Must We Forgive Those Who Have Tabbed Us?

Ethics-free in '23!

It’s March 14th: happy Star Wars Day! “March the 14th be with you,” in the famous words of Hans Solo. Mark Zuckerberg is about to march the 14th batch of one thousand newly-ex employees out of the Metaverse Corporation’s increasingly empty offices, along with the 15th through 21st thousand, while cancelling another five thousand job openings. Hey… how many people work for Meta? And if so, why? Microsoft also broke out Choppy the Jobs Axe and fired ten thousand people including, according to Platformer, “its entire ethics and society team within the artificial intelligence organization,” presumably to harmonize with industry trends in AI development where ethics were a luxury Big Tech could only afford when it thought there was no competition for its in-house AI girlfriends. But we’re ethics-free in ‘23, baby!

The Thanussy Is Inevitable

This eBay listing’s promise that the item is “unused” is raising questions that are not answered by the listing. Also Today in Dicks: Armenian dick brandy, “stop saying guac and balls,” and dicks out for 9/11. And now that we’re all warmed up to confront some real horrors, here’s this:

I appreciate that they illustrated it with a picture of me when I saw the post. Also today in Agnes Callard news, “dogged reporter in search of the truth” Willy Blackmore refused to stop digging (“i.e. sent one email”) until he discovered Agnes Callard’s grad student-wooing cookie recipe. It turns out it was “Baking With Julia’s” rugelach, which are… not a cookie? How did this get through fact-checking? He even got a picture of Callard’s personal recipe, with handwritten marginalia pertaining to which nuts and what quantities are best for scoring a wavy-haired Aristotelian:

A picture of the rugelach recipe precisely as described above.

Morning Brew’s Dan Toomey is back with Wtf happened with Silicon Valley Bank - Part 2:

The title: “VC thoughtleader” above Dan Toomey dressed as a VC podcast bro (i.e. basically wearing his regular clothes) and speaking into a VC podcast bro style mic, with the caption “it’s apocalypse time, folks.”

Not content with burning down their own bank from the gondola at Aspen and then getting fully bailed out by the Fed, venture capital’s whiny piss babies are now having a four alarm meltdown because they found out that most people think they suck. Edward Ongweso Jr. wrote a well-supported and tightly argued case against the entire VC/startup system, and then expertly trolled its worst offenders into promoting it all over Twitter for him. Egg went straight for the Nazis, while Nate Fischer opted to compare this Slate post to “the Rwandan genocide” instead. And Flo Crivello called out “the media’s coordinated anti-tech campaign,” which is an amazing imaginary culprit for someone who makes cold-calling software to blame for people hating them.

This was not so much classic large-scale bank in which mass psychology played its part on a grand scale, as a bitchy high-school playground in which the cool thing to do was to bank with SVB until it no longer was. As Klein puts it: “this was more a case of a “bank-run by idiots” rather than a “bank run by idiots”.”

It is those idiots that got bailed out.

Adria Hon: ”nasa employee: oh hey u guys are back early. astronaut: moon's enhanced. nasa employee: what? astronaut: *loading a daguerreotype and getting back on the rocketship* moon's enhanced.”

It’s a rough Tuesday in the tabs so here’s some good news: Kottke.org just turned twenty-five. Imagine doing anything for twenty-five years? Incredible.

Given the choice of playing along or protesting, I played along. I’m great at the Asian accent as minstrelry. When I do it for my white friends even today, it never fails to bring a laugh. Assimilation was the goal, and even though I could never hide my physical difference, I could at least laugh along with their enthusiastic recognition of my perpetual alienness.

“Blockchain technology is the future,” [Signature Bank CEO Joseph DePaolo] said. “You don’t want to be caught short, because in five years a number of banks will not be around because of blockchain technology.” 

rstevens: “He's a private detective who uses sex to uncover the truth and solve mysteries. Tune in Tuesdays at 9pm for Fuck Around and Find Out.”

Finally: Teen Vogue has some of the first trickles of what is going to be a flood of family-vlogger babies who grew up furious that their childhood was monetized online.

Claire, whose name has been changed to protect her privacy, has never known a life that doesn’t include a camera being pointed in her direction. The first time she went viral, she was a toddler. When the family’s channel started to rake in the views, Claire says both her parents left their jobs because the revenue from the YouTube channel was enough to support the family and to land them a nicer house and new car. “That’s not fair that I have to support everyone,” she said. “I try not to be resentful but I kind of [am].” Once, she told her dad she didn’t want to do YouTube videos anymore and he told her they would have to move out of their house and her parents would have to go back to work, leaving no money for “nice things.”

Today’s Song: The White Stripes, “Ball and Biscuit”

You just lost the game.

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