Hal Singer

MD @ EconOne | Prof @EconUofU | ED @ UtahProject | NYTimes: "one expert for the plaintiffs" | Prospect:"preeminent watchdog of The Economist's most wrong takes"

[Daniel Hanley @danielahanley]

On an ITIF webinar, Diana Moss of the euphemistically named Progressive Policy Institute said "Antitrust is…not some broad policy tool to attack myriad political, economic, and social problems." She is flatly wrong. See my two recent remarks for details👇
https://t.co/2cyFlJW2vv

[Hal Singer @halsinger]

Looks like Darren’s thesis—higher fuel costs killed Spirit—is gaining traction in the mainstream media. Sorry antitrust haters. (My account was out of commission when this excellent piece posted.)

[The Sling @TheSlingUtah]

A Spiritless Post Mortem by Darren Bush. No, Biden's DOJ isn't the cause of Spirit's demise. But there's plenty of blame to go around for the state of the airline industry. Darren thanks Hal Singer (whose account is still hacked) for insightful comments.

https://t.co/WpEvnkVRVT

[Matt Zemek @MattZemek]

@halsinger And yet, as @andrewperezdc and @levernews have both reported in various ways, Collins has the worse marital scandal BY FAR. It's so repugnant and disgusting. @nytimes is propagandizing by omission (not covering Collins' scandals and naked corruption).

[Alex Veremeyenko @alex_verem]

This is peak insanity.

Meta just posted $26.8 billion in quarterly profit. Their answer to the worst employee morale in 20 years?

More snacks. Bigger event budgets. A hackathon in July. Assigned desks. That is the plan.

Meanwhile, here's what's actually happening inside the building:
→ 8,000 fired in May. Same month the company reported its most profitable quarter ever.

→ 6,500 engineers got involuntarily transferred via surprise email into a unit they now call "the gulag." Their job: writing coding puzzles and busywork to train AI models. One employee told Wired: "You have zero purpose in life all of a sudden, you barely interact with anyone, you just have these tasks every week."

→ An engineer hijacked a company livestream and told the room to write a senior AI exec and "tell him that he's a piece of s***."

→ 1,600+ employees signed a petition against keystroke and mouse tracking software installed on their laptops. No opt-out. The software was so aggressive it burned through some employees' entire monthly home internet data in days. Protest flyers went up on vending machines and toilet paper dispensers across Meta offices: "Don't want to work at the Employee Data Extraction Factory?"

→ UK employees launched a formal unionization campaign. First in Meta's history.

→ Median compensation dropped from $417,400 to $388,200. Stock raises cut 15% over two years. While cutting engineer pay, Zuckerberg personally recruits AI researchers with $100 million packages.

→ Some employees are now openly hoping to get laid off just to collect the 16 weeks of severance.

→ One Instagram employee put it plainly: "Everyone is unhappy. The only people who are not unhappy are, literally, executives."

Bosworth called his own rollout "atrocious." His word.

The CTO of a $1.5 trillion company looked at what they did to their workforce and said "atrocious."

And his answer was trail mix.

The snack budget tells you everything about how leadership reads this situation. Small enough to fix with perks. Minor enough to smooth over with a memo about "rekindling culture."

But you can't fire 8,000 people, draft 6,500 more into busywork, surveil the survivors, cut everyone's pay, recruit their replacements at 250x their salary, spend $145 billion on AI infrastructure, and then act confused about why the vibe is off.

Employees are literally training the systems designed to make them redundant. While watching their compensation shrink. While their keystrokes get logged. While executives hand out nine-figure signing bonuses to the people building the thing that replaces them.

No hackathon fixes that. No assigned desk fixes that. No snack budget on earth fixes that.

$145 billion for the machines. Doritos for the humans still training them.

[David Sirota @davidsirota]

🚨EXCLUSIVE: @LeverNews interview with Dave Regan - the union leader spearheading the billionaire tax @GavinNewsom & his billionaire pals are trying to block.

Regan says liberal groups' leaders caving to Newsom's bullying are selling out their members.

[Isabella M Weber @IsabellaMWeber]

Almost five years ago I was declared an “unreal economist” for proposing that the return of inflation had something to do with a sharp rise in profit margins.

This was the beginning of a tireless research effort. @EvanWasner and I wrote a paper explaining how emergencies coordinate corporate price hikes causing sellers’ inflation. Our work has been discussed widely and cited by central banks, the IMF and OECD.

Now, Evan just became Dr Wasner with a brilliant dissertation on inflation, critical inputs and inequality.

Could not be prouder of my first ever PhD student graduating! Onwards! 🍾🍾🍾🍾

[Hal Singer @halsinger]

The attacks on Platner from the party's corporatist wing via the mainstream media won't stop. When you can't argue policy, you argue character. Apparently.

[Hal Singer @halsinger]

Here's a recent story by @DylanGyauchL via @theprosect on the funding sources for the abundance movement, including millions from Silicon Valley titans.

https://t.co/oyaGd3gUJZ

[David Dayen @ddayen]

We obtained documents detailing the abundance movement's "capital stack."
It's $260 million/year, including $100 million from former Microsoft CEO/LA Clippers owner Steve Ballmer, who hadn't been listed as an abundance donor before.
https://t.co/Q0iYqtWrwP

[Hal Singer @halsinger]

"Noise pollution [from AI data centers] is regulated at the local level through a thicket of zoning ordinances." Note that zoning rules are constantly under attack by the abundance crowd, presumptively at the behest of AI companies and other developers.

[Elizabeth Warren @ewarren]

BREAKING NEWS: The Senate passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act to build more housing supply and lower costs.

This bill also stops private equity from buying up single-family homes.

[Sandeep Vaheesan @sandeepvaheesan]

1. @openmarkets just filed a brief in CareFirst v. Johnson & Johnson. J&J is accused of maintaining its monopoly over Stelara (a biologic drug used to treat Crohn’s and other autoimmune diseases) through patent misconduct and profiting at the expense of patients and payors.

[Hal Singer @halsinger]

@slyarak Delaware is competing against other states like Nevada and Texas that are willing to drop shareholder protections. It’s a race to the bottom. The solution is a federal law, akin to something Sen. Warren introduced years ago.

[Hal Singer @halsinger]

Just a few days ago, @TheEconomist pronounced that America capitalism was not run by billionaires.

[Hal Singer @halsinger]

You can read the full piece here:

https://t.co/mvVXW6uHMh

[Hal Singer @halsinger]

Fun history here of how Delaware, like Texas and Nevada today, promised companies a safe haven from antitrust laws to induce incorporation in Delaware in 1913. A never-ending race to the bottom among states in terms of enacting protections for investors (now) or consumers (then). The solution is clearly federal legislation.

[Lawprofblawg @lawprofblawg]

Good news? Did you have your merger halted by the Biden Administration? You might be entitled to compensation!

#Satire

[David Dayen @ddayen]

Fox's purchase of Roku gives them a landing spot if cable implodes (as I expect), and could easily be weaponized to restrict competition, surveil on viewers and widen its conservative news dominance. Don't sleep on this.
https://t.co/UuCPCpVquI

[David Dayen @ddayen]

We obtained documents detailing the abundance movement's "capital stack."
It's $260 million/year, including $100 million from former Microsoft CEO/LA Clippers owner Steve Ballmer, who hadn't been listed as an abundance donor before.
https://t.co/Q0iYqtWrwP

[talmon joseph smith @talmonsmith]

my book 'What Can We Afford,' set to pub early '27, is now available on the Simon & Schuster website (+Amazon etc) for preorder

what $ tradeoffs are real? and which are BS or overstated?

this is the uncensored 40k mile roadtrip from Wall St to MT to West Texas of what I found: