• As a former Trader Joe's employee, I know the store inside and out.
• I rely on the store's products for quick, nutritious meals that I can make ahead of time.
• Some of my favorite items include the frozen pie crusts, soy chorizo, and miso-ginger broth.

After shopping at Trader Joe's for over 20 years — and working at my local store for two — I like to think I know the chain inside and out.

The retailer is my go-to spot for picking up budget-friendly meals I can make in my small apartment kitchen.

Here are some of my favorite items to buy for quick meals I can throw together without much thought.

The police’s treatment of the student last month sheds light on how a wave of school unrest evolved into national protests that spilled into widespread riots on Saturday.

France imposed scattered curfews on Monday after weekend protests over living costs and poor school conditions devolved into riots.

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Student demonstrations converged on Saturday with a broader protest movement against rising living costs, heightening a national reckoning.

© Abdul Saboor/Reuters

Days after the shooting at Silver Rail Elementary School, the community is questioning its resilience — and safety.

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The city of Bend, Ore., is praising those who worked to stop the gunman at Silver Rail Elementary School. The authorities are searching for answers.

© Jordan Gale for The New York Times

• Anthropic published new surveys comparing its staffers' sentiments to those of US workers.
• The AI startup's employees expect the tech to change work and the economy far more dramatically.
• Most Anthropic employees guessed that unemployment would top 12% in 2030.

Anthropic employees believe that AI will make their labor obsolete. Most US workers don't see their jobs that way at all.

The AI company published research on Friday that compares surveys with US adults against an internal poll of 1,334 Anthropic employees. Most of the Anthropic staffers said AI will handle at least 80% of their jobs by 2030, while only about 5% of the US workers felt the same.

The research, titled "The AI expectations gap," shows the chasm between how the employees at the AI startup feel and how other American adults feel. Anthropic workers are far more optimistic about the progress of AI capabilities, how much it's already saving time, and how fast the economy will grow.

The median Anthropic employee said that by the end of 2030, they expect AI to handle 95% of the work of building a new AI model.

Peter McCrory, Anthropic's chief economist, wrote on X that the views might help outsiders prepare for more capable AI systems.

"We're publishing this research because Anthropic runs roughly a year and a half ahead of the economy on AI adoption, so what happens at Anthropic could be a leading indicator for the broader world," he said.

Anthropic workers expect higher unemployment and extreme GDP growth

Anthropic's surveys examined how workers already use AI and how they think it will change.

"US adults and Anthropic staff largely agree about what AI can do today," the researchers wrote. "However, they disagree about how quickly it will improve, how widely it will be used, and how large the productivity gains measured by time saved will be."

There are a few possible explanations for the discrepancies. Anthropic employees have larger budgets for the tools and often get access to unreleased models. US workers, on average, are more likely to work with their hands or in a service industry.

The researchers found that workers in manual trades, production, and transport thought AI would handle the least of their work by 2030, compared with Anthropic staffers, tech workers, and respondents in business and finance.

Most Anthropic employees surveyed said that they expect the unemployment rate to top 12% in 2030. The majority of the US workers thought it would hover around or under 8%. It's currently 4.2%.

So far, researchers have found mixed evidence on AI disrupting the job market — a Yale team recently found it had mainly changed jobs, and had "no connection" to changes in unemployment.

The Anthropic researchers also compiled survey responses to estimate predictions on economic growth. Based on their answers, the median US adult's guess for GDP growth in 2030 was 5.4%, compared with 17.1% among Anthropic employees. The country's GDP grew by 2.2% last year.

Anthropic's staffers are following their leader

Anthropic's CEO, Dario Amodei, has become one of the industry's most closely watched voices on labor upheaval. In March of 2025, he said he expected AI to write 90% of code within 6 months, and "essentially all of the code" within the year. He made more headlines that May, telling Axios that AI could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years and lift unemployment to 10% or 20%.

Amodei expanded on that claim in a later essay, writing that he expects AI to be different from prior technological changes. He wrote that he expects an "unprecedented" short-term shock to labor, and that the economy will grow dramatically.

"AI isn't a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans," he wrote.

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As the Trump administration's short-lived Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project implemented its plan to downsize the federal workforce, there was much wailing from the liberal institutions in Washington, D.C.

Federal employee unions filed lawsuits to block the effort. NPR ran profiles of federal workers who, for the first time, faced the prospect of potentially not having absolute job security forever. The Brookings Institution wondered how many jobs the federal government could shed before it crashes.

The answer: plenty. The Trump administration has cut more than 10 percent of the federal workforce, and the government hasn't crashed. Indeed, it hasn't even shrunk—if you're counting by dollars spent instead of people employed.

In a new article for City Journal, Manhattan Institute senior fellow Judge Glock highlights the tremendous gap between the dire predictions about DOGE's cuts and the reality that has emerged, more than a year after DOGE was shut down. Despite having only a modest impact on spending, Glock writes, DOGE "had a massive impact on the federal civil service."

This is true—to a point, more on that in a moment—and notable. Aside from a modest downsizing in the 1990s, the number of people employed by the federal government has been steadily growing for decades. Reversing that trend is one of the few genuinely libertarian accomplishments by the Trump administration.

The cuts to the federal workforce prove that "DOGE worked," argues Glock.

Well, hold on.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (who departed the DOGE project before Trump's inauguration and is now running for governor of Ohio) set some very ambitious goals after being appointed DOGE co-chairs in late 2024. In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal in November 2024 where they promised "we won't just write reports or cut ribbons. We'll cut costs."

Musk repeatedly attached some rather absurd numbers to that promise. He said DOGE would cut $1 trillion or even $2 trillion in federal spending. In the end, it didn't come close. By DOGE's own (questionable) accounting, it cut $170 billion. Meanwhile, overall federal spending has increased in each of Trump's first two years in office, and the budget deficit has widened as well.

Yes, Musk and Ramaswamy also said they would reduce the federal workforce. But that was presented as a natural consequence of cutting spending, not as the primary goal.

Think about it like this. If I spent months promising my friends and family that I would lose 50 pounds on a new diet, and then didn't lose any weight, would it be fair to say the diet worked?

What if I reduced the number of donuts I eat every day, but still didn't lose any weight? Sure, that might be good for my health in some way—just like reducing unnecessary workers in the federal government is good for America's fiscal health—but it certainly wouldn't mean I had achieved the goal of losing weight.

Finally, even the claim that DOGE cut the federal workforce requires an asterisk. As Glock also notes in his report, the decline in federal workers has been offset by an increase in federal contractors.

It's not a one-for-one trade, of course. The new contractors are overwhelmingly concentrated in places like the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon, while the cuts mostly targeted other areas, like the Department of Health and Human Services.

"Most of that increase came from the buildup in homeland-security and defense contracting, including purchases such as surveillance aircraft and tanks, rather than substitutes for government workers," Glock writes. "DOGE achieved real contract savings, but these were more than offset by higher spending elsewhere, reflecting a shift in priorities rather than an overall reduction in contracting."

So, the government is eating fewer donuts but more pizza.

There might be libertarian reasons to prefer contractors over government employees. They are less likely to hold those jobs for life, for one. But there's nothing inherently good about a government policy that cuts jobs in some areas just to create more room in the budget for poorly trained immigration enforcement agents and defense contractors. That may even be a negative outcome for liberty.

In the end, the DOGE project looks less like a meaningful attempt at cutting government spending or employment levels and more like a way to purge parts of the federal workforce likely to get in Trump's way during his second term. "As long as [Trump's] larger commitment is to extending his power rather than rolling back power itself, you shouldn't expect the government to stop growing," as Reason's Jesse Walker wrote last year in comparing DOGE to President Richard Nixon's attempted purge of the civil service.

Did DOGE work? Only if you grade it on a pretty dramatic curve.

Yes, it proved that a president can slash bureaucratic jobs—particularly the bloated managerial and administrative types—without doing much damage to the government's core responsibilities. That's a lesson future administrations should remember.

Maybe, someday, a president will try applying the same logic to government spending too.

The post DOGE Worked? Only If You Grade on a Curve. appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Let’s look at what happens when school police arrest children.

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The ruling was the latest defeat for the administration as it continues a mass deportation campaign.

© Victor J. Blue for The New York Times