ll wave around. Four point one. Strong. Meanwhile average monthly job gains this year sit at 34,000. May’s numbers got revised down by 66,000 after the fact. June got...
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1 min read
Where ICE Goes, Jobs Go Too
Read more . . . →Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went on television this week and said the quiet part at volume ten: “Where ICE goes, rents go down.” That’s the sales pitch — deport your neighbors and your landlord might charge you less. What he left out: the economy lost 23,000 jobs in July. First negative payroll number in years. Healthcare hiring slowed to a crawl. Construction craters every time enforcement surges. For every six undocumented workers ICE pushes out of a community, one American-born worker loses their job too. That’s from economists studying payroll data in hundreds of cities. The jobs don’t get “freed...
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1 min read
Walmart Gets $2.4 Billion Back. You Get the Receipt.
Read more . . . →Walmart just got a $2.4 billion refund check from the federal government. Apple got $2.19 billion. Amazon, $600 million. Ford, $1.3 billion. Your refund: zero. Trump spent two years collecting $166 billion in tariffs that the Supreme Court ruled were illegal, and now the money is flowing back — to the corporations that filed the customs paperwork. You paid the markup at the register for two straight years. You ate the price hikes on everything from groceries to sneakers. The refund process is designed so that only the “importer of record” can claim a cent. You were never the importer...
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1 min read
His Lawyer Said AOC Would Be President Without Him
Read more . . . →Andrew Tate’s lawyer went on Instagram this week and wrote that AOC will be the next president if Trump doesn’t intervene to stop his client’s extradition to the UK. The client in question is sitting in a Miami jail on 59 charges of rape and sex trafficking, using his phone to complain about the food and beg his followers to show up at his bail hearing on August 13. His lawyer, Joseph McBride, went on the Fresh and Fit podcast to make the pitch: help the man facing nearly five dozen rape charges, or lose the youth vote. The White...
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She Came from UnitedHealth and Promised Not to Make Trouble
Read more . . . →The CDC has a new director. The last one got fired for disagreeing with RFK Jr. about vaccines — the real kind, the kind that wiped out polio, not the Facebook comment section kind. The replacement is Dr. Erica Schwartz, previously of UnitedHealth Group, where she pulled $850,000 a year. At her confirmation hearing she said vaccines are safe and effective, then dodged every question about whether she’d push back if Kennedy told her otherwise. Said she was “unaware” of some of his policy changes. The whole audition was don’t know anything, don’t push back. The agency she’s inheriting has...
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He Lost in Court So He Changed the Name
Read more . . . →The Supreme Court told him the tariffs were illegal. So he kept the rates, swapped the legal citation, slapped “forced labor” on the label, and went right back to taxing 99.4% of U.S. imports like nothing happened. Twenty-five state attorneys general filed suit yesterday because they can read a calendar — the old tariffs expired and the new ones showed up at the same rates, on the same goods, the next business day. His own trade rep went on record promising “continuity.” That’s not even a cover story. That’s a guy plagiarizing his own paper after the professor caught him...
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The Guy Who Leaked Airstrikes Put His Third Wife in Charge of Military Families
Read more . . . →Trump signed an executive order yesterday creating a “Presidential Military Spouse Commission” to improve the lives of military families. He put Jennifer Rauchet in charge. Her qualifications: she’s Pete Hegseth’s third wife. That’s it. Former Fox News producer, no government title, no confirmed security clearance, no accountability to Congress. She does sit in on Pentagon meetings though, so at least she knows where the bathrooms are. This is the same Hegseth who leaked airstrike schedules to a Signal group chat she was in. The same Hegseth who purged so many Pentagon staff he had to start bringing her to work...
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You're Paying to Power the Machine That Replaced You
Read more . . . →Oracle fired 30,000 people in March to free up cash for AI data centers. No warning. Employees got termination emails at 6am from “Oracle Leadership” — not from their manager, not from HR — a mass email from the void telling them their role had been eliminated and today was their last day. The company needed $50 billion for server farms, and the fastest way to find it was to stop paying humans. Call it what it is: a cash grab with a body count. Here’s where it gets good. Those data centers need electricity — obscene amounts of it...
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He Fired the Guards and Blamed the Neighbors
Read more . . . →Trump went on camera this week and blamed Minnesota for getting hacked. Not Iran, whose state-aligned hackers the FBI is actively investigating. Not his own administration, which fired a third of CISA’s workforce and is trying to slash another $700 million from the cybersecurity budget. Minnesota. Because they have a Democratic governor, and that’s apparently how threat attribution works now — not by forensic evidence, but by party affiliation. Hackers hit water systems in seven states starting July 27. Thirty-six municipal water systems in Minnesota alone — the kind of infrastructure where failure means people can’t drink the water. DOGE...
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