Buyers Remorse

Hey Friends,

I've been posting frequently on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is like if the devil ran out of fire for hell, so he/they created a social media platform in its place.

To be effective on LinkedIn, you must ask yourself these questions: "Should I post this or not post this? Will people care? Will I be too vulnerable? Will this make me look better than I really am to all of the people on the internet? Or is this meaningless bloviating that doesn't matter and is a waste of everyone's time?"

If you answer yes to the last two questions, then you should post. LinkedIn is where people are humbled and honored to announce they just got a really big title at a business that has never made a profit. On LinkedIn, you'll connect with people who list themselves as "Investor" for every mutual fund in their 401(k).

At home, you're the guy who needs to get off the couch and take out the trash. On LinkedIn, you're a serial entrepreneur because you used to cut grass for five neighbors as a teenager, before you became a realtor.

Success is all about the hustle and the number of likes you get on each post.

As you'll recall, I think social media is a bane to humanity. I've written about its perniciousness in The Semantic Web and how our inner lives long for freedom from the online in Blank Spaces. But still, we are stuck on the semantic web, and it is both evil and necessary at the same time, until our societies can wean off of it.

I have been using it to share my thoughts on marketing, brand strategy, and business, and to connect with people like you. I try to be myself, unapologetically, instead of a LinkedIn-stained growth hacker. I love the connections, but less so the hell we have to swim through to make them.

You can connect with me here. But be mindful to be yourself and not who the algorithm wants you to be.

Let's get to The News.

Hot Takes

Week 23 of 2025

Today's issue is long, so I hope you have some relaxing time this weekend to enjoy it.

Budget Crunched

Swiftly after passing the so-called big beautiful bill through the House, several prominent Republicans said they wished they hadn't. Two weeks ago, the bill text was available to read at bedtime on Wednesday, and the vote was before breakfast on Thursday. It's a thousand pages, and it's taken this whole time for most of the government to find out what is in it.

Elon Musk criticized the bill on his website, calling it an abomination and vowing to help remove its supporters from office in the midterm elections. He might disapprove of the deficit that undermines his attempts at savings through DOGE, but he also may dislike the tax credits for buying electric cars that benefit his company. Since he spoke out, the rift between him and Trump has become apparent, with them trading public criticisms last night, as Trump threatened to cancel his government contracts. Musk threatened to decommission the spacecraft that NASA relies on. Steve Bannon has suggested deporting Musk.

The worst part about it? Each toddler is posting from his own separate social media site, so the thread is hard to follow.

Senate Republicans are uncomfortable with the bill as well. Senator Rand Paul said he wouldn't vote for the bill without changes, including a provision that raises the debt ceiling by $4 trillion.

Some members of the house said they were surprised to learn what they had voted for. Even Marjorie Taylor Greene pushed back against the bill, despite her usual routine of celebrating all Trump all the time. The bill provides sweeping changes to social services, including making it harder to get welfare, rule changes that will reduce access to Obamacare, and increased budgets to fund Trump's immigration enforcement policies. It makes the Trump tax cuts from 2017 permanent before they expire this year. Critics say that there is a lot of pork in the bill. If that's true, hopefully, it includes surgery to fix Kash Patel's eyes.

Every expert calculates a bill's cost a little differently, but here's a summary of the math, according to the Congressional Budget Office's calculations:

• The bill cuts government revenue, which is the only way the USA or any business or person can cover expenses or pay off debt, when it didn't save enough for emergencies or retirement. The easiest way to reduce this revenue is through taxes, a popular plan, because no one likes paying taxes. This cut, paired with spending increases, totals a cost of $4.2 trillion.
• The bill saves money in a few categories by creating roadblocks to accessing government programs, including Medicaid, Welfare, Obamacare, and eliminating green energy tax breaks. The total savings are about $1.8 trillion. This seems like a great savings!
• Unfortunately, $1.8 trillion is way less than $4.2 trillion, which means there is a $2.4 trillion increase in debt. Republicans, including Stephen Miller, claim it does not add to the debt at all, which makes me wonder why the $4 trillion debt ceiling increase is in the bill. Maybe it's just in case we have to buy
• The argument: Stephen Miller, Trump's defender and one of his policy architects, explains that making Trump's 1.0 tax cuts permanent in a 2.0 world is just keeping revenues at baseline. Therefore, the shortfall of revenues should not be counted. They say math doesn't lie, but I assure you, people do, and it's unclear whose lie is more useful in this case.
• Republicans complain that the CBO is not counting tariff revenue, and since literally no one knows what those numbers are, I say nobody else is either. But let's do that now. Currently, tariffs are projected at about $80 billion for the 2025 budget year, or less than 2% of the federal budget, which means we will have to increase tariffs by 2,150% to cover the 2024 deficit of $1.8 trillion. If we make China tariffs $2,150%, an iPhone will cost $2,365,000. I'm still upgrading every year.
• Just one little sober note about tariffs. Trump's sales team says tariffs will generate revenue and increase manufacturing in the USA. Likely, both are true, but they work directly against each other. Manufacturing will only increase to avoid the cost of tariffs. That is, the tariffs that will only generate revenue if they are not avoided. In other words, small tariffs generate small revenues because people ignore them, and big tariffs eliminate them.

In a nutshell, the tax cuts largely benefit people with money. The spending cuts hurt people without it. The combination leaves us with a deficit. Deficits are not new. In fact, all budget bills have added to the debt since our last balanced budget in 2001. Americans that I talked to elected Trump because our debt (and the woke mind virus) was out of control. This bill promises to keep it that way.

What Does This Ketamine?

BREAKING: Elon Musk is a drug user. He fights depression with ketamine, a drug that makes some people better, but kills the rest of them. He's somewhere in the middle, after reports came out that he has abused the drug and also America while he was on it. (more)

The Drone Ranger

Ukraine made use of its drones to destroy what Adam Kenzinger calls "about a third" of Russia's bomber fleet – reports about whether Adam Kenzinger has a career in politics cannot be independently verified, but it's great that he has all this inside information about Ukraine. This is a big deal because while Trump says Ukraine "doesn't have the cards," it appeared to have an ace up its nationally sovereign sleeve that it had been planning to use for the last year. Putin, in a call with Trump, said he will respond to the attack. (more)

Nuclear and Present Danger

The good news for Earth is that it appears we’ll soon have another nuclear power if Trump's negotiating skills stay intact, where he notches a win for the far right by losing every negotiation while seeming tough. The even better news is that it’s Iran, whose values we all share except for the terrorism part and for some of us, the torture of women who refuse their headcovers. But we love the flowy robes. Imagine the amount of underwear you could skip with that thing on. I call this fashion choice "enriched uranius". (more)

The Presidentures of Joe Biden’t

I don’t know who was president during the Biden Administration, but Donald Trump has ordered his administration to investigate it. His theory is that if Biden wasn’t calling the shots, maybe all the laws his hand was used to sign didn’t count. One theory shared on social media by Trump says that Biden was executed in 2020 and replaced with a robot. They say AI is coming for our jobs, and if we believe this report about the job of Commander in Chief, it looks like none of us are safe.

Still, the prevailing theory remains that Biden simply didn’t always remember he was the president, even if he generally was technically doing the job, Weekend at Bernie's style. However, when it was brought to his attention, he recalled wanting to run for another term, and his aides encouraged him to stick to the plan they told him he came up with.

If he did run and win, I’d give him a cake with a single candle on it to blow out and celebrate, but I would tend to find it hard to believe the country would make such a bad election choice. However, I then checked who was in office. (more)

That's it for this week.

Remember: The Lorem Ipsum is always in budget. Consider paying for it, so I don't have to run deficits every year. Upgrade to paid here.

Have a great weekend!