How to perfect your corporate accent

Plus, setting the economy on fire; Yahoo is 30; a new meme phrase we should use every day

My son started his high school JV baseball career last week. His team’s starting catcher and second base(wo)man are both girls, either which are relatively uncommon — fewer than 1,400 girls play high school baseball in America, meaning boys outnumber girls 344-to-1.

In the seventh inning, the second basewoman came in to pitch, and she struck out two opposing hitters, including with a vicious slow-motion knuckleball that left the parents gasping. Following the game, the umpire told us the two girls constituted the first all-girl battery (pitcher + catcher) in Bay Area high school baseball history. I’d be surprised if that were true, but it seems plausible — the odds that a high school team would even have two girls is about 589-to-1, and it could be that catcher and pitcher are the most unlikely positions for them to play, least of all at the same time.

Throwing like a girl

Anyway, the two girls took a photo together at home plate to commemorate the (possibly) historic event.

It likely occurred to nobody on the team or in the stands that an all-girl battery was anything special. With all the disingenuous chatter about “DEI” these days, it’s important to note that these girls are playing nearly every inning because they are two of the best players on the team. Everybody seems to be cool with this, and now I’m wondering why the sex of high school athletes is a national issue.

Let’s talk about the economy or something

I promise I’m not going to make Rangelife entirely about the horrors of the Trump administration. As I wrote here on the eve of the election, the world was destined to go through a historic crisis period no matter who won the last election. Trump is accelerating it, while also openly taking bribes and acting like the law and constitution don’t apply to him, because they actually don’t! It turns out that all the prior presidents were suckers for abiding by the law and constitutional separation of powers. Thanks, Chief Justice Roberts!

(This style of government we’re witnessing unfold could be defined as patrimonialism, a regime with a leader who treats the state as his personal property, similar to how a criminal gang operates. Or Russia.)

Anyway, I’m trying to keep my eyes on the big picture and not all the little details. I feel like this little one-minute video really captures the moment. Let’s all watch it together.

OK, now let’s talk about the economy. So, how are you feeling about the economy? I started writing this post two weeks ago before the markets started melting down, but I got really busy with work. And in those two weeks, the markets caught up. Yikes!

Let’s check where we are: Economic signs are mixed. Unemployment is still low but trending up. Core consumer inflation is down, but inflation expectations are elevated and consumer confidence is down. Credit card delinquencies are climbing alarmingly fast. Car payment delinquencies are the highest since the deepest depth of the Great Financial Crisis. The early read on Q1 is that GDP is trending down. Two quarters in a row of that would be the definition of a recession, not that official definitions matter.

The stock market surged after Trump’s reelection, because traders assumed he was exaggerating about tariffs and telling the truth about Project 2025. But it turns out he was underselling tariffs and lying about Project 2025.

Nobody priced in “actual war with Canada.” All those stock market gains are a memory now.

Warren Buffett’s vibes are negative. Berkshire Hathaway is sitting on $334 billion of cash, or about one Elon Musk. Buffett tends to sell stocks and hoard cash when he doesn’t see companies worth buying. Last time Berkshire looked like this was about a year before the financial crisis.

And the economy is an aggregate of all our vibes, not just Buffett’s. But we don’t all feel vibes the same. For years, U of Michigan has published regular updates on how people are feeling about the economy. And it would only make sense that our individual economic vibes reflect the bubbles we each place ourselves into.

So starting in 2020, Michigan started splitting out consumer confidence and inflation expectations by political party. And guess what!

Democrats apparently expect inflation at 5% this year. Republicans expect 0%. LOL.

People tend to credit or blame the president for the state of the economy, but presidents are generally only moderately influential on the state of the economy while they’re in office. Occasionally, they quickly engineer a deep recession to beat inflation (see: Argentina since 2024) or print money to cause inflation (see: Argentina for the prior 25 years), but real economic progress and wealth are driven by factors that take years to blossom.

Due to Trump’s assumption of new patrimonial powers, the US economy is no longer downstream from the government, but increasingly a government product that Trump is shaping in real-time. Assuming SCOTUS or his McDonald’s addiction doesn’t stop him prematurely, Trump’s illegal federal cuts and frozen grants will likely result in substantial job losses and push down inflation.

On the other hand, tariffs on — well, everything from everywhere — are a real economic shock. They are driving higher costs throughout the supply chain — steel prices were already 30% higher in anticipation of tariffs. Supply disruptions are what pushed inflation around the world during the pandemic. The bond market is betting on inflation blowing up due to Trump’s trade war.

One thing we can be sure of is that the newly managed economy is not being managed thoughtfully, but being speedrun by two billionaire psychopaths. The Speaker of the House likens this random chaos to the opening break of a game of pool, admitting that Trump is just blasting balls all over the table to set up some future shots. Cool! Nothing too big at stake here.

But there’s another issue with the economy that I think is being under-reported. As I mentioned in the last Rangelife, one of my current gigs is for a clean energy finance company. And right now, developers have paused some important energy projects because nobody knows if their federal loans will be honored, or if their project will just get killed by some weird Project 2025 appointee who believes solar is a Satanic ruse.

(Trump has already unilaterally decided to destroy domestic wind power because he doesn’t like seeing wind turbines from his resorts. It’s not just Trump, though — I first learned of the existence of RFK Jr. when he worked to kill an offshore wind project that would have been distantly visible from his family estate on Nantucket.)

The delayed energy projects portend a much larger economic threat. Business investment depends on a system of laws, rules, and contract enforcement. If you think you might get ripped off, you’ll invest your money elsewhere. Nobody is going to build a factory to take advantage of tariffs, unless they believe the tariffs are predictably permanent. But instead, tariffs are being announced, canceled, doubled, or postponed — sometimes all in a day — depending on whether the King got enough sleep last night.

As the woke-ass commies at The Economist write in their lead story this week:

Few businesspeople want to speak truth to power for fear of drawing Mr Trump’s ire. And so the president and reality seem to be drifting ever further apart. Because his approach lacks any coherent logic, there is no knowing how to avert his threats… Mr Trump has no patience for being told that he is wrong. The fact that his belief in protectionism is fundamentally flawed may not sink in for some time, if it ever does.

A government that doesn’t pay its bills, where policy vacillates based on the King’s mood, where people can steal with impunity by bribing the royal family, is not a good investment environment. Corruption makes countries poor!

We’ll see some of this hubris drag down short-term economic indicators, and we’ll see a lot more of it later this year and beyond when we start to feel the impact of all these canceled investments. Even after Donald Trump eats his last Big Mac, it’s hard to see how the Supreme Court’s establishment of a extra-legal presidency will be anything but bad for the economy well into the future.

In the meantime, the administration is changing its tone to “Trust the process.” Even they know they’ve fucked the golden goose and increasingly normal people do, too. The Crisis Era is just hitting its stride.

How’s your corporate accent?

I’ll assume a lot of you are watching Severance, but in case you’re not, here’s the premise: a mysterious company/religious cult called Lumon operates its business in a brightly-lit underground facility. To preserve the confidentiality of the work, everybody who works there is “severed,” meaning they have a brain implant that renders them unable to know their outside identity when they’re in the office, or to remember anything about their workday when they leave the office. All the severed employees are effectively two different people — one of whom only knows their work, and the other of whom only knows life outside work. (It ain’t The Office.)

People love the show for its bold narrative style, its compelling story, and its very impressive sets and production design. But I think something else about it really strikes a nerve. Anyone who’s ever worked in an corporate office can relate to the experience of working at Lumon. We’re all little severed when we’re at work.

My entry into corporate America was at a big consulting firm, and after four years at a liberal arts college, I was baffled by the expectations of “professionalism,” a word I’d never heard until I started my career.

Professionalism and its pejorative partner “unprofessional” sought to establish an order of how one was meant to speak, to act, to be. But it had no clear lines to it. It wasn’t until an executive admin hung up a sign in the break room declaring that the smell of microwaved popcorn was “unprofessional,” that I understood that it meant whatever someone wanted it to mean. (“This is a workplace, not a Sunday matinee!”)

Eventually I adapted, and learn to wear a mask at work like everyone else. We spoke in phrases and patterns that didn’t exist outside the building. We dressed in uniforms that we wouldn’t wear at home. We celebrated “wins” and awarded each other trinkets to recognize our contributions to meeting corporate goals. The moment we got off the elevator, we become our severed selves.

But sometimes the severance would kick in outside office hours. One time I ran into a co-worker at a bar on a Saturday night. He immediately lit up when he recognized me. But then within seconds, I saw the mask come back on. He pulled away from the guy he was fondling, he straightened his posture, he smile calcified, he even hid his cocktail behind him. He transformed back into the work version of himself, and so I quickly left him alone before I ruined his night just by being near him.

Like Lumon, real corporations also have cult elements like founding myths, relics, and cultural enforcement. Wells Fargo celebrates its origin as a courier of frontier gold, but reall a Minnesota bank formerly called Norwest has worn the Wells Fargo brand like a skin suit since 1998. Most Silicon Valley companies are built to be cults of personality around their founders, even retired or dead founders.

About a year ago, I started seeing videos about the “corporate accent.” The corporate accent is an unnatural, monotonous linguistic pattern characterized by professional-grade cliches that would sound ridiculous in any other context. Here’s a TikTok that really nails what it is and why it exists.

I can’t begrudge people for using the corporate accent. As I wrote in the last issue, workplaces are riven with bias because people are biased, which is why DEI is good for companies. Dress codes and standards like the corporate accent tend to level out our differences. In the 2010s when some big companies started encouraging people to “bring your whole self to work,” most people chose to remain severed, assuming that “your whole self” really only applied to certain kinds of people.

Gen X approached corporate conformity as a choice. We didn’t have social media to name things, so we just had to ask ourselves: Do I want to conform or remain outside the system? Do I want to be Ben Stiller or Ethan Hawke? (Am I getting that right? I never saw the movie.)

But the following generations have platforms to deconstruct and name these systems, and they also have their responses to them. For example, when bosses got wind of “quiet quitting” (doing the bare minimum not to get fired), they started requiring employees to “RTO” (return to office). Now some employees are engaging in “task masking” (looking busy) or “strategic disengagement” (quietly opting out of activities that don’t help your career). None of this endears Gen Z to their elders.

Corporate conformity feels unnatural, but it gives us a common culture in a highly unnatural social environment. Earning a living in an office by talking and typing and staring at a screen is extremely new by the standards of human history. We’re all figuring this out together, and we’ve all had those nights when we wished we had brain implants and couldn’t remember a thing from work that day.

Yahoo is 30

In early 1996, when I was working in downtown Miami, an admin named Bertha asked me what website she should visit. Her husband was getting a modem that night.

I recommended Yahoo. The office IT guy didn’t like that answer, and he made a face at me. (That was when I learned that you can never win over the IT guy; he chose this career because he hates you.)

If you had a computer in the 1990s, Yahoo was important to you. You probably had Yahoo email, and it was likely your primary news, sports, and finance source. I even met a long-term girlfriend on Yahoo Personals in 1998, which was considered so weird at the time that we generally didn’t tell people.

This building is vacant now. It’s right next to a sewage treatment plant, a fact that Yahoo-hating tech columnists loved to mention.

I worked for Yahoo (unsuccessfully) for about a year in the mid 2000s. When I got there, it was still number one in email, news, sports, and finance, but it was clearly in decline, and turnover was super-high. (My former co-worker Brian Robinson wrote a fantastic and very funny satirical novella about this era, and I highly recommend it.)

Yahoo’s been through the ringer a few times, including a weird merger with the bones and gristle of AOL and a weirder acquisition by Verizon. But it’s actually thriving again. It’s a rare private equity success story! Even my teen uses the Yahoo sports app and fantasy sports. Yahoo is very much alive, and like some 30-year-olds, it’s lucky enough to know who it wants to be now.

Rangelife Shorts

The fallacy of left and right wing. What makes supporting sexual freedom left but economic freedom right? Is free trade left or right wing? Why are American right-wingers like this? An expansionist USSR led by the KGB was left, but an expansionist Russia led by the former KGB is right? None of this makes any sense, and here’s a video about why we should stop thinking about the political spectrum this way.

Trump coins an amazing new phrase. Americans still ironically say “the internets” because George W. Bush said it unironically in a presidential debate in 2004. Trump’s “Wow, everything’s computer” deserves that kind of lifespan.

This is Gavin Newsom. Everybody seems unhappy with Gav doing a podcast with right-wing guests, but I listened to both the Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon episodes, and they were fascinating, especially the latter. Gavin doesn’t seem terribly interested in arguing, but he’s finding unexpected common ground and giving credence to the uselessness of the left-right model.

Siskel & Ebert mock Protestants. I’ve seen other outtake videos where these two men bicker like an old married couple at the airport, but never one where they ganged up like this. Wonderful.

Everybody and the Sunshine Band. Finally, DJ Cummerbund’s delightful meta-mashup of “That’s the Way” with a whole bunch of other tracks you’re not expecting, with full participation by KC himself. Get ready.