On Monday stocks plummeted again following President Trump’s tariff announcements last week. For a brief moment, they dramatically shot back up following reports that Trump was considering a 90-day pause in tariffs. But, that turned out to be false, and people have been trying to find out where the idea that there would be a 90-day pause actually came from.
A company called Benzinga carried the headline “Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett Says Trump Is Considering A 90-Day Pause in Tariffs For All Countries Except China,” according to what appears to be a screenshot of the headline posted to Bluesky.
Benzinga itself is now blaming posts on X for the market-moving mistake.
In response to an emailed request for comment, Steve Krause, chief of news operations for Benzinga Pro, told 404 Media that the company issued this note:
“Benzinga Note: Market continues to be volatile after the White House Calls Hassett Tariff Headline 'Fake News' Amid Numerous Tariff Developments from EU, China. Hassett was misquoted by numerous X accounts and sources as indicating that Trump was considering a 90-day pause in tariffs.”
On Saturday Elon Musk sat in his personal jet and tested out Starlink’s in-air WiFI by streaming some Path of Exile 2. Less than five minutes into the stream, someone in game chat asked him to “jerk off mr trump so he dies of a heart attack!” For the next hour and 40 minutes, the world’s richest man frowned his way through a livestream while people yelled at him.
Path of Exile 2 is an action role-playing game and Musk loves it, but he’s terrible at it. He has claimed he’s one of the top players in the world and later admitted he’s paid people to help keep his account leveled up and full of the high-end gear it needs to play the game at the highest level.
Over the weekend, in his jet, he was playing the game in hard core mode. When a player dies in this mode they cannot progress any further. Essentially, players have one life. Musk died a lot. The stream’s entire vibe was fucked. This is the richest man in the world sitting in a private jet playing a game by himself for an audience of strangers while techno music blasted through the speakers. Streaming on a platform he owns using technology he owns in a jet he owns, he sat stone-faced and grinded his way through the early portions of Path of Exile 2 while other players yelled at him.
It’s the first Monday after Donald Trump started implementing his so-called “reciprocal tariffs” and the markets are seeing red. At the time of writing the S&P 500, Dow, and Nasdaq are all down around four percent with the latter taking the hardest hit. And that’s on top of the S&P 500’s 10 percent fall last week. Things can still change quickly, and it’s up to historians to decide what to call Trump’s decision to push the economy off a cliff when they write their history books, but Wikipedia editors, who are arguably writing one of the first drafts of history, have already called it the “2025 stock market crash.”
“At the beginning of Donald Trump's second term, he was inaugurated inheriting a particularly strong domestic stock market,” the top section of the Wikipedia article titled “2025 stock market crash” reads. “Whilst this was maintained for a period of a few weeks after his inauguration, the Trump administration began making and announcing increasingly aggressive trade policies in an attempt to practice protectionism and economic pressure, including heightening previous trade wars, starting new trade wars, heavy tariffs, and increasing tensions with allies; most prominently, Canada. As the administration continued to practice these policies, markets began to experience continued turbulence, volatility, and general uncertainty.”
While the current title of the article definitely calls it a stock market crash, it is, like every Wikipedia article, subject to change depending on how editors continue interpreting events. The article currently includes two disclaimers. The first notes that it “may be affected by a current event,” and the “article may change rapidly as the event progresses.” The second notes that there is a pending request from some editors to change the article title to “2025 stock market decline.”
“The suggested renaming is just a placeholder,” one editor who wants to call it a “decline” said in the “talk” page where Wikipedia editors debate the decision. “I cannot find many reliable sources describing this as a "crash", at least not yet. A crash is generally considered to be a fall of >20%.[1] Most indices are bubbling around 9–10%; it is certainly contentious to label it a crash.”
The talk page for the Wikipedia article shows that previously there were two Wikipedia pages for the current economic turmoil caused by Trump’s tariffs, one titled “stock market crash” and the other titled “stock market decline.” Editors agreed to merge the articles, and at least for now keep the “crash” title.
Although there is no definition of a stock market crash it's generally accepted an “‘abrupt double-digit percentage drop in a stock index over the course of a few days’” is a crash (which both have happened),” the editor said, citing Investopedia. “Also this is a really big crash, the last time the smp was at 5000 points was in April of 2024, meaning a year of progress has been wiped out in 48 hours. My personal stock portfolio dropped by 25%. But with that being said it might be better to change the title of the article to something like April 2025 stock market crash as there might be a bigger crash later.”
Just because Wikipedia says something doesn’t necessarily mean it’s fact. It’s a crowdsourced repository that ultimately reflects what Wikipedia editors decide. But it’s also one of the most useful and reliable repositories of information humanity has created, which feeds Google and countless other tools on the internet, and at the very least it reflects a prevailing point of view on what Trump did to the global economy.
In 2018, I spent two days at Facebook’s Menlo Park campus doing back-to-back on-the-record interviews with executives who worked on the company’s content policy teams. This was after we had published article after article exposing the many shortcomings of Facebook’s rules, based on internal guidebooks that were leaked to Joseph. We learned, for example, that Facebook would sometimes bend its rules to comply with takedown requests from governments that were threatening to block the service in their country, that Facebook had drawn an impossible-to-define difference between “white supremacy,” “white nationalism,” and “white separatism” that didn’t stand up to any sort of scrutiny, and that it had incredibly detailed rules about when it was allowable to show a Photoshopped anus on the platform.
After months of asking for interviews with its top executives, Facebook’s public relations team said that, instead, I should fly to Menlo Park and sit in on a series of meetings about how the rules are made, how the team dealt with difficult decisions, how third party stakeholders like civil liberties groups are engaged, and how particularly difficult content decisions were escalated to Sheryl Sandberg.
One of the people I interviewed while at Facebook headquarters was Guy Rosen, who was then Facebook’s head of product and is now its chief information security officer. I interviewed Rosen about how it could be possible that Facebook had failed so terribly at content moderation in Myanmar that it was being credibly accused of helping to facilitate the genocide of the Rohingya people. What Rosen told me shocked me at the time, and is something that I think about often when I write about Facebook. Rosen said that Facebook’s content moderation AI wasn’t able to parse the Burmese language because it wasn’t a part of Unicode, the international standard for text encoding. Besides having very few content moderators who knew Burmese (and no one in Myanmar), Facebook had no idea what people were posting in Burmese, and no way to understand it: “We still don’t know if it’s really going to work out, due to the language challenges,” Rosen told me. This was in 2018; Facebook had been operating in Myanmar for seven years and had at that time already been accused of helping to facilitate this human rights catastrophe.
Posters that were hanging at Facebook HQ in 2018. Image: Jason Koebler
My time at Facebook was full of little moments like this. I had a hard time squaring the incredibly often thoughtful ways that Facebook employees were trying to solve incredibly difficult problems with the horrendous outcomes we were seeing all over the world. Posters around HQ read “REDUCE CLICKBAIT,” “DEPOLARIZE,” “REDUCE MISINFO,” and “UNSHIP HATE.” Yet much of what I saw on Facebook at the time and to this day are, well, all of those things. Other posters talked about having respect for employees, as I wrote about a workforce that was largely made up of low-wage contractors around the world whose job was to look at terrorism videos, hate speech, graphic sexual content, etc. When I asked a Facebook executive about what it was doing to support the mental health needs of its content moderators and to help them deal with PTSD, the Facebook executive in charge of content moderator training at the time told me that they had designed “actual physical environments” in its offices where traumatized employees could “just kind of chillax or, if you want to go play a game, or if you want to just walk away, you know, be by yourself.”
The biggest question I had for years after this experience was: Does Facebook know what it’s actually doing to the world? Do they care?
In the years since, I have written dozens of articles about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, have talked to dozens of employees, and have been leaked internal documents and meetings and screenshots. Through all of this, I have thought about the ethics of working at Facebook, namely the idea that you can change a place that does harm like this “from the inside,” and how people who work there make that moral determination for themselves. And I have thought about what Facebook cares about, what Mark Zuckerberg cares about, and how it got this way.
Mostly, I have thought about whether there is any underlying tension or concern about what Facebook is doing and has done to the world; whether its “values,” to the extent a massive corporation has values, extend beyond “making money,” “amassing power,” “growing,” “crushing competition,” “avoiding accountability,” and “stopping regulation.” Basically, I have spent an inordinate amount of time wondering to myself if these people care about anything at all.
Careless People, by Sarah Wynn-Williams, is the book about Facebook that I didn’t know I had been waiting a decade to read. It’s also, notably, a book that Facebook does not want you to read; Wynn-Williams is currently under a gag order from a third-party arbitrator that prevents her from promoting or talking about the book because Facebook argued that it violates a non-disparagement clause in her employment contract.
Wynn-Williams worked at Facebook between 2011 and 2017, rising to become the director of public policy, a role she originally pitched as being Facebook’s “diplomat,” and ultimately became a role where she did a mix of setting up meetings between world leaders and Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, determined the policy and strategy for these meetings, and flew around the world meeting with governments trying to prevent them from blocking Facebook.
The reason the book feels so important and cathartic is because, as a memoir, it does something that reported books about Facebook can’t quite do. It follows Wynn-Williams’ interior life as she recounts what drew her to Facebook (the opportunity to influence politics at a global scale beyond what she was able to do at the United Nations), the strategies and acts she made for the company (flying to Myanmar by herself to meet with the junta to get it unblocked there, for example), and her discoveries and ultimate disillusionment with the company as she goes on what often feels like repeated Veep-like quests to get Mark Zuckerberg to take interactions with world leaders seriously, to engineer a “spontaneous” interaction with Xi Jinping, to get him or Sandberg to care about the role Facebook played in getting Trump and other autocrats elected.
Facebook HQ. Image: Jason Koebler
She was in many of the rooms where big decisions were made, or at least where the fallout of many of Facebook’s largest scandals were discussed. If you care about how Facebook has impacted the world at all, the book is worth reading for the simple reason that it shows, repeatedly, that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook as a whole Knew. About everything. And when they didn’t know but found out, they sought to minimize or slow play solutions.
Yes, Facebook lied to the press often, about a lot of things; yes, Internet.org (Facebook’s strategy to give “free internet to people in the developing world) was a cynical ploy at getting new Facebook users; yes, Facebook knew that it couldn’t read posts in Burmese and didn’t care; yes, it slow-walked solutions to its moderation problems in Myanmar even after it knew about them; yes, Facebook bent its own rules all the time to stay unblocked in specific countries; yes, Facebook took down content at the behest of China then pretended it was an accident and lied about it; yes, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg intervened on major content moderation decisions then implied that they did not. Basically, it confirmed my priors about Facebook, which is not a criticism because reporting on this company and getting anything beyond a canned statement or carefully rehearsed answer from them over and over for years and years and years has made me feel like I was going crazy. Careless People confirmed that I am not.
It has been years since Wynn-Williams left Facebook, but it is clear these are the same careless people running the company. When I wonder if the company knows that its platforms are being taken over by the worst AI slop you could possibly imagine, if it knows that it is directly paying people to flood these platforms with spam, if it knows it is full of deepfakes and AI generated content of celebrities and cartoon characters doing awful things, if it knows it is showing terrible things to kids. Of course it does. It just doesn’t care.
Throughout the book, Wynn-Williams grapples with the morality of what she’s being asked to do, and whether it feels ethical for her to be doing it at all. This is her book, of course, and she generally comes off as someone fighting to do the right thing at a company that often did not do the right thing. But even this retrospective introspection hit hard for me; Wynn-Williams is a funny, colorful, and sometimes heartbreaking writer. She writes about staying at Facebook even as she’s treated terribly and asked to do horrible things following a near-death health emergency she suffered during childbirth because she needs the health insurance, she talks about sexual harassment she says she endured from her boss and Sheryl Sandberg, and about being fired after reporting it.
It is obvious why Facebook doesn’t want people to read this book. No one comes out looking good, but they come out looking exactly like we thought they were.
Situated high above Newport Beach in Sydney, Australia, LA Cool is a outdoor living space that completes the original vision of Newport House, a 2015 project by Carter Williamson Architects. This addition transforms the property into a seamless blend of indoor and outdoor luxury, creating an environment that feels equally inviting throughout all seasons. Designed with a deep understanding of the coastal landscape and inspired by the sleek, understated elegance of Californian modernism, LA Cool celebrates natural beauty while enhancing functionality and comfort for year-round enjoyment.
The project embodies the essence of indoor-outdoor living – a concept synonymous with the laid-back lifestyle of the Southern California coast. Drawing influence from iconic mid-century designs that emerged in Palm Springs and Los Angeles during the 1950s and 60s, the space adopts the philosophy of creating fluid transitions between indoor and outdoor areas. Just like the low-slung, minimalist pavilions that dotted the Californian landscape, LA Cool prioritizes openness, blurring the boundaries between home and nature.
These iconic Californian designs, pioneered by architects such as Richard Neutra and Pierre Koenig, emphasized simple, geometric forms and expansive glass walls that dissolved the line between indoors and outdoors. Similarly, LA Cool channels this spirit with its open-plan design and expansive pavilion that invites the surrounding landscape into the living space. Positioned to maximize panoramic views of Newport Beach and Pittwater, the addition takes full advantage of its elevated position, offering breathtaking vistas that become an integral part of everyday life.
The design pays homage to the principles of California modernism by embracing a minimalist aesthetic that prioritizes clean lines and simplicity. The pavilion’s low-profile structure allows it to sit unobtrusively within its coastal surroundings, ensuring the focus remains on the breathtaking 180-degree views that envelop the site. By using a pure, natural material palette that mirrors the existing Newport House, LA Cool maintains a balance between indoor and outdoor spaces, reinforcing a sense of cohesion.
A hallmark of LA Cool is its adaptable pavilion, meticulously crafted to suit the ever-changing Australian climate. Unlike traditional outdoor spaces that are limited to summer use, this pavilion offers both covered and uncovered sections, ensuring it remains functional and comfortable regardless of the season. A series of strategically placed skylights punctuate the roof, flooding the space with natural light while maintaining a sense of openness and connection to the outdoors.
Equipped with thoughtful amenities, LA Cool transforms outdoor living into a year-round experience. A cozy fireplace warms the pavilion during cooler months, creating an inviting atmosphere perfect for gathering with family and friends. Meanwhile, the fully equipped outdoor kitchen, complete with a woodfire pizza oven, encourages leisurely al fresco dining.
The selection of materials, including natural stone, timber, and neutral hues, reflects a deep respect for the surrounding landscape. These elements echo the tactile qualities of California’s desert modernism while simultaneously celebrating the coastal textures and tones of Sydney’s Northern Beaches. The result is a space that feels effortlessly integrated into its environment, where every element has been carefully curated to enhance the experience of living by the sea.
Drawing inspiration from the play of light and shadow in California’s desert homes, the design incorporates sculptural cut-outs in the pavilion’s western wall, allowing the golden hues of the evening sun to filter through the living space. This careful interplay of light creates a dynamic, ever-changing atmosphere that shifts with the time of day and the seasons.
For more information on LA Cool and Carter Williamson Architects, visit carterwilliamson.com.
Der "Berater" hinter Trumps Zöllen heißt übrigens Peter Navarro und genau so ein nützlicher Idiot, wie man vielleicht vermuten würde.
Bereits während Trumps erster Amtszeit arbeitete Navarro für den Republikaner im Weißen Haus. Er diente als Wirtschaftsberater und war später auch in die Maßnahmen zur Bekämpfung der Corona-Pandemie eingebunden.
Natürlich war er das!
Nach Trumps Wahlniederlage gegen den Demokraten Joe Biden 2020 verbreitete Navarro die Lüge vom Wahlbetrug mit und versuchte, Bidens Bestätigung im Kongress zu verhindern. Später weigerte er sich, Dokumente herauszugeben und vor einem Untersuchungsausschuss des Repräsentantenhauses zum Angriff auf das US-Kapitol vom 6. Januar 2021 auszusagen.
Das brachte ihm eine viermonatige Haftstrafe ein: Geschworene befanden Navarro wegen Missachtung des US-Kongresses für schuldig. Navarro saß die Strafe in einem Gefängnis in Miami im US-Bundesstaat Florida ab. Damit war er der erste nahe Trump-Vertraute, der im Zusammenhang mit dem Kapitol-Sturm tatsächlich eine Haftstrafe verbüßte. Das Gleiche galt auch für Trumps einstigen Chefstrategen, Steve Bannon, der ebenfalls für mehrere Monate hinter Gitter musste.
Nicht nur der Präsident ist vorbestraft. Aber das ist nicht, worauf ich hinauswollte.
This week, Washington learned about the mysterious anti-China voice that has long whispered in Mr. Navarro’s ear: Ron Vara.
Aufmerksamen Lesern wird an dieser Stelle auffallen, dass Ron Vara ein Anagramm von Navarro ist.
Ron Vara has appeared as a cryptic voice of economic wisdom more than a dozen times in five of Mr. Navarro’s 13 books, dispensing musings like “You’ve got to be nuts to eat Chinese food” and “Only the Chinese can turn a leather sofa into an acid bath, a baby crib into a lethal weapon and a cellphone battery into heart-piercing shrapnel.”
But Ron Vara, it turns out, does not exist. At least not in corporeal form. He is apparently a figment of Mr. Navarro’s imagination — an anagram of Mr. Navarro’s surname that the trade adviser created as a Hitchcockian writing device and stuck with as something of an inside joke with himself.
Jawohl. DIE Art von Experte ist das, der sich selbst ein Pseudonym zulegt, um sich selbst als Experten zitieren zu können, ohne das das so auffällt.
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