What Caught My Eye forSeptember 2 - 23 (#29)

And if you don’t believe that meta has been particularly good, like what amazes me of the people celebrating this are the same people who are like meta is terrible and we don’t trust them.

And now you have handed them the pen to write the rules of how internet safety for children works across the internet.

This was a fantastic episode going over the recent settlement between Meta and the states’ attorneys general.

You said you were doing fine, but your kids are struggling living at home, or they want to do some of the big milestones, like get engaged, buy a house, but they’re just not there financially.

And when you hear people talk about, well, you know, the younger generation, they just have to pull themselves up from their bootstraps.

Do the math.

That’s what I like to tell people.

Do the math.

It’s not the same.

You like to think it’s the same.

It’s not the same.

All you have to do is look at rent and look at what the minimum wage is.

Rick is refreshingly thoughtful about this stuff.

He says he got where he is now, not just through smart decisions that he made and pensions and investments, but also because of these programs that he and his wife benefited from.

Like Rick got a federal first-time homebuyer’s tax credit.

Well, I looked it up before I called you and said, do they still have that?

No, they don’t have that anymore.

They haven’t had it for years.

There are some homebuyer tax credits still, but the one that Rick got doesn’t exist anymore.

Another thing, Rick’s wife, she got a job that qualified for student loan forgiveness.

People talk about student loan forgiveness as like a sin now, but we had access to that.

I didn’t realize.

It does feel like it’s like a new thing.

I didn’t even know you guys took out loans in the 70s.

I thought college was like $100 a month.

Yeah, well, see, that’s the other thing.

Higher education was cheap.

It’s too easy to just blame the youth, blame the millennials and whatnot as if they’re doing something wrong. They aren’t. The world changed.

My heart goes out to all the Haitians around the country who are dealing with the end of their protected status right now. This was a great podcast talking about what’s going on in Springfield Ohio.

The administration has used the 9/11 toolkit to advance its domestic agenda, too. DHS has become the engine of Mr Trump’s deportation campaign, with thousands of its agents, some of whom worked in counterterrorism, reassigned to immigration enforcement. A presidential directive signed in September 2025 orders the FBI’s terrorism task-forces to track loose, left-wing movements like Antifa, which the administration has labelled “domestic terrorists”. The State Department has designated Antifa’s overseas offshoots as FTOs and pressed allies to follow suit.

We gave the government way too much power after 9/11 and it’s time to take it back.

Diesel is a global market, and if the U.S. pulled its exports out of that market, “you would see global prices for diesel skyrocket,” said Bob McNally, founder and president of Rapidan Energy Group.

That would immediately push prices up on the East and West Coasts, where most diesel is imported. Even though the U.S. produces plenty of diesel, there’s no good way to transport it across the country.

“Now, for a brief period of time, the pump price in Texas and Louisiana and some of the Midwestern states would collapse,” McNally said.

But he said oil refiners would then see their profits collapse, too.

“And in response to that, refiners will reduce their production,” he said.

And reduced production would push prices right back up.

Actions have consequences, I’d like to say we could look past short-term thinking with this, but who am I kidding.