Author: sts
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The Spreadsheet They Voted to Stop Keeping
Notes from the Field — July 27, 2026 For sixty years, if you were a Black manager passed over for promotion or a pregnant worker quietly sidelined, there was one place your suspicion could go looking for company: a federal spreadsheet. Every company with a hundred or more employees had to report, once a year,…
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The Floor Fell Out
Block 9, Article 4 — The Destruction Was Complete Before Most Newsrooms Understood It Local newspapers did not die because people stopped wanting local news. They died because the business model that paid for it was destroyed by companies that had no interest in news at all — and the destruction was complete before most…
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The Clock That Restarts Itself
Notes from the Field — July 30, 2026 Congress gave itself a clock in 1973. It runs sixty days. If a president sends troops into hostilities without a declaration of war, the clock starts, and when it runs out, the troops are supposed to come home unless Congress says otherwise. That’s the whole idea. Not…
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The Fine Is the Product
Block 9, Article 3 — Not Prevented From Knowing. Kept Comfortable Enough Not to Need To. In 2019 the Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook $5 billion for privacy violations. It was the largest fine in FTC history. It was also, by any reasonable measure, a successful business transaction for Facebook. The company had been expecting…
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The Company That Owns the Wake Word
Notes from the Field — July 16, 2026 On July 16, the European Commission ordered Google to open eleven features of the Android operating system — the ones Gemini uses to listen for its wake word, read a user’s screen, and act inside other apps — to any competing AI assistant that wants them. Before…
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The Rent Stopped
Block 9, Article 2 — The Wolfman No Longer Needed Mexico Steve Sagnotti · thebrokenframes.substack.com In 1963 a disc jockey named Bob Smith took a job at a radio station just across the Rio Grande from Del Rio, Texas. XERF broadcast at 250,000 watts — five times the legal American maximum. At night the signal…
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No One Left to Ask
Notes from the Field — July 23, 2026 On July 21 and 22, within a day of each other, two federal agencies stopped doing something they’d each done for decades: counting, and asking. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission voted 2-1 to stop requiring the roughly 73,000 employers who file it — companies with 100 or…
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Two Warnings
Block 9, Article 1 — A Republic, if You Can Keep It Philadelphia, September 17, 1787. The Constitutional Convention has ended. Benjamin Franklin makes his way to the home of Elizabeth Powel, one of the city’s most prominent political hostesses, where the delegates have gathered. She asks him what they’ve built. He answers in five…
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The Empty Room
Block 8, Article 10 — Eliminated to Save Less Than Two Congressional Offices Congress once had its own independent scientific body — and eliminated it to save less than the cost of two congressional offices. In 1972 Representative Chuck Mosher stood on the House floor and said out loud what every member already knew: “Let…
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The Manufactured Doubt
Block 8, Article 9 — Doubt Is Our Product Your uncertainty about climate science, vaccine safety, or pesticide risk may have been manufactured by the same people who spent thirty years telling you cigarettes were safe. Not misinformed. Not confused by complexity. Manufactured. The uncertainty you carry on a dozen settled scientific questions was produced…
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