Kansas has sent a letter to each of their trans residents saying they are suspending their drivers licenses, effective today (February 26th), with no grace period for updating credentials. It directs trans people to go to a DMV to surrender their old license and be issued a new one that shows their sex as the one assigned at birth. (Though they can’t drive themselves to the DMV because, y’know, their drivers licenses are suspended.)
They are doing this the extra cruel way on purpose. If they knew which people to send this letter to, then they could have just as easily just automatically mailed them replacement licenses. But forcing them to make arrangements to travel to a DMV, present themselves in person (to be potentially humiliated/deadnamed by the DMV employees to their faces), and to be unable to drive themselves to their work/school in the interim, are all just ways of making this process even harder. And because there’s a National Driver Register database that lists individual drivers’ status and history information, it’s not necessarily even as simple as just moving to a different state and get a new license issued there, because it will presumably show their previous license as being suspended.
Someone has been comparing this to the day in 1938 when the German government invalidated all German passports held by Jewish people, forcing them to surrender their old passports and instead have passports stamped with a “J” for Jewish on them.
For trans people, carrying an ID that misgenders them opens them to intrusive questions, harassment, and even violence.
There’s a nonprofit in Colorado, the Trans Continental Pipeline, that helps queer people relocate from unaccepting/unsafe states to Colorado. Colorado shares a border with Kansas, and is the closest blue state. Apparently they are getting overwhelmed with requests. If you have spare money to donate, now seems like a good time. If you’re in Colorado and have time to volunteer, their volunteer form is here.
February 25th, 2026: Toronto has been wet for weeks now. It snows but then it melts a bit, or it rains. Just endless wet! But I figure, maybe complaining about it on my personal webzone might change things? You know - SOMEHOW??
I don’t want to walk to the edge of the cliff– The edge is unstable, eroded, and if Our feet were placed carelessly we’d stumble by Off of the rock, through the wind, through the sky– Too much air or too little between you and I– I don’t want to know if we’d fall or we’d fly. I don’t want to risk everything to the crash, And live through the moments we wait for the smash– Perilous, damaging, wild and intense– But also I don’t want to build a fence.
A friend mentioned to me over the weekend that he’d heard about Wall Streeters buying up the rights to tariff refunds from big corporate importers. So the idea is that a Wall Street firm goes to an importer and says, you’ve now paid $10 million in tariffs. I’ll pay you $2 million right now for the right to collect the refund if courts ever end up deciding the tariffs were illegal. My friend had also heard that one of the most aggressive buyers was Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm until recently headed by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and now run by Lutnick’s sons. Twenty-something Brandon Lutnick, pictured above on the left in a 2016 photo, is the current chairman of Cantor Fitzgerald. (He must be hella talented!)
Damn, I thought: That’s a hot story, crooked as the day is long. But I’m not sure how I or we would track it down without better finance world sources. Still, it was worth some quick googling. It turns out this is happening and Cantor’s role has already been reported. Wired and others reported this more than a month ago.
In mid-July, according to Wired, Cantor was buying up the rights to your potential tariff refund at between 20 and 30 cents per dollar. Needless to say, I bet that price has gone up a lot since last Friday’s federal appellate court upheld the lower court ruling that almost all of Trump’s tariffs are illegal. So in paper terms Cantor has probably already made a ton of money on this.
Now, before going any further I want to make clear that in itself this transaction is fairly unremarkable. A huge amount of modern finance is about making bets on uncertain outcomes, bets which can be structured in various ways. It might be commodities futures. In this case, it’s the right to collect a refund that may never happen. The sale of debt — a ubiquitous feature of modern finance — is similar. Purchasing debt, whether it’s a government bond or your home mortgage, is fundamentally a bet on the likelihood of repayment. I don’t want to belabor the point, only to make clear that the transaction in concept is neither outlandish or suspect, at least no more than any other part of modern finance.
All that said, it’s hard to imagine anything more emblematic of the Trump Era than what is for all intents and purposes still the Commerce Secretary’s company (yes, yes, arms length hand off to his twenty-something sons) making bets on something Lutnick himself has significant influence over. Indeed, far more important than whatever influence Lutnick has over tariff policy is that significant visibility he has into the bet’s probable outcome.
Lutnick can’t be certain what’s in a judge’s mind any more than Trump can. But he’ll have lots of visibility into what the government’s lawyers think, how they rate their odds of success, what their arguments will be. On top of that, given the immense corruption of the current Supreme Court, I would say there’s at least a 50%-50% shot that Trump and thus Lutnick will gets signals from one or more of the justices about how the Court will rule. Any way you look at this it’s corrupt as hell. And on a more metaphoric level it typifies the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose rules that the billionaire class and their sub-billionaire toadies live by.
As somebody or the other said, the scandal isn’t what’s illegal, it’s what’s legal.
movies about apocalypses: it’s every man for himself!! you can’t trust anyone, it’s a wasteland of solo travelers and sad families, we’re alone out here
humans irl: *pack bond with strangers*
*pack bond with large carnivores*
*pack bond with robots in space thousands of miles away*
Apocalypse preppers who fantasise about all our artificial rules and governments falling away in times of chaos seem to forget that we invented those rules and governments. Over and over. When you put humans near each other, they group up and make a society; that’s why those governments exist. Do they think we magically stop doing that in dangerous situations? Because… we don’t.
hopepunk doesn’t have time for your racist doomsday hard-on, carl.
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