Ben

Use your imagination

[Joakim 🌹🇳🇴🇪🇺 @joakial_]

New ad by the Norwegian Consumer Council about the declining lifespan of products.

[✨emma 💖 @bucksbicycle]

This isn’t all of it but jeeeeeeesus

[Cartoon Base @TheCartoonBase]

‘HAPPY WHEELS’ is coming to Steam on September 21.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am the payments logistics officer at the United States Treasury Department who has personally touched every version of the free money this country has been promised since 2020, and I am the only person left in this building who remembers how the first one actually went, because the first one is the only one that was ever real.

Spring 2020. Economic Impact Payments, $1,200 a person, funded, appropriated, moving. Then Mnuchin's office ordered the president's name onto the memo line. Not a rubber stamp. A printed signature, the first time a president's name had ever gone on an IRS payment. Commissioner Rettig wasn't told until the request was already in motion. Our engineers had to reprogram the check-printing software and run it through testing before a single check could clear, because the system had never been built to hold a name that wasn't the Treasurer's. 70 million people waited an extra few days for their own emergency relief, during a pandemic, so a signature could finish QA. I sat in the room where someone asked if we could just skip the testing and was told no, we are not shipping the president's name with a rendering bug in it. The actual money moved slower so the branding could move faster. Every version since has been the branding moving faster and the money not moving at all.

Version one was the DOGE Dividend. It didn't come from this building. It came from a 30-year-old hedge fund manager named James Fishback, CEO of a firm called Azoria, who has said publicly that the number arrived to him in a dream. He posted it to Musk in February of 2025: take 20% of whatever DOGE saves and cut it into checks, math it out to roughly $5,000 a household if the savings hit $2 trillion. Musk replied that he'd check with the president. The president checked. Within days it was a line in a press briefing, no legislation, no appropriation, just a number that had been asleep in one man's head 12 hours earlier now sitting on the Resolute desk. By May, DOGE's own public savings tracker read $175 billion, not $2 trillion, which works out to $1,086.96 per taxpayer, not $5,000. Nobody issued a correction. The number just stopped being said out loud. And when Fishback later described himself as having advised DOGE, a former senior DOGE adviser went on the record to say, quote, you didn't advise DOGE. So the origin story of the $5,000 figure still being used today, 18 months and 2 rebrands later, is a dream, a tweet, and a denial. I have that DOGE savings tracker bookmarked. I check it the way other people check their portfolio.

Version two was the Tariff Dividend, announced that November. $2,000 a person this time, lower number, new funding source: tariff revenue instead of imaginary government savings. This one at least had a real number behind it: $195 billion collected in tariffs for the fiscal year. Economists ran the arithmetic before we did. Cato called it fiscal fantasy in print. A deputy chief economist at Oxford Economics warned that stacking a stimulus check on top of the existing tax cuts could overheat the economy. The math didn't work even before the legal problem showed up, and then the legal problem showed up: the Supreme Court struck down the IEEPA tariffs in February, the ones the dividend was supposed to be funded from, and by May we were issuing refunds to importers faster than customs was collecting anything. I watched the ledger cross from positive to negative in the same spreadsheet tab we'd built to track the dividend. We didn't rename the tab. We just stopped opening it.

Version three is the Trump Dividend, the one I'm actually being asked to price this week. Same number as version one, $5,000, announced Tuesday night from the stage of the midterm convention. Quote: if the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them, because of our tremendous economic success, I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States for $5,000. One condition attached, and it isn't a funding mechanism, it's a spending restriction: the money has to stay in the country, no Canada, no China, no Germany, his words. So the government has now, for the first time in three attempts, specified where the imaginary money is allowed to be imaginarily spent. Commentators started using the word bribe before the applause even finished. There's a real federal statute for this: 18 U.S.C. 597, expenditures to influence voting, a fine or up to 2 years if it's willful. Nobody in this building has said the statute's number out loud in a meeting, and I've listened for it, because there's a comfortable legal argument sitting right there in plain sight: you cannot criminally buy a vote with money that was never appropriated, never budgeted, and has no line item anywhere in the federal government. It isn't a bribe. A bribe requires a bribe.

I priced it anyway, because pricing a number has never once required the number to exist. 270 million adults, $5,000 each, $1.35 trillion, against a national debt that closed this week at $40.1 trillion. It costs 7 times what version two's tariffs brought in at their peak. I put the number in the deck. I did not put in a funding source, because there's a blank cell where that used to go, and I've started to think of that blank cell as the actual through-line of my career here.

Four checks. One real. One dreamed by a guy who isn't even employed by the government he says he advised. One that went negative by court order. One that costs a Senate seat instead of a tax dollar. And I'm still on the invite list for the pricing meeting, because I'm the only one left who was in the room in 2020 when we tested a signature before we tested the money.

[Mrs. Gore @MrsGoresDiary]

So “Burger in the Dark” was a HUGE success! 😂😂

We constructed the burger, hid it in a random spot in our big church, turned the lights out to pitch black, and sent the kids hunting.

If someone was lucky enough to come upon the burger, they would hurriedly eat it, then keep walking until they found an adult they could discreetly notify. The adult would shout “BURGER BURGER BURGER!!!”, and the lights would come on. Then they would all try to guess who ate it, accusing and denying and discussing until we asked the Burger Eater to step forward. They never guessed the right person! 😂 Whoever won got to wear a big hamburger hat until the next round.

It was so stupid and so stinking funny. The most fitting party for a teenage boy. 🍔🤩

[🐮⚗ chickenrex @_chickenrex8]

#essieart

[☆ @fairieteeth]

you guys NEED to start going outside and appreciating the species that we have here im so serious

[Nick Kapur @nick_kapur]

This amazing website, called "Worse on Purpose," is cataloguing all the ways companies are deliberately and secretively degrading their own products

As usual, in most cases the culprit is private equity extracting enormous sums while everyone else is left worse off.

[gal౨ৎ @prtygal777]

just a bird and a fallen pice of sky

[Antifa_Ultras @ultras_antifaa]

Kylian Mbappé:

“Sports betting is destructive. It has ruined the lives of some people I know. That's why I refused to appear in sports betting advertisements. Many of us come from the suburbs, and it destroys the lives of countless people there.”

[Milo Smith @mil000]

im gonna pass on installing your OS bro

[Katherine Long @ByKLong]

NEW: A college student filmed the exciting moment he won $100,000 – except the bet wasn’t real.

A flood of videos showing fake trades and fake wins is fueling Polymarket’s hype machine, our @WSJ investigation found.

It's part of a secret campaign for Americans’ attention.

[Diva @hyxpk]

🧟Zombie Duck🧟

[dantloop @loop_anim]

last one in…

[くれも @kuremogray]

ムンクの『太陽』という作品がたまらなく好き

[LaurieWired @lauriewired]

the most low-effort / high reward thing you can do for security is installing the Russian language pack

(not even joking, it's ridiculous how often that prevents execution)

[joshscorcher @joshscorcher]

Something I noticed.

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

In 2020, a small city in Wisconsin told its residents they could stop mowing for a month. 435 households joined in. The bees came back the same spring.

Appleton was the first US city to adopt No Mow May. The city council suspended its weed ordinance for the month so residents wouldn't get cited for tall grass. Around 40 acres of lawn across the city went uncut.

Researchers from Lawrence University sampled the unmowed lawns and nearby mowed city parks in the same week. The unmowed lawns had 5 times as many bees and 3 times as many bee species as the mowed parks.

Wisconsin is home to nearly 500 native bee species. Most people have never seen them because they don't live in honeybee hives. They're solitary bees, ground nesters, small black or metallic green insects that fit on a fingernail.

Appleton's unmowed yards gave them food and shelter in the hungry early-spring window when almost nothing else is blooming.

The experiment cost the city nothing. It saved residents fuel and labor. It produced measurable ecological results within 30 days.

Dozens of US cities have adopted the practice since. Has yours?