Panic! At The Shoppy Shop

"Snorting the occasional vial of stem cells."

How much would you pay to have the “rectum of an 18-year-old?” No not like that, Father, I mean to de-age your own presumably 18+ rectum until it has a measurable rectal age¹ of eighteen years. What if that included all your other organs? Your “brain, heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, tendons, teeth, skin, hair, bladder, penis,” and presumably sense of shame? Bloomberg Businessweek’s Ashlee Vance reports that forty-five year old fintech bro Bryan Johnson is spending upwards of two million dollars a year in an attempt to biologically de-age himself back to eighteen. So far he looks like an extremely low body-fat percentage Photoshop, but good luck to him and may he enjoy many years of precisely 1977 calorie vegan slurry. Tabs Editor Emeritus Reyhan Harmanci has additional unsettling pictures in her newsletter today.

Also Today in Bloomberg: Max Chafkin and Dana Hull have a good feature on how badly Tesla is doing while Elon spends his time LARPing as Catturd’s social media assistant:

By early this month, it was undeniable that Tesla was struggling with demand for the first time. The company said it had ended the fourth quarter having made 34,000 more cars than it sold, and deeper price cuts followed. In the US, it lowered the cost of the cheapest Model Y by 20% to $53,000 and knocked $21,000 off its priciest vehicles. The idea is to sacrifice profit margins for volume. Tesla’s next earnings report is set for Jan. 25. Its stock has fallen 62% since Musk’s April 4 Twitter disclosure…

Most car companies roll out redesigns every five years or so; the Model S was unveiled almost 14 years ago, the Model 3 seven years ago. “If they don’t evolve their product line, they will fall behind,” Palmer says.

What does Tesla even have in the pipeline? The CYBRTRUK? Lol. Meanwhile Dave Karpf is on Twitter Tumbleweed watch.

Bec Shaw @Brocklesnitch

Remembering the time my ex was in the ER after being in an accident & the doctor could absolutely not get their pronouns right after like 12 hours & in the morning we overheard him explaining the accident to another doctor and he said “…a car hit they”

When you’re low on provisions and desperate for tinned fish or artisanal cardamom, what do you do? Head to the Shoppy Shop of course. In Grub Street Emily Sundberg dropped an absolute banger of a tab on the Shoppy Shop phenomenon, the new retail Insta brands, and “smallwashing.” Why are there identical Shoppy Shops everywhere now? Turns out there’s a wholesale Shoppy Shop supply platform, of course. Ft. Kyle Chayka coming in hot: “My current thought is that they don’t feel local to a place, but instead they feel local to the internet, which is, after all, where we all live.” Thanks, I hate it.

ChatGPT² reportedly passed a Wharton MBA exam, but then again so (reportedly) did Donald Trump. Kathryn Tewson was less impressed with DoNotPay’s “robot lawyer” service, which failed to generate a defamation demand letter or a divorce settlement agreement, while its attempt at a small claims court demand letter was underwhelming. Meanwhile robot lawyer huckster Joshua Browder has decided not to go to jail for his legal experiment, which is on hold.

BREAKING NEWS:

Sandra Bullock @TheSandraBee

I got so scared filming Gravity

Hi Dutonians: PagerDuty’s Jennifer Tejada wrote one of the all-time worst layoff memos. It was so bad that ChatGPT even picked the same self-aggrandizing Martin Luther King Jr. quote. Based Farhad. Margaret Sullivan got a whole Guardian column out of the premise that if she ran Twitter she wouldn’t be a complete jackass about it. God bless. “‘They didn’t give me a taste for it!’ Red said. ‘It was my crime! If I am an abomination, it is on my own terms, and I take the sin upon myself!’” They cast Cousin Greg as the guy in the “Cat Person” movie. I feel some kind of way about that but I don’t know what. Dog shoots man.

Today’s Song: De La Soul finally managed to get “The Magic Number” onto streaming! More is coming March 3rd.

CORRECTION: Yesterday Today in Tabs misgendered Toadzilla, who is “believed to be a female,” but also still dead. We regret the error. Today in Tabs subscriptions are non-binary (afab). When can you quit? Click here to learn more.

1. A thing that definitely exists.

2. I’m gonna start boldfacing ChatGPT because apparently we have gone from asking it for comment as a bit to asking it for comment as a journalistic best practice, which makes it a person according to the Tabs editorial standards that I’m making up just now.