That's great, but it doesn’t start with an earthquake according to the Club of Rome’s 1972 “Limits to Growth” report, which claimed that resources are not unlimited, a statement that’s obviously true but also controversial because we’d all much rather it wasn’t true. Gaya Herrington from KPMG checked in on how those predictions are shaping up and found that we’re only ten years away from either a gentle decline or a catastrophic crash, reports Nafeez Ahmed in Motherboard.
Only five more days away from a different gentle decline or catastrophic crash are Space Dragon Lord Jeff Bezos and his possibly-doomed band of increasingly zany upper atmosphere tourists, which now includes his brother, “I want to say Mike?” Bezos, 82 year old astronaut manqué Wally “Way Uptown” Funk, and now the final crew member, 18 year old Space Chad Oliver Daemen, the annoying Wesley Crusher of the crew and son of some Dutch private equity guy. Space Chad replaces the original winner of the $28 million seat, who suddenly found something more important on his Gcal than dying for Jeff Bezos’s ego, but “will instead fly on a future trip,” if there is one. Good luck to them! They won’t be the first people to go to the limits of the upper atmosphere, nor will they accomplish anything by doing it, but end of statement.
Brooklyn ice cream brand Van Leeuwen made a Kraft Mac & Cheese ice cream, which costs $12 a pint and is very good according to Eater. Rachel Sugar’s analysis in Grub Street: “This ice cream has won.” It’s already sold out though, so you won’t be trying it. And neither will the juvenile chinook salmon in the Sacramento river, because they’re probably all dead. Also dead: Twitter’s “Fleets.” What were Fleets? I don’t know, no one knows, and now no one ever will.
Today in Consumer Sentiment: “Parts of the Amazon Go From Absorbing Carbon Dioxide to Emitting It,” eastern Oregon’s “Bootleg Fire grows to a quarter of a million acres,” currently 7% contained and generating pyrocumulonimbus clouds like the ones that caused last month’s western Canadian lightning barrage, the moon is about to turn evil and unleash floods, and Coca-Cola is changing the flavor of Coke Zero. How do we feel? “Consumers are nervous.”
Roll a d100 and find what “weird guy you meet while standing in line for the tavern’s outhouse.” “Betray and eat your friends” in this game, or wherever, I’m not the boss of you. It’s time to face the fact that SoftBank’s humanoid robot Pepper is an adorable failure who sucks at everything. Does targeted advertising work? Much like Pepper, “it does not appear to,” says researcher Krzysztof Franaszek in Marketing Brew. Remember the random mislabeled seeds everyone got last year? Chris Heath has pretty good evidence it was just people forgetting about their own Amazon orders. Jason Koebler wrote about the same subject last fall, so naturally there were spicy tweets. Macmillan is serializing Cixin Liu’s excellent “Three-Body Problem” as a podcast. Facebook quietly ends its mind-reading technology research. And this Cat Person thing is getting out of control.
Today in Crypto: Spike Lee made an ad for Bitcoin ATM company Coincloud. It’s excruciating. Meanwhile the co-creater of Dogecoin believes:
that cryptocurrency is an inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalistic technology built primarily to amplify the wealth of its proponents through a combination of tax avoidance, diminished regulatory oversight and artificially enforced scarcity.
Today’s Song: McGruff the Crime Dog, “Inhalants” (sorry).
~Cleaners, sprays and other household chemicals can become deadly tabs when inhaled~
Listen, we’re gonna be fine, we have ten more years to turn things around! That’s plenty of time. It’s fine. It’ll be fine. I think we’re all talking about the AI-generated voiceover lines in the Bourdain movie now anyway. Follow @fka_tabs and tell me if the AI voice is Bad or Fine, Actually. Or subscribe and we can decide together in the Open Thread tomorrow. And don’t do inhalants.