Token Price Reductions Just Won’t Cut It

‘Callahan says with the inventory being a little higher than in years past, it gives buyers more options to choose from and the ability to negotiate. ‘We’re seeing now more FHA loans and VA loans being accepted. We’re seeing people be able to get closing cost credits to either buy down their rate or, you know, pay for closing with lawyers and things like that,’ explained Callahan. ‘And so in that sense, it’s like it’s still a good time to sell in the sense that, like the value of your home is not decreasing. In the recent past, where things were going 10-20, $30,000 over asking regularly, we’re seeing things go maybe 1 to 5% over, asking if it’s a desirable property, and we’re also seeing people finally get things for under asking at significantly. But within, you know, $10,000 of asking price’

You almost let the cat out of the bag at the end there Erin.

So Long to Tech’s Dream Job

SAN FRANCISCO — When Rachel Grey started working at Google as a software engineer in 2007, it was a good time to be a Noogler, or what the search giant called new employees.

At a two-week orientation at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, Grey discovered a utopia of perks. The company’s cafeterias served steak and shrimp, kitchens were stocked with fresh juices, and gyms offered free workout classes. Workers received stock grants on top of their salaries, a 50% match on their retirement contributions and a Christmas bonus that came in the form of $1,000 tucked in an envelope.

Over the years, though, her experience changed as she became a software engineering manager. The Christmas bonus shrank. Employees were no longer provided a fire hose of corporate information. The company abandoned a pledge that its artificial intelligence would not be used for weapons. The budget for promotions dried up, pressuring Grey to lower performance ratings, which she said was “stunningly painful.” In April, just shy of 18 years, the 48-year-old quit what was once her dream job.

Life for workers at Silicon Valley’s biggest tech companies is different. Very different.

Gone are the days when Google, Apple, Meta and Netflix were the dream destinations for tech workers, offering fat salaries, lush corporate campuses and say-anything, do-anything cultures. Now the behemoth firms have aged into large bureaucracies. While many of them still provide free food and pay well, they have little compunction cutting jobs, ordering mandatory office attendance and clamping down on employee debate.

It’s the shut up and grind era, workers said.

“Tech could still be best in terms of free lunch and a high salary,” Grey said, but “the level of fear has gone way up.”

“I suppose it’s better to have lunch and be scared to death than to not have lunch and be scared to death, but I don’t know if it’s good for you to be there,” she added.

The turning point came in 2022 and 2023, when Elon Musk bought Twitter (renamed X) and shed three-quarters of its employees, while Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, cut thousands of jobs during what he called “a year of efficiency.” Google and Amazon also conducted mass layoffs. Many of the companies blamed the pandemic for their overhiring during lockdowns as more people turned to digital services.

Along the way, the companies became less tolerant of employee outspokenness. Bosses reasserted themselves after workers protested issues including sexual harassment in the workplace. With the job market flooded with qualified engineers, it became easier to replace those who criticized.

“This is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts co-workers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics,” Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, said in a blog post last year.

“The tide has definitely turned against tech workers,” said Catherine Bracy, the founder and chief executive of TechEquity, a nonprofit that pushes for economic inclusion in the industry. “Companies have even more leverage to use against workers, and AI is supercharging that.”

Liz Fong-Jones, the field chief technology officer at Honeycomb, a San Francisco company that helps engineers find and debug problems in their code, said AI’s effect on jobs was overblown. But that could change five years from now, she cautioned.

Tech workers could stop AI from taking hold, said Fong-Jones, a former Googler, adding, “but we’re all afraid enough to go along with training our own replacements.”

For some tech workers, the change in the workplace was abrupt. Adam Treitler, 32, a human resources strategist who worked at Twitter’s New York office before and after Musk’s acquisition, said the company’s moves under its new owner were startling.

“From the day before Elon to the day after Elon, it pivoted overnight from ‘how do we improve HR management’ to ‘what are the fewest number of steps involved and the fewest number of people needed to pay our employees,’ ” said Treitler, who joined Twitter in 2021 and left in January 2023. He now works for jewelry company Pandora.

Others said the shift had played out more slowly. Ava Sazanami, a designer in her 40s in Seattle, joined Meta in 2022 to make tools to help users with their privacy settings. The mother of two said she had felt empowered to help solve some of the tech concerns that worried her as a parent.

Meta also allowed a flexible schedule so she could accompany her children to appointments, and LGBTQ+-friendly policies made her feel welcome because she had gay family members, she said.

But over time, Meta curtailed its family benefits, Sazanami said. In January, the company killed its diversity programs and social media policies against hate speech targeting LGBTQ+ people. A month later, she was laid off when Meta cut 5% of its workforce.

“We’re seeing right now why tech needs unions,” said Sazanami, who is looking for a new job. “The current culture has disempowered workers.”

For Grey, Google’s exhilarating early days seem like another lifetime. The work was not always easy, she said, but the company’s culture made it easier to power through. One day, she recalled, she and her coworkers arrived to find Nerf guns on their desks. When a power outage hit, shutting down computers, they grabbed their Nerf guns and broke into a friendly fight.

“Google had such a glow about it then,” she said. “There was an institutionally approved playfulness to it all. I loved that.”

Now “the future of the whole industry seems very shaky,” said Grey, who is taking time off from tech.

https://www.myheraldreview.com/news/business/so-long-to-tech-s-dream-job/article_8672c717-a3d5-42b7-b169-b72d63a33025.html

Let’s Admit It: Trump Is Winning the Trade War with Canada

A few weeks ago, I ran into somebody involved with the Canada–US trade talks. Can’t get more specific than that. When I asked how it was going, this person bugged their eyes out, since miming was probably safer than using words. “Must be like negotiating with a roulette wheel,” I offered. This person didn’t disagree.

All over, there are signs of flagging motivation. British Columbia premier David Eby gave an extraordinary interview to Bloomberg, where he questioned the wisdom of further counter tariffs. The rebuttals Eby announced with some fanfare on February 1 “haven’t seemed to have had the kind of impact that we would hope for,” he says now. Adding another layer of Canadian counter tariffs might inflict “severe harm” on British Columbians without making Trump budge.

This is all deeply unsatisfying, but it may be that there is no satisfying way to respond to Trump. As the summer wears on, there is a notable droop to the once proudly waving Canadian elbow.

Pete Hoekstra, Trump’s man in Ottawa, recently said something goofy. What’s really interesting is the response he got. I’m indebted to Politico’s Canada Playbook for this. “Where I’ve been for the last 90 days, there’s no advocates for the Canadian-American relationship,” Hoekstra told a business conference. “So, when people now come to me and say, ‘Well, you know, your favorability has gone down, and China’s has gone up . . . what’s the surprise here?” Hoekstra asked. “There’s nobody been advocating for the strength of the relationship.”

And it’s true! Where are the Canadians who are eager to pay more to do business in a country where there’s been a measurable increase in the risk of being persecuted for thoughtcrime or threatened with annexation?

It’s not weak for a business association to defend the interests of business. If you’re in the business of selling widgets, what’s the ideal end to Trump’s tariff adventure? Surely, it’s that Trump changes his mind, or loses the midterms, or is replaced by a classic Clinton-era free-trading Democrat—that, one way or another, the US simply stops being weird and goes back to being the vast and easy market it’s been for most of our lifetimes.

But here’s where it gets tricky. Short of that ideal outcome, what’s next best? At 15 percent tariffs on everything Canadian, for many if not most Canadian exporters, getting over the tariff wall and into that vast market is probably a better outcome than the three main alternatives: abandoning exports; taking a flyer on distant and, in many cases, saturated third markets like Europe; or adding Canadian counter tariffs to American tariffs for spite.

Mark Carney came to office with a plan to respond to Trump: dissuade Trump; seek compensating growth in third markets outside the US; and seek compensating growth inside Canada, through the “One Canadian Economy” push for liberalized internal trade. It should have been obvious from the outset that all three parts of that plan would be huge challenges. Now it’s more obvious, because experience has made us half a year wiser.

Dissuade Trump? See above. Third markets? By my very rough calculation, if Canada–US trade declined by 10 percent but trade between Canada and South Korea quintupled, we’d be no further ahead. There aren’t a lot of rabbits to be pulled from those distant hats.

Internal trade? In Huntsville this week, Eby signed “trade” “agreements” with the governments of Ontario, Manitoba, and Yukon. I couldn’t find the text of the agreements on the BC government’s website, but here’s the deal Eby signed with Doug Ford. It amounts to a solemn undertaking to try to keep the cat from eating tomorrow’s homework.

With regard to a US that generated Trump and keeps generating Trump disciples: it will still, always, forever, be by far the largest basin of economic opportunity within a day’s truck drive from Windsor. Everything will go easy if the Americans work in their best economic interest, but Canadians can’t compel them to. We are stuck making our own decisions based on our own interest.

With regard to the rest of the world: Canada basically isn’t in the game when it comes to seeking new, expanded export markets in the Americas, Europe, Asia, or Africa. It could stand to triple its effort. Start with the easy stuff, like finally naming a new ambassador to Germany or having the prime minister attend the Halifax International Security Forum. But understand: even greatly expanded effort overseas won’t compensate for severe erosion in the Canada–US relationship.

The problem with One Canadian Economy is that the second word seems to swamp the others. It’s, you know, a Canadian economy: poky, hidebound, haunted by hopes and wishes, innocent of effort. It took a lifetime to get here and will take a lifetime to get out, if there is any getting out.

https://thewalrus.ca/carney-vs-trump-swing-miss-repeat/

New attack on the Dreamers

The day Mariana returned to Mexico for the first time in 2022 after 26 years, she sat down with her father and explained why it was so hard for her to recognize herself in the place where she was born — why she was no longer the same person who had been taken to the United States at age seven.

“I had that conversation with my dad and told him: ‘I don’t think I’d make it here anymore. I don’t feel my Spanish is good enough, that I can carry myself the same way I do over there.’”

She was happy to see her homeland again, to introduce her family to the son she had during that time, but the visit confirmed what had kept her up at night: if one day she loses her protection under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA), she has no idea what she’ll do — how she would explain to her son that they’d have to leave for a place she’s from, but he is not.

“It would be a culture shock to have to go there. My son’s life is here, he plans to go to college, and it would be very difficult,” says 36-year-old Mariana, switching between English and Spanish, who requested her name be changed out of the same fear shared by many others: fear of deportation. It’s not an unfounded fear. The Trump administration has reiterated that the more than 500,000 DACA recipients are not exempt from deportation. Now, it’s gone even further, urging them to “self-deport.”

In recent months, amid the White House’s immigration crackdown, some DACA recipients — who had previously been shielded from raids and deportation — have also been arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. One recent case was that of Javier Díaz Santana, a 32-year-old Mexican DACA recipient who was detained while working at a car wash in Los Angeles and spent a month in a Texas detention center.

There were even reports of a DACA recipient who, after missing a court date for driving with a suspended license, became one of the first to be sent to the notorious Alligator Alcatraz detention center in Florida.

At the time, Mariana — who was 24 then — didn’t apply. She was afraid of how the government might use the personal information she’d be providing. “I wasn’t sure. It was the first time I was going to expose myself like that,” she says.

However, her two brothers — who had also crossed the Mexico–U.S. border as children and later settled in Texas — did apply and received DACA protections. Mariana finally applied in 2015, at age 26. Many things changed for her then: with a work permit, she could use her science degree professionally, obtain a driver’s license, travel within the U.S., and board a plane for the first time to visit Mexico and reunite with her family.

The protection she now had helped ease her fear of immigration authorities — especially remembering how, around 2012, deportations were very common. “Back then, my mom gave me a little book with our aunt and uncle’s phone numbers and told me that if she ever didn’t come home, I should call them so they could help us.”

It was a difficult time for the family. The Obama administration — which deported more than three million people during its two terms, more than any other president in the country’s history — also expelled Mariana’s father to Mexico. The same president who sent her father back paved the way for her to obtain temporary protection in the United States.

This month, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) within the Department of Education opened a “national origin discrimination” investigation at five U.S. universities that offer scholarships to DACA recipients.

In June, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that Dreamers would not be eligible for the federal health insurance marketplace.

Like in most families with DACA recipients, Mariana’s family includes U.S. citizens, like her son, but also undocumented relatives, like her mother. Now that fear is creeping back in, her siblings call each other frequently to warn about potential immigration raids in the neighborhood, looking out for one another. “This is a persecution, and we need to be more united,” says Mariana.

Still, Mariana — who has helped many others apply to the program over the years — continues to believe that DACA will survive, as it always has. “We were the ones who won DACA in the first place, who pressured the president back then,” she says. “I feel angry because we exposed ourselves — gave the government our information — and now we feel vulnerable, knowing they know where we live, even who our family members are.” That’s frustrating, she says, “but we know we have to keep fighting. I know the strength is in the community.”

https://english.elpais.com/usa/2025-08-04/new-attack-on-dreamers-trump-administration-encourages-daca-recipients-to-self-deport.html

“I feel angry because we exposed ourselves — gave the government our information — and now we feel vulnerable, knowing they know where we live, even who our family members are.”

You’ll all get used to the outhouse Mariana.

Trump policies lead prominent day laborer activist to leave US with his family

A scroll through the last seven years of reels on the Radio Jornalera Instagram account reveals a consistent theme. Day laborers like car wash workers, gardeners and street vendors talking about issues like wage theft and labor rights.

“It was the workers themselves amplifying their own voice and experiences. It was not another Telemundo or Univision, it was themselves,” said Luis Valentan, the founder of Radio Jornalera, a multiplatform project that includes a radio show and social media posts.

But over the weekend, Valentan, who was also involved in in-person organizing, left the U.S. with his family to move back to Mexico City after 33 years.

The trigger happened a few months ago, while watching a speech by Trump advisor Stephen Miller. What Valentan heard made it clear to him how much the U.S. has changed since he arrived.

“They were talking about the America that they want to see… America for Americans only, White America… all these really awful narratives,” he said.

Valentan has three adult children from a first marriage and two young kids, 4 and 2 years old, from a second marriage. All are U.S. citizens, except him.

“I’ve been living here more than in my own country, but I don’t feel safe. I don’t feel like this is a place for me to raise my two little kids,” Valentan said.

Three of his five children have left with him and his wife.

“It is a loss,” said Angela Sanbrano, co-executive director emeritus of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, the umbrella organization that Valentan’s done his work for. Valentan’s decision to leave is sad, Sanbrano said, but not a surprise.

“[The Trump Administration] is going to make it so miserable for immigrants to live in the United States, that they will self-deport,” she said.

In recent years, Valentan had been living in Utah. He returned to L.A. over the weekend to say goodbye to friends and colleagues. “I’ll take with me a lot of memories. You know, this is where my kids grew up, this is where my kids were born,” he said. It’s also where he arrived when he was 18 years old.

He said he’ll miss the U.S., and Los Angeles.

“I’m gonna miss sunsets, sunrises… beautiful places. Because I think there are beautiful things in this country, but not the idea of one America, White America,” he said.

https://laist.com/news/politics/trump-policies-lead-prominent-day-laborer-activist-to-leave-us-with-his-family