What's Good: Apr. 30, 2021

Thieves, union strong, and börgers.

Apr 30, 2021

Hello, good morning, happy Friday. Bit of a rough week this week. Today, however, I am finally supposed to receive the fancy olive oil that I pre-ordered months ago after watching an episode of Worth It. I am excited to buy some nice bread and cheese and whatnot and go to town. Maybe I will also use it to make some pasta aglio e olio!

It’s supposed to be 78 in Chicago tomorrow, which is exciting. I mean, it’s going to go back down below 60 again for over a week after that, but I’ll take the wins where they come, you know?

Oh and last weekend I replaced a plugin I commissioned 8 years ago for my Minecraft server with entirely my own code, written from scratch with better optimization and more features! Woo! It’s so cool and I’m proud of it. Here’s our weekly Reddit post, too.

Grand theft meme

I don’t think it’s any kind of secret that I have disdain for Elon Musk. I do not regard him as the hero of humanity that his Twitter fanboys seem to - I think he is a reckless dude who does not really care about other people and mostly just wants to get rich with very little effort. Job done, I guess. It turns out that my skepticism has been vindicated:

Everyone who makes content for the internet knows your work will be reshared, aggregated and often stripped of credit. What you don’t necessarily expect is that some dumb joke you make will end up on the Twitter page of a guy who was recently the richest person alive.
That’s just what happened to me April 8. I tweeted an image that suggested recipients of the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines should put aside their differences and team up for a “slutty summer.” “Slutty” is not a negative judgment here, just a reference to the summer hedonism that young singles now anticipate in the wake of widespread vaccination.
Early the next morning, Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted an identical image. He followed this up with a string of suggestive emojis. Then he deleted both tweets.

Also, while we are on the subject, Matt Levine had some choice words about Musk in yesterday’s Money Stuff:

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a roundup of “Elon Musk’s War on Regulators,” covering his fights with the SEC (over securities fraud), the National Transportation Safety Board (over self-driving cars), the Federal Aviation Administration (over launching rockets), the National Labor Relations Board (over unionization at Tesla) and the Nevada Occupational Safety and Health Administration (over factory safety):
Federal agencies say he’s breaking the rules and endangering people. Mr. Musk says they’re holding back progress.
Yes, well, right, that is the sort of question that gets answered ex post. If you ignore regulations and safely build safe self-driving cars and safe rockets that fly safely to Mars, you get to say “see those stupid regulators were holding back progress” and everyone congratulates you. If you ignore regulations and kill a lot of people with your cars and rockets, you get imprisoned in an impregnable island fortress. So far … well, the casualty count of self-driving Teslas is not zero, but Musk has had enough real success that articles like this have a tone of grudging admiration rather than, like, “this madman keeps breaking the law, who will stop him.”

Personally I think he is, like, cartoonishly evil and people just let him get away with it because they like the fantasy of the dream he is selling. And it’s hard to blame them - it’s a nice dream - but I feel like the whole thing sort of falls apart when subjected to even a moderate amount of scrutiny.

City on fire

This is a story about bad landlords in Chicago, and it is heartbreaking but important:

After a fire killed four children in a South Side apartment building with known fire safety problems, indignant politicians again vowed consequences for landlords who fail to keep tenants safe.
It was just one more in a pattern of broken promises going back more than a century.
“We are putting these negligent landlords on notice that we mean business,” then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced after the 2014 tragedy. “We will not stand by and allow these landlords to neglect the services and protections their tenants are entitled to under the law.”
Emanuel pushed two new ordinances through the City Council. One required fines on landlords who violate smoke detector regulations. The other established a public list of problem landlords.
More than six years later, both ordinances are routinely ignored. City officials soon abandoned the list of bad landlords, and records show they do not consistently impose the required fines for smoke detector violations.

Oops, all cover-ups

Last week’s Addendums included a link to a Buzzfeed News story about how Facebook knows it was used to incite the January 6th terrorist attack on the Capitol. Rather than, you know, addressing that whole situation, Facebook chose a different path:

Last Thursday, BuzzFeed News revealed that an internal Facebook report concluded that the company had failed to prevent the “Stop the Steal” movement from using its platform to subvert the election, encourage violence, and help incite the Jan. 6 attempted coup on the US Capitol.
Titled “Stop the Steal and Patriot Party: The Growth and Mitigation of an Adversarial Harmful Movement,” the report is one of the most important analyses of how the insurrectionist effort to overturn a free and fair US presidential election spread across the world’s largest social network — and how Facebook missed critical warning signs. The report examines how the company was caught flat-footed as the Stop the Steal Facebook group supercharged a movement to undermine democracy, and concludes the company was unprepared to stop people from spreading hate and incitement to violence on its platform.
The report's authors, who were part of an internal task force studying harmful networks, published the document to Facebook's internal message board last month, making it broadly available to company employees. But after BuzzFeed News revealed the report's existence last week, many employees were restricted from accessing it.

And because Facebook chose to block access to it, BFN has published the full thing. It’s quite the read.

Piece of shit can’t shoot for shit

Does everyone remember Wayne LaPierre? He was the head of the NRA for a long time, he’s a huge asshole, he’s responsible for some of the worst propaganda of the last decade? Yeah, yeah. Fuck this guy:

After the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in 2012, Wayne LaPierre, the head of the National Rifle Association, told Americans agitating for new gun regulations, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Less than a year later, LaPierre and his wife, Susan, travelled to Botswana’s Okavango Delta, where they hoped to show N.R.A. members that they had the grit to take on a different adversary: African bush elephants, the largest land mammals on Earth. The trip was filmed by a crew from “Under Wild Skies,” an N.R.A.-sponsored television series that was meant to boost the organization’s profile among hunters—a key element of its donor base. But the program never aired, according to sources and records, because of concerns that it could turn into a public-relations fiasco.
The Trace and The New Yorker obtained a copy of the footage, which has been hidden from public view for eight years. It shows that when guides tracked down an elephant for LaPierre, the N.R.A. chief proved to be a poor marksman. After LaPierre’s first shot wounded the elephant, guides brought him a short distance from the animal, which was lying on its side, immobilized. Firing from point-blank range, LaPierre shot the animal three times in the wrong place. Finally, a guide had the host of “Under Wild Skies” fire the shot that killed the elephant. Later that day, Susan LaPierre showed herself to be a better shot than her husband. After guides tracked down an elephant for her, Susan killed it, cut off its tail, and held it in the air. “Victory!” she shouted, laughing. “That’s my elephant tail. Way cool.”

No, Susan. That is not “way cool.” That is fucking disgusting, and fuck you.

We’re calling your parents

I am not a labor lawyer, so I cannot say whether this is probably illegal or not, but it is certainly absolutely fucking ridiculous:

On Monday, New York University's president Andrew Hamilton sent a letter to parents of striking graduate students arguing that the strike is unnecessary and unwarranted.
“In short, we believe the strike is unwarranted, untimely, and regrettable,” Hamilton wrote in the letter, which is titled “A Letter to Parents from NYU President Andrew Hamilton” and was posted online by the school. “And we think a mediator could have made and still can make a difference.” The letter links to another sent by Hamilton the previous day addressed to “the NYU community” which is even more forceful and calls the union’s demands “unreasonable.”
Nearly all of the graduate employees union members (96 percent) voted to approve the strike and set a deadline at 12:00 AM ET on Monday, April 26th for the administration. Over the past ten months, negotiations have stalled and the Graduate Student Organizing Committee (GSOC) has insisted the university has refused to bargain in good faith or meet their demands for a new contract.

If 96 percent of the union members are voting in favor of the strike, I am not sure contacting their parents is going to be an effective negotiation tactic, probably you have bigger problems. But, hey, fuck you for trying!

Robbed

You may have heard of the young Robinhood trader who accrued hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt and took his own life shortly thereafter. This is his story:

Bill Brewster was sitting around a campfire with family on a Wisconsin vacation in June 2020 when he got the call. It was Dorothy Kearns, the mother of his cousin Alex. Over the phone, Dorothy and her husband, Dan, relayed fragmented pieces of what had just happened.
A couple of years ago, Alex Kearns, a sophomore and ROTC cadet at the University of Nebraska, had started trading stocks on an app called Robinhood. No one else in the family used the app, but Dan had talked with Alex about it, and it seemed harmless enough. Alex was studying management and had gotten curious about investing as he learned more about financial markets. He’d even started chatting on the phone with Bill, a professional investor and portfolio manager, about economics and central banking. But unbeknownst to anyone who knew him, Alex had begun trading high-risk financial instruments called options. The day before, a little before midnight, he’d gotten a startling notification indicating they had lost him $730,000. He had only about $16,000 in his account.

He was 20 years old.

Börgers

Nick Kindelsperger published his list of the 10 best new burgers in Chicago this week, and while I know many of you are in fact not Chicagoans at all, I feel like we could all enjoy some pictures of egregiously delicious burgers this week. Maybe you can come visit once you get vaccinated, and then you can find this article and it will be useful. Anyway, behold:

Even though the pandemic slowed down burger openings in 2020, it could never hope to stop the public’s insatiable demand for ground beef on a bun.
But the pandemic did seem to influence the kind of burgers restaurants were serving. Instead of handsomely presented burgers with lots of froufrou toppings, the rise of takeout over the past year meant that chefs mostly tried to keep things simple.
In particular, the pandemic has seen a rush of new smash burgers, a style very close to my burger-loving heart. It’s the kind where a chef tosses a handful of ground beef on a griddle and literally smashes it down with a spatula until flat.
You’d think this would simply press out all the juices, but if done immediately before the meat gets warm, the losses are minimal. Plus, the meat gets a righteous sear from full contact with hot metal, developing complex, meaty flavors that grilled burgers couldn’t dream of replicating, along with craveable crispy edges. If you’ve ever tried Steak ’n Shake, Shake Shack or Culver’s, or even local favorites The Region or Schoop’s, then you know what I’m talking about.
The Tribune has extensively researched the best burgers in Chicago, including when I once tried 130 to find the best in the city and in the suburbs. These nine new burgers from restaurants that opened in the past year — plus one that technically opened in 2019 but deserves love nonetheless — prove Chicago chefs will always find inventive new ways to make this classic dish.

Nick’s list doesn’t mention it, but the burger at the Revolution Brewpub is somehow even better than it was before covid. Really. (And I recommend adding bacon and pickles.)

Gaetzgate

This is the story I’ve been waiting for:

A confession letter written by Joel Greenberg in the final months of the Trump presidency claims that he and close associate Rep. Matt Gaetz paid for sex with multiple women—as well as a girl who was 17 at the time.
“On more than one occasion, this individual was involved in sexual activities with several of the other girls, the congressman from Florida’s 1st Congressional District and myself,” Greenberg wrote in reference to the 17-year-old.
“From time to time, gas money or gifts, rent or partial tuition payments were made to several of these girls, including the individual who was not yet 18. I did see the acts occur firsthand and Venmo transactions, Cash App or other payments were made to these girls on behalf of the Congressman.”
The letter, which The Daily Beast recently obtained, was written after Greenberg—who was under federal indictment—asked Roger Stone to help him secure a pardon from then-President Donald Trump.
A series of private messages starting in late 2020—also recently obtained by The Daily Beast—shows a number of exchanges between Greenberg and Stone conducted over the encrypted messaging app Signal, with communications set to disappear. However, Greenberg appears to have taken screenshots of a number of their conversations.