Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• This Secretive Company Built An Empire By Hawking Bad Financial And Health Advice On Facebook: The Agora, sued by the SEC, FTC, and two state AGs, reaches hundreds of millions of people across social media with misleading promises of wealth and wellness. (Forbes)
• Who Goes MAGA? It is an interesting and somewhat macabre social media game to play while scrolling through your feeds: to speculate who in your network would go full MAGA. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—watching the 2016 election, the pandemic, January 6th, and now Trump’s return. I have come to know the types: the born MAGAs, the MAGAs whom social media criticism has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would fall for the grift. (TechDirt)
• Anatomy of a WhatsApp Stock Scam: The latest stock to get sunk. And more details on how these scams operate. (Herb Greenberg)
• Trump’s DOGE Cuts Are a Texas-Sized Disaster: Reckless agency layoffs and the dismantling of federal relief programs could leave the Lone Star State in peril. (Note: This was published Thursday, literally the day before flash flooding hit Texas, warning about the DOGE Cuts) (Texas Observer) see also Texas lawmakers failed to pass a bill to improve local disaster warning systems this year: A GOP state lawmaker who represents Kerr County says he likely would vote differently now on House Bill 13, which would have established a grant program for counties to build new emergency communication infrastructure. (Texas Tribune)
• Florida is letting companies make it harder for highly paid workers to change jobs, thanks to Ken Griffin: Florida enacted a law allowing non-competes of up to four years. The law targets high earners with access to confidential company information. Citadel was among the companies that lobbied for the law. (MSN)
• Elon Musk’s Grok Is Calling for a New Holocaust: The chatbot is also praising Hitler and attacking users with Jewish-sounding names. (The Atlantic) see also How exactly did Grok go full ‘MechaHitler?’ xAI has yet to give a comprehensive answer. (Engadget)
• This tax testifies to the utter corruption of conservative thought: Congress is coming for your EV — and what’s left of conservatism. Congress is proposing that the federal government slap a tax on something you have already purchased, whether you drive it or not, just because you own it. It’s no different from saying you now have to start paying an annual tax on that second refrigerator in your basement or the computer in your backpack. (Washington Post)
• ‘It’s too late’: David Suzuki says the fight against climate change is lost: “We have failed to shift the narrative and we are still caught up in the same legal, economic and political systems,” said David Suzuki in an exclusive interview with iPolitics. “For me, what we’ve got to do now is hunker down.” (iPolitics)
• Inside America’s Death Chambers: What years of witnessing executions taught me about sin, mercy, and the possibility of redemption (The Atlantic)
• The Death of Partying in the U.S.A.—and Why It Matters: Young Americans today spend 70 percent less time attending or hosting parties than they did at the beginning of the 21st century. Why? (Derek Thompson)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this week with Richard Bernstein, founder of RBA. The firm focuses on Macro trends, and manages (or advises on) $15.7B AUM. Previously, he was Chief Investment Strategist at Merrill Lynch from 1988-2009. Bernstein was named to Institutional Investor’s “All-America Research Team” 18X, and inducted into the Institutional Investor “Hall of Fame.”
In 2000, we declared measles eliminated in the US. Now, 2025 already has the highest number of cases since 1992
Source: @SteveRattner
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