Hello, good morning, happy Friday. Kind of an up and down week this week. Don’t have a lot for you on the personal front, sorry. Just keepin’ on, you know? Also, happy pride month, if you do not support LGBTQ people you can kindly unsubscribe, thanks.
Rent seeking
Yes, the title of this article is perfect:
New Yorkers may especially love telling horror stories about their housing travails, but expensive rents are no longer the exclusive purview of the coastal cities: Across the country, tenants are feeling the pain of low vacancy rates and astronomic prices. On episode 49 of The Politics of Everything, hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene look into what’s driving the increase in costs, what we can expect will happen in the housing market, and what could help people remain in their homes. Guests include Dean Baker, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and Bridget Read, a features writer at New York magazine.
Clandestine
During Operation Trojan Shield, in which the FBI secretly managed an encrypted phone company called Anom in order to spy on organized crime syndicates on a global scale, the FBI enlisted the help of an unknown third country to collect the messages from backdoored Anom devices. That country obtained court orders under its own laws and acted as the data bottleneck that allowed the FBI to monitor Anom phones. The FBI has steadfastly refused to reveal which country that was.
Now there is some more information on where that country is located. The FBI used a country in the European Union to collect the messages before it transferred that data to the FBI, according to a U.S. authored document obtained by Motherboard.
Fire for effect
This is my favorite recurring storyline:
Military secrets are supposed to stay, you know, secret. This fact has apparently eluded fans of the tank simulator War Thunder, as they keep posting real-life military schematics to the game's forums in order to win flame wars. And no, that's not an exaggeration.
As Kotaku reports, this most recent disagreement stems from a user lobbying the developers to change the stats of a Chinese tank shell. According to a ResetEra thread, when the user saw that the statistics of a certain shell were the same as a previous version of the game — when they were, in fact, placeholder values — they apparently leaked the real schematics of the shell in order to "correct" the developers.
Is this securities fraud
Yes:
From the end of 2020, throughout most of last year, if you were making history within the budding NFT space, it usually meant you made a record-breaking amount of money, as future prognostics for ownership over digital artwork pointed in the positive direction.
Nate Chastain, former Head of Product at OpenSea, who resigned from the company after being accused of insider trading back in September, has now made history for all the wrong reasons, however. This week he was formally charged with the first ever digital asset insider trading scheme by the U.S. department of justice, and arrested in New York.
The indictment was announced in a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, in the Southern District of New York, and alleges that Chastain committed wire fraud and money laundering “by using confidential information about what NFTs were going to be featured on OpenSea’s homepage for his personal financial gain.” Both charges carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
Glass door
Talking about wages is good and cool:
It’s hard to ask how much a person makes. Our society has drilled into our brains that it’s taboo to disclose your salary to your coworkers, friends, or random strangers. But the plight of the worker has evolved over the past decade, alongside social media and the world wide web.
Starting in the spring of 2021, U.S. workers started to resign from their jobs en masse amidst the turmoil of the economy and the pandemic. The Great Resignation has ignited a labor movement in the country, with workers at large retailers like Amazon and Starbucks starting to unionize.
With conversations around salaries starting to normalize, one TikTok account is taking it to the front lines.
Salary Transparent Street is a TikTok account with over 670,000 followers created and starring Hannah Williams. The 25-year-old’s videos are all fairly similar and simple: wearing a branded shirt, she walks around with a microphone asking strangers what they do, how much they make, and if they have any career advice.
Conflict and conversation
I mean maybe this is why the talk needs to be had:
The rising Hindu nationalist movement that has spread from India through the diaspora has arrived inside Google, according to employees.
In April, Thenmozhi Soundararajan, the founder and executive director of Equality Labs — a nonprofit that advocates for Dalits, or members of the lowest-ranked caste — was scheduled to give a talk to Google News employees for Dalit History Month. But Google employees began spreading disinformation, calling her “Hindu-phobic” and “anti-Hindu” in emails to the company’s leaders, documents posted on Google’s intranet and mailing lists with thousands of employees, according to copies of the documents as well as interviews with Soundararajan and current Google employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of concerns about retaliation.
Soundararajan appealed directly to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who comes from an upper-caste family in India, to allow her presentation to go forward. But the talk was canceled, leading some employees to conclude that Google was willfully ignoring caste bias. Tanuja Gupta, a senior manager at Google News who invited Soundararajan to speak, resigned over the incident, according to a copy of her goodbye email posted internally Wednesday and viewed by The Washington Post.
How much does a dollar cost
Imagine if society was not just randomly subject to the whims of billionaires:
The tech bubble may finally be bursting, though it may be more accurate to refer to it as a foam of tech bubbles: an advertising tech bubble, a pandemic-boosted tech bubble, a cryptocurrency bubble, a bubble of firms that style themselves as tech firms when they aren’t, a profitless growth tech bubble—the list of assets and corporations with inflated values is endless. Some are large, others old, and others still are more fragile than the rest, but all of them are part of the same froth that attracted investors who pinned their hopes on their ascendance.
These past five years, the largest contributor to that froth has arguably been Masayoshi Son—the billionaire chief executive and founder of Japanese telecommunications giant SoftBank, who tells anyone who will listen that he will usher in the next stage of human civilization: life mediated by artificial intelligence. He’s made moves for years in this direction, directing investments to take control of or consolidate industries key to his strategy. Along the way, his investments propped up the "gig economy" and, notably, Uber and WeWork—two companies that are now seen as so emblematic of this era of money-burning startup capitalism that they're the subjects of their own prestige TV series.
Swedegate
Here is what all of your friends are tweeting about:
A Swedish child sits at a dinner table while his friend and the friend’s parents dine on meatballs, mashed potatoes and lingonberry sauce. The delicious aroma wafts below the child’s nose, but there is no plate for him.
This setting, while quite normal in Sweden and other Nordic countries, has horrified people around the world, shocked to learn that some Swedish families do not invite their children’s visiting friends to eat with them at mealtime.
Instead, when it’s time to eat, a child might go home, stay in the friend’s room and play or sit at the table with the family and not eat.
I mean listen, this strikes me as a bit odd, but it’s not my culture so whatever.
You deserve some good animal content
Have a good weekend.
Addendums
My Internet: Manny Fidel. The Supreme Court Is Building Its Own Surveillance State. PROFILE 10:00 A.M. Pride and Prejudice and Fire Island. Microsoft Promises To Play Nice With Future Unions Too. Tulsa gunman bought an AR-15 the day of the mass shooting and targeted his doctor. We Might Have Accidentally Memed “Morbius” Back Into Theaters And It's All Our Fault. The Pivot to Web3 Is Going to Get People Hurt. Redditors Demand Formal Apology From SEC Over Anti-Meme Stock PSA.