🎁Weekend Links = All Here.

Operation London Bridge and how the tech sausage is made. Context Collapse #153

Neal Ungerleider

Sep 09, 2022

Weekend’s here, you lovely people. On to the links.

New Futures:

Elana Zak @elanazak

Here are the homepages of The Guardian, CNN, New York Times and Washington Post right now.

Queen Elizabeth II passed away, marking the end of a 70-year reign. Operation London Bridge officially went into effect.

Evidence is piling up that long COVID is real. Money quote from Dr. David Strain: “The level of damage that’s been done to population health, it would be as if everybody suddenly decided to take up smoking in one go.”

“Google's top brass reportedly told executives that moving forward, there would be a "high bar" for what is considered critical travel. Social functions, team offsites, and travel to in-person events that offer a virtual option should no longer be approved, The Information reports.”

Curtis Yarvin, private equity ideologist.

“Because of pandemic rust, a generational shift or something else, the working world is getting ruder.”

a16z’s in-house publication: “Remote startups will win the war for top talent.” I suspect they’re right1.

How Starbucks is dealing with unionization, employee burnout, customers who want drinks without waiting and customers who don’t want any human contact.

Advertising/Marketing/PR:

Why do new cars look like this? Blackbird Spyplane explains.

Blackbird Spyplane @BLKBRD_Spyplane

Why do new cars look like wet putty ??

blackbirdspyplane.comWhy do new cars look like this??“Wet Putty” whips are everywhere. What’s behind it? ... a BBSP investigation

RIP The Wing.

There’s a black market for Instagram verification badges2. Related: Mailchimp (which has a vested interest in these things) on what to do when your business' Instagram engagement plummets.

Whoops! “A slip-up by social media giant Snap allowed leading Democratic campaigns and party committees to unwittingly tap into a vast repository of Republican voter data to hone their midterm ads, Axios has learned.”

Russia’s war on Wikipedia editors.

“By creating a membership program, Disney would be betting it could offer customers more value, prompting them to spend more on the company’s products and services, while providing Disney with a trove of information about their preferences. The effort is supported by Disney Chief Executive Bob Chapek.”

YouTube is the new TV and more than 2000 fans sleeping overnight outside a mall for a MrBeast burger restaurant opening is the proof.3

Yellowstone is so popular that the TV show is now spinning off a hard seltzer brand.

Tariq the Corn Kid is South Dakota’s new corn-bassador. Good on him!

Governor Kristi Noem @govkristinoem

The Corn Kid came to South Dakota’s very own @Corn_Palace!!! Welcome to South Dakota Tariq, our official Corn-bassador! Eat lots of corn

Dan Mihalopoulos @dmihalopoulos

Elected official in Nevada arrested in murder of investigative reporter who covered him and was working on another story about him

reviewjournal.comPolice arrest county official in reporter’s stabbing deathClark County Public Administrator Robert Telles was arrested Wednesday on suspicion of murder in the stabbing death of Las Vegas Review-Journal investigative reporter Jeff German.

A Nevada politician was arrested in the fatal stabbing of Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter Jeff German. German had previously written about the politician.

Television news legend and longtime CNN anchor Bernard Shaw passed away at 82. RIP.

Vice in talks for content deal with MBC, a media giant partly owned by the Saudi government.

Headline that sums up all you need to know: “How Twitter’s child porn problem ruined its plans for an OnlyFans competitor.” Related: OnlyFans is generating revenue like crazy.

Glenn Greenwald signs deal to air daily live show on Rumble.

Politico’s new owner, Mathias Dopfner, on October 3, 2021: ““Do we all want to get together for an hour in the morning on November 3 and pray that Donald Trump will again become President of the United States of America?”

How many bots are on Twitter posing as humans? Noone knows!

Netflix rebooting Teletubbies with Tituss Burgress.

Congrats to Greg Galant and the Muck Rack team on raising $180 million after more than a decade of bootstrapping.

CNN’s new rightwing tilt: It’s not about ideology, it’s about advertising. (Twitter thread)

YS @ReallyActivist

Thread. 1/ What happened to CNN? I worked there for 18 years. This is what happened. Everyone wants to know why CNN is shifting. Let me explain why. What Fox News gets that MSNBC and CNN don’t get… Each quarter, the Cable Operators release their subscriber base.

Tech:

Garry Tan named as YCombinator’s new CEO.

Bloomberg: “Alphabet Inc.’s Google pays billions of dollars each year to Apple Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. and other telecom giants to illegally maintain its spot as the No. 1 search engine, the US Justice Department told a federal judge Thursday.”

Things sound… not great… at Travis Kalanick’s CloudKitchens.

Misc.:

J’accuz.

Kevin H Bell 🌵 @KevinHBell

Hello and welcome to the dumbest meme I have made in weeks

Dude, my feelings on remote work are complicated. On the one hand I’m a dude in my early forties who happily runs a boutique consulting firm out of a coworking space. On the other hand I’ve seen both how working from home blurs work-life boundaries for a lot of people in deep and really shitty ways + how full-time remote work is insanely shitty for younger employees who miss out on a lot of training, networking and mastering the unspoken norms of their industry. Again… Complicated!

Mark my words: One of the biggest ongoing catastrophes made by Facebook/Meta, Twitter and Google is the decision to not create any public-facing phone number or email-based customer service system for users of their core products. If I have an issue with, say, my mobile phone provider or my electric utility, I can pick up a phone or send an email and reach a human promptly-ish. If someone hacks your Gmail or if algorithms take down your FB account in error? Hhhahaahahalol good luck to you.

2000+ MrBeast fans (Beasties? Beastatarians?) slept out overnight outside the American Dream Mall for a MrBeast Burger opening. More than 10,000 additional fans came the next day. Pandemic era of no big IRL events is officially over over over.