Feuding With Amazon, Fighter Jets Falling Into The Ocean, & Foreign Language From Robots

April 30, 2025

Hello, readers – happy Wednesday! Today, we’ll be talking about Amazon, Trump’s first 100 days, Canada’s elections, a slippery fighter jet, UPS layoffs, Harvard controversies, and how to learn a language from a robot.

Here’s some good news: A new tribal national park in North Dakota’s Badlands is opening to the public as part of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation’s efforts to preserve the land and encourage visitors. Also, the European Space Agency (ESA) successfully launched a first-of-a-kind satellite that uses a special radar system to help scientists understand the importance of rainforests in storing carbon and the impact of deforestation.

“It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.” – Thomas Sowell

Bezos Backs Down Like A Good Boy

(Jeff Bezos by Eugene Gologursky via Getty Images)

Early yesterday, online news outlet Punchbowl News published a story claiming that Amazon had plans to begin showing how much an item’s cost has been inflated due to tariffs alongside the item’s listed price. Soon after the story dropped, the White House lashed out against the online retailer, calling the plan a “hostile and political act.”

Soon after that backlash, Amazon backed down. A spokesperson for the company told the press that “the team that runs our ultra low cost Amazon Haul store considered the idea of listing import charges on certain products,” adding, “This was never approved and is not going to happen.”

Amazon Haul is the company’s response to other online low-cost retailers like Temu and Shein. The businesses are expected to be slammed by Trump’s tariff policies as well as his changes to the de minimis exemption, a loophole that allows cheap goods to evade tariffs entirely if they’re shipped into the U.S. in bundles worth less than $800 in total. “Jeff Bezos is very nice,” Trump said after the situation was resolved in his favor. “He solved the problem very quickly. He did the right thing. Good guy.”

Taking Stock Of Trump

Yesterday marked the 100th day of Trump’s presidency. Over the past three months, the president has destroyed decades-long alliances with Europe, broken more relationships with both its neighbors, shocked and unshocked the entire world economy, and laid waste to multiple federal agencies that he doesn’t like. While Trump called the period the “most successful first 100 days of any administration,” Americans and other people across the globe disagree with that assessment.

“The shake-up has been revolutionary, extraordinary. It’s upended 80-some years of American foreign policy,” said Ivo Daalder, president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a former ambassador to NATO. “The foundation of the Pax Americana was trust, and once you break trust, it’s extraordinarily difficult to restore. And restoring trust – trust in America, trust in American institutions, trust in American voters – it takes a long time to rebuild.”

Aside from eroding trust with other countries, Trump has also lost the backing of many Americans. According to a recent survey by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), 52% of Americans now agree with the statement that “Trump is a dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy.” In the same poll, just 4 in 10 Americans expressed favorable views of the president.

Prevailing Over Poilievre (Twice)

(Pierre Poilievre by Minas Panagiotakis via Getty Images)

Canadian media outlets called the election in the Liberal party’s favor on Monday night, but the full picture of the election results didn’t become clear until yesterday afternoon. On Tuesday, Canadian media projected that Liberals would remain in power with a minority government, meaning they’ll have to construct a ruling coalition with the help of other political parties.
While that’s not a great result for the Liberals, things were much, much worse for Canada’s Conservatives. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre lost his seat in Parliament in yesterday’s election, adding another stunning defeat to his resume. Poilievre had held the seat through seven consecutive elections, but managed to lose it to Liberal Party candidate Bruce Fanjoy. To stay on as the head of the Conservative party, Poilievre will need another Conservative MP to give up their seat, though there are reports that the party now wants to (understandably) give their leader the boot.

If A $67 Million Jet Falls Into The Ocean, Does Everyone Hear It?

Yesterday, the U.S. Navy threw $67 million into the ocean. Well, not literally, but an object worth that amount slid off the deck of the aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman. The carrier is currently stationed in the Red Sea as part of the U.S.’s task force launching missile strikes on Yemen’s Houthi rebels. According to Pentagon officials with knowledge of the incident, Navy sailors lost a F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jet overboard while towing it around with a tractor – for some reason, they were trying to move the jet around while the Truman was banking a hard turn to reposition against Houthi missiles.
Luckily, nobody was hurt in the incident (aside from American taxpayers’ wallets). But this isn’t the first mishap that the Truman has been involved in during its short stint in the Red Sea. In February, the $4.5 billion aircraft carrier (with all of its state-of-the-art navigation and detection systems fully functioning) managed to collide with a 189-meter-long merchant vessel, and last December, the carrier lost another Super Hornet jet in a friendly fire incident. For context, the average American with a college degree makes $2.3 million over their lifetime, so losing one of these jets is like burning up 29 Americans’ lifetime earnings!

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Brown Can’t Do Much For You Anymore

UPS announced yesterday that it will be cutting about 20,000 jobs and closing more than 70 facilities. The news comes after UPS announced in January that it had reached a deal with Amazon, its biggest customer, to lower its volume by more than 50% by the second half of 2026.
“Amazon is our largest customer but it’s not our most profitable customer,” CEO Carol Tomé said back in January. The company employs about 490,000 workers, according to FactSet. The company’s first-quarter financial results were fairly encouraging – earnings were $1.49 per share, better than the $1.44 per share analysts expected.

More Crimson Controversies

Harvard is back in the headlines today, and it’s not for their war with the Trump administration…well, not entirely. Two reports released yesterday found that the campus is rife with antisemitism and anti-Muslim sentiment (though it’s worth noting that pro-Palestine sentiments seem to be counted as antisemitism in these reports).
There is a Trump-related headline, too, though. Late Monday night, the White House said it would investigate whether the school and its student-run journal, the Harvard Law Review, violated civil rights law when editors fast-tracked consideration of an article written by someone of a racial minority.

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Can It Teach Me How To Speak Robot Too?

Duolingo’s green bird is set to become a cyborg soon, as the company is apparently shifting to an “AI-first” approach. In a company-wide email sent out yesterday, Duolingo cofounder and CEO Luis von Ahn told employees that they “need to rethink much of how we work,” and announced that AI usage will become a key metric in the company’s hiring and performance reviews.
“AI isn’t just a productivity boost,” von Ahn wrote. “It helps us get closer to our mission. To teach well, we need to create a massive amount of content, and doing that manually doesn’t scale. One of the best decisions we made recently was replacing a slow, manual content creation process with one powered by AI.” So if you want to learn another language, you can log in to Duolingo to be taught by a robot!
But maybe the pressure to adapt to the supposed AI revolution is being put on Duolingo from the outside. Yesterday, Google unveiled three language-teaching experimental features powered by its Gemini AI. The first offers situation-specific lessons, the second is supposed to help users learn more natural slang words, and the third lets you take pictures of objects to learn the words for them in whatever language you’re trying to learn. Of course, these come with the usual AI disclaimers – Google warns that “Slang Hang” will occasionally misuse or even come up with non-existent slang words. Glad we’re investing billions of dollars into this totally reliable technology!

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