Adam Weinstein

CNBC Lora Kolodny article: Tesla must pay portion of $329 million in damages after fatal Autopilot crash, jury says Key Points A jury in Florida determined that Tesla should be held partly liable for a fatal 2019 Autopilot crash. The company must pay a portion of $329 million in damages to victims and a survivor, including compensatory and punitive damages. Tesla had argued that the driver’s behavior was to blame for the fatal crash, while plaintiffs claimed Tesla’s Autopilot technology was flawed and deceptively marketed.

Elon tweet: "Teslas can drive themselves!"

Two days ago: Tesla has to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for deceptively marketing Autopilot in a way that falsely made people think it could drive the car by itself.

Today: Elon Musk "Teslas can drive themselves!"

A Fight Over a West Point Job Reveals Two Visions of America Under Trump

This story leaves unexplained just why it is that Loomer has the crazily outsized pull with Trump that she does. She's been around for years. But there's not much pre-2024 that wld point to her having THIS much pull. Does not add up. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/u...

Trump’s Tariffs Are Making Money. That May Make Them Hard to Quit.

Trump’s tariffs could be one of the biggest contributors to economic inequality in American history.

The money raised by them will allow Trump to achieve his aim of slashing taxes for the wealthy. Meanwhile the cost of the tariffs will be paid by working people through increased prices.

The rise of AI tools that write about you when you die Families and funeral directors are using AI obituary generators to more efficiently memorialize the dead. What happens when they get it wrong?

New: A few weeks ago, when my father-in-law died, the funeral home asked if we wanted to use AI to write his obituary. So I dug into it and found that it's the biggest new trend in "death care." Tens of thousands of AI obits have been made already. Often the families don't even know wapo.st/4okuxIg

Stupidest possible way to run the economy

A Fight Over a West Point Job Reveals Two Visions of America Under Trump

A conflict between two Americans: one, a West Point grad, combat vet, Rhodes Scholar, expert and academic. The other… a woman banned from Uber because she was too abusive to Muslim drivers.

Guess who wins.

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/u...

A Fight Over a West Point Job Reveals Two Visions of America Under Trump

What a fucking kicker from Greg Jaffe

“Both she and Ms. Loomer were sharing their visions of America. For the moment, Ms. Easterly was the outsider.”

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/u...

Screenshot from Reddit r/BrownU “Does Brown have a rival school? Best comment: The Board of Education

The scream I scrumpt. 💀💀

National Guard member admits giving inmates drugs, phones A New York National Guard member has been arrested on charges of selling contraband to state prison inmates at Collins Correctional Facility in Erie County.

Two Nat'l Guard members, brought in during the NY prison guards' strike, have been arrested after selling drugs, phones, and "possibly razor blades" to incarcerated people, per @timesunion.com. Roughly 3k guard members remain stationed in NY prisons www.timesunion.com/capitol/arti...

This margin is a good reminder that you can transform politics without throwing out all the shitty politicians first.

Elected officials respond to incentives. When incentives change, their behavior changes—for good and for bad.

That's a real load-bearing curiosity gap in that Beast skeet

Claiming dibs on that for a title of the book I write someday

All circuses, no bread

It's gotten so bad that Cillizza political metaphors from 2017 are manifesting as political realities

EXCLUSIVE: Trump White House lawyer wasn't actually an attorney when firm said he represented Andrew Tate Ingrassia was listed as an 'Associate Attorney' on his firm's press release and his own Substack.

Paul Ingrassia went to Cornell, but didn't pass the bar the first time he took it. That didn't stop him (or the firm he worked for) from misrepresenting Ingrassia as a barred attorney. If you see claims that Ingrassia represented Andrew Tate, they are wrong - he had not yet been admitted to the bar.

I remember once astonishing a colleague’s husband when he naively asked why we (historians) couldn’t just look something up on the internet and we had to explain that WE are the ones who find the stuff and add it to the internet

Donor List Suggests Scale of Trump’s Pay-for-Access Operation

"Donor List Suggests Scale of Trump’s Pay-for-Access Operation...many in the crypto business, wrote big checks while seeking favor from the president."

Trump is the most corrupt president in living memory and it's not even close.

Paul Ingrassia (lawyer) - Wikipedia

The guy Trump picked to lead the office that’s now investigating Jack Smith:

— said Niki Haley is ineligible to be president
— has neo-Nazi ties
— was Andrew Tate’s lawyer
— 2x Claremont fellow
— wrote for Gateway Pundit
— called for Pence to be hanged
— called for secession after 2020 election

What did Uncle Luke say? 2 Live Crew rapper’s resurfaced Trump video goes viral Luther ’Uncle Luke’ Campbell made claims about an alleged party hosted by Donald Trump in the 1990s

Back in 2016, Uncle Luke of 2 Live Crew recalled how Donald Trump invited him to a party at Mar-a-Lago with seemingly underage beauty pageant contestants:

Reddit post: I can’t even connect to wifi without getting hate messages from my neighbor The WiFi name: FREE PALESTINE

“antisemitism”

Paul Ingrassia—a 30-year-old former right-wing blogger and newly minted lawyer who was admitted to the bar in 2024—is Trump’s pick to lead the Office of Special Counsel.

Ingrassia has called Jack Smith a “disgusting man,” accused him of “election interference,” and said he should be jailed.

I'm not engaging with the idea that Democrats need a version of *that guy*, but I do wish I was hearing more about how the political forces opposing Trumpism envision a post-Trump restoration of laws and norms and credibility working in practical terms, if at all

“… and is married to a senior local Republican official.”

🙃

I mean, he also suggested that the Bureau of Labor and Statistics Commissioner "rigged" with employment date to make him look bad. (And then he fired her). donmoynihan.substack.com/p/trump-shoo...

Welp!

We have had stable, professional, vouchsafed information about the physical & economic world for so long that we entirely take it for granted. It's going to be truly wild to operate in a world where quite literally no one knows for sure what is happening, where there is no fact of the matter.

"the drainage grates are in the shapes of American flags"

this is a very good and fairly exhaustive piece that should bring one up to speed on the adl’s heel turn.

U.S. job growth turns cold as Trump’s agenda takes its toll on the economy The question for the White House is simple: “If Trump has created a ‘hot’ economy, why has American job growth slowed to a 16-year low?”

Over the first seven months of 2025, the economy has added 597,000 jobs.

Over the first seven months of 2024 — when Trump said the economy was terrible — the total was over 1 million jobs.

www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddo...

Lemme just say if President Bernie Sanders had unilaterally imposed, by executive fiat, hundreds of billions of new taxes, personally browbeat executives about job cuts and investments and then fired the head of BLS, the Chamber of Commerce and the business orgs would not be sitting idly by.