What Would You Do?

What WOULD you do? What would YOU do? WHAT would you DO?

Death has come for the Choco Taco, and what hope is there for the rest of us? Alexis Ohanian tweeted an offer to “buy the rights” to the quasi-Mexican-themed frozen novelty from its corporate parent/murderer Klondike, because if you own the brand you can just mint a Choco Taco NFT, then you still have the same asset. Nothing has changed. Anyway according to Christina Morales at The New York Times, the whole ice cream truck business is also melting down, with price increases hitting fuel, parts, ice cream, even sprinkles.

Parks, pools and residential streets used to be prime territory for the ice cream man. But now, more often than not, a soft-serve truck’s jingle plays to a crowd of no one as prices for some cones with add-ons like swirly ice cream and chocolate sauce reach $8 on some trucks.

A soft-serve truck’s jingle plays to a crowd of no one, the ice cream man has ransomed his dignity to the clouds, and the uncomprehending birds listened. No one came forward. No one waved a dollar at him. The silence was unbreakable, it imposed itself upon him; it was obscene.1

Meta employees are melting down because Zuck suddenly wants to flip the switch from “extra days off for everyone” to “all days off for some (because fired), extra work for everyone else” as the company starts to panic about committing itself to spending the next decade building an imaginary place that no one wants while it watches TikTok devour its users and revenue. It’s a well-known business fact that when the CEO is at the all-hands saying “there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here,” everything is just great. Haha Kylie who? And anyone who rented a cheap apartment in New York during the pandemic is melting down when they see their 60%+ rent hike, reports Ronda Kaysen.

The displacement of so many New Yorkers at once is having a ripple effect in neighborhoods around the city, pushing the rental market to the outer limits of affordability.

Surely, you’re thinking, no one left a rent-controlled apartment in Queens for a Lower East Side two bedroom at a ludicrous pandemic-deflated $1700 a month? Of course not, sweetie. No one would do that. Don’t read that last tab, though, it’s not for you. But have Emily and Keith found a new place to Raise Raffi™ yet? Officially:

But perhaps unofficially….

Bless This Mess: New Yorker staff leapt to the defense of their unfairly dismissed and maligned colleague, ex-archivist Erin Overbey… Ah, no I’m sorry, checking my notes again it appears they did exactly the opposite of that. Lachlan Cartwright rounded up the basics in The Daily Beast, and former co-workers were not exactly effusive. The social media silence got quite loud indeed before it was broken by Laurel Maury, who had a tale to tell about Overbey as a co-worker:

Maury summarized the whole kerfuffle as follows:

As a few ex-Mormons have pointed out, Sparks was not the first Mormon to publish a text ostensibly based on an original source that the rest of the world did not get to see.

And on New Yorker Dot Com (“The Deuce”) Kyle Chayka wrote about “algorithmic anxiety,” the cargo-cult mixture of fear and reverence people have developed for the online black boxes that seem to determine what we buy, what news we see, possibly who we are? If you like this post, Kyle has a book coming out that you’re gonna love. And “the good Atlantic” Kaitlyn Tiffany explored what the Facebook news feed becomes when it’s no news and all feed: “Have a nice day! Have a nice day! Have a nice day!”

 Today’s Song: Wet Leg covering The Chats “Smoko”

~ what are you gonna do, tab me? ~

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