Update: After publication of this piece, House Oversight Democrats disabled comments on the photos. The original article follows below.

Thursday afternoon House Democrats publicly released a new trove of photographs they’ve obtained from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein via Dropbox. They left the comments on so anyone who is signed into Dropbox and browsing the material can leave behind their thoughts.

Given that the investigation into Epstein is one of the most closely followed cases in the world and a subject of endless conspiracy theories, and that the committee released the trove of photographs with no context, it’s not surprising that people immediately began commenting on the photographs. 

“Really punchable face,” BedeScarlet—whose avatar is Cloud from Final Fantasy VII—said above a picture of New York Times columnist David Brooks. Brooks, who wrote a column about his boredom with the Epstein case in November, attended a dinner with Epstein in 2011 and appears in two photographs in this new document dump.

“Noam Chomsky,” Alya Colours (a frequent Epstein dropbox commenter) said below a photograph of the linguist talking to Epstein on a plane. Below this there is a little prompt from Dropbox asking me to “join the conversation” next to a smiley face.

In another picture, director Woody Allen is bundled up to his eyes in a heavy coat while Epstein side hugs him. “Yep, I’d know that face anywhere,” Susan Brown commented.

Among the pictures is a closeup of a prescription bottle labeled Phenazopyridine. “This is a medication used to treat pain from urinary tract infections,” Rebecca Stinton added, helpfully, in the comments.

“The fuck were they doing all that math for?” BedeScarlet said next to a picture of Epstein in front of a whiteboard covered in equations.

“Shit probably tastes like ass,” he added to a picture of Epstein cooking something in a kitchen.

There are darker and weird photographs in this collection of images that, as of this writing, do not yet have comments. There’s a pair of box springs in an unfinished room lit by the sun. There is a map of Little St James indicating where Epstein wants various buildings constructed. Bill Gates is shown in two photos standing next to women with their faces blocked out.

And then there are the Lolita pictures. A woman’s foot sits in the foreground, a worn annotated copy of Vladimir Nabokov novel Lolita in the background. “She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet teen in one sock,” is written on the foot, a quote from the novel.

These photos are followed by a series of pictures of passports with the information redacted. Some are from Ukraine. There’s one from South Africa and another from the Czech Republic.

The House Democrats allowing the public to comment on these photos is funny and it’s unclear if intentional or a mistake. It’s also a continuation of the just-get-out-there approach when they have published other material, with it sometimes being in unsorted caches that readers then have to dig through. The only grand revelation in the new material is that Brooks was present at a dinner with Epstein in 2011.

“As a journalist, David Brooks regularly attends events to speak with noted and important business leaders to inform his columns, which is exactly what happened at this 2011 event. Mr. Brooks had no contact with him before or after this single attendance at a widely-attended dinner,” a Times spokesperson told Semafor’s Max Tani.

House Oversight Democrats did not immediately return 404 Media’s request for comment.

The California Public Utilities Commission voted 4 to 1 on Thursday to keep profits at Southern California Edison and the state's other big investor-owned utilities at a level that consumer groups say has long been inflated.

Shoppers are filling their carts, both literally and digitally, with last-minute gifts. One tempting purchase, whether for gifting or for showing up in style at a holiday sweater party, is ultra-cheap clothing from Shein. Like many around the world, the French hunt for deals in December.

During a recent interview with journalist Thomas Mahler, I learned that fast fashion has become a political flashpoint in France, the country known for haute couture. French lawmakers are considering measures aimed at threatening the economic viability of Shein, the Chinese company that dominates ultra-cheap clothing globally. 

Millions of French consumers shop through Shein regularly. Mahler asked me: Can politicians persuade consumers to buy domestically-made clothes instead, in a country with a proud tradition in domestic fashion? My reply was that this dilemma extends beyond France. Wealthy countries do not manufacture much apparel at home. It’s cheaper to produce at scale in lower-income countries, and residents of rich nations rarely aspire to work in garment factories. 

The French government’s proposed intervention is an “eco-penalty” on fast-fashion items, a tax that could eventually add €10 per garment. The purpose is to make French-made clothing more competitive while also discouraging the environmental excesses of disposable fashion.

Fast fashion generates garbage. Trend cycles in cheap apparel last for only weeks instead of seasons. Shein adds many new items daily, while a traditional French fashion house releases only a few designs each year. Much of the clothing is so cheaply made that it’s worn only a few times before being thrown away. Even charities struggle to accept donated garments because of the flood of unwanted clothes. Discarded polyester shirts pile up in landfills at best, or pollute rivers and beaches at worst. Synthetic fibers shed microplastics. These are real externalities. 

France’s approach thus combines modern environmentalism with a familiar protectionism. It may be politically easier to sell a tariff when it’s framed as discouraging “wasteful” consumption rather than only protecting domestic producers.

Revealed preferences, meaning the preferences people demonstrate through their actual purchasing behavior rather than their stated ideals, show that consumers want affordability and variety. That puts them at odds with protectionist policymakers. When a Shein dress costs €15 and a French-made equivalent costs €100, even patriotic consumers face a hard trade-off. The price gap reflects not just labor costs, but supply-chain efficiencies, economies of scale, and a fundamentally different business model.

Even if these measures succeeded in reducing the amount of clothing bought from Shien, would the French people take garment manufacturing jobs that are “brought back” to France? French youth unemployment hovers above 17%, but garment work doesn’t match the aspirations of an educated workforce. In the United States, the few apparel factories that remain largely employ recent immigrants. Is trying to rebuild a mid-20th-century industrial base like trying to resurrect typewriters? Nostalgia is not an economic strategy in a technologically advancing world. Furthermore, would robots soon “take” most jobs that could be done by French people today in garment manufacturing? 

Mahler also asked me whether people could simply buy fewer clothes to help the environment. It’s an interesting question because we also see this dilemma with food in the rich world today. Calories were once expensive; now the binding constraint is waistlines, not income. Clothing has followed the same pattern. After the Multi-Fiber Arrangement ended in 2005, global textile trade boomed. For example, one Chinese city now produces more than 20 billion pairs of socks per year, which they can export at low prices. For many consumers, the price of clothes is not the main constraint on how many garments they purchase. The result has been the democratization of style and abundance.

Reasonable people can debate the appropriate policy response. A Pigouvian tax on new garments to fund recycling or reduce waste, akin to a carbon tax, is worth considering. Better labeling, such as durability ratings, could help consumers make more informed decisions on how long garments will last so they can appropriately trade off price versus quality. Cultural norms are shifting such that some consumers brag about thrift-store finds rather than new purchases, somewhat reducing the flow of new clothes to landfills. 

While addressing the excesses of cheap fashion, we should resist romanticizing the past. We should not return to a world in which only the rich could afford variety and comfort. Countries like Bangladesh and Vietnam have reduced poverty by joining global garment supply chains. Bangladesh’s GDP per capita was under $500 in 1998; today it is over $2,500. 

Fast fashion is neither a triumph nor a catastrophe. It is the outcome of solving an important problem: how to clothe billions of people affordably. The French, along with many of us around the world, now face a more pleasant question: how much is enough once basic scarcity has been conquered?

Someone from 1850, wearing his one patched coat, would be astonished to learn that we are debating whether people buy too many clothes. That we have the luxury to ask is evidence that, despite its problems, the system has delivered something extraordinary.

For years, pointing out the obvious was considered impolite: America's biggest, most distortionary transfer of wealth does not flow from elites to the working class. Nor does it show up as corporate welfare. It flows from the relatively young and poor to the relatively old and wealthy. It's the defining injustice of our fiscal regime, the largest driver of our government debt, and the quiet engine behind the malaise of Millennials and Gen Z.

More than a decade ago, Reason editor at large Nick Gillespie and I wrote a piece arguing that Social Security and Medicare had together become the great cause of America's generational inequity. We noted that senior households were wealthier than ever while young households still working to make ends meet had to prop them up further.

We also warned of the threat to a genuine social safety net. Treating every elderly person, no matter how well off, as a member of a protected class entitled to increasingly unaffordable benefits will eventually destroy a system that progressives in particular cherish.

Around that time, "Occupy Wall Street" protesters were railing against "the 1 percent." I offered the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that they also consider occupying the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), the most powerful lobby defending the largest intergenerational wealth grab in American history.

As such, I greatly appreciated seeing Russ Greene, managing director of the Prime Mover Institute, join the fight and coin the term "Total Boomer Luxury Communism" in an important article over at the American Mind. The name sounds like a joke, but the math is sound.

American heads of households younger than 35 now have a median net worth of about $39,000 and an average net worth of more than $183,000. Those over 75 have a median net worth of roughly $335,000 and an average net worth exceeding $1.6 million. As a group, today's seniors are the wealthiest we've ever had.

Many own their homes outright in markets younger families cannot afford to enter. Seniors enjoy higher rates of stock ownership and have benefited enormously from decades of rising asset values. Meanwhile, younger Americans face soaring housing costs, student loan debt, delayed family formation, and a labor market shaped by slower growth and higher federal indebtedness.

Some of this reflects natural wealth accumulation over time, and there is nothing wrong with that. But why does the modern welfare state magnify the disparity? As Green explains, "retired millionaires have become the greatest recipients of government aid," as Social Security can redistribute up to $60,000 a year to an individual and $117,000 to a household. "Meanwhile," Green notes, "Medicare programs are paying for golf balls, greens fees, social club memberships, horseback riding lessons, and pet food."

Younger Americans are also on the hook for about $73 trillion in unfunded obligations projected over the next 75 years, making now the time to act. Some defenders of the status quo argue that higher taxes will fix the problem, but it would again fall on younger earners to continue redistributing benefits to the same affluent seniors, worsening the generational imbalance. The problem is not a lack of revenue; it's a benefit structure that ignores modern demographics, modern wealth patterns, and basic fairness. Paying less to seniors who don't need the money is the only fair reform to this dilemma.

Every time someone points these facts out, defenders respond reflexively: "But seniors paid in. They earned it." No, not all of it. Not in any meaningful, actuarial sense.

We've known for decades that the system is wildly unbalanced. As Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute points out, a typical average-wage retiree in the 2030s will receive 37 percent more in Social Security benefits than they paid in taxes. Medicare is even more lopsided: Seniors routinely receive three to five times the amount they contributed.

Some older Americans who oppose reducing benefits will respond that we need to preserve the same system for younger generations. I'm sorry, but avoiding destitution in old age does not require a 25-year-old to fund the most regressive wealth transfer scheme in the developed world—especially when certain seniors use it to enjoy 25 years of vacations.

On the legal front, things are not what people think. As the Supreme Court made clear in  Flemming vs. Nestor (1960), Congress has a legal right to amend Social Security benefits. The government can change the formula tomorrow.

Social insurance programs are compatible with a basic safety net, but what we have now is a slow-motion generational fleecing.

Politicians continue to treat seniors as an overwhelmingly fragile and impoverished group in order to oppose reforming the system. Thankfully, Americans across ideological lines are beginning to recognize the structure for what it is: one that requires punishing younger generations through taxes and debt so that their grandparents can receive far more in benefits than they ever contributed or were originally promised.

COPYRIGHT 2025 CREATORS.COM

The post The U.S. Is Stealing From Millennials and Gen Z To Make Boomers Even Richer appeared first on Reason.com.

Stephanie Vee: Delete Spotify? Sure, But Don't Just Replace it With Another Subscription

streaming music sucks for almost everyone involved. I believe we only do it because we’ve allowed ourselves to be convinced that renting music indefinitely is cheaper than purchasing it outright – especially since streaming companies grant us the equivalent of an all-you-can-eat buffet with our subscriptions.

Spoilers for an upcoming Cozy Zone episode, but I've come to the conclusion that streaming music platforms are a shared lie we all agree to that suggests we're paying for music when we're actually may as well be pirating it, we just pay $10 a month to keep the cops away.

To me, a music streaming subscription only really makes sense if you’re at that impressionable stage of your life where you still live and breathe new music – or if you’re one of those rare people who continue to seek out new music as you age. As for the rest of us? I think we should maybe just own our shit and stop paying tech CEOs to rent it. Chances are, I’ll still be rocking out to Hot Fuss in my retirement home, so why should I rent it from the likes of Daniel Ek for the next four decades (or longer)?

As one of the seemingly rare 40-year-olds who still checks the new music releases every week, this resonates with me as well. I kind of feel like I want to buy all of the music I listen to in 2026…we'll see.