News / political
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1 min read
Fire 290 People, Then Wave a Million Dollars at the Survivors
Read more . . . →ClickUp just cut 290 people — 22% of the company — and the CEO announced it on X like he was shipping a feature. Zeb Evans calls the new structure a “100x org”: roughly 3,000 internal AI agents that now outnumber his remaining humans three to one. The money saved by firing nearly a quarter of the staff doesn’t go back to customers or get banked for a rainy day. It goes to the people who survived the cut, in the form of salary bands that climb to a million dollars a year in cash. Get laid off, or get...
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1 min read
Executive bonuses are tariff-proof. Yours isn't.
Read more . . . →The 2026 proxy season is the clearest look yet at how this economy actually works. Companies are quietly rewriting their executive bonus metrics mid-cycle to exclude tariff impacts — adjusted EBITDA, adjusted operating income, adjusted until the payout math works again. Axon did it. Caleres did it. More are coming. The tariff uncertainty was apparently too unpredictable to hold executives accountable for. The same uncertainty has hit small businesses for 13 consecutive months of job losses. The average American household is paying $1,500 more this year in tariff taxes. There’s no adjustment committee for that. These are the same companies...
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1 min read
Trump's Name Is Getting Etched in Marble at Penn Station. You're Paying For It.
Read more . . . →Penn Station has been a disaster for decades. Cramped, sweaty, falling apart — New Yorkers have been begging for a renovation forever. Now they’re getting one: $8 billion, raised ceilings, two new entrances. And “President Donald J. Trump” etched in marble next to a presidential seal, gold railings, columns, and escalators throughout. Of course. This is a public train station. The busiest in the country. Hundreds of thousands of commuters a day, most of them not billionaires. Design renderings leaked this week showing a monument to the sitting president built into a transit hub that working people depend on to...
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1 min read
Salesforce Replaced the Engineers. The Salespeople Are Fine.
Read more . . . →Salesforce didn’t hire a single engineer last year. Not one. Marc Benioff — $145 billion company, personal net worth north of $10 billion — stood up and told the world that AI handles the coding now, so why pay humans to do it? Productivity’s up 30%, he said, clearly pleased with himself. Zero new engineers in fiscal year 2026. That’s the headline he volunteered. That’s the thing he thought was worth bragging about. But here’s what he made sure to mention in the same breath: sales is booming. Nearly 20% more salespeople hired. Because someone still needs to walk into...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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,...
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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...
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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...
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