Hello. I stood with my ex during her gommage,
but stuff still happened. So what's up? Buckle
up, strap in, grab a pal on the butt. Let's talk
about the tax bill and get consent before grabbing
your pal on the butt. Unless it's a dog. So here
in the United States of America, we are watching
as our government is trying to pass a new tax
slash spending bill that has a lot of bad shit
in it. It's so bad that Republicans, who are
the only party that are drafting and voting on
this bill, can't even pass it. Let's back up
and talk about this big, beautiful bill. It's
not very beautiful. So Trump has been talking
about wanting to pass one big, beautiful bill.
He has this weird fixation with, like, making
all legislation happen in one big drop. I don't
know why. But because of that, Republicans have
unironically called this bill the Big Beautiful
Bill Act. Very cringy. This bill is over a thousand
pages, and they're trying to pass it through
reconciliation, which is essentially an administrative
process that would allow them to pass it without
getting any votes from Democrats at all. For
the House, I want to be clear. We're talking
about the House of Representatives. This still
has to get past the Senate, which is... A very
different process. But as of right now, the bill
is out there. It's over a thousand pages long
and contains a ton of stuff. And everyone is
saying that it contains everything or doesn't
contain everything. I tried my best to get an
actual list of what I felt was the most meaningful
points from it from the bill itself. So this
is not not hearsay. This is not I heard this
is what's actually in there. Here we go. About
five trillion dollars in tax cuts. And most of
that's going to go to the super rich because
proportionally. That's where tax cuts give the
most dollar per point. So a $5 trillion tax cut,
they're going to try to make up for that with
a bunch of cuts elsewhere to the spending budget.
We'll get to that for a second, but first, not.
cutting back spending a $60 billion bailout for
farmers. An $800 billion reduction in spending
on Medicaid, which is, to be clear, a thing that
Republicans very loudly and very clearly said
they would not do. With this reduction in spending
on Medicaid, they've got increased work requirements
for getting Medicaid. It also aims to defund
Planned Parenthood via Medicaid. And independent
estimations note that 7 .6 million citizens will
lose their health care if this goes through.
That has given some Republicans some... because
that's enough people to lose an election. It
includes a temporary increase to the standard
deduction for taxes and a bit of a bigger deduction
for high -tax states like New York. It contains
a temporary exclusion of tax on qualified tips
and overtime. That is not all of them. That break
will only last during Trump's term through 2028,
so it's a temporary break on... stuff that still
has other requirements around it. It shifts a
lot of the cost of SNAP or food stamps from the
federal budget to state budgets. States don't
currently pay a whole lot for SNAP. The Fed does.
This moves it down to the state level, which
frankly is going to destroy some state economies.
For people on food assistance, they are working
to increase the age at which you no longer have
to work to receive food assistance from 54 to
64. It also removes a provision that exempted
adults from the work requirement if they had
a child under the age of 18. that limit is now
seven so if you are a parent who has a young
child and you need food assistance you will now
need to work after that child is the age of seven
otherwise you won't qualify and when i say work
i mean like there are work requirements like
minimum requirements that are going to vary by
locale most people who are on food assistance
still do have to go do things. They're not just
sitting around collecting a check. That's not
how that works. It removes a $200 tax on gun
silencers that's been in effect since 1934. Really
tackling those top of mind problems like... taxes
on gun silencers. It gives the president the
ability to designate that nonprofits are terrorist
supporting organizations so that he can remove
their tax exempt status. It throws a few hundred
billion dollars into very Trumpy efforts like
his deportation efforts and his concept of the
Golden Dome, which is a missile defense system
like the Iron Dome, but it's Trump. So it's the
Golden Dome. It expedites approvals and sale
of hundreds of thousands of acres of public land
for mining, drilling, and logging. Increases
the estate tax threshold about a million dollars
from about 14 million to 15 million dollars.
If your family doesn't have that much money,
this doesn't apply to you. So... This doesn't
apply to me. It also establishes a MAGA investment
account for babies born between 2024 and 2028,
so Trump's presidency, in which the state will
put $1 ,000 into the account and then you can
contribute to it and it grows like a baby 401k.
It's literally called a MAGA account. They changed
the acronym to not have it be Make America Great
Again, but it's literally called a MAGA account.
So, you know, it's got that stuff in it. Is it
going to pass? Probably not. Like I said, there
are already Republicans who are like, this goes
way too far. Like it doesn't, this does not pull
back on spending. This is going to just skyrocket
our debt. It's going to remove people's ability
to access insurance. It's going to make it harder
to get food assistance. It just takes things
away while giving tax cuts to the rich. It's
what they always do. We knew this was going to
happen. But anyway, that's what's in that bill.
Let's move on. Kind of tired of talking about
tax bill legislature. I want to go back to talking
about tax bill legislature. A woman in Georgia
is being kept alive against her family's wishes
because she was pregnant when she died. Adriana
Smith was about nine weeks pregnant when she
had a sudden medical issue that resulted in her
death. It was it came out of nowhere. Family
devastated. But because Georgia has a quote unquote
fetal heartbeat bill, which as an aside, that's
not a heartbeat. That's that's not what a heartbeat
is. But because they have a quote unquote fetal
heartbeat bill. the fetus has personhood. So
this woman has been declared brain dead and the
hospital has her on life support and the family
can't stop them. She's now at about 20 weeks.
We don't know how long they're going to be keeping
her alive. We don't know what's going to happen
to the baby. They don't even know what the baby
is going to be OK. This is not healthy for anyone
involved. But Georgia passed this law in 2019.
And then when Roe v. Wade was overturned, it
went into effect. And so now at six weeks. a
fetus is considered a full human being with rights.
That thing that every medical professional disagrees
with? That thing. If you lack a uterus, you might
not know that most people don't even know that
they're pregnant until like four to ten weeks
into their pregnancy. It can go as long as 20
weeks without even knowing that you're pregnant.
It's all over the map. But six weeks? You're
not even going to have a chance to find out.
Roe v. Wade was overturned on the cynical sentiment
that states wanted to be able to choose whether
or not abortion should be allowable. And every
state that it's been on the ballot has passed
with flying colors. This is because no one wanted
it to be up to the states. We were happy with
how it was. Overturning abortion rights was a
deeply, deeply unpopular move. And it was never
about states' rights. Republicans in Missouri.
are currently trying to overturn a constitutional
amendment that the population voted for that
enshrined abortion rights. No joke, the state
voted to enshrine abortion rights in their constitution,
and they're trying to get it overturned against
the will of the people. Which is about as not
states' rights as you can get. I feel like there
was once a political party that was against a
nanny state having too much overreach into your
personal life and medical decisions. I don't
know where they went. Can they come back? This
past week, over two dozen people were killed
in Kentucky and Missouri as harsh storms and
tornadoes tore through the area. Hundreds of
thousands of people are without power and crews
are working around the clock to try to restore
power, find people, help people. Can those people
get a round of applause? Can we get more, just
more general appreciation and recognition for
the people who, in the face of catastrophe, abandon
their own comfort to help others? Can we do that
more? Now, unfortunately, it does seem like this
disaster was made worse by the fact that Doge,
in the current administration, recently made
a bunch of cuts to NOAA, N -O -A -A, the government
wing that tracks the weather. In fact, one day
before the storm, the New York Times posted an
investigative report into the cuts at NOAA and
specifically listed Jackson, Kentucky as one
of the locations that was the most desperately
understaffed. That's one of the places that got
hit. So the timing doesn't look good. There were
delays in getting out the warnings and there's
reductions in staff at the places that give out
those warnings. Between this and the FAA cuts,
can we stop getting rid of people whose job it
is to maintain national safety? I want to be
able to go see my friends via air travel and
via having them still be alive. Hey, if you like
what I do, I could really use your help. I need
to eat. I need to live, and that costs money.
And so if you want to support me, you can head
to merchfrom .dev. You can get yourself a Skulls
Keep Happening denim jacket or a bunch of other
stuff. Or if you want to get more of a digital
sort of package from me, that sounds suggestive,
you can head to patreon .com slash Endeavorance,
and you can support me. Any tier gets access
to everything, and there's a whole bunch of content
with much more on the way. Thank you so much.
Back to stuff. All right, I'm done with the United
States for this video, but also at large. Let's
go on to the world. All of the world. Well, some
of the world. You may remember last November.
That's fun. In New Zealand, there were some indigenous
members of parliament who stood up and performed
a haka. If you're not familiar, it's like a ceremonial
dance thing. I don't actually know how to describe
it. It's fucking rad. It's like somewhere between
a showing of pride and celebration or intimidation.
It has a whole bunch of purposes, but... Yeah,
so they did a haka in the parliament on the floor.
It was a protest against legislation and the
entire world saw it and was like, that's rad,
that's sick. But now the New Zealand parliament
is looking into punishing the people who participated
in that. They want to suspend them for a few
weeks, which is like an unprecedented punishment.
But don't worry, they're justifying it to themselves.
Quote, we intend to leave members in no doubt
that the behavior discussed is not acceptable
and that the intimidation of other members of
the House is treated with the utmost seriousness.
That seriousness, that utmost seriousness, also
includes a complaint that during the haka, it
looked like one of the members of parliament
made... A gun shape towards another. Very serious
concerns. Anyway, I don't know. I'm going to
side with the indigenous people who are protesting
using their culture on the land that their culture
is from that was colonized. I'm going to stand
with them on this one. Eurovision happened again.
Eurovision is like a big old song contest. It's
like somewhere between the Olympics and Glee.
Bunch of European countries come together, perform
songs, and then there's an audience vote and
a judge vote. Austria won. Good job, Austria.
But notably, second place was Israel, who had
an outsized amount of audience votes compared
to their judge votes. So there's probably nothing
there. We don't really need to look into that.
That's nothing. But I do want to take a deeper
dive into this little country that got second
place. See what they're up to. Oh, they're continuing
to carpet bomb Gaza and destroy lives. They've
been continuing their next wave of just eradicating
Gaza. from the map. I can't even keep tallies
anymore. I'm seeing articles of 100 people killed
in an airstrike last night. And the next day,
another 93 were killed. Hospitals are shutting
down. There's virtually no hospitals left for
them to go to. It's basically the end. I've been
covering Israel's assault on Gaza for over a
year. And the number of times that I've got up
in front of this camera and talked about the
number of children that have been killed, the
amount of atrocities being committed, the fact
that virtually the entire world agrees that this
is a genocide, ethnic cleansing, that the leadership
of Israel need to be held accountable for their
actions. Nothing, nothing changed. The United
States of America has a vested interest in Israel
existing, largely from a geopolitical foothold
perspective, but also pretty much equally from
a death cult fulfillment perspective. It is critically
important to the ethos of evangelical Christians
in America. to have Israel be established and
sustained. There are a reason that Christian
groups are pushing so hard for Israel to exist.
It's not because of their good graces towards
Jews. Because again, Israel is not synonymous.
with Judaism. And so while I don't want to be
a doomer, I don't want to be like, oh, there's
nothing we can do. There's kind of nothing we
can do. The damage has been done. And we're at
the point now where the Trump administration
is toying with an idea of just resettling a million
people from Gaza because Israel wants it and
they got to get what they want. Anyway, congrats
to Israel for their second place in the singing
competition. It's a shame that we couldn't preserve
the millions of souls living in what's supposed
to be a sacred land. Technology. Stuff keeps
happening. We'll be back after I talk to you
about white genocide in South Africa. Beep boop.
I'm a robot. Okay, backstory. Twitter has the
option to tweet at Grok, which is XAI's version
of ChatGPT. XAI is Elon Musk's AI company that
also technically now owns Twitter. It's a whole
thing. My cord is stuck on a button. Fixed it.
Anyway, it's a whole thing. Recently, starting
around like 3 a .m. one night, Grok started to
just include phrases about white genocide in
South Africa in response to everything. You can
ask it about anything. I saw one that was asking
about like baseball contracts and it was like,
ah, yes, this is an interesting baseball contract.
But on the topic of white genocide in South Africa,
blah, blah, blah. And it was just that for like
every response, just everywhere. It was out of
nowhere bringing up white genocide in South Africa,
which at this point, I want to make it very,
very clear. There is no white genocide happening
in South Africa. This is a bullshit made up conspiracy
theory pushed by you guessed it. Elon Musk, among
many other folks on the right. And it's also
tied up with Trump having recently brought in
a handful of quote -unquote refugees from South
Africa who, shocker, were all white and got expedited
entry into the country. So, of course, everyone's
like, oh, weird. Elon Musk's AI is suddenly telling
everybody about white genocide in South Africa.
And so it was so blatant that XAI had to actually
put out a statement in which they were like,
well, a rogue employee. edited the system prompt
for the ai at 3 15 a .m we're looking into it
a rogue employee yeah so to make things funnier
they decided to try to save face by publishing
their system prompts to GitHub, the open source
coding platform. So they're like, the world can
see. It's an open source thing. So someone decided
to open up a pull request, which is a suggestion
for a change to the code, to re -add the line
about white genocide and always talking about
white genocide to the AI system prompt. And someone
at XAI approved that change. It was a joke. The
person who made the change was like, this is
a gag, but it got included. It was later reverted.
But what? So here's a privately held company
with direct ties to the White House who's building
an AI and for some reason can have a rogue employee
completely upturn the entire system and try to
shill fabricated stories. Furthermore, they have
some rando just approving poll requests on public
open source projects that could potentially be
detrimental to said project. I have spent...
half of my life working in the tech industry
that is not how any of this is supposed to work
you're not supposed to be able to just have one
guy make changes to the production systems at
three in the morning without anyone knowing that
is mind -boggling to me and so here we have a
very direct look at why we should not trust ai
models for all of the the shrieking and pearl
clutching about deep seek ai that came from china
and how it's got propaganda here is An American
AI company directly getting caught with their
pants down, having attempted to do that. And
specifically, it's an AI company that Elon Musk
himself says is supposed to be anti -woke and
quote -unquote maximally truth -seeking. Maximally
truth -seeking, except when you need to, you
know... nudge the truth in the direction that
you want it to go. Microsoft plans to lay off
about 3 % of their workforce in June, about 6
,000 people. They're trying to reduce the complexity
of their company in order to best position the
company for success in a dynamic marketplace.
I am so glad. I said that I worked in tech for...
I'm so glad I'm out. My God. Microsoft has been
laying people off left and right for the past
few years. This is more of that. I do want to
note that Microsoft recently beat their quarterly
earnings expectations in April. So, yeah, you're
really tightening the belt there. Okay, let's
get uplifted. I found a good one. I found a good
one. So aside from not having white genocide
in South Africa, there's also good research happening.
Researchers in South Africa have found two new
genetic signals that can help better identify
breast cancer in black African women. So we know
that medical science is way behind on women and
black people. So black women especially have
it real bad in the medical science field, both
as researchers and as patients. However. There
was recently a genome -wide association study.
Don't know what that means, but cool. The study
revealed these new genetic identifiers, which
could help create medicine to target specific
cancer cells that exhibit these identities, which
is cool. I also learned that Africa has the most
genetic biodiversity among people living there.
So that's cool too. Game it! Okay, so GTA 6 was
delayed, right? Like, I talked about that last
time. But now a bunch of companies are scrambling
to figure out what to do with their games that
were supposed to release around the new release
date for GTA 6. Grand Theft Auto 6 has been one
of the most anticipated, if not the most anticipated
piece of media maybe ever. Like, so much so that
there is a meme of just like, we got whatever
before we got GTA 6. Like, it's... It's been
in the zeitgeist, but it was recently delayed.
And, you know, that that level of anticipation
being pushed back to spring 2026 means that a
bunch of other games that were supposed to come
out in spring 2026 are now like, oh, oh, I don't
want to deal with that. So we'll see if there's
a if there's a game you've been looking forward
to and that's supposed to come out around that
time. Maybe maybe check in on them. EA. is doing
a return to office now. Electronic Arts, the
behated game publisher, has said that their employees
are going to have to come back into the office
for at least three days a week, and they are
no longer doing remote hiring. This, of course,
uproots a bunch of people's lives and plans and
work -life balance and everything. And also,
insult to injury, we pretty much know now that
there's not much of a difference between remote
work and in -person work. So this is not going
to do a whole lot. I'll tell you one thing, actually,
it will do a whole lot. Because studies have
shown that return to office plans basically just
result in a bunch of employee turnover, which
for EA, maybe that's for the best. Well done,
EA. Bungie is running a marathon. This one's
personal. So Bungie, game developer Bungie, they
developed games, they made Halo, they made Destiny.
They're in hot water. So I am a loser. I play
a lot of Destiny 2. And for a long time... People
who played Destiny 2 were begging for Bungie
to do anything in the player versus player arena
space. Like, there is a player versus player,
like, game mode. It's just been atrophying. So
for, like, years, players were asking for something.
And Bungie was like, hey, PvP people. We've got
something for you. It's a new game that we're
building. Not, not, we're not fixing the, we're
going to make something different entirely, which
pissed a lot of players off because they didn't
want that. They just wanted like, I don't know,
a new map maybe. So Bungie announces Marathon,
a new extraction shooter game, which is a new
type of game that I don't fully understand, but
it's basically like a battle royale, but with
like RPG and looting mechanics. Long story short,
nobody wants this game. And then they released
a preview and people started playing the game
and the reviews were very lukewarm. And then,
and then during the preview, an artist pointed
out like, hey, that's my art. It turns out Bungie
used stolen art assets in the game and then they
admitted to it. And now they're just getting
dragged. So here's a game that people weren't
really thrilled about the announcement of that
then the first preview was not inspiring and
then also contained stolen artwork. And Bungie's
just been laying people off left and right. Like,
it's really, it's not going great. I just wanted,
I don't know, like, a capable ranking system.
I just wanted, like, reasonable matches without
cheaters. That's literally it. I don't know.
Lightning round! A Mexican Navy vessel crashed
into the Brooklyn Bridge, killing two people
on board and injuring 19 others. The vessel was
here on a goodwill mission. Oops. The US no longer
has a perfect credit rating, just like the rest
of us. A kindergartner in Pennsylvania brought
jello shots to school, but don't worry, he brought
enough for the whole class. Oh, he brought enough
for his friends, but I wanted to make the joke.
Anyway, yeah, a kindergartner doing jello shots.
That's a new one. A plantation house in Louisiana
burned to the fucking ground. I'm just gonna
say that again. A plantation house in Louisiana
burned to the fucking ground. One more time.
A plantation house that held slaves. In Louisiana,
burned to the ground. More of that. Also Louisiana,
10 inmates recently escaped from a New Orleans
jail. Three of them have been caught, seven still
on the run. A fertility clinic in Palm Springs
was bombed. FBI is saying that they're investigating
it as an intentional act of terror. I've seen
murmurings about the person who did it being
like an anti -being -born, like mad about being
alive kind of person. unclear. And finally for
today, my dog was very wiggly this morning and
I gave him some good belly rubs. Thank you so
much for listening to today's episode of Stuff
Keeps Happening. Head to skh .news for sources,
bonus content, and a thousand more pages of tax
code. My name is Endeavorance. I'll be back on
Monday. Take care and be well.