A dairy disaster // What's Good: Feb. 23, 2024
Money, milk, and baseball.
Hello, good evening, happy Friday. Kind of. We can pretend. Had a super busy day today and yesterday, sorry this one was delayed.
Backfire
This is awesome, I love it when a plan falls apart:
If you are a certain kind of cynical, Reddit’s S-1 filing sets off alarm bells. There’s the mention of r/WallStreetBets. (Five mentions in total, actually.) There’s the stockpile it’s amassed of Bitcoin and Ethereum. And there’s the program to give certain power users the option of buying stock before it debuts on the public market.
Self-destruction
Behold the power of dairy:
I worked at VICE for roughly three and a half years—from September 2019 until February 2023—which is three years longer than I expected to be there. By the time I arrived, the company was notorious for layoffs dressed up as "reorganizations," and the ax dangling above our heads was palpable the entire time I worked there. I spent the last eight or so months that I worked at VICE heavily involved in the union's organizing committee, which meant I spent a lot of time talking to my coworkers about why we didn't have any fucking money—at various times, there was no money to pay cast and crew members on time, or money to reimburse full-time employees for expenses they accrued while reporting, or money to pay for subscriptions to other publications or for tools like transcription services or FOIA submissions or LexisNexis or working laptops. We stopped printing our magazine because we stopped paying the printers. Our video teams had to scramble to rent gear because overdue bills made the company name all but worthless at most of the equipment rental facilities we used in Brooklyn. We stopped using Slack because VICE stopped paying for it. Snacks disappeared from the mostly vacant office, except for coffee and an inexplicably—believe me, we asked, and they did not explain it—large amount of milk.
Very fine people
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — Nazis appeared to find a friendly reception at the Conservative Political Action Conference this year.
Throughout the conference, racist extremists, some of whom had secured official CPAC badges, openly mingled with conference attendees and espoused antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Like I know we all know this, you all are sophisticated consumers, but come on what the fuck.
Hot links
I am so fucking tired of all this:
Elon Musk took over Twitter promising to rid the platform of what he described as its biggest problem: bots. In his characteristic fashion, he not only failed to make good on his word, but the paid verification system he claimed would solve the issue pushed more fake accounts into users’ feeds. Junk advertising and artificial engagement are everywhere you look on the site, alongside lots of misinformation and extremism.
Ozymandias
Stop deleting your content! Please! The internet is being obliterated:
On Thursday morning, a rumor started to circulate among media workers. Vice senior editor Janus Rose disclosed that staffers were in possession of an anonymous tip that management planned to shutter Vice—and delete the entire website. Employees had noticed the company disabled a Google feature that allowed them to download their emails. “Fun times in the media death spiral!!!” Rose wrote on X. “Will update once I know whether or not we’re all fired.”
Another Vice staffer, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, said that the brand’s journalists spent the day downloading their articles as PDFs and saving links on public archive websites like the Wayback Machine.
Attention to detail
Yes, the uniforms are bad, but the reason why is really something:
Last week, as American sports fans’ eyes moved from football to baseball, a great cry—or at least a significant grumble—was heard from MLB players arriving at spring training: The new uniforms are bad.
You deserve some good animal content
https://twitter.com/ServalEveryHr/status/1761636197196030456
https://twitter.com/RedPandaEveryHr/status/1761636181358334382
https://twitter.com/raccoonhourly/status/1761579298635251980
https://twitter.com/mischiefanimals/status/1761567896860258784
https://twitter.com/twaniimals/status/1761475946102575300
https://twitter.com/mischiefanimals/status/1761439789021036700
https://twitter.com/weirdlilguys/status/1761222065166684394
Have a good weekend.
Addendums
Clarence Thomas Hires Clerk Accused of Writing "I HATE BLACK PEOPLE." An AI-Generated Content Empire Is Spreading Fake Celebrity Images on Google. Tumblr CEO publicly spars with trans user over account ban, revealing private account names in the process. “Are You Blacker Than ChatGPT?” is a new game highlighting racial bias in AI. Journalist indicted after accessing Tucker Carlson video footage.