Starting soon @naleoofficial.bsky.social: I'll be talking about the soaring costs of data center tax breaks and how communities can help ensure the best deals for their residents if a data center does come to town. Come on down! #DataCenters #NALEO

Excited to be joined at #IRE26 by a cracker jack group of reporters sharing tips on covering the growing corporate influence. Learn how to dig into behavior and relationships, even when you're on deadline. Join us Thurs, June 18 at 2:30 p.m.! And don't forget to stop by the @goodjobsfirst.org table!

We used to wait in a line at the ticket office. Now we bid on our phones. The cheapest World Cup opener tickets would cost the average family the equivalent of 7 months of health care premiums. @lindsayowens.bsky.social on how dynamic pricing turned buying a ticket into an auction.

Why FIFA’s 2026 World Cup is such a rip-off

The price of watching live sport in the U.S. has shifted - and the World Cup is taking full advantage of the landscape

nytimes.com

Georgia spent about $1.69 a day per person in prison in 2024, and has proposed to spend $1.60 a day in 2027 — less than $.60 per meal. The Food and Drug Administration’s “thrifty plan” estimates that feeding an adult man “a nutritious, practical, cost-effective diet” costs about $10 per day.

Rats, Insects and Mold: How Bad Food Leaves Prisoners Hungry and Sick

Georgia spends about 60 cents per meal for prisoners. One man described it as ‘Being hungry all the time, and being fed slop.’

themarshallproject.org

‪It's 95 degrees in Cambridge today. If you can't imagine spending time outside, imagine being a worker on a shift with no heat standards at your outdoor job. It's dangerous and it's preventable. Check out our latest report with @groundwork.bsky.social clje.law.harvard.edu/extreme-heat...

Extreme Heat is Killing America’s Workers - Center for Labor and a Just Economy

A report from Groundwork Collaborative, Workshop, and Center for Labor and a Just Economy outlines a coordinated campaign by corporations,…

clje.law.harvard.edu

It's not too late to apply! Looking forward to being part of this amazing conference.

UCLA IRLE@uclairle.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Announcing three sessions for the 2026 Strategic Labor Research Conference 📣 From analyzing ICE’s local consequences to uncovering hidden public subsidies, this lineup offers practical skills for researchers. 🚨 Applications close May 15 📝 Apply and learn more: irle.ucla.edu/research/ucl...

🚨NEW ANALYSIS🚨 14 states and scores of localities fail to disclose how much revenue they lose to data center tax breaks. Yet such losses are known to be soaring in states that do disclose, with three states already losing $1 billion or more per year. 🧵 goodjobsfirst.org/data-center-...

NEW: At least 88 corporations paid $0 in federal income tax in 2025. That's despite collectively earning more than $105 billion in U.S. income. The list includes Tesla, Palantir, Live Nation Entertainment, Coinbase, United Airlines, Walt Disney, and more. itep.org/88-profitabl...

At Least 88 Profitable U.S. Corporations Paid Zero Federal Income Tax in 2025

At least 88 of the largest corporations in America paid $0 in federal income tax for 2025. Corporate tax avoidance has increased at least in part due to President Trump's “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” ...

itep.org

"Like Musk, Jack Dorsey, and Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman has benefited greatly from a U.S. tech press pathologically obsessed with mythologizing terrible white men with a lot of money." - @karlbode.com:

Rob Sheridan@rob-sheridan.com · 4mo ago

The story of our age is billionaire narcissist men who are widely known to be frauds or creeps within their industries but are allowed to destroy the world in plain sight because American media & business view rich confidently-speaking white men through an infinitely-forgiving lens of merit.

Gosh, if only there was 50 years of research on this subject, which had reached a definitive conclusion that public stadiums are universally awful public investments....

Hillsborough County previously identified $2.6B worth of roads, sewers, etc. to use Community Reinvestment Tax funds on — meaning diverting $437m to a Rays stadium could require cutting back on building actual public infrastructure.

Rays stadium votes pushed back to May, as questions grow about sales tax surcharge

While it's way too early to say that Tampa Bay Rays owner Patrick Zalupski's plans for a new stadium on the current cite of Hillsborough College's Dale Mabry Campus are in trouble, the approval proces...

fieldofschemes.com

Virginia’s sales and use tax exemption for the data centers that fuel the AI industry’s huge windfalls for billionaires are now costing the state’s public school students $212 per year. @goodjobsfirst.org goodjobsfirst.org/virginias-da...

I have a lot to say on the positives of these mass scale peaceful protests. They can not be the only action, but they're important pillars. They're high visibility, can give us all an energy boost, can foster new connections, and are excellent entry points for people who want to start taking action.

Greg Pak@gregpak.net · 4mo ago

Hot take: No Kings is good and if you have the time and capacity, you should go to a protest on Saturday.

-The cases found a way around Section 230 -Juries are more willing to sanction social media than judges -the general public has soured on social media -states are responding to this & demanding structural remedies A big multidistrict litigation heads to trial in August. prospect.org/2026/03/26/s...

Social Media’s Endgame Moment - The American Prospect

Even users don’t like it. So when you ask juries to render verdicts, they’re inclined to punish the platforms.

prospect.org

NEW: Our study discovers that companies boost their profits up to 200% by making it harder for you to cancel subscriptions. Your exhaustion & frustration is what makes these companies profitable. @julianakaplan.bsky.social breaks it down & how it's costing us $165B a year in wasted time & money.

Companies are making it exhausting to cancel, get help, or get your money. They profit when you give up.

Companies are making customer service experiences more exhausting. A new report calls it the "annoyance economy" and it costs Americans $165 billion.

businessinsider.com

this particular CEO routinely says all kinds of things that don't mean shit! Now I don't pretend to be a Pulitzer winner, but I think if you're doing even baseline actual journalism you might want to include that as useful context for a reader.

Reminds me of the infuriating Boeing 737 MAX saga, in which the sole person actually prosecuted was the guy in charge of the simulators, which weren't even the problem, it was cheap, lazy engineering. Not one executive even indicted. Boeing itself got a tidy DOJ agreement.

Jesse Felder@jessefelder.com · 5mo ago

‘While state and federal prosecutors have sent record numbers of people to prison for violent crimes and property- and drug-related offenses, the US retreated from prosecuting and punishing white-collar crime, despite a tsunami of elite-level wrongdoing.’ www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

An Uber-backed group has poured more than $8 million into supporting Gov. Hochul's insurance deregulation push. The big cash drop includes an ad with "testimonials" by New York drivers who were mostly professional actors, Streetsblog found. nyc.streetsblog.org/2026/03/13/h...

Hired Actors, Paid Media: Big Tech Has Already Dumped $8M Into Hochul's Car Insurance Ploy - Streetsblog New York City

Buckets of cash and ads with professional actors are boosting Uber and Hochul's cause.

nyc.streetsblog.org

Marimar Martinez was shot five times by a Border Patrol agent. Her lawyer believes that her case should be studied as a “playbook” for D.H.S. violence. “She’s one of the few people who has survived the bullets and can speak out,” he said. newyorkermag.visitlink.me/j0manC

The Preschool Teaching Assistant Shot by Border Patrol, Then Called a “Domestic Terrorist”

When Marimar Martinez was shot five times by a Border Patrol agent, the D.H.S. justified it by calling her a “domestic terrorist.” In the aftermath, she’s been trying to recover her reputation and, with it, a sense of reality.

newyorkermag.visitlink.me

it's quite surreal how we've completely normalized the fact that a good 70% of our business, political, and tech press exists exclusively to blow smoke up the ass of the wealthy, creating elaborate mythologies for otherwise unremarkable people

The truth is, modest tax increases on millionaires won’t change their lifestyles. But the revenue can make a real difference for working families who rely on public services every day. Fair taxes help build rich, free, & stable communities and economies. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/11/n...

Raise Taxes on the Rich? These Rich New Yorkers Are All for It.

nytimes.com

Do higher taxes cause millionaires to flee? Patriotic Millionaire Craig Kaplan doesn't think so.⬇️ “I can’t imagine anybody who has that kind of income would leave New York over a $20,000 tax increase. It would mean absolutely nothing for me.”

A recent industry piece in @pilotonline.com argues Virginia must preserve its data center tax breaks to protect its “competitive edge.” But if lawmakers stop subsidizing some of the world’s richest companies, will data center companies really flee? The tl;dr: No. goodjobsfirst.org/virginias-da...

Imagine the reaction in the US if ~175 schoolgirls had been killed by a targeted Iranian missile. (Or anyone's missile.) This is an atrocity.

Gregg Levine@greggjlevine.bsky.social · 5mo ago

The Iranian girls’ school was hit by a US tomahawk cruise missile. NPR has confirmed the footage.

Excellent point, Utah resident Lionel Trepanier: “This is real. This is people’s lives. The choices are being made between, what? Childhood and maternity care and giving a subsidy to the biggest oil producer in Utah?” www.utahinvestigative.org/tax-credit-f...

Remember that Kristi Noem created a bottleneck at FEMA by demanding personal approval of large contracts, but fast-tracked relief for a Florida tourist attraction after a contributor to her campaign made a call.

Kristi Noem Fast-Tracked Millions in Disaster Aid to Florida Tourist Attraction After Campaign Donor Intervened

The DHS chief has been widely criticized for slowing down FEMA’s response after natural disasters. Texts and emails obtained by ProPublica point to an effective way to get help faster: have one of Noe...

propublica.org

Please: LLMs do not 'hallucinate'. They provide incorrect information. They produce erroneous outputs. They don't have any intentionality, or consciousness. This metaphor is becoming increasingly unhelpful.

I'm moderating a panel at NICAR this week! Come hear @allanlasser.com, @elizabethrenter.bsky.social, @arlenemartinez.bsky.social and I talk about careers and finding your niche in news or news-adjacent roles. Stop by, say hi and bring your questions! schedules.ire.org/nicar-2026/#...

You paid more for a water at the airport than Southwest Airlines paid in federal income taxes last year. Because they paid $0.