A federal judge sentenced Ruadhri “Rory” McCormick, the owner of Single Shot, a Capitol Hill restaurant, to 13 months in prison for not paying $1.4 million in payroll taxes. McCormick instead pocketed the money between 2014 and 2024. An investigation revealed he spent $400,000 on his Vashon Island home, flushed $125,000 into casinos, and dropped $38,000 for trips. McCormick also didn’t pay his personal income taxes between 2015 and 2024.
October clouds, we need a timeout. What in the world is eating you? Despite being thick and dark and low in the sky, you’re not letting go of your water. We very well know it’s in you. We can see it with our very own eyes. But, you keep on keeping it to yourselves as you pass over the city. What gives? Sure, there were some showers this weekend, but Monday, like Tuesday, saw almost none at all. Where do you clouds think you’re going with all your water? I’m asking this for the Columbia City trees and other puzzled plants. Expect a high 53 today. Also expect no rain on Halloween.
More on Microsoft’s voluntary exits for around a quarter of its workforce. The offer, which the tech giant made to employees in Canada, India, the UK, and the US, expires in early December. If accepted, you have to bounce on the last day of the year. Predictably, many are blaming AI for this dismal state of affairs. Robots are replacing humans because they are “better, stronger, faster” and, most important of all, cheaper. But a close examination of the matter is not required to plainly see what’s really going on: AI isn’t making nearly as much money as the massive amounts of borrowed cash being pumped into it on the regular. The logical thing to do, under these circumstances, would be to pull the plug on the unprofitable machine; but, instead, Microsoft and other tech corporations are pulling the plug on workers for short-term gains.
By the way, Microsoft’s total revenue in 2025 was nearly $300 billion. And its bottom line (or net income, or net profit) was just above $100 billion.
Old, and even worthless, is the idea that finance represents a late-stage expression of capitalism. The conclusion of this way of thinking is that the more the honorable business of making money from making things produces profits that don’t make the eyes of executives water or pop, then the more they turn to the funny phantom money of capital markets. But I think a more accurate reading of finance places its moment of flight not at the dusk of productive capitalism, like Hegel’s owl of minerva. Its moment arrives, instead, with the rise and shine of the sun. You don’t have capitalism without the swirl of speculative bubbles.
When asked by the BBC if Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed is too radical, too far to the left, Nicole Williams, a Detroit hairdresser, said it like it is: “Socialist, socialize, social, don’t matter to me, lower my cost of living!”
One of the key characteristics of capitalism is that it collapses or goes into crisis when its growth is zero or negative. It cannot survive without the positive feedback of money making more money, which is why it needs, for its movement, a propeller with these blades: the production of luxuries like penthouses, and the production of a prodigious amount of waste (and this is why recycling is, in essence, anti-capitalist). Put another way, capitalism does not, one, make life cheaper, but more expensive (which explains its rabid resistance to public forms of transportation, housing, and health insurance—they are more efficient, and therefore not costly); and, two, it must maintain an energy flow that moves not in cycles, but is uni-directional: from extraction to production to, whenever possible, permanent destruction (disposability).
At around 12:35 a.m. on Tuesday, a young man was spotted climbing a crane that rose high above Fremont. What was he up to? Maybe trying to reach the moon, which was pretty full that night (October’s Hunter’s Moon appeared the day before)? The climber managed to reach “20 to 30 stories high” before the police arrived, brought him “straight back down, down to earth,” and arrested him for “reckless endangerment.”
Fremont’s crane/moon incident not only recalled, for me, a line from a hit tune by a forgotten Brit pop band, Curiosity Killed the Cat, that made old Andy Warhol way too thirsty, it also recalled this passage from W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz: “We are not alone in dreaming at night for, quite apart from dogs and other domestic creatures whose emotions have been bound up with ours for many thousands of years, the smaller mammals such as mice and moles also live in a world that exists only in their minds whilst they are asleep, as we can detect from their eye movements, and who knows, said Austerlitz, perhaps moths dream as well, perhaps a lettuce in the garden dreams as it looks up at the moon by night.”
Like father, like son. Or the apple does not fall far from the tree. Or cut from the same cloth. Or some other similar saying. So, after losing Brazil’s presidential election, far-right Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of the former president of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro (he is doing to time for attempting to pull a Jan 6 after losing the election in 2023), got onto a jet with his family and fled the country. He has now landed in Florida to lick his wounds before the president of the United States of America. The winner of the election, socialist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, described the whole sorry business as “shameful.” Bolsonaro is not a straight shooter. Dark money swirls around him like the autumn leaves swirled around me yesterday, as I walked at dusk from Hillman City to Columbia City. Bolsonaro is expected to request political asylum.
Let’s end AM with Ice Cube’s “Alive on Arrival,” which will be one of the tracks I discuss with Dr. Daudi Abe and Vitamin D during tomorrow’s See You at the Crossroads: Death In Hip Hop show at Black & Tan Hall. Abe’s description of the track: “This story of the dangers and pitfalls of urban life is also a scathing critique of police mistreatment and indifference and a dysfunctional health care system. After being shot, the storyteller winds up lying on the floor of an emergency room and then handcuffed to a bed. The on-beat beep of a heart monitor punctuates the climax of the song, which concludes suddenly with a flatline.”
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