Half of America fails money 101, Infected mosquitoes & Concorde's back

Good morning, and grab the coffee — you might need it strong today.

You might notice a slight facelift around here. Love it or hate it, let us know. It's part of a few changes in the works — the podcast, some free ebooks, and more we'll get into next week. For now, just know we're building.

And speaking of things that take suspiciously long to finish — mail-in voting is back in the spotlight. A federal investigation is reportedly underway over alleged "BIG cheating" by Democrats in California, where votes are still trickling in. Counties say they'll keep releasing results for weeks. Or, put another way, until the preferred candidate crosses the finish line. The percentages have moved in some interesting directions since election night.

Make of that what you will.

Jobs came in hot. Employers added 172,000 in May — more than double the 85,000 economists expected. Unemployment held at 4.3%. Turns out the people who predict the economy for a living are still guessing.

Senate Republicans pulled together long enough to advance Trump's roughly $70 billion immigration package, funding ICE and Border Patrol for three and a half years and closing a chapter that began during the longest shutdown in history. The unity didn't last — divisions over the broader agenda were on full display after a marathon vote session.

The $1.8 billion "anti-weaponization" fund is on ice. The DOJ halted work after a federal judge blocked it — and after Republicans in Congress pushed back hard enough to threaten the rest of the GOP agenda. Their own party did the blocking.

Acting AG Todd Blanche says the DOJ stumbled onto a room packed with documents from Jack Smith's Trump investigation. Not officially secret, he claims — just a room nobody knew about.

And Trump had his war powers reined in, much to his irritation.

Americans are voting with their feet. New Census Bureau data shows the highest-tax states are bleeding residents while Southern and Sun Belt states keep posting some of the biggest population gains. The pitch is simple: cheaper housing, lighter taxes, lower cost of living. Los Angeles County alone lost over 54,000 residents in a single year, with billionaires among those packing up for zero-income-tax Florida. One state's exodus is another state's gold rush.

Jamie Dimon came in swinging. The JPMorgan CEO blasted a crypto-friendly bill moving through Congress, demanded that crypto platforms follow bank rules if they take deposits, and called Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong "full of s--t" over his multimillion-dollar lobbying push. He's vowing to fight the bill. Nothing says "threatened" quite like the head of the country's biggest bank picking a public brawl.

Bitcoin closed out a brutal week, sitting roughly 50% below its all-time high. Last time it traded under $60k was September 2024. The diamond hands are getting tested.

It's official — Texas just dethroned California as the country's top home for Fortune 500 companies, leading the 2026 list 57 headquarters to 56. Texas corporations pulled in $2.8 trillion in revenue, edging out California's $2.7 trillion.

Add Samsung to the moving trucks. The electronics giant is relocating more than 1,000 employees from its New Jersey headquarters to Plano, Texas, after just one year in the building. The math isn't subtle: New Jersey carries the highest corporate tax rate in America at 11.5%, plus a personal income tax topping 10.75%. Texas has neither.

The restaurant shuffle continues. Yum Brands is reportedly in talks to sell Pizza Hut to private-equity firm LongRange Capital, while Red Lobster is closing its Times Square location after more than two decades.

Honda is recalling nearly 99,000 Honda and Acura vehicles from 2016 through 2026 over a defect that could fire airbags unexpectedly during a crash.

And Bank of America is hiring — nearly 4,000 summer interns and full-time campus recruits, betting on fresh talent.

Last Week:

We asked for your take on the U.S. government, and the answer was loud — 68% of you went with "Reagan was right, get out of the way and let America run itself." Turns out small government still has a big fan base.

This Week:

The White House lawn is now apparently a venue. Cage fighting on the same grass where treaties get signed — what's your take? 🥊

Global defense budgets are expanding, but the allocation has changed. A growing share of spending is going toward AI-enabled systems, satellite networks, and advanced aerospace, not the platforms that dominated the last generation of procurement. We identified five companies at the center of this reallocation in a single research brief. Inside, you'll find the investment case for each, the contracts driving revenue, and the risks worth understanding before you commit capital. If you want exposure to defense sector growth beyond the traditional mega-caps, this report is a practical starting point. Free, concise, and built for investors who want to move ahead of the crowd.

Read the report

Winners:

American Factories:
Factory activity just hit a four-year high — the third straight month of expansion and the first real manufacturing job growth in three years. No ribbon-cutting, just machines running and people working.

Spencer Pratt:
The "Hills" star turned outsider looks like (mail-in voting results pending) forcing LA Mayor Karen Bass into a November runoff — a registered Republican in a city barely 20% GOP, backed by Paris Hilton, Joe Rogan, and Kristin Cavallari. Even Seattle's progressive mayor admits he's right on drugs fueling homelessness. When that side agrees, you've struck a nerve.

Losers:

John Bolton:
Trump's former advisor turned nemesis is set to plead guilty to one count of illegally retaining classified documents — down from 18. The deal reportedly carries a $2 million fine and up to 60 months in prison. The hawk got clipped.

FIFA (Again):
The lawsuits are stacking up. FIFA is accused of colluding with resale platforms to offload seats at low-demand World Cup games — after warning fans not to buy from resellers. Do as they say, not as they do.

This week's closing thoughts came out of a video from the UK, not the US — and fair warning, it's a hard watch. More than any political angle, this is a story about humanity failing at the most basic level. Watch the background below, then meet us at the end, where we lay out both sides and ask where you land.

A criminal complaint says NIH researchers Vincent Munster, 53, and Claude Kwe, 38, flew into Detroit from the Republic of Congo — mid-mpox outbreak — with a large black case. Munster allegedly denied carrying any biological materials, claiming it held testing equipment. Inspectors found 113 vials in foam coolers, some holding deactivated mpox virus, chickenpox virus, and human DNA — none declared. The two face up to five years in prison.

Translation: The "trust the experts" crowd left out the part where the experts pack their own coolers.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier sued OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, alleging the company's chatbots were unsafe and that it ignored the harms to users. The complaint claims OpenAI's $850 billion rise rests on "a web of deceit" and an "insatiable quest to win the AI arms race" — including rushing the GPT-4o launch to beat Google, with Altman personally overruling his own safety staff.

Translation: Move fast and break things works great, right up until the thing you break is the customer.

Thomas Diana, who owns a small eight-unit building in Park Slope, says he's spent nearly a decade and up to $325,000 in unpaid rent and legal fees trying to remove one tenant. She moved in back in 2014 as a live-in companion through a Craigslist ad; that resident died in 2016, and the courts have delayed resolution ever since. Diana calls it a "Twilight Zone."

Translation: Nine years, a six-figure hole, and a college fund gone — and the system calls that due process.

A TIAA survey found that 51% of U.S. adults failed a set of basic personal finance questions across eight categories. The number's barely moved in nine years — literacy has topped 50% only twice since 2017. All while costs climb and the margin for a money mistake keeps shrinking.

Translation: They cut the home-ec class and kept the one where you memorize the mitochondria.

Alphabet, Google's parent company, is seeking federal approval to deploy 32 million modified mosquitoes a year across California and Florida starting next year — 64 million total over the two-year program. The plan is to infect males — which don’t bite — with a bacteria called Wolbachia, which effectively renders them sterile. They are then released to seek out wild females and mate. Females will lay eggs but these won’t hatch, which experts say drives down the population over time. Critics are calling it one of the largest open-air biological experiments in U.S. history, and they want it stopped before it starts.

Translation: "Don't be evil" apparently didn't come with a clause about the bugs.

Daniel McLaughlin, owner of Mission Taqueria in Philadelphia, is adding a 20% service charge to every check ahead of the 500,000-plus visitors expected for the World Cup and America's 250th. The reasoning: foreign tourists unfamiliar with American tipping shouldn't get to treat his staff like a "cheap date," especially with Pennsylvania's tipped base wage at $2.83 an hour. He'd rather his team share in the volume than spend the summer explaining gratuity culture.

Translation: When the tip is mandatory, it's not a tip — it's just the price with extra steps.

Researchers asked ChatGPT to find candidates for fictional roles and found a clear tilt toward younger applicants. Told an "employer" wanted enthusiasm and fresh ideas, it suggested ages 21–45 and never mentioned anyone older. The Lead researcher warns that as AI spreads into hiring, that built-in bias could become widespread age discrimination at work.

Translation: Decades of experience, gone in a prompt — turns out the machine ages you out faster than the mirror does.

For nearly 30 hours, BART riders couldn't load money onto their Clipper cards — the fare system, run by Cubic Transportation Systems, was effectively dead. The cause, per Cubic's own COO: an unpaid AT&T bill on an account the company didn't even realize it had. Commuters across the Bay Area got the delays; Cubic got the embarrassment.

Translation: They can track every tap, swipe, and trip you take — but somehow lost the envelope marked "AT&T."

NASA's $247 million X-59 is gearing up for its first supersonic test flight, aiming for Mach 1.6 — about 1,218 mph, fast enough to fly London to New York in under four hours. The twist: instead of Concorde's window-rattling sonic boom, the X-59 is engineered to produce a soft "thump." After months of test flights since its October debut, NASA is now prepping it to break the sound barrier.

Translation: Twenty years after we grounded the last one, the government's quietly rebuilding the future we already had.

A group of Indiana players thought they'd hit $100,000 on the Hoosier Lottery's new $5 Space Invaders Cash Invasion scratch-off — the kind of ticket that ends the daily grind. Then came the "technical glitch." The tickets were printed with winning combinations the lottery says don't actually count, and the game's been pulled from shelves entirely.

Translation: Heads they win, tails you lose — and apparently the house gets a do-over too.

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May CPI Inflation Report
Wednesday, June 10
The Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the May Consumer Price Index. April ran hot at 3.8% year-over-year and 0.6% on the month.
Why You Should Care: This print lands one week before the Fed meets. A hot number kills the case for a rate cut — and your grocery bill already knows the answer.

Flag Day, the Army's Birthday & Trump's 80th
Sunday, June 14
Three milestones on one day: Flag Day, the Army's 251st birthday, and Trump's 80th — one year after tanks rolled down Constitution Avenue.
Why You Should Care: A rare convergence of the flag, the founding, and the world's most powerful Army sharing one candle — and a reminder, weeks out from the 250th, that the experiment is still running.

2026 FIFA World Cup Kicks Off
Thursday, June 11
The first 48-team World Cup opens with Mexico vs. South Africa in Mexico City. The U.S. plays Paraguay June 12 in LA. Runs through the July 19 final in New Jersey, across 16 host cities.
Why You Should Care: The biggest sporting event ever on American soil — 104 matches, three countries, a month of soccer. And after those resale-ticket lawsuits, fans will be watching how FIFA runs it as closely as the games.

The footage is hard to argue with. An 18-year-old college student, Henry Nowak, lay on a street in the UK, stabbed five times, telling police he couldn't breathe. Nine times, by his father's count. His killer stood a few feet away, claiming he was the real victim of a racist attack. The officers took the standing man at his word and cuffed the bleeding one. "Don't think you have, mate," one told Nowak. By the time they started CPR, it was too late. The court later ruled the killer made the racism up entirely. He recently got a life sentence.

So Britain is asking the obvious question, and it is worth asking here too: are police now grading victimhood on a curve?

Yes, it's real: The man claiming racism was believed instantly. The kid bleeding out was not. Critics say officers have been trained to fear the word "racist" more than they fear getting an emergency wrong — and that flinch killed a teenager. Even the local police commissioner admitted the response raised serious concerns about impartiality, fairness, and judgment. When your own people concede that, it's not paranoia.

No, it's one tragedy: You can't build a theory of systemic bias on a single catastrophic screwup. The killer lied convincingly, and chaotic scenes breed bad calls. Tellingly, Nowak's own father refused to make it about race — he wanted safer streets, not "further division, hatred or tension." Turning a dead teenager into a culture-war trophy lets the real failure — basic neglect — walk free.

Our take, for what it's worth: strip the politics and you're left with something darker than any policy fight. A teenager said he couldn't breathe, and the people paid to help wouldn't look. That's not left or right. That's a broken human instinct.

And that's what scares us. The division didn't grow by accident — politicians profit from it, the media feeds on it, and now it's showing up in everyday life, here and abroad. When people stop seeing a dying kid and start seeing a side, something has come loose. Where does it end?

That's the one we can't answer. So we're asking you — two-tier policing, real or the wrong lens entirely? Hit reply. We read every one.