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Now: News!

Matt Davis — Need2Know Chedditor

News You Need2Know

• Meta’s staff hate being forced to use AI

• Inflation hits 3.8%, outstripping 3.6% pay raises

• Harvard students furious over grades crackdown

• Amazon staff use AI tool for unnecessary tasks to …

• Why Rare Earths Americas, inc. did an IPO

• Poll of the day: Did you get a raise?

• Poll of the day: A share of the wealth

What’s the stock market up to, eh?

$SPX ( ▼ 0.16% ) $DJI ( ▲ 0.11% ) $NDX ( ▲ 1.59% )  

Companies mentioned in today’s newsletter

$META ( ▲ 0.69% )  $AMZN ( ▼ 1.18% )  $COST ( ▲ 2.24% )  

Meta’s staff hate being forced to use AI

Meta $META ( ▲ 0.69% ) has discovered a brilliant new way to boost employee morale: Forcing its 78,000 staff to use AI, surveilling their every digital move, and then laying off 10% of them, starting next week, to pay for it all.

In a heartwarming display of corporate trust, Meta recently announced it will track what workers type, where they click, and what they see on their screens. The goal is to let their AI models learn "how people actually complete everyday tasks using computers." Naturally, employees were not thrilled. One engineering manager complained, "This makes me super uncomfortable... How do we opt out?," the New York Times reports. Meta's Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth offered this response: "There is no option to opt-out on your corporate laptop." Workers showered the mandate with more than 100 angry and surprised emojis.

But the fun doesn't stop at inescapable surveillance. Meta also introduced internal dashboards to track employees' AI "token" consumption, turning the workplace into a bizarre, highly competitive version of the AI hunger games. You might enjoy a later story in this ‘sletter about Amazon $AMZN ( ▼ 1.18% ) staff doing something similar, actually.

The grand prize for participating in this mandatory AI circus? Helping build the machine that takes your job!

As the company cuts 10% of its workforce starting May 20 to offset its (checks notes) massive AI investments, workers are anxious about training their AI replacements. One employee aptly told leadership, "Your callousness to the concerns of your own employees is concerning." Another simply wrote on an internal board, "It’s incredibly demoralizing.”

I assume those two staffers will be first against the wall next week. Apparently tons of staff are trying to signal they’d like to be laid off so they can collect severance. Oof.

Quote of the Day

Inflation hits 3.8%, outstripping 3.6% pay raises

Just when you foolishly thought that sweet 3.6% bump in your hourly wages was going to help you get ahead (and excuse me, but I don’t remember actually getting a pay raise!), the U.S. economy has intervened to put Americans back in our humble places. For the first time in three long years, inflation has bravely surged past wage growth, once again, hitting a glorious three-year high of 3.8%.

Who do we have to thank for this financial masterpiece? Look no further than your local gas station, where regular gasoline will now safely set you back at least $4.50 a gallon, and where you’re more likely than ever to encounter stickers like this:

Thanks to President Trump's war in Iran, pump prices have skyrocketed by more than 50% since late February. As Diane “Just Call Me Diane” Swonk, chief economist at KPMG told the Financial Times, "The war in Iran is real," adding that "increases in things like diesel are now showing up at the grocery store."

Regardless of the impact of inflation, I assume it’s observations like that which explain why they pay Diane the big bucks. When you do the math, your hard-earned pay raise (and sorry, but I gotta tell ya again, I really don’t remember actually getting one, do you? Let us know in today’s poll!) translates to a 0.3% decline in inflation-adjusted hourly wages. Alfredo Romero, an economics chair at North Carolina A&T, told the Wall Street Journal that when inflation eats your paycheck, "that makes people a little more hesitant about buying things, which can lead to a ripple effect through the rest of the economy."

Hesitant is certainly a nice new word for “broke.” Swonk cheerfully warns that the supply chain shock has "got very long legs,” too. So fire up your Costco $COST ( ▲ 2.24% ) membership.

Harvard students furious over grades crackdown

Pray for the undergraduates at Harvard University, who might actually have to earn their grades from now on. Faculty are voting on a ruthless proposal to cap “A” grades at a meager 20% of the class.

Currently, Harvard is a magical utopia where "roughly 60% of grades were an A in the academic year ending in mid-2025," Bloomberg rerports. The brilliance of the student body is so uniformly staggering that an award for the top GPA, traditionally meant for just one senior, recently resulted in a hilarious "54-way tie.” But alas, the easy-A era might be over. Professor Jason Furman said: “It’s fundamentally dishonest to give the best students in the class the same grade as someone in the bottom half of the class.” 

Ruh-roh. Students have pushed back in overwhelming numbers, nervous about securing prestigious internships. Even some faculty are rushing to protect these fragile scholars. Professor Scott Duke Kominers warned, “If we adopt a system that systematically punishes students for stretching themselves, I am very concerned we would see the top, top students just choose not to come here.”

This argument reminds me of hedge fund boss Ken Griffin threatening to leave New York for good if the city taxes his $238-million pied-à-terre apartment. The problem is that the day a 26-year-old Citadel employee wants to live and spend their enormous paycheck anywhere outside Manhattan will be the same day top undergraduates “choose” Rutgers over Harvard, no matter what grade they’re scoring on their papers. I say make ‘em work a little harder before they drop out to start their tech companies. Don’t you?

Song of the Day: Bea Miller, ‘Depressed on the Internet’

Here’s a self-aware, raw, and sarcastic punk-rock track about how mental health struggles are commodified online.

Amazon staff use AI tool for unnecessary tasks to inflate usage scores

What is the best way to prove you are an innovative tech employee in 2026? Apparently it’s artificially inflating your AI usage statistics to climb a corporate leaderboard. Amazon $AMZN ( ▼ 1.18% ) has recently rolled out its internal AI tool, "MeshClaw," and employees are brilliantly utilizing it to automate completely non-essential tasks. Why? Because the company introduced a mandate expecting more than 80% of developers to use AI every single week.

It turns out nothing sparks a healthy, productive corporate culture quite like a leaderboard tracking "token" consumption. While Amazon has told its staff that these statistics won't be used for performance evaluations, the workforce knows better. As one current employee astutely told the Financial Times, "Managers are looking at it... When they track usage it creates perverse incentives and some people are very competitive about it." The pressure is so intense that workers are creating unnecessary AI activity to inflate their metrics, a trend similarly seen at Meta called "tokenmaxxing." Another employee confessed, "There is just so much pressure to use these tools.”

The best part? This highly ambitious AI agent can initiate code deployments and triage your emails while you sleep. However, giving an AI permission to act on your behalf isn't sitting well with everyone. Noting the obvious risks of an agent going rogue and making errors, one terrified worker told the paper, “The default security posture terrifies me... I’m not about to let it go off and just do its own thing.”

But who cares about terrifying security risks and unintended actions when you can win employee of the month keep your job?

Why Rare Earths Americas, inc. did an IPO

Rare earth minerals power the modern world, driving the manufacturing of everything from electric vehicles to defense systems and physical AI. Yet, the Western supply chain remains alarmingly vulnerable. Don Swartz, CEO of the newly publicly listed Rare Earths Americas $REA ( ▲ 14.52% ) , highlighted the crisis during an interview with us, noting that nearly 90% of heavy rare earths are mined and processed in China or Myanmar.

"It's really a big risk to the Western supply chain," Swartz told us. He emphasized that global governments must recognize "that there has to be this detachment from that Chinese supply chain and this bifurcation of the market.”

To combat this foreign monopoly, Rare Earths Americas is mining for those elements in Georgia and Brazil. Swartz highlighted the strategic value of the company’s Brazilian operations, which feature easily processed ionic clay. He likened this efficient extraction method to pulling "sugar off the top of a donut," explaining that it is far less intensive than traditional hard rock mining, which is like trying to remove "sugar from a baked cake."

I love a man who’s good with his ionic clay mining metaphors, don’t you? And the stock market seems to, too, with the company’s share price going up 30% in the week since the float. The demand for these critical high-performance materials is skyrocketing, particularly with the robotics sector, which uses rare earths, growing at 24% annually. Best of luck, Don!

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Should you check your 401(k) today?

👎️ 

No.

Poll of the day: Did you get a raise?

Poll of the day: A share of the wealth

We asked: “Are you jealous of the OpenAI staff who just cashed out $30 million each in shares before the company even has a whiff of going public?”

You answered:

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ No, no. It is doing absolute wonders for my San Francisco rent. (9)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Why would I be jealous? Back in the dot-com boom, we had the sheer character-building joy of waiting for a prolonged period after the IPO to cash in, only to watch the bubble burst and lose all our potential wealth. (60)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ It is truly inspiring to see people scraping by on a mere $30 million still find the strength to optimize their tax brackets. (81)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Yes. (274)
424 Votes via @beehiiv polls

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