Today in Tabs

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The Three Genders: Male, Female, and Venezuela
www.todayintabs.com

The Three Genders: Male, Female, and Venezuela

We must end this Vox on Vox violence.

Rusty Foster
Dec 14, 2022
27
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The Three Genders: Male, Female, and Venezuela
www.todayintabs.com

Headlines:

  • “Scientists Have Finally Found the Snake Clitoris” —CNET. This is one of those stories that everyone took a shot at but I think only CNET really nailed the headline. Anyway, she deserves this, it’s been a long time.

  • “STUDENTS REBEL AGAINST HEAT-SENSING CROTCH MONITOR SURVEILLANCE DEVICES” —Hackaday. Pretty self-explanatory really.

  • “German cum-ex mastermind handed 8-year jail sentence for tax fraud” —Reuters. I guess Germans had a thing called “cum-ex” and it was a scandal? Weird folks, Germans. Have you seen their toilets? I don’t know, man.

  • And The New York Post on SBF. You do, unfortunately, gotta hand it to them.

    Cover of the NY Post for 12/14, with a picture of Sam Bankman-Fried looking disheveled and the headline “HAIRY PLOTTER”

Speaking of which, Bloomberg’s Lindsey Rupp added up the charges and figured out that Bankman-Fried is looking at one hundred fifteen years in jail. It’s not “lightly touching miette with the side of my foot” time, but it would be enough to finish the prison Quickbooks course. The other fun fact from yesterday’s Congressional FTX hearing was that the polyamorous pyramid’s personnel were apparently saving the private keys to crypto wallets worth billions in, like, Notepad.

Toot from Jenn Schiffer: “I need to put on the official Congressional Record that I am, and for most of my adult life have been, hot, smart and depressed.”

Vox-on-Vox Violence

The collapse of FTX has also set off a civil war within the SBF-adjacent castle-buying movement called “Effective Altruism,” particularly in the Effective Altruists’ house media organ, Vox.com. “Why do we keep believing things that are too good to be true?” asked Vox’s Rebecca Jennings a couple weeks ago:

Did anyone really think that a billionaire could be benevolent? Did anyone think Horizon was the future? Did people think Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover was going to proceed in any normal way? Probably. We lie to ourselves all the time.

She should ask her Vox colleague Dylan Matthews, who writes for the site’s Bankman-Fried funded Effective Altruism vertical “Future Perfect,” and who didn’t have any trouble lying to himself until very recently. Matthews gestured at wrestling with the implications of the premiere example of EA being a flagrant grifter:

Obviously, knowing what we know now, I wish we hadn’t taken the money. It proved the worst of both worlds: It didn’t actually help our reporting at all, and it put our reputation at risk.

…before deciding that, no! He couldn’t have known:

Based on what we knew at the time, there was also little reason to believe Bankman-Fried’s money was ill-gotten.

…and then just one paragraph later admitting that of course he knew all along:

…a common criticism I’ve gotten via email and Twitter is that I, and other EAs, should have known this guy was sketchy. And in some sense, the sense in which crypto as a whole is a kind of royal scam without much of a use case beyond paying for drugs, we all knew he was.

This is a prime example of Effective Altruist reasoning here, and I am both making fun of it and absolutely serious. This is the level of thinking the movement operates at: “Yes it’s a scam, but it’s our scam, so pass the castle keys.” Vox founder Ezra Klein is now ensconced in his cushy Times Opinion gig, but he also took a shot at arguing that EA is still Officially Good despite being a circus of grifters and a favorite moral excuse for wealth-hoarding, because his pet charity GiveWell (after a lot of effort) eventually managed to learn that poor countries are poor:

“At the very beginning, we had no conception how different the impact of working in a low-income country can be from a high-income country,” Elie Hassenfeld, GiveWell’s co-founder and chief executive, told me. “We initially had a menu for working in low-income countries and high-income countries. But the most basic learning was the simple fact that a dollar goes so much further overseas.”

Incroyable. Who can ask for more than that?

An Important Message, From Your Wall:

Ad graphic that says “Wasting your one precious life imagining everyone hates you?” And who isn’t, right? The ad doesn’t say this part, I’m just riffing for the screen reader crowd. I mean don’t we all carry a load of imaginary projected opinions of ourselves that are probably absolutely not real? Anyway the product here is an original 8 by 10 print on nice violet colored and delicately textured “archival, acid-free 290 gsm cotton rag paper” that reads: ”Nobody is upset with you.” As always, take 20% off with the secret code “TABS.” (They’re still upset with ME though.)

Honestly, they’re probably not thinking about you at all. Wait, I mean—

NEED ART? SHOP HAL🎨MART.


Pics or GTFO

Kottke: “Some of the Best Moon & Earth Photos from NASA’s Artemis I Mission.”

The Artemis capsule and solar array in the foreground, with the blue marble of Earth in the background and the moon in the lower right corner.

The 2022 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards are here!

“Hippo yawning next to a heron standing on the back of another hippo”
Jean Jacques Alcalay / Spectrum Photo

And ancient web photography archive Flickr is starting a foundation. I hear Stewart is free, maybe he’d be interested in coming back to run it.

Toot from Josh Millard: *making a perfect vacuum even emptier by adding some antimatter*

Finally: I have a lot more links to really dumb stuff that happened but let’s skip it all and just laugh at genders.wtf instead.

Screenshot of a web form that asks “Gender:” and offers the choices “Female,” “Male,” and “Hot Bread”

Today’s Song: Paramore, “The News”

~ turn on, turn off, the tabs ~

One more day until Tabs holiday break! If I said I wasn’t ready for it I’d be lying. And if I’m lying I’m crying and if I’m crying I’m dying so don’t be sighing or scrying just hit the button and get to buying…

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