News / political
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1 min read
Speed of Sound turns 21. It still sucks.
Read more . . . →21 years ago today, Coldplay released “Speed of Sound.” It still sucks. It’s Clocks. Same piano arpeggio, same key, same Chris Martin emoting at you with his whole face like he’s about to say something important and then doesn’t. They had one formula, got scared to leave it, and repackaged it. The marketing team worked harder than the songwriters on this one. Here’s what you should have been listening to in 2005: Chemical Brothers – Galvanize — Q-Tip rapping over a drum machine in a song that actually has forward motion Pendulum – Tarantula — DnB that makes your chest...
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1 min read
China got Boeing planes. You got a $1,500 tax bill.
Read more . . . →The whole sales pitch was that China was going to pay. Not you — China. Tariffs were going to force them to capitulate, manufacturing was coming home, and American workers were going to win big. What actually happened: tariffs hit 145%, the US shed over 100,000 manufacturing jobs, small manufacturers watched their profit margins drop 24%, and the average household is out $1,500 this year in higher prices. Not China. You. So Trump flew to Beijing. First US president to visit China in nearly a decade. He came back with soybeans and Boeing planes. China agreed to buy American agricultural...
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1 min read
The Factories Were Going to Roar Back
Read more . . . →Trump said the factories would come roaring back. He said it a lot — roaring back, coming back, bigger than ever. Seventy-two thousand manufacturing jobs gone since Liberation Day, and the Whirlpool plant in Iowa runs with 1,300 workers now. It had 3,000. The rest are in Mexico. That’s the part nobody’s saying straight: the tariffs were supposed to stop companies from offshoring. Whirlpool heard that, did the math, and offshored anyway. John Deere took $300 million in tariff costs and handed out layoff notices in Illinois and Iowa. Because that’s how it works — the tariff hits the company...
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1 min read
Fired on a Promise
Read more . . . →A Harvard Business Review survey of over 1,000 executives found something that should probably be front-page news: companies aren’t laying off workers because AI replaced them. They’re laying off workers because AI might replace them someday. That’s the deal now. You didn’t lose your job to a machine — you lost it to a PowerPoint slide about a machine. 113,863 workers in tech and adjacent industries are out in 2026 so far. 819 a day. Meanwhile CFOs are privately admitting AI layoffs will run 9x higher than what they’re telling the public. The productivity gains they promised haven’t materialized —...
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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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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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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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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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