The 70s are back. Not in a fun way.

In late 1973, President Richard Nixon fired the special prosecutor investigating him for Watergate, also fired the guys who initially refused to fire that guy, and days before infamously telling the world “I am not a crook,” he naturally thought to himself, the US really ought to be energy self-sufficient by 1980. So, he launched Project Independence, an initiative to end the US’ dependency on “foreign oil.” For many, that term stoked anti-Arab racism rather than a sense of urgency around the climate crisis that oil was fueling.

The push for energy self-sufficiency didn’t come out of nowhere. Prices skyrocketed after oil-producing nations in the Middle East refused to give oil to the US because of its support for Israel, which had recently refused to return land that it had captured. (An oil crisis tied to US support for Israel sounds awfully familiar. I wonder if Déjà Vu Dave has anything to say about this.)

So, public officials implemented energy standards to reduce dependence on that oil, which saved Americans $5 trillion over 40 years and stopped us from releasing 14 billion metric tons of carbon. Around this time, President Jimmy Carter also worked to expand solar energy development. Even the next president and my personal nemesis Ronald Reagan signed a law requiring the Energy Department to regularly review and tighten standards for how much energy household appliances use.

Now, the US and Israel’s war on Iran has once again driven up oil prices. While the 1970s oil crisis pushed public officials to reduce how much oil we use, President Donald Trump is working to roll back energy standards. His administration has also gotten rid of clean energy tax credits, worked to block wind and solar projects, and is funding new fossil fuel generation. So, much like the 1970s, skyrocketing oil prices could push us away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy so our wallets and our planet can stop hurting. Unlike the 1970s, our leaders are unwilling to do that.

That brings us to this week’s media literacy tip from our friends at MediaWise.

Last month, Congress passed a bipartisan bill aimed at making housing more affordable. The bill eliminates some barriers to building affordable housing, authorizes programs to offer grants to build more housing, and increases access to small-dollar mortgages and financial literacy programs.

But we need more than a bill to build more homes. We need people to physically build them. I’m too twinky for all that, which is why we used to have a unionized workforce that did it for solid pay and good benefits. Then, corporate home builders lobbied to weaken labor laws. Unsurprisingly, people didn’t want to go into a field whose pay and benefits had just been gutted, so they took other jobs.

Immigrants filled that gap. As the grandson of Cuban immigrants, I want to carefully avoid the all-too-common framing that immigrants are only valuable because of their labor and not because of their full humanity. But this is worth covering because when the federal government rejects immigrants’ humanity by deporting, detaining, and killing them, that humanitarian crisis becomes linked to economic crises like our housing shortage.

Construction jobs were still steady. So as Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush (another personal nemesis of mine but not because of this) expanded legal immigration, many immigrants gravitated toward these jobs. Now, ICE is raiding construction sites and scaring immigrants away, which means fewer workers to build homes we need. So, if we brought back the pay and benefits that union busting previously stripped, and if we stopped targeting immigrants seeking those jobs, then what could we (literally) build?

Investors are making money by reading Trump’s Truth Social posts about events that shape markets (like a deal to keep US Steel headquarters in Pittsburgh) and then investing accordingly (like buying stocks in US Steel). Now, Trump wants to charge investors for early access to posts like that.

Even Republican senators don’t want this, and a former White House ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration told The Wall Street Journal that this is “information he doesn’t have the right to use for trading himself, or for tipping other people off and charging them a fee.” In other words, this is likely not allowed.

Speaking of using insider knowledge of what the president will do to place bets, Trump’s teleprompter operator is under federal investigation for allegedly using Kalshi to place bets on what the president will say. (Are you placing bets on where I hid a non-news related link in this newsletter for our weekly scavenger hunt? Everyone is doing it, it seems.)

Ok, so Meta has this AI image generator, right? And it let users generate these AI images by pulling photos from Instagram accounts that had opted into this feature. The thing is, Meta took a pretty broad definition of opting in — it automatically enrolled public Instagram accounts into this feature.

If you have a private account, you were automatically opted out of this feature. But what if there are still pictures of you available on other people's public accounts? The feature notably drew from public accounts, but reporting on this doesn't specify that it's only for public users. So the worst photos you've ever seen of yourself taken by your friends may be fair game.

So, Meta removed the feature and issued a statement on July 10 that, in my opinion, reads like the worst apology you’ve ever received from a man who’s sorry you felt that way. “Our intent was to provide a useful creative tool,” Meta wrote. “We’ve heard the feedback that this feature missed the mark, so it’s no longer available.”

Thanks for reading the news. Here’s a nice raccoon story as a palate cleanser. This morning, I asked Dave what his next video would be about so I could write about it in this newsletter. His enigmatic response? “Jimothy.”

Who is Jimothy, you might ask if you’re like me and live under a rock? Jimothy is reportedly the internet’s favorite raccoon, which is apparently a very coveted thing to be. Jimothy lives in Seattle and he walks like this. The Instagram user who posted the now-viral video of him told the TODAY Show that he “just looked like a ‘Jimothy’ to me.”

Researchers say Jimothy probably has short spine syndrome or a similar condition. It’s not clear if that causes Jimothy pain, but many dogs have the same condition and live pain-free lives. One must imagine Jimothy happy.

As endearing as he is, experts say you should not approach Jimothy. He has the best chances of surviving in the wild, they say, if he doesn’t become reliant on humans.