What's in the The Big Beautiful Bill?

You've probably already heard a lot about the current proposed tax/spending bill in the US House of Representatives, so...

What is Even in the Big Beautiful Bill?

Lots. Like its over 1,000 pages long.

US House Republicans are working around the clock to pass a spending bill literally titled the "One Big, Beautiful Bill" because that's what Trump keeps saying so we GOTTA make sure we glaze him more.

There's been a lot of misinformation about what is and isn't in the spending bill. That kinda always happens with these huge bills, because it's very easy to claim something is within the 1,000+ page legal document. I'm going to try not to do that and instead talk about a few of the things actually found in the document.

• About $5 Trillion in tax cuts, much of which is for the richest class
• $60 Billion in bailouts to farmers
• $800 Billion reduction to Medicaid
  • Increased work requirements for Medicaid
  • Aims to defund Planned Parenthood
  • Estimated that 7.6 million citizens would lose healthcare
• Temporary increases to the standard deductions and additional changes to standard deductions for certain states
• Temporary and qualified exemption to tax on tips and overtime which will last through 2028
• Shifts much of the cost of SNAP ("food stamps") to the states rather than the federal budget
• Increases work requirements for people needing food assistance and increases the age in which you are required to be working to receive food assistance from 54 to 64
• Removes a provision that allows parents to be exempt from work requirements for food assistance until their children turn 18 (new cutoff is 7 years)
• Removes a $200 tax on gun silencers which has been in effect since 1934
• Allows the POTUS to declare nonprofits as "terrorist supporters" to remove their tax exempt status
• A few hundred billion for deportation efforts and other Trumpy goals like his "Golden Dome" missile defense concept
• Expedites approvals and sale of hundreds of thousands of acres of public land for mining, drilling, and logging
• Increases estate tax threshold to $15,000,000 (up about $1,000,000)
• A new "MAGA" investment account for children born between 2024 and 2028, where the fed contributes $1,000 (works kinda like a 401k-ish)

So, y'know. That kind of stuff.

Is it going to pass? Not as-is. Republicans are having some trouble closing their ranks around the bill as it stands, as even they are having a hard time stomaching the "nearly 8 million people lose healthcare" thing.

Policy

Grim Realities Aren't Abstract

Adriana Smith was declared brain dead this past February, but is being kept alive against the wishes of her family due to Georgia's "fetal personhood" laws.

Adriana was just a few weeks pregnant when she passed away from a sudden medical issue. At time of death, she was about nine weeks pregnant: three weeks past the six week cutoff in the state. As a reminder, many women tend to not even know they are pregnant until somewhere in the 4.5-10 week range, depending on myriad health inputs.

Given her pregnancy, the state's law requires her body to be kept alive on life support for the fetus to grow. It is unclear what the endgame is here, and the family is just sitting around waiting to hear updates about if the fetus will even be viable once born.

The overturning of Roe v Wade triggered the Georgia law to go into effect and is one of many deeply regressive and outright cruel laws that the state has enforced in, well, my entire fucking lifetime. I only ever knew a world in which Roe v Wade was precedent.

No matter what the "pro-life" crowd claims, it was never about states' rights. It was always about exerting control over women and furthering the installation of religious values into public policy. Hell, over in Missouri, Republicans are trying to overturn a successful state constitutional amendment which enshrined abortion rights. Residents overwhelmingly voted to protect their bodily autonomy, and the lawmakers are trying to overturn the will of the people regardless.

Hey—maybe we shouldn't have a nanny state with laws that interfere with personal medical decisions. I feel like there was a political party who was loudly against invasive government policy, but I can't quite remember who.

NOAA Cuts Hurt Us All

Over two dozen people were killed by storms and a tornado which tore through Kentucky and Missouri this past week. Hundreds of thousands are without power as crews are working to help victims between further weather events.

Unfortunately, the Trump Administration—though the Elon Musk-led DOGE efforts—made deep cuts to NOAA who provides crucial weather monitoring and alerting services. According to an investigation by the New York Times, weather forecasting operations have been deeply impacted by the cuts. They even went as far as to note Jackson, Kentucky as one of the places hit by the layoffs.

What's truly chilling though is the timing: the report came out one day prior to the catastrophe.

Between this and the FAA cuts, maybe we could take a quick moment and accept that perhaps having national infrastructure and safety experts is actually a good thing.

World Stuff

Do it Again, but Louder

Remember last November when some indigenous members of the New Zealand parliament performed a haka? As a refresher, several MPs stood during session and began loudly performing a ceremonial dance known as a haka in protest of legislation.

It was fucking rad.

But now, New Zealand parliament is punishing the MPs who took part, pushing to suspend them for a few weeks in an unprecedented move. But it's okay, they're doing what they can to explain to themselves why this punishment is totally okay and reasonable:

we intend to leave members in no doubt that the behaviour discussed is not acceptable and that the intimidation of other members of the house is treated with utmost seriousness

The panel making this proposal also cited that one of the members "appeared to simulate firing a gun at another member"—and like—bro come on.

Eurovision Happened

Eurovision happened, an annual European song competition that pits countries against each other in a sort of mashup of the Olympics and Glee.

Austria took home first place, followed by Israel in second place and Estonia in third. Some of the voting comes from public input, which suspiciously voted overwhelmingly for Israel, breaking starkly with the score given by official judges. I'm sure there's nothing interesting going on there, but I do think it's worth taking a look at that second place country and see what they're up to.

Ah, they're continuing to carpet bomb Gaza, killing people by the hundreds daily and forcing the shutdown of some of the few remaining hospitals while barring humanitarian aid, food, medicine, and any notion of humanity from their own souls.

Glad for them about their neat song vote though. Shame we couldn't preserve a population of millions of souls in what is considered a sacred land.

Technology & Science

Stuff Keeps Happening Will Return After I Tell You About White Genocide in South Africa

The internet had a beautiful moment recently when the Twitter-enabled Grok AI chatbot started arbitrarily replying to people with thoughts on the subject of "white genocide" in South Africa.

I wanna be clear: there is not white genocide in South Africa.

On Twitter, you can mention @Grok in a tweet to get it to respond to you about something. Users began to notice that regardless of the context, Grok would bring up "white genocide" in South Africa, and explain that the situation is complicated.

You could ask it about what melons are in season, and it'd be like, "oh, cantaloupe is good, but on the subject of white genocide in South Africa…"

It was so blatant that xAI—the company that makes Grok (and technically owns Twitter now)—put out a statement to explain what happened:

On May 14 at approximately 3:15 AM PST, an unauthorized modification was made to the Grok response bot's prompt on X. This change, which directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic, violated xAI's internal policies and core values. We have conducted a thorough investigation and are implementing measures to enhance Grok's transparency and reliability.

They went on to say they'll start publishing their internal configuration prompts for Grok to the open source code platform GitHub, which then quickly resulted in a wonderful next part to all of this when a GitHub user proposed a change to the code which re-added the prompt for discussing white genocide. Astonishingly, an xAI engineer accepted the proposal temporarily before reverting the change shortly after.

Of course, the entire internet knows that the 3:15AM unauthorized change came from Musk, who has been working overtime to push the conspiracy of white genocide during his time playing as Big Government Boy. Thankfully, he is too incompetent to have done this subtly, and instead has sparked a conversation about trustworthiness among these giant AIs. Especially since he has loudly claimed Grok to be "anti-woke" and "maximally truth-seeking."

Microsoft Cuts Again

Microsoft is laying off about 3% of its workforce, which amounts to about 6,000 people. This comes after massive layoffs about two years ago.

The company says the shift is to cut down on management layers in the company in order to "best position the company for success in a dynamic marketplace," whatever that means.

Microsoft recently beat their quarterly earnings expectations in April.

LETS GET UPLIFTED: Breast Cancer Research for Black Women in Africa Yields Results

Researchers in South Africa have found two new generic signals which could better identify breast cancer risk in Black African women.

It is widely known that medical science lags FAR behind for both Black people and women, so there's of course a huge lack of research into a broader medical understanding of Black women's bodies. However, after a "genome-wide association study," researchers found new potential early indicators of breast cancer in the demographic.

The study was the first of its kind on the continent, and its results may yield new insight into developing treatments by targeting cancer cells which exhibit these genes.

Here's a little bonus tidbit from Science Daily:

African populations have more genetic variation than any other population in the world, but they have been significantly underrepresented in genomic research. This means that the global understanding of disease risk, and the tools and treatment developed from it, is limited.

Gaming

Planning Around GTA 6

Grant Theft Auto 6 was delayed until May 2026. The game is so highly anticipated that it has been a meme for years, with people citing that we, "got [some thing] before GTA6."

Now that the release has been delayed, other game studios are caught scrambling to figure out what to do about their own release schedule, concerned that they may need to compete with the release of one of—if not the—most highly anticipated media releases of all time.

So if you were looking forward to a game releasing in Spring 2026, maybe check in to see if they've moved the date around. Or just buy and play the game you wanna play anyway.

EA Return to Office

Behated games publisher Electronic Arts recently announced that they will be ending their remote work policy and terminating remote hiring, much to the ire of their employees.

The changes aren't happening immediately, but are still uprooting life plans and working habits of large swaths of employees. Of course, there's the added insult that in-person work not proven to be more productive, especially in digital production companies. At best, the effectiveness of remote vs in-person is case-by-case. So blanketly saying everyone has to come into an office just makes your employees less comfortable and more likely to leave.

Which—I mean—It's EA, maybe that's for the best.

Bungie Runs a Marathon

Hey, Bungie, you coulda just put some more focus on fixing Crucible.

Game development studio Bungie—famous for the original Halo games as well as the Destiny franchise—is having a rough go of it.

For one, they've had a bunch of layoffs recently, and have had trouble maintaining players in Destiny 2 after reaching the conclusion of a decade-long story arc. To make matters worse, Destiny fans were pretty damn upset when Bungie announced they'd be making an entirely new game rather than addressing the issues with Destiny.

Bungie announced Marathon, an "extraction shooter" game (if you don't know what that means, its just a sort of player-vs-player tactical shooter arena thing) as their new focus. Recently, we saw an early look at the game which was met with a lukewarm reception, but then Bungie got hit pretty bad when an artist publicly noted that artwork found in Marathon seemed to be work that was stolen from them. Bungie admitted to this.

Since then, they've been on their back foot, dealing with the fallout of a dull first look at a game that upset their core player base to begin with, which seems to be using stolen assets, after getting a huge cash infusion from Sony while also routinely downsizing their staff and laying off beloved community coordinators.

So hey uh… Bungo? Fix your shit.

Here's the Weather

More Stuff

• A Mexican Navy vessel crashed into the Brookyln Bridge, killing two crew members on board and injuring 19 others
• US loses last perfect credit rating amid rising debt
• A kindergartener in PA brought jello shots to school, even bringing some for friends, which was pretty thoughtful
• A Louisiana plantation house caught fire and burned down, which is lovely and should happen more often
• 10 inmates recently escaped from a New Orleans jail. 3 have since been caught
• A fertility clinic in Palm Springs was bombed, the FBI is saying it is investigating it as an intentional act of terror