My fourth month of unemployment. I'm fresh off an interview with a senior technical role advertised with a decent compensation range whose upper end would let me make median rent, and whose lower range would not. At the end of an excellent interview, I am informed that said compensation range, contrary to the Base Compensation tag in the job description, is in fact all inclusive, and that the role actually tops out below the living wage threshold for a three adult household for its base compensation.

I feel it's highly relevant to note that this was a role where I would own the entire technology estate for an employer. Every switch, every firewall, every database, every server, every phone, every laptop, every cloud, every badge system. All data, everywhere, at any time.

Everything.

For an employer in the public safety industry.

Seriously, this is a company first responders rely on for tech, and they want to pay below subsistence wages to senior technical people!

This is not the first time that compensation has been mismatched to the role, but it is the first time it's happened with a role so critically important to a company playing such an outsized role in as critical an area as public safety.

Which got me thinking: have employers just lost the plot on what compensation is actually for? What its intended function is? Because it seems to me that everyone thinks compensation is merely payment for labor and nothing more, a number to be driven down by any means necessary in order to keep more for those at the top.

And oh my god it is so much more than that.

We live in a society. This society has been arranged around using currency to purchase necessities, because some people decided that necessities are not guaranteed. You acquire currency by either investing currency you already have to compound it through the labor of others, or you labor in order to earn less currency than investors do.

Is that a gross oversimplification? You betcha, but I'm really trying to stay on topic and not fill this with reaction GIFs.

Author's Note: I failed.

Anyway, everyone needs currency to afford everything. Rent costs currency, food costs currency, electricity costs currency, water and sewage and garbage and healthcare and childcare and education all cost currency. Only after your essentials have been paid for, can you use excess currency to save for tomorrow - buying a home, or a car, or a retirement if you're really lucky.

Now at some point, the humans involved in handing out currency decided that too many people were living too nicely. The thinking was simple: trading time for currency in the form of labor was a sucker's game, and those with currency deserve more currency because they already had currency. Companies in particular deserved more money than the people who worked for the company, at least according to Powell.

Thus labor was reframed into those terms: wages were merely a payment to those who did labor, and labor was only to be paid the minimal amount possible in the marketplace for said labor, and not one cent more, regardless of external forces (like the cost of living). Minimum wages are bad, because wages should only ever go down relative to inflation and productivity, never up. Only those who own business deserve more currency, because they're the real workers.

Again, a gross oversimplification coming from an openly biased dinosaur. That's not the point.

The point is that wages aren't meant to merely compensate labor; they're also meant to protect the company.

Tony Soprano reminding you that this is a business.

I'll just be blunt: wages are also protection money. They're not just compensation for doing your job, they're compensation for not burning down warehouses, not going on strike, not sabotaging workloads, and not unionizing in the first place. It's the longest unspoken social contract dating back to pre-history: you pay me to live, or else.

Occasionally, employers will call labor's bluff. If twenty-thousand years of history is any indication, their temporary wins are always undone by the sheer ratio of workers to wealthy owners, though not before employers provoke and employ violence first. We are going through such a phase right now, if the above links are any indication.

Employers haven't paid their dues to labor in decades. Labor, kind as we are, have cut back on our lives as much as we're able to. We've given up homeownership, we're dropping out of healthcare, we're begging from food pantries, we're taking on gig work, and we've seen none of the wage gains from productivity our elders enjoyed. It's gotten so bad that, with workers having sacrificed our very ability to move up the socioeconomic ladder, the economy has gone K-shaped.

Despite this, employers seem to think there's more room for workers to yield. I say this because despite median wages being unable to afford median homes, I'm still finding employers offering lower and lower pay for work on their job descriptions. This isn't just economics anymore, this is a security risk, and employers are playing with fire.

Modern employers

Take your CPA, for instance, median pay of $81,680 a year and at moderate exposure to AI displacement according to Anthropic. These are people who know your books better than you. Where every penny goes, and where every penny can be silently swindled. They also audit your fancy new AI financial workflows, making corrections when it goes off the rails, and know where all your financial skeletons are buried.

Do you really want to pay your accountant so little that they can't make rent or buy a home? Do you really want them going to a food bank instead of a grocery store? They're excellent at judging risk, and know exactly what that pay gap is worth to them if the timing is right. Maybe it's blowing the whistle before you can fix an issue and leading to a costly investigation, maybe it's sharing your supply chain costs with a competitor for a higher paying job, or maybe it's committing outright embezzlement that they're sure your fancy AI tooling will miss.

Are you sure underpaying your accountant is a good idea?

Tech work, the last bastion of Middle Class employment, isn't doing any better. Take Computer and Network Architects, with a median pay of $130,390 per year; or the Computer Systems Analysts, median pay of $103,790 per year; or the Systems Administrators, with a median pay of $96,800 per year. These groups have the keys to your systems, your data, your endpoints, your real estate. They can see and do anything with a keystroke, including destroying billion-dollar businesses. The reason for the comparatively high wages was their comparatively high degree of trust.

Instead, employers outsourced to MSPs, then offshored overseas, then on-shored to underpaid and exploited H1Bs shackled to their employer's temporary sponsorship, then briefly hired North Korean spies, and are now attempting to replace the technical workers outright with AI that routinely drops production systems. All the while they lay off workers by the tens of thousands, over and over again.

I feel like there's an example of the consequences of not treating your technical experts with respect in popular media...

Dennis Nedry is a fucking asshole whose actions endangering personnel and guests were reprehensible, but he did repeatedly make it clear he felt undervalued relative to his contributions...

I'm not Dennis Nedry, but I've worked with folks like them before. Brilliant minds who can debug complex architectures and systems, who pour their lives quite literally into the work because they have a passion for it...and increasingly are all too willing to burn it to the ground when they feel slighted. Spend time around actual engineers and the like in most orgs, and you'll see patterns of ill-health: smokers, drinkers, chewers, vapers, over-eaters, out-of-shapers, poor posture, bags under eyes, thinning and greying hair, high amounts of stress, messy desks. All signs of humans sacrificing their own health for their employers, prioritizing work over life, overworked to an early grave.

Most folks aren't as egalitarian as I am, and as someone who has sacrificed physical, mental, emotional, and psychological health to the field for over fifteen years, I sympathize with where my peers are coming from. Most people aren't wired to "do no harm" no matter what, which means most people are a huge security risk if they're undercompensated.

Thing is, undercompensation isn't limited merely to your specialists and senior workers. Fast food workers will slow down lines to give themselves breathing room due to understaffing, and retail workers won't put in the added effort of store maintenance when they can't even maintain a roof over their heads. Office workers doing more menial tasks aren't going to follow through on security best practices if they're more worried about how to pay the electric bill this month while also affording insulin. Your contracted-out security staff aren't likely to pay close attention to camera feeds since they know they'll be replaced in three months before benefits kick in. Your MSP or offshored technical staff won't be invested in your long-term success when their KPIs only cover ticket counts and response times, and their competitors are already preparing to underbid at renewal anyhow.

The workers have been incredibly clear about their problems for twenty years, now, especially the younger cohorts. Employers haven't wanted to listen, believing one more technical control or one more AI system will finally give them the permanent, unassailable leverage they need to keep all the money and fire all the workers.

Fuck you, pay me.

I don't really have a positive way to end this. This is a warning, another canary in an increasingly smoke-choked mine. We're at the point that workers are quite literally burning down infrastructure and engaging in violence against leadership, and the response from those who can change things - our politicians, our corporate leaders, the investor class that's richer than ever in human history - don't really seem to give a fuck. There's this thick tension in the air between workers scrambling to survive, and monied classes who feel the demands of the workers are wholly unreasonable.

History paints a pretty clear picture of how this ultimately ends, but for what it's worth, I still feel like I should at least try to warn folks about the consequences of undercompensation.

Failing to pay your workers the money they need to live is breaking the social contract. It's the single biggest security vulnerability in your organization, and I promise you that there is not, and never will be, a technological control that can protect against it.

You gotta pay up, or you're going to get burned down.

Milton was right.

An addendum.

AI is making it faster and easier to brute-force security vulnerabilities at a time when open source is falling apart due to lack of funding and successors. Major companies are firing engineers to replace them with AI tooling, then hiring them back at lower pay packages when the AI fails, but still holding the AI Sword of Damocles over their heads. Software is expanding rapidly at a time when employers seek to eliminate the technical professionals who ensure their safety and prosperity, who can translate institutional processes and knowledge into cost-effective infrastructure.

Housing prices are up. Rent is up. Utilities are up because of AI datacenter builds. Food costs are rising due to global conflicts instigated by America. So too are energy prices, tariffs, inflation, and interest rates.

You, the employer, have a decision to make: do you start raising wages, working with policymakers to immediately address affordability, cease arbitrary layoffs, invest in worker futures, and promote regulatory schemes that reign in the worst myopic excesses of your peers for society's collective benefit?

Or do you take up smoking cigarettes while sitting inside a warehouse of loose gunpowder and dynamite, with a mob of torches and pitchforks right outside?

Coco has had it up to here with your bullshit.

A US Army soldier was arrested for insider trading after being accused of making prediction-market wagers on the timing of the military's capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Army soldier Gannon Ken Van Dyke made a profit of nearly $410,000 by making bets on Polymarket, and he was indicted on charges of unlawful use of confidential government information for personal gain, theft of nonpublic government information, commodities fraud, wire fraud, and making an unlawful monetary transaction, the Department of Justice announced yesterday.

"As alleged in the indictment, Van Dyke participated in the planning and execution of the US military operation to capture Nicolás Maduro, called 'Operation Absolute Resolve,' and Van Dyke used his access to classified information about that operation to personally profit," the DOJ said.

Van Dyke, a 38-year-old North Carolina resident stationed at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, has been an active-duty soldier since 2008 and a master sergeant with US Army Special Forces since 2023, according to the indictment. He was bound by nondisclosure agreements forbidding him from revealing classified or sensitive military information.

Van Dyke allegedly started making bets about a week before the January 3 capture of Maduro. He was charged in US District Court for the Southern District of New York.

"Van Dyke won his wagers on those contracts," and "profited approximately $409,881," the DOJ said. He later "sent most of his proceeds to a foreign cryptocurrency vault before depositing them into a newly created online brokerage account," and "took steps to conceal his identity as the trader in the Maduro- and Venezuela-related markets," the DOJ said.

Trump: It's like "Pete Rose betting on his own team"

The DOJ described the bets as follows:

As alleged, on or about Dec. 26, 2025, Van Dyke created a Polymarket account, funded it, and began trading on Maduro- and Venezuela-related markets. In total, Van Dyke made approximately 13 bets from Dec. 27, 2025, through the evening of Jan. 26. Those bets all took the “YES” position on “US Forces in Venezuela... by January 31, 2026”; “Maduro out by... January 31, 2026”; “Will the US invade Venezuela by... January 31,”; or “Trump invokes War Powers against Venezuela by... January 31.” Van Dyke bet a total of approximately $33,034 on those outcomes while in possession of classified nonpublic information about Operation Absolute Resolve.

President Trump was asked about Van Dyke at the White House on Thursday, and responded by comparing the wagers to "Pete Rose betting on his own team," according to CNBC. “Pete Rose, they kept him out of the Hall of Fame because he bet on his own team," Trump was quoted as saying. "Now, if he bet against his team, that would be no good, but he bet on his own team. I’ll look into it.”

CNBC wrote that when "a reporter noted there have been other allegations of insider trading on prediction markets about the Iran war, Trump said, 'You know the whole world, unfortunately, has become somewhat of a casino.'" Trump also said that he is "not happy with any of that stuff."

Polymarket said in a statement yesterday that it "identified a user trading on classified government information," and "referred the matter to the DOJ and cooperated with their investigation. Insider trading has no place on Polymarket. Today's arrest is proof the system works."

Trump Jr. firm invested in Polymarket

Polymarket last year announced an investment from a venture capital firm backed by Donald Trump Jr., and added Trump Jr. to its advisory board. The investment was reportedly at least $10 million. Trump Jr. is also a strategic advisor for Kalshi, another major prediction market.

Some US states have tried to impose stricter regulations on prediction markets, but are facing pushback from the Trump administration. The US won a court ruling finding that the federal government's jurisdiction over prediction markets prevents New Jersey from enforcing laws that prohibit betting on college sports and require licenses to offer other types of sports wagers.

Van Dyke became involved in the planning and execution of Operation Absolute Resolve on or about December 8, 2025, the indictment said. Van Dyke "possessed material nonpublic information about that operation at the time of each and every trade he placed in Maduro- and Venezuela-related markets," and had received that information "under a duty of trust and confidence to maintain the confidentiality of such classified information and to not use it for personal matters or gain," the indictment said.

The indictment said that hours after Maduro's capture, a photo was taken depicting Van Dyke "on what appears to be the deck of a ship at sea, at sunrise wearing US military fatigues, and carrying a rifle, standing alongside three other individuals wearing US military fatigues." The photo was uploaded to Van Dyke's Google account, the indictment said.

Shortly after the Maduro operation, "reports of unusual trading in Maduro-related contracts on Polymarket appeared in the press and on social media," the DOJ said. The agency alleged that Van Dyke reacted to the reports by trying to conceal his trades.

"On or about January 6, 2026, for example, Van Dyke asked Polymarket to delete his Polymarket account, falsely claiming that he had lost access to the email address to which the account had been associated," the DOJ said. "That same day, Van Dyke changed the email registered to his cryptocurrency exchange account to an email address that was not subscribed to in his name, and which he had created on or about Dec. 14, 2025."

Van Dyke also faces CFTC lawsuit

The DOJ press release said the combined maximum penalty of the charges is 60 years in prison, but noted that the maximums "are prescribed by Congress and provided here for informational purposes only, as any sentencing of the defendant will be determined by the judge."

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) separately filed a civil complaint against Van Dyke, also in the Southern District of New York. The agency said it is seeking "restitution, disgorgement, civil monetary penalties, trading and registration bans, and a permanent injunction against further violations of the Commodity Exchange Act and CFTC regulations."

Van Dyke "was entrusted with confidential information about US operations and yet took action that endangered US national security and put the lives of American service members in harm’s way," CFTC Chairman Michael Selig said.

The case is "the first time the CFTC has charged insider trading involving event contracts, and the first time the CFTC has used the so-called ‘Eddie Murphy Rule’ to bring charges based on the misuse of government information," the agency said. The Eddie Murphy rule is named after the actor because of the insider trading scheme depicted in Trading Places, which involved futures contracts for frozen concentrated orange juice.

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Howdy folks,

I have some good news, which is that, after seven months, I’ve finally recovered from Long Covid. This is not something I particularly want to talk about in depth but it was the worst thing that ever happened to me! Anyway, sorry for the long period without posting that much, but I hope this amazing house (both laudatory/derogatory, that’s dialectics, baby) will make up for the three months I went AWOL.

BEHOLD:

Not to be over-exuberant, but I genuinely think this is the best McMansion exterior of all time. That includes all the messed up castles, the Mediterranean-style cult complexes, the Staten Island weirdness. Nothing, to me, epitomizes just how uniquely wacky these houses can be. The oversized broken pediment with the fat fake corinthian columns, the lawyer foyer transom window, the ultra-nub, the 45-degree angle, it is all there and it is all hellish, and none of it will ever happen ever again. Anyway this house is $2.5 million dollars and 10,000 square feet. Someone should buy it and give house tours to young people for whom this way of live will soon be unimaginable.

There is nothing so bold to me as the idea of a canted lawyer foyer flanked by two equally huge windows. The fact that the house is more populated by vases than people…something something a vessel for wealth, ah!

Someone on TikTok is going to find this house and set all the pictures to that terrible vaporwave nostalgia song. “tuscan kitchen [black heart emoji]” (as is their right, just like blogging is my right)

If you were a rich person muralist, please get in touch with me (patreon@mcmansionhell.com) I want to hear YOUR stories!!!!

I mean, if I had a giant mysterious wardrobe I, too, would be fernmaxxing (I am 32 years old and will not be talking like this. I am getting generationmogged and have to draw the line somewhere.)

If someone says to you “we should go to Venice in May” ABORT ABORT ABORT. you WILL pay 15 euros for gin and tonic. you WILL get pickpocketed or puked on by British people. you WILL be eaten by mosquitoes. Go in November when no one’s around and you can have a good cry about how everything dies, sinks into the ocean, one might say, and how futile it is to try keeping it alive on horrible wooden stilts. The gondolier will tell you wistfully about how the dolphins returned to the lagoons during the pandemic lockdown. Then he will look at you because their leaving again is your fault.

I hate putting the word “cuck” in this blog. Ten years ago, that would warrant an angry parent email. Now children say cuck to each other in elementary school because they learned it from a Charlie Kirk assassination fancam.

This is kind of like one of those 19th century galleries but for 400,000aires who mostly think of art as a piece of furniture.

I used to not believe in the mobbed up pizza place (no one likes an ethnic stereotype) but there was one I went to in Coastal New Jersey that was unmistakably mobbed up. Guys coming in and out of the back in suits, cash only, no GrubHub, no delivery. It wasn’t called Vito’s though. That would be stupid of me to disclose.

It’s so funny that for a month we collectively pretended that every man alive cared about the roman empire. Just the kind of cute thing we used to do online before cultural microphenomena became primarily driven by incel forums.

That’s right, folks, McMansion Hell is TEN YEARS OLD this year, and there WILL be a party in Chicago in July. (More details later.) Anyway, heinous back facade. What were they thinking.

If you like this post and want more like it, support McMansion Hell on Patreon for as little as $1/month for access to great bonus content including a discord server, extra posts, and livestreams. (Don’t worry! This doesn’t adjust for inflation! Now’s the perfect time to join!) By the way: new subscribers can buy a year of McMansion Hell for just $12!

Not into recurring payments? Try the tip jar! (I would seriously appreciate any and all tips because I am now, like, $3000 in medical debt from having Long Covid, a disease doctors and insurance companies famously believe in and cover. If you are the woman who hacked up a lung next to me on my flight to New Mexico, not even an N95 could beat your germs and I feel entitled to financial compensation.)

Anyway! See you next month!

Apple fixed a security bug that made it possible for cops to access content from deleted Signal messages.

Vulnerable users hoping to evade law enforcement surveillance often use encrypted apps like Signal to communicate sensitive information. That's why users felt blindsided when 404 Media reported that Apple was unexpectedly storing push notifications displaying parts of encrypted messages for up to a month. This occurred even after the message was set to disappear and the app itself was deleted from the device.

404 Media flagged the issue after speaking to multiple people who attended a hearing where the FBI testified that it "was able to forensically extract copies of incoming Signal messages from a defendant’s iPhone, even after the app was deleted, because copies of the content were saved in the device’s push notification database." The shocking revelation came in a case that 404 Media noted was "the first time authorities charged people for alleged 'Antifa' activities after President Trump designated the umbrella term a terrorist organization."

On Wednesday, Apple confirmed that it had fixed a bug allowing the FBI to access this content. Affected users concerned about push notifications can update their devices to stop what Apple characterized as "notifications marked for deletion" that "could be unexpectedly retained on the device."

According to Apple, the push notifications should never have been stored, but a "logging issue" failed to redact data.

On Bluesky, Signal celebrated the update, saying it was "very happy" that Apple did not delay fixing the bug.

"We’re grateful to Apple for the quick action here, and for understanding and acting on the stakes of this kind of issue," Signal's post said. "It takes an ecosystem to preserve the fundamental human right to private communication."

In their post, Signal confirmed that after users update their devices, "no action is needed for this fix to protect Signal users on iOS."

"Once you install the patch, all inadvertently-preserved notifications will be deleted and no forthcoming notifications will be preserved for deleted applications," Signal said.

Ars could not immediately reach Apple or Signal for additional comments.

User panic remains

On Signal's thread, however, users debated whether the update was sufficient, with some urging that best practice is likely still to disable message previews entirely to limit device access to sensitive chats. Previously, Signal president Meredith Whittaker had posted on Bluesky to remind users that they can update Signal settings to "Show 'No Name or Content'" in push notifications and avoid privacy concerns. Some users agreed that enabling message previews on any kind of device—not just Apple's—seemed unwise in light of 404 Media's reporting.

"By having message previews in notifications, you're giv[ing] the OS access to that content without being sure how it will handle those messages," a Bluesky user "LofiTurtle" wrote. "This patch removes one known method, but for full assurance you should just turn off previews so the OS never sees it in the first place."

Another Bluesky user, "Alexndr," speculated that Apple's update suggested there may be other concerning content stored in ways that might frustrate other app users.

"The notification content surviving app deletion is the wild part," Alexndr wrote. "Glad it's patched but makes you wonder what else is sitting in iOS notification caches."

Somewhat defending Apple, a Bluesky user, "Coyote," emphasized that Apple's blog made it clear that it wasn't a caching issue, but a logging issue.

"Notification content wasn’t supposed to make it into diagnostic logs but sometimes did," Coyote suggested. "Specifically happened when you get a notification the phone can’t handle, like when the app it is for has been deleted."

For Apple users, questions likely remain since governments seem keen to access encrypted chats however they can. Apple made headlines last year for pulling end-to-end encryption in the United Kingdom to avoid complying with a law that made it easier for government officials to spy on encrypted chats. 404 Media noted that globally, law enforcement has increasingly relied on "push notifications more broadly as an investigative strategy." Last year, Apple caved to legal demands that "gave governments data on thousands of push notifications," 404 Media reported.

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Most organizations never had a model for developing engineers. They had an environment that produced growth by accident. AI just made the luck run out.

By Lindsay Whitehurst, Associated Press

The Supreme Court will hear from Catholic preschools that say Colorado violated their religious rights by excluding them from a state-funded program over their admission policies.

The court agreed on Monday to take up the appeal from St. Mary Catholic Parish, which is supported by the Republican Trump administration.

Joined by the Archdiocese of Denver, the facilities argue it’s unconstitutional to bar them from a taxpayer-funded universal preschool program because of their faith-based restrictions on admission of LGBTQ+ families and kids.

The state said that religious schools are welcome to participate but are required to follow nondiscrimination laws. The program was created by a 2020 ballot measure and provides public funding for free preschool at centers selected by parents.

It’s the latest religious rights case for the conservative-majority court, which has backed other claims of religious discrimination while taking a more skeptical view of LGBTQ+ rights.

As part of the case, the court will consider narrowing a landmark 1990 decision over the spiritual use of peyote, a cactus that contains a hallucinogen called mescaline. That opinion, written by conservative icon Justice Antonin Scalia, found religious practices don’t create exemptions from broadly applicable laws.

The justices declined a push from the schools, along with a Catholic family in Colorado, to overturn the ruling.

The case will be heard in the fall.