Free the Wage Slave
Money news for people building an exit.
Two independent outlets for a news claim. Computed arithmetic for every figure. Both enforced by the pipeline, not by good intentions.
A report of an event needs at least two independent outlets. We do not publish a claim first and wait to be corroborated, and we do not treat two feeds owned by the same publisher as two outlets. Where a piece rests on a single published figure rather than an event, we say so in the byline — "1 source" — and we check that the figure appears in that outlet's own copy before we use it, not merely in the headline its feed sent us.
Where a piece rests on nothing outside this building, the byline says "our own calculations" and the sources section says none, deliberately. A page whose every number is our arithmetic on our stated assumptions makes no claim about the world that could need a source.
One file holds every formula the site publishes, and it is a port of the JavaScript behind the calculators, so the two cannot drift. Running it asserts each formula against a figure already printed on a built page — a real return of 4.39% on 7% nominal and 2.5% inflation, a $1,200,000 target on $48,000 of spending at 4%, 24 years to reach it from $90,000 with $24,000 saved a year. If one assertion fails, nothing publishes.
Writers work around a finished table. They may state a difference between two of its rows; they may not recalculate, re-round, or introduce a figure of their own. A draft carrying a figure that is neither in the table nor in a cited source's own copy is rejected automatically, because a plausible invented number is the failure a careful reader cannot catch.
Our pipeline drafts and our desk decides. Automation selects candidate stories, verifies figures against source copy, computes every table, and writes prose around numbers it is forbidden to touch. It does not choose what the site covers, it does not set a headline where the headline makes a claim, and it cannot publish a piece that fails a check.
Some of those checks exist because a draft failed in a specific way. A headline once inflated a $295,000 figure to $295,000,000. A draft once wrote a link to a page at a real outlet that had never existed. A percentage describing a share of managers was once fed into a calculation that expected a pay rise. Each of those is now a rule, and each rule rejects the whole piece rather than quietly fixing it.
We take no payment for coverage, we do not accept copy from a subject, and no advertiser or partner sees a piece before it publishes. Where that changes, this page changes first and says what the arrangement is.
Not advisers. Everything here is arithmetic on stated inputs, and no projection is a prediction — every one of them assumes contributions continue and returns average out, which no real life does exactly. For anything with a legal or tax consequence, take advice from someone who can see your whole position.
Changes to this policy. Dated at the top like everything else. When a rule changes, the piece that caused the change is named — see corrections.