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The Environmental Protection Agency is planning to eliminate long-standing requirements for polluters to collect and report their emissions of the heat-trapping gases that cause climate change. The move, ordered by a Trump appointee, would affect thousands of industrial facilities across the country, including oil refineries, power plants and coal mines as well as those that make petrochemicals, cement, glass, iron and steel, according to documents reviewed by ProPublica.
The Greenhouse Gas Reporting Programdocuments the amount of carbon dioxide, methane and other climate-warming gases emitted by individual facilities. The data, which is publicly available, guides policy decisions and constitutes a significant portion of the information the government submits to the international body that tallies global greenhouse gas pollution. Losing the data will make it harder to know how much climate-warming gas an economic sector or factory is emitting and to track those emissions over time. This granularity allows for accountability, experts say; the government can’t curb the country’s emissions without knowing where they are coming from.
“This would reduce the detail and accuracy of U.S. reporting of greenhouse gas emissions, when most countries are trying to improve their reporting,” said Michael Gillenwater, executive director of the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute. “This would also make it harder for climate policy to happen down the road.”
The program has been collecting emissions data since at least 2010. Roughly 8,000 facilities a year now report their emissions to the program. EPA officials have asked program staff to draft a rule that will drastically reduce data collection. Under the new rule, its reporting requirements would only apply to about 2,300 facilities in certain sectors of the oil and gas industry.
Climate experts expressed shock and dismay about the apparent decision to stop collecting most information on our country’s greenhouse gas emissions. “It would be a bit like unplugging the equipment that monitors the vital signs of a patient that is critically ill,” said Edward Maibach, a professor at George Mason University. “How in the world can we possibly manage this incredible threat to America’s well-being and humanity’s well-being if we’re not actually monitoring what we’re doing to exacerbate the problem?”
The EPA did not address questions from ProPublica about the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program. Instead, the agency provided an emailed statement affirming the Trump administration’s commitment to “clean air, land, and water for EVERY American.”
The agency announced last month that it was “reconsidering” the greenhouse gas reporting program. In a little-noticed press release issued on March 12, when the EPA sent out 24 bulletins as it celebrated the “most consequential day of deregulation in U.S. history,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin described the reporting program as “burdensome.” Zeldin also claimed that the program “costs American businesses and manufacturing millions of dollars, hurting small businesses and the ability to achieve the American Dream.”
Project 2025, the far-right blueprint for Trump’s presidency, suggested severely scaling back the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program and also described it as imposing burdens on small businesses.
In contrast, climate experts say the EPA reporting program, which tallies between 85% and 90% of all greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., is in many ways a boon to businesses. “A lot of companies rely on the data and use it in their annual sustainability reports,” said Edwin LaMair, an attorney at the Environmental Defense Fund. Companies also use the data to demonstrate environmental progress to shareholders and to meet international reporting requirements. “If the program stops, all that valuable data will stop being generated,” LaMair said.
The loss of that data could have a devastating effect on the world’s ability to rein in the disastrous effects of the warming climate, according to Andrew Light, who served as assistant secretary of energy for international affairs in the Biden administration. Light noted that addressing the dangerous and costly extreme weather events requires international collaboration — and that our failure to collect data could give other countries an excuse to abandon their own reporting.
“We will not get to the kinds of temperature stabilization needed to protect Americans against the worst climate impacts unless we get the cooperation of developing countries,” Light said. “If the United States won’t even measure and report our own emissions, how in the world can we expect China, India, Indonesia and other major growing developing countries to do the same?”
In its first months, the Trump administration has shown waning support for the reporting program. The EPA left the portal through which companies share data closed for several weeks and, in March, pushed back the emissions reporting deadline. Then last Friday, a meeting held with several program staff members raised further questions about the fate of future data collection, according to sources who were briefed on the meeting and asked not to be named for fear of retribution.
At the meeting, political appointee Abigale Tardif, who is principal deputy assistant administrator of the EPA’s office of air and radiation, instructed staff to draft a rule that would eliminate reporting requirements for 40 of the 41 sectors that are now required to submit data to the program. Tardif did not respond to inquiries from ProPublica about this story. Political appointee Aaron Szabo, who was present at the meeting and is awaiting confirmation as assistant administrator to the office, declined to answer questions, directing a reporter to EPA communications staff.
Before joining the EPA, Tardif and Szabo worked as lobbyists. Szabo represented the American Chemistry Council and Duke Energy among other companies and trade groups and Tardif worked for Marathon Petroleum and the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers Association.
Some climate advocates noted that industry stands to benefit from the elimination of greenhouse gas reporting requirements. “The bottom line is this is a giveaway to emitters, just letting them off the hook entirely,” said Rachel Cleetus, senior policy director with the Climate and Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Cleetus derided the choice to stop documenting emissions as ostrich-like. “Not tracking the data doesn’t make the climate crisis any less real,” she said. “This is just putting our heads in the sand.”
For four years, Trump supporters regularly exploited the federal judiciary, carefully selecting friendly judges in single-judge districts to block Biden administration policies through nationwide injunctions. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, with courts regularly ruling against Trump’s executive actions, they’re crying foul — claiming an army of “radical leftist” judges has secretly infiltrated the courts.
The flood of judicial rulings against Trump isn’t coming from some shadowy cabal of leftist judges — it’s coming from Trump’s own unprecedented wave of executive actions while Congress sits idle. Law professor Steve Vladeck, who has been studying jurisdiction shopping extensively, recently analyzed the data and found that “the cause of this unprecedented flurry of judicial activity is neither the judges nor the courts; it’s the policies they’re reviewing.”
During the Biden administration, certain names became very familiar in major policy cases: Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, Judge Reed O’Connor, Judge Terry Doughty. This wasn’t coincidence — it was strategy. MAGA lawyers deliberately filed cases in jurisdictions with single judges known to be sympathetic to their cause, guaranteeing their cases would land before friendly faces.
Now that Trump is back in power, the people who loved the ability to go to a single judge knowing they’d likely rule against Biden and issue a nationwide injunction are suddenly freaking out and accusing those bringing suits of using far leftist radical Marxist judges. There’s just one big problem: it’s not true. At all.
Vladeck and his researchers find that, yes, courts are ruling against Trump frequently, but note that’s because he’s doing a ton of crazy shit, issuing over 100 executive orders while Congress is sitting on its hands. But, more importantly, there’s little evidence of the kind of judge shopping that MAGA was famous for the last four years:
With one fleeting exception, one of the 67 lawsuits we found in which interim relief has been sought against Trump administration policies have been filed in “single-judge divisions” (where a case has a 100% chance of being assigned to a specific judge). This kind of “judge-shopping” is distinct from “forum-shopping,” in which litigants with options pick where to file based on various factors, perhaps including the overall composition of the local bench. At least with regard to finding a way to bring a case so that a specific, hand-picked judge will be assigned to decide it, we haven’t seen any of those in the cases in our dataset.
(And if you’re wondering about that “fleeting” exception, that case was reassigned 24 hours later).
Indeed, they found that the one court in a “blue” state that has a single judge division (in Massachusetts) just quietly changed its rules so these kinds of cases (targeting nationwide injunctions) would be more randomly assigned across all 20 judges in the district. This stands in stark contrast to the response in Texas, where courts famous for judge shopping essentially refused to implement new policies meant to prevent it.
Meanwhile, Dems seem to be bending over backwards to make sure judge selection is random and fair. It’s almost as if one party wants to cheat and the other actually cares about judicial fairness. Crazy.
But… maybe everyone challenging Trump is still getting these supposed crazed Marxist judges. Well, the data again says “fuck no.”
To help make clear how the party of the President who appointed the relevant judge is not driving these rulings, of the 20 cases in our dataset that were assigned to Republican-appointed district judges, nine of those saw grants of a TRO and/or PI. Thus, even looking at the cases before Republican-appointed district court judges alone, plaintiffs have still obtained preliminary relief in 45% of the cases in which they’ve sought it. That’s … high.
One last point on the data: The only subset of appointees whose rulings have been uniform are district judges appointed by President Trump. Of the 67 cases we identified, eight have been assigned to judges Trump appointed between 2017 and 2021. In all eight of those cases, the district court denied interim relief. Whatever that says about Trump appointees, note what it says about judges appointed by previous Republican presidents: Of the 12 cases in our dataset assigned to such judges, nine of them have produced a TRO against the challenged policy, a PI, or both. I understand that there are those to whom you literally can’t be a Republican if you do anything to oppose Trump. But any claim that judges like John Bates, Richard Leon, and Royce Lamberth are liberal squishes betrays the claimant’s utter lack of seriousness.
The pattern here is striking: Trump-appointed judges protect Trump, while other Republican-appointed judges frequently rule against him when his actions violate the Constitution. Yet in MAGA world, this becomes evidence of some vast leftist conspiracy.
It’s a perfect example of the “every accusation is a confession” phenomenon. Having spent years actually gaming the judicial system through careful judge shopping, they assume everyone else must be doing the same thing — even when the evidence shows exactly the opposite.
And now, in a final twist of irony, MAGA forces are suddenly calling to eliminate nationwide injunctions entirely — the very tool they relied on repeatedly during the Biden years. It’s almost as if their only consistent principle is “whatever helps Trump.”
by Stephen Morris, Paul Caruana Galizia, Kana Inagaki, and Chris Cook, Financial Times
Job cuts at the US traffic safety regulator instigated by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency disproportionately hit staff assessing self-driving risks, hampering oversight of technology on which the world’s richest man has staked the future of Tesla.
Of roughly 30 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration workers dismissed in February as part of Musk’s campaign to shrink the federal workforce, many were in the “office of vehicle automation safety,” people familiar with the situation told the Financial Times.
The cuts are part of mass firings by Doge that have affected at least 20,000 federal employees and raised widespread concern over potential conflicts of interest for Musk given many of the targeted agencies regulate or have contracts with his businesses.
WASHINGTON—Bragging that he had forced the world leader into “total submission,” President Donald Trump boasted to reporters Thursday that he had strong-armed President Donald Trump into pausing his latest round of tariffs. “I said to him, ‘Donald, these reciprocal tariffs have got to go,’ and that poor son of a bitch was like putty in my hands,” said Trump, who claimed the pause as a major victory for his administration, adding that he knew from the beginning a “weak, spineless loser” like Trump would cave to his demands. “It took a five-minute phone call to the White House and I made him pause those tariffs like a dog. He was beggin’ for mercy, so I said, ‘Okay, I’ll let you keep the tariffs on China, but no others,’ and he said, ‘Thank you, sir,’ with his tail between his legs. He was kissing my ass by the end. People from these shithole countries like America just can’t negotiate like I do, so I make them fall in line.” At press time, Trump added that he would bring America to its knees if Trump ever tried something that stupid again.
Don’t be embarrassed, it’s a common mistake. You look around and think, Yep, this is it. Paramilitary deportations, apocalyptic foreign policy, and private corporations looting the federal government. This has to be the Fourth Reich.
Not so fast, my friend. That’s a protected term. Technically speaking, it’s only the Fourth Reich if it comes from the Reich region of Germany. Everything else is just sparkling fascism.
Fascism can come from anywhere, of course. Spain and Italy have produced their own versions over the years. Some of the stuff coming out of California rivals the classic vintages. However, only one region holds this unique appellation.
This is fascism, obviously. No one is arguing that. It’s simply a matter of designation. You see, every region has what they call terroir, something in the land that imparts a certain je ne sais quoi on a given far-right government. You might not be able to describe it, but you know it when you see it.
The economy is tanking, public services are being stripped for parts, and the government’s only solution is to pump more money into the police and military. This can’t be anything other than the Fourth Reich. Nein! You could label it “Fourth Reich Style” or “Fourth Reich Method,” but don’t confuse this with the real thing.
Believe me, I see where you are coming from. A white South African is tag-teaming with a New York City real estate developer. Those are textbook Fourth Reich ingredients. It’s not a matter of better or worse, I’m just saying that only one type of fascist insurgency can lay claim to that special title.
I know I’m splitting hairs. When higher education is outlawed and your local post office is sold to a used car dealer, most people aren’t worried about naming conventions. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, as they say. But rules are rules, dammit. If everything can be called the Fourth Reich, that devalues the work of longtime German Reich producers.
Think of this as an opportunity. You have a whole new brand of American fascism. Why lean on old protected terms when you can coin a new one? How about “French Fry Fascism” or “Anti-Vax Authoritarianism”? Maybe “Yankee Doodle Death Spiral”? That has a nice ring to it. You could put that on a T-shirt.
Look on the bright side. You don’t need Europe anymore to define what is or isn’t a fascist death cult. You have your own style, your own spin on it. If that doesn’t brighten your day, I don’t know what will. Cheers!
The county's Refugee Health Services Program, which serves about 11,000 annually and provides nearly 35,000 immunizations per year, is facing layoffs and other financial challenges after funding was frozen by the administration of President Donald Trump.
The U.S. Commerce Secretary defended the country’s decision to impose tariffs on Heard and McDonald Islands, an uninhabited archipelago populated only by penguins and seals. What do you think?
“There go our closest allies.”
Nora Summerville, Systems Analyst
“But my mollusk futures!”
Gary Bates, Truck Puller
“It’s about time they start paying their fair share of krill.”
“Anyone who doesn’t talk about how big the crowds are in an erotic way goes in the Iron Maiden!” The Beaverton Weekly Report is back to cover all the top stories, from the tariffs to the election, with a lot of talk about The Fast & Furious in between. Luke and the Panel (Clare Blackwood, […]
Along with the parade, a free event scheduled for 2 p.m. Saturday, the Orange Show Center for Visionary Art is holding a series of related festivities from Thursday through Sunday.
HUNTSVILLE, AL—Confirming that the group’s long ordeal was finally over, NASA announced Thursday that it had successfully rescued three children stranded for more than nine months at Space Camp. “At 12:07 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time today, 11-year-olds Lillian and Evan Peltier were safely returned to their home in Chattanooga, TN after an extended 286-day educational experience at Space Camp,” said NASA spokesperson Heather Frugé, adding that the twins’ planned week-long summer camp program had been significantly lengthened after the malfunction of the family Toyota Sienna that was intended to take them home. “By staying focused on their model rocketry experiments and carefully rationing Tang and chicken nuggets from the cafeteria, Lillian and Evan were able to endure the demanding conditions of Space Camp while NASA scientists worked around the clock to bring them back home. The siblings are in good health, though their extended stay at Space Camp has left them both 2 inches taller. We’re proud of the team-building and problem-solving skills they developed during their visit, and we’re grateful to SpaceX for providing the bus that ultimately allowed them to make their return.” When reached for comment, the Peltier children denied having ever felt “stuck” or “abandoned” at Space Camp and instead begged for another turn on the Multi-Axis Trainer.
The most remarkable thing about antitrust (that no one talks about) (permalink)
It's hard to remember now, but for more than three years under Biden, it was possible to read the headlines every morning and feel excited that your government was taking big, decisive action to tame the corporate behemoths that rip you off, maim you on the job, and undermine our democracy.
The antitrust surge under Biden was and is a truly remarkable thing: a sustained, organized, effective government policy that supported the interests of the majority of people against the interests of a tiny cohort of ultra-wealthy wreckers and looters. According to political scientists, that antitrust surge should have been impossible. In 2014, a pair of political scientists from Northwestern and Princeton published their landmark study, "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens":
The paper analyzes 1,779 US policy fights from 1981 to 2002, and conclude that the US only does things that regular people want if those are also things that rich people want:
Ordinary citizens… get the policies they favor, but only because those policies happen also to be preferred by the economically-elite citizens who wield the actual influence.
When ordinary people want something that rich people don't want, ordinary people lose. Even when 80% of us want something, we only get our way 43% of the time. This is antidemocratic in the most fundamental sense: rich minorities get their way at the expense of working people, nearly all the time.
And then there's antitrust. Ordinary people don't like having their wages stolen. They don't like having their rents jacked up by algorithmic collusion. They don't like having their air and water poisoned. They don't like being mangled or killed on the job. They don't like having to sign noncompetes that bar them from taking a better job if one opens up.
More to the point, working people are not made better off when stuff like this happens. On average, working people own either zero or nearly zero stocks, not even in a 401(k) retirement account, because 40 years of wage stagnation and the near-abolition of employer based defined-benefits pensions has left most Americans with nearly no retirement savings (hence the panic over Trump and Musk's attempt to kill Social Security):
By contrast, the richest 10% own 94% of all the stocks held by Americans. Even if you, personally, don't want to be locked up by a noncompete or have your water poisoned by frackers, if you're in the top 10%, you probably benefit when this happens. After all, businesses cheat and maim because it's profitable, not because they're sadistic (they may be sadistic, or they may be depraved in their indifference to the harms they visit upon the rest of us, but the reason they do it is money):
Antitrust systematically attacks the sky-high monopoly rents extracted by the largest corporations and redistributes them to working people and small businesses, which, for the most part, are not listed on stock exchanges or traded over the counter. In other words, antitrust is a way to clobber the policy priorities favored by the wealthy in order to benefit the rest of us.
That means that the antitrust surge is amazing. It's one of those things that shouldn't exist at all. It defies political science. What's more, antitrust fervor precedes the Biden administration. Some of the Biden administration's most important antitrust cases (like the Google case) started under Trump. Some were even kicked off by far-right state attorneys general, like Texas's cartoonishly corrupt AG Ken Paxton, who led a coalition of nearly every AG in America in suing Facebook.
Antitrust fervor isn't a US phenomenon – it's global. Take Canada: in its entire history, the Competition Bureau (Canada's answer to the FTC) filed only three merger challenges, and won zero of them. But last year, Parliament passed a massive, muscular new bill giving the Competition Bureau unprecedented powers:
In the UK, the Competition and Markets Authority led the world in investigating and punishing Big Tech monopolies…and they did so under a succession of shambolic Conservative governments. Indeed, it was a Labour (or "Labour") Prime minister, Keir Starmer, who fired the head of the CMA and replaced him with the former head of Amazon UK:
We've seen big, ambitious antitrust action all over the world: Germany, France, Spain, the EU, Australia, South Korea, Japan, and even China.
It goes without saying that there is no dark money org funneling billionaires' wealth into this project to destroy billionaires. This is a groundswell political phenomenon, it's global, and it's powerful. The fact that Starmer and Trump have gutted their wildly effective antitrust agencies is heartbreaking, but it's not the end. The reason the US and the UK pursued such an ambitious antitrust agenda is the public groundswell. Getting rid of the agencies doesn't kill that groundswell – if anything, it only makes people madder.
It's hard to overstate just how weird the antitrust surge is. We've been fighting for decades for even tiny concessions to the interests of working people – a modest, below-inflation rise in the minimum wage, say, or small-dollar efforts to improve public education, reduce student debt, or control the price of prescription drugs. These efforts have largely failed, and when they've succeeded, the victories were modest, or worse, merely symbolic.
But antitrust is the exception. Antitrust – again, a movement that is squarely aimed at neutralizing the power of the wealthy – is the most successful popular movement of the past decade. Companies worth trillions of dollars are facing breakup as a result of antitrust cases. Everyone from meat-packers to landlords to sea freighters to pharma companies have faced massive, multi-billion-dollar setbacks at the expense of the antitrust movement.
Like I said, the current antitrust surge kicked off under Trump. But of course, that doesn't mean the GOP power-brokers support it – rather, they were cornered into it by their own base. The same is true of the Democrats: Biden didn't appoint the most effective antitrust enforcers the US has seen since the 1970s because he opposed corporate monopolies. Remember, this is the guy who, on the campaign trail, told business audiences that "nothing would fundamentally change" under a Biden administration:
Nor does the Democratic Party power-structure support this stuff. Remember when Harris's billionaire surrogates Marc Cuban and Reid Hoffman demanded that Harris fire the Biden administration's antitrust enforcers?
The success of the antitrust movement happened in spite of the Democratic Party, in spite of the GOP. To the extent that either party embraced an antitrust agenda, it's because the people demanded it, so undeniably that the parties chose the public interest over the interest of the billionaires who call nearly every shot for them.
It's impossible to overstate what an anomaly this is. On today's episode of the excellent Organized Money podcast, hosts Matt Stoller and David Dayen reminisce with Jonathan Kanter, Biden's former DoJ antitrust boss, about a conference they attended together in 2017 where the after-dinner keynote speaker was Richard Posner, a judge who was hugely influential in the dismantling of antitrust in the 1970s and 1980s. According to Dayen, the substance of Posner's keynote was:
Antitrust. That's dead, isn't it? I don't know what you guys are even talking about. This is ridiculous. There is no such thing as antitrust law.
And Kanter, Dayen, Stoller and future FTC chair Lina Khan were all sitting around a table, listening to this in 2017. By 2021, Kanter and Khan were running the DoJ and FTC antitrust agenda, and they did more in the next three years than all their predecessors over the past 40 years, combined.
Khan, Kanter, and their colleagues (like Rohit Chopra at the CFPB) did incredible work during the Biden administration. There is no denying their skill, their competence, their commitment. But the reason they were able to bring all those virtues to bear in service to working Americans is the massive popular surge of rage at corporate dominance. In other words, the Biden administration's prodigious trustbusting accomplishments were the effect of the antitrust movement, not its cause.
The corollary is that just because Trump has dismantled the agencies that were buoyed up by the movement, it doesn't make the movement itself smaller or less powerful. If anything, the Trump regime's relentless pursuit of an agenda in service to the rich at working people's expense will only add fuel to the anti-corporate, anti-billionaire wildfire. Trump's tariff chaos might be bad for some parts of the ruling class, but as Van Jackson writes for Labor Notes, there's plenty of plutocrats who love the prospect of a deep recession sparked by global trade chaos:
[L]avish tax cuts, deregulation, and an environment friendly to union-busting are just as valuable to most CEOs as a growing economy. What they lose in the stock market, they will more than make up in surplus labor, a fire sale on distressed assets, and Trump’s promise to totally eliminate the capital gains tax.
American wealth is more concentrated today than it was in France on the eve of the French Revolution. People are pissed. That anger is out there, waiting to be harnessed by smart political movements:
To grab that anger and mobilize it, we need to show people that their rage over specific issues is actually downstream of excessive corporate power. Furious that one company owns every brand of eggs and has used the excuse of bird flu to make record profits? You're not angry about eggs, you're angry about corporate power:
Worried that the EPA has been put in an induced coma and that means your kids will grow up with asthma and lead poisoning? You're actually angry about corporate power:
The Department of Education is in the hands of a woman who took over her rapey husband's professional wrestling monopoly, a corporation that misclassified performers as contractors, leaving them without health care so they have to beg for pennies on Gofundme so they can die with dignity of their workplace-related injuries:
Trump's Secretary of Education is monumentally unqualified for her position. Not only is she is planning to fire teachers en masse and replace them with AI, she doesn't know what AI is and just gave a speech where she repeatedly referred to it as "A-1":
Angry about this? Worried that your kids' teachers are about to be replaced with steak-sauce thanks to the incompetence of this fucking muttonhead? Me too. But you're not just angry at Trump or Linda McMahon – you're angry at corporate power.
In his book The Public Domain, the copyright scholar James Boyle talks about the political salience of the term "ecology." Boyle recounts how, prior to the rise of the word "ecology," there were many standalone issues, but no movement. Sure, you care about owls, and I care about the ozone layer, but what does the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere have to do with the destiny of charismatic nocturnal avians?
The term "ecology" welded all these thousands of issues together into a movement. When I look at the incredible, organic, bottom-up surge of antitrust energy, the only explanation I can find is that something similar is happening here. Concentrated corporate power is the common enemy of beer drinkers, surgeons, shippers, patients, farmers, grocery shoppers, social media users, any anyone who wears sneakers:
Something remarkable is happening, right under our noses. Nothing like this has happened in my lifetime. The world is terrifying, but this? This is exciting.
Smart political organizers have a once-in-a-century opportunity here. Trump's wildly unpopular destruction of the antitrust enforcement system opens up all kinds of opportunities for state enforcers (remember, states can also enforce antitrust law):
A massive political change that bubbles up from the bottom, aimed directly at the richest, most powerful people in the history of the human race, is an amazing thing. As bad as things are – and boy are they bad – this remains true, and important.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
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“President Trump on Wednesday abruptly reversed course on steep global tariffs that have roiled markets, upset members of his own party and raised fears of a recession. Just hours after he put punishing levies into place on nearly 60 countries, the president said he would pause them for 90 days.” — New York Times, 4/9/25
- - -
Folks, I’m thrilled to announce that the gamble paid off. Nobody believed we could do it, but here we are. The plan worked—stocks are skyrocketing back to less than they were before.
You’ve probably seen the numbers by now, and they’re incredible numbers. An absolutely fantastic set of numbers. In fact, these numbers are nearly halfway to the numbers we had before we tried any of this.
Now, a lot of people are saying we did a whole lot of damage for nothing. But you know what? That couldn’t be further from the truth. On the contrary, we’re pretty confident that this is the smartest thing anyone’s ever done. We undid so much damage that, as of today, we’re only mostly damaged.
Think about it:
Tariffs? Not a problem anymore—we just lowered them back to way higher than they’ve ever been.
Retirement funds? Doing great—they’ve made huge gains, all the way up to so much worse than anyone was expecting.
International relations? Totally copasetic—other countries are really warming up to us. They only hate us twice as much as they did a month ago.
Still not on board with this whole strategy? Still don’t see why it’s been a huge success? Maybe a metaphor would help.
It’s like if you were on a cruise ship during a storm, and suddenly the captain said, “I’ve got a plan. Everybody tie rocks to your feet and jump in the ocean, right now!” So you did, and you started sinking—fast. And then the captain said, somehow audible underwater, “Okay, untie those rocks!” And so you got rid of the rocks and shot back to the surface. And now you’re treading water during a hurricane. Isn’t that wonderful? Don’t you feel excited? That’s the power of negotiation.
Look, we’re not going to pretend like all our dreams have just come true. But we did just make an absolutely enormous amount of money by pushing stock prices down, buying, and then bringing the prices back—wait, sorry, um, forget that part.
We’re proud to announce that we stayed the course, and our plan to help the American people paid off. The economy is finally back to being worse than it was before any of this. And if everyone continues to do exactly as I say, we’ll never have to worry about anything getting better ever again.
EL RENO, OK—Explaining to the server at local restaurant Sid’s Diner that he only wanted one patty—not two—dainty little man Carlos Villarreal reportedly ordered a single cheeseburger Thursday. “Oh dear, is this delicate fellow worried a burger with double meat would upset his tender tummy?” said onlooker Miles Friedmont, wondering aloud whether Villarreal was purchasing the diminutive sandwich not for himself but for a young child of poor appetite, or perhaps a bedridden relative unable to stomach anything more substantial. “And he wants no bacon on his burger, either? Maybe the fragile gentleman is watching his figure—or maybe he’s more sickly than he looks. My goodness, now he’s telling the woman behind the counter that he doesn’t even want the meal deal, just the sandwich. How prim and refined his lordship must be to forgo fries!” According to reports, the dainty little man went on to ask for a cup of water, no doubt concerned the bubbles in a fizzy soft drink would overwhelm his sensitive nervous system.
According to the CDC, more than one quarter of U.S. adults suffer from seasonal allergies. The Onion shares tips for managing allergic rhinitis symptoms.
Try a nasal-removal spray.
Politely ask the flowers in your neighborhood to stop blooming.
Ask ADT about their anti-ragweed security systems.
Teach the trees in your area that sexual reproduction is shameful.
Cross the street if you encounter a gang of street pollen.
Get your hazmat suit in a seasonal, pastel color so you don’t look weird.
Sudafed can easily be synthesized from any spare meth you have lying around.
Consider alternatives to breathing.
Try to convince your sensitive immune system not to take pollen so personally.
To be honest, there is very little to discuss with respect to Houston’s weather forecast. We expect sunshine, warm and dry weather, and some ground ozone/air quality issues in the mornings and evenings over the next few days. Highs will be in the 80s with lows in the 50s and 60s. Beginning around Sunday, we’ll add some more humidity to the mix and slightly hotter weather with highs near 90 degrees by Monday and lows in the 60s. Overall, it looks great, albeit a little hotter than usual for April.
Our next meaningful rain chance likely does not come until the middle of next week, if then. More to come.
Nothing about this forecast on the surface is especially notable or alarming or fascinating. It’s simply a slightly above average forecast.
But what is somewhat notable about their forecast is some of the under the hood items they address. First, we are likely to be coming out of a La Niña event, something we discussed last back in February. But as the CSU team notes, we don’t know for sure if we’re headed for El Niño or ENSO neutral (La Nada) conditions. ENSO neutral summers combined with warm water temperatures “typically provides a more conducive dynamic and thermodynamic environment for hurricane formation and intensification.” In other words, hurricanes like those background conditions.
We do not yet have a “plume” from the C3S suite for April, but the March plume skewed slightly toward El Niño development.
Multi-system ensemble of various forecast models predicting a trend toward positive sea-surface temperature anomalies this summer, possibly giving a slight edge to a developing El Niño event. (Copernicus)
If we get to El Niño conditions by late summer or fall, that does not guarantee that conditions will shift to become more hostile to hurricane development. But that may take the edge off a bit. However, if we “hang” near the neutral line or even in weak La Niña territory, any hostile conditions may be apt to stay away, ensuring a busier season than usual.
In addition to the forecast for named storms and such, the CSU team also does try to convert that seasonal outlook to a prediction of U.S. landfall risk. Indeed, with a more active season expected, the odds of a U.S. landfall are also higher. They have a 51 percent chance of a major hurricane landfall on the U.S. coast, compared to a historical average of 43 percent. The odds on the East Coast are 26 percent, compared to 21 percent typically. And in the Gulf, the landfall odds between the Florida Panhandle and Brownsville are 33 percent versus a 27 percent average.
According to the CSU team, all model guidance is pointing to an above-normal season. Water temperatures remain well above long-term averages across the Atlantic. As we noted earlier this year, however, this is not last year’s Atlantic sea-surface temperature profile. But it’s still quite warm.
March 2025 minus March 2024 sea-surface temperatures, showing year over year warming in the Caribbean, Gulf, and mid-latitudes, but not in the tropical Atlantic. (NOAA PSL)
From the map above, you’ll notice that the eastern Atlantic has cooled markedly since last year, however the Gulf, Caribbean, and northern Atlantic Ocean are all warmer. The fire that was burning all last summer in the eastern Atlantic is still smoldering, but it has been somewhat extinguished. The Gulf and Caribbean are another matter. The Gulf is warmer than 2024 by a good bit but still lags 2023. While the Caribbean was warmer than 2024 in March, it has since cooled some in April, taking it back under 2024 levels. Water temperature conditions can change quickly, but the bottom line is that the Atlantic, with the exception of the eastern basin are in the upper echelon of warm years at this point. The warmer overall waters in March in the eastern North Atlantic (north of the tropics), along with the warm Caribbean do correlate to active hurricane seasons.
The bottom line is that the underlying data support the idea of an active hurricane season — but not to the levels feared last year. But there aren’t very many red flags at this time arguing against that outcome. At least last year, we had the expectation of a developing La Niña to help grease the wheels a bit, and a slow development could have slowed the hurricane season a bit. This year? There’s no real glaring red flag that says the season will bust. But hurricane seasons always have surprises. Hopefully this year’s involves calm.
HCC Drama Program Coordinator and longtime theatre director Debra Schultz has directed the dark comedy stage play ‘Assistance’ from Hollywood writer and recent Star Wars showrunner Leslye Headland. Loosely based on Headland’s experience working as the assistant to Harvey Weinstein during her time at Miramax, ‘Assistance’ explores the daily lives of administrative assistants who begrudgingly give most of their time to their overpowering and illogical boss inside a toxic work environment laden with co-dependent relationships and inter-office affairs.
The show premiered on March 5th at the Black Box Theatre on the Northeast campus. One week before showing it to audiences at HCC, Schultz took the stage play to the TCCSTA Play Festival at Blinn College-Brenham. Having directed many stage productions throughout her career, Schultz saw the opportunity to direct a play that would challenge her drama students and bring them out of their comfort zones.
“I wanted something that would be a big challenge that none of the students had ever done before,” mentioned Schultz. The production allowed each of the six cast members to play characters Schultz described as “crude and disgusting.” Despite the crudeness and use of foul language, Schultz saw these elements as essential to making the audience take something away after leaving the theatre.
“As a longtime theatre person, very little offends me,” admitted Schultz. “Because I live in that world. I live in the theatre world where we want to make audiences feel uncomfortable.” Uncomfortable may be an understatement, as the play has many adult themes and evokes the horrific experiences many women faced in Hollywood, which sparked the #MeToo Movement.
Mixing comedy with a serious subject matter like workplace abuse may be considered a recipe for disaster; however, Schultz believed the comedy was needed to give the play a varied tone and make the audience question why they laughed at the inappropriateness of it all.
“The audience walks away thinking, ‘Wait, why did I laugh at that?’” noted Schultz. “That’s the goal, to make the audience think after the show is done.”
‘Assistance’ ran from March 5th to March 8th. While it was a pleasure for her to have directed the play, Schultz refuses to rank it as one of her favorite experiences. In fact, the director tries not to rank all the plays she has directed. For Schultz, each new project is a learning experience she’ll bring to the next endeavor and a chance to make the audience feel something again.
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. My very supportive boss is leaving, and I blame his partner
I currently have an incredibly supportive boss but he plans to leave his role soon because his long-term partner lives in a different region of the country and refuses to move nearer to where he lives even though they work remotely.
I’m legally disabled and worried that whoever takes over once he lives will be far less accommodating in regards to my disability, especially considering that I’ve had to pivot to a lower caliber field after a devastating job loss that I’ve still not gotten over.
As a result, I can’t help but feel that my boss’ partner is selfish and I secretly hope that they break up, even though I know that it will break his heart. I have no attraction towards him and do not desire a romantic relationship with him if that was what you were thinking, I just don’t want a supportive boss to be replaced by a less than adequate one.
That’s an understandable way to feel! But it might help to keep in mind that managers leave jobs for all sorts of reasons — he could break up with his partner tomorrow, then get a fantastic job offer the next day and quit to take it. Or he could have a health emergency, or decide to move to live near aging parents, or get a sudden yen to live in Alaska, or want to start his own freelance rice sculpting business. Any of these would be disappointing, but I but they wouldn’t strike you the same way, since you’d see him as having more agency in the decision … whereas now it feels like someone else is “doing this” to him. But managers leaving is a thing that happens. It’s okay and normal to be disappointed and worried, but ultimately your boss has decided this is what’s best for him. He gets to make that decision for himself, just as much as you get to wish he didn’t!
However, could you ask for his advice on preserving your current accommodations with the new manager? That might nudge him to think about whether there’s a role he can play in how the accommodations are framed to his replacement that might set you up as well as possible. (In theory, accommodations should come from your company, which is not changing, but in reality different managers can be different degrees of supportive and are positioned to make your life harder or easier. But you could talk to your HR about your concerns too.)
2. What does it mean to have no HR?
I interviewed recently with an organization that seems like a very good fit for me. They have a clear mission and solid history, funding, and infrastructure to support it and what seems to be a good culture fit (as far as anyone can tell in an initial interview.) No alarm bells whatsoever with the hiring panel; I’d be excited to advance in the search.
Towards the end of the call, as part of the conversation surrounding being a small-staff (about 14 employees), cross-functional operation, they mentioned that they “have no HR.” I have seen this mentioned throughout the years of reading your site, but this is the first time I’ve encountered it.
What does this mean, in a practical way? They have the usual full suite of benefits, so presumably someone administrates that, but I’m not sure what sort of questions I should be asking to ensure that the absence of a dedicated person won’t be a present concern. They are small enough that they would be exempt from a lot of employment regulation (USA) already, and I am exceedingly fortunate to have never been involved with HR for any reason other than benefit questions in my career to this point. What should I be considering here if I’m invited to move ahead?
It’s very, very normal not to have a dedicated HR function until an organization reaches 50-75 or even 100 people; there’s simply not the work to support it until then. Instead, what you typically see is someone whose job includes things like benefits administration and onboarding paperwork, but whose main duties are something else. Meanwhile, the more complex parts of HR — like policy, investigations, management coaching, legal compliance, etc. — are often handled by someone like a chief of staff or second-in-command, with some of it (like legal compliance) often being outsourced. In other words, it’s not that those things aren’t happening at all; it’s that it’s operationalized differently. That can mean that there’s more room for them to be done poorly, but that tends to be tightly correlated with how effective and well-run the organization is overall (something that is especially important when the org is small).
3. Pitching a company where an ex from an acrimonious relationship is on the board
When I was in grad school, I had a serious relationship with a classmate for over three years. It was a stressful time for both of us, and the relationship was always dramatic and often toxic. It ended in an acrimonious but rather unspectacular fashion, with both of us going our separate ways and never speaking again.
It’s been 20 years since we’ve had any contact. We have both been married to others for most of that time, kids, successful careers (thanks, social media). I’ve spent a lot of time in therapy, and I work hard to avoid unnecessary drama in my life.
This week, a close colleague and I were at a networking event where we reconnected with a contact and learned that he has recently joined my ex’s family company. The contact invited us to pitch for the company’s business. Afterwards, when my friend excitedly started talking about this opportunity, I told her about my connection (pretty sure my ex is on the board of said company). She was delighted and has started assembling a team for a pitch meeting.
Here’s the thing: I don’t just have a personal connection to a director; I know a lot about this company. I know all the people involved and because the relationship ended without fireworks, I’d like to think that the family remembers me as a smart and hard working person and that my connections are likely a net positive. I am also a local leader in my specialty and my skills are particularly well-suited to the company. While the ex is on the board and probably a decision-maker, it is unlikely we’d have much day-to-day interaction.
I don’t want to show up and ambush my ex, and it would be disingenuous for me to pretend I don’t have a connection to this company. The respectful and professional thing to do is to reach out to the ex directly and … reconnect somehow, right? The problem is the thought of even getting coffee with this person fills me with dread and anxiety. I am quite content to never see them again. At the same time, the idea that we could be on speaking terms if we run into each other again would ultimately be a relief (no more running out the back door of bars!), and the alternative is to pass on the opportunity to be on the client team. I think my friend would be disappointed but understanding, but I would miss out on the financial and professional benefits that would come along from landing a new client.
I am consulting my therapist about this as well, but I appreciate feedback from the professional side. I’ve struggled with that goal of avoiding drama and can’t always see where I’m inviting it instead.
This doesn’t require coffee!
Email is perfectly suited for this, so that your ex can read it and have whatever initial responses they might have privately, and then can think about how to respond. You do not need to get together in person and go through the social ritual of coffee; you can just lay out the situation and ask how they’d like you to handle it.
The email could be as simple as, “Hi Artexerxes! I know it’s been many years since we’ve talked and I hope you’re doing well. I’m writing because an employee at CompanyName has invited my team to pitch for (project type). Normally I’d attend the pitch meeting and be part of any proposal for working together, but I thought I should touch base with you first. If you’d prefer I pass this one up and leave it to others here, I’d of course respect that, so I wanted to check in with you before my team moves forward.”
The biggest risk here is probably of Artexerxes thinking you’re overreacting — that it’s been 20 years and of course they don’t care if you pitch their family’s company. But it’s better to err on the side of being careful and respectful, which this would be.
4. Customers with ridiculously long payment times
I’m a freelancer, and I work with businesses of all sizes, from small businesses to multi-billion dollar corporations. I just ventured out on my own about a year or so ago, and I’ve run into an issue that I’m not sure how to solve.
Several of my customers have (what feels to me) absurdly long remit periods: 90 days. I’m a one-woman shop, and these 90-day remit periods leave me without access to a substantial amount of my income for an entire quarter of the year. Moreover, one of them doesn’t do lump-sum payments every quarter. They pay invoices one-off that are 90 days old. So, instead of paying all the invoices I submitted during those 90 days in a lump sum, they’ll pay the invoice I submit for April at the end of July, the one for May at the end of August, etc
When I submit an invoice, my “payment due date” is a month after I’ve submitted the invoice, which feels very reasonable. I mean, as a consumer, no one gives me an entire quarter to pay my bills without adding a lovely little chunk of interest, and I suspect that these slow-to-pay companies don’t allow their customers 90 days to pay them either.
While I’m not (currently) worried about making rent, I’m not made of gold. These long remit periods leave me incredibly stressed from a financial perspective. Moreover, they actively cost me money because the money I’ve earned from them is not sitting in my savings account accruing interest.
How do I tell these customers that they have to pay me within 30 days? Can I ask them to change their policy for me? Can I say that my policy is an X% charge for every month it’s not paid after my payment period has ended?
And a lovely little tidbit that I’m sure your readers will “enjoy” is that the businesses with the long remit periods are the not the small businesses. They’re the ones pulling in hundreds of millions, if not billions, every year (eye roll).
You can try to insist on 30-day payment terms, but a lot of big companies will refuse to alter their payment systems for you and you’ll have to decide if you’re willing to accept 90 days or not get the business. If you do try to get their agreement on 30 days, you’ll have a better shot if you raise it from the start and try to get their explicit agreement; otherwise they’re just going to shuffle you into whatever their default payment systems are. Even then, though, you might not be able to do anything about it; big companies have enough monetary power to basically force their vendors to accept their terms (or be willing to walk away, which most won’t be). That’s true even if you build late fees into your contracts; a lot of big companies will simply decline to work that way. You can try it! Just go in knowing that very often, the bigger they are the more likely they are to just use their established systems and you’ll have to decide whether you want the business under those terms or not. That’s not how it’s supposed to work, but that’s often how it does work.
That said, could you look at moving to a retainer model, where you get at least some portion of the payment up-front, or collect initial deposits? That won’t be realistic for every product/service (and if you’re in the only one in your field who charges that way, big companies may flatly refuse unless they really want you in particular), but it’s worth considering it.
5. Loud coworkers in shared space
After five years of being remote since Covid, we have been called back to the office. It’s been an adjustment, but overall going well. We have suites filled with cubicles, so it’s a shared space, and the cube walls provide minimal noise protection.
I am wondering how to handle loud coworkers who haven’t fully adjusted back to “shared space” volume, and are practically shouting in their meetings for who knows what reason. (Thinking they are being quiet through their headphones? shouting back at someone who is yelling into their phone in a noisy environment? I can’t decide.) It’s become such a problem that in my own meetings, I am not heard because the coworker’s voice is overtaking mine in the microphone! I have to either just use the chat box, or try to quickly get up and move to a quieter area. On busier days when more people are in, this isn’t always an easy option. I’d prefer to be able to stay at my desk.
This is not someone I am close with by any means, and I’m not sure how to politely tell them to lower their voice or be more aware of it. Any thoughts?
Is it one or two people or more widespread than that? If it’s one or two people, you can say, “I’m sorry to ask but I’m having trouble hearing my calls — could I ask you to lower your voice a little when you’re in meetings?” Feel free to add “the acoustics in here are tough” if you want.
But if it’s more widespread, mention the problem to your manager and ask for help, whether that’s by her reminding people to adjust their volume now that they’re around a bunch of coworkers again, or adding more noise protection (there are ways to do this if a company cares to, like installing soundproofing panels between cubicles), or rearranging things to be more acoustically friendly, or so forth.
