Year: 2022

  • The week that was

    The week that was

    After a raucous meeting, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors approved a controversial directive allowing the SFPD to use armed robots against criminal suspects “after evaluating alternative force options or de-escalation tactics.”

    Robot lawn mowers are industrial Roombas for your yard. The prices have come down to about six grand and Yarbo’s 3-in-1 Yard Robot comes with attachments so that it can serve as a snow or leaf blower. Because it’s modular, you can “upgrade the Yarbo for more purposes when you have the money or inclination.” Home sentry perhaps?

    A Florida woman filed a class action lawsuit against Kraft, makers of Velveeta microwavable Shells & Cheese cups, claiming the additional steps such as removing the lid, adding the water, and stirring in the cheese make the ready in 3½ minutes statement on the box “false and misleading.”

    Four Buddhist monks from a temple in Thailand have been shipped off to rehab after they all tested positive for meth.

    It was a shitty day in Wisconsin.

    The Brooklyn art collective MSCHF (the same ones that built Spot’s Revenge shown above) installed an ATM at Art Basel Miami which takes a photo and posts the customer’s account balance on a leaderboard for all to see.

    Australian big wave surfer Matt Formston is taking on the world’s largest waves in Nazaré, Portugal next week. “Like his counterparts, the Sydney-born surfer has been in the water for decades, winning national and international titles and riding some of the best waves in the world. But unlike his counterparts, Formston is blind”

  • NYC Rat Czar

    NYC Rat Czar

    New York City has a rat problem. If you don’t think so, just watch the video below. It’s OK, I’ll wait.

    It’s not surprising really. Leave bags of hot, steaming food out all night on the sidewalk and pretty soon the critters will come out for a meal – and have babies.

    In response, the city has listed a job opening for a cabinet level post. The Director of Rodent Mitigation, a Rat Czar.

    What’s so amusing about this is that the Mayor is having a bit of fun within the confines of big city politics and had the Job Posting written up with a bit of flair designed to get a bit of media attention. And it worked.

    Here are my favorite bits (bolding is my own).

    The About This Job section opens with a bang:

    Do you have what it takes to do the impossible? A virulent vehemence for vermin?

    They then lean into the job title, full well knowing it’s not the most sexy but, hey, go with it.

    If so, your dream job awaits: New York’s Citywide Director of Rodent Mitigation.

    I think the PR folks that helped write the job description are still hurting from all the earned media from the Pizza Rat. I was in San Francisco and even I heard about the Pizza Rat.

    Despite their successful public engagement strategy and cheeky social media presence, rats are not our friends. . . Cunning, voracious, and prolific, New York City’s rats are legendary for their survival skills, but they don’t run this city – we do.

    That final line echos Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch’s October 17th speech in which she famously declared “but the rats don’t run the city, we do” which was spotted on signs at the NYC marathon and instantly became a TikTok meme and is even being monetized by the sanitation department.

    But back to the JD. Yadda, yadda, yadda, then they show they mean business.

    The ideal candidate is highly motivated and somewhat bloodthirsty, determined to look at all solutions from various angles, including improving operational efficiency, data collection, technology innovation, trash management, and wholesale slaughter.

    Then on to the qualifications. New York City resident, Bachelor’s Degree, experience in policy and urban planning, strong organizational skills and attention to detail, proficiency with Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint, team player, adapts well to change, then:

    Swashbuckling attitude, crafty humor, and general aura of badassery

    This was it. Only in NYC would you see this line in a government job posting. It’s not just be a bad ass, no – they spiffed it up a bit and wrote a “general aura of badassery” Damn – this is a city that will talk straight to you.

    Here you go, read it for yourself.

  • The week that was

    The week that was

    President Joe Biden celebrated his 80th birthday. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, 82, announced she would step down from her leadership role and Senator Chuck Grassley, 89, filed to run for reelection in 2028.

    The organizers of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar banned the sale of alcohol inside the stadiums just days before the first game. After initially tweeting, “Well, this is awkward” Budweiser, the primary drinks sponsor, pivoted to announce that it would award all the beer it shipped to the tournament to the winning country.

    After losing his reelection to the presidency of Brazil last month, Jair Bolsonaro has not been seen in public. We finally found out why. He has a skin infection that prevents him from wearing pants.

    People in Woburn, Massachusetts have been subject to a barrage of attacks and intimidation by five wild turkeys, forcing some to take up improvised weapons and residents reporting being trapped in their homes. The leader of the gaggle (sounds too friendly), the flock (sounds too docile), the rafter (too esoteric) the pack (yeah, that’s it) is named Kevin (not exactly terrifying).

    The Belgium customs agency has been doing such a bang up job seizing cocaine at its ports that the government has run out of incinerator capacity to destroy the drugs.

    A 68-year old suspect using a walker to get around robbed a Fresno, California bank of $200. He did not get far.

    During an Indiana high school law enforcement training class the instructor confused his training weapon for a loaded firearm and shot one of his students. After putting the school on lockdown (as is customary when shots are fired on campus) police arrived to investigate and take care of the student who is, thankfully, recovering from non-serious wounds and probably re-thinking their future career in law enforcement.

    What’s happening on Twitter you say? Welp, Kyle Rittenhouse is selling a video game called Turkey Shoot where you battle the Fake News.

    The water source for a community of homes in the foothills outside of Scottsdale, Arizona is due to run dry by the end of the year.

    An event in England designed so that members of the public will be able to find out how to “keep their homes and properties as safe as possible from flooding and what to do in the case of a flood” was cancelled due to rain.

    Ye announced his candidacy for the 2024 presidential election and asked Donald Trump to be his running mate.

  • The week that was

    The week that was

    Jeff Bezos, founder and former CEO of Amazon, announced that he plans to give away most of his fortune. Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and former CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, lost 94 percent of his net worth in a single day. If you need a refresher on what happened at FTX, this 90-second Tik-Tok is all you need.

    Steve Jobs’ worn out Birkenstock sandals sold for $218,000 at an auction.

    The head of Amazon’s hardware division, Mr. Limp, announced business was softening so there would be layoffs.

    San Francisco opened up its long awaited Central Subway line that will take you from the 4th Street CalTrain terminal straight up to the Moscone Center, Market Street and all the way into Chinatown. The project kicked off in 2010 and was four years behind schedule.

    The global population ticked over to 8 billion souls this past week. The last billion were born in the last eleven years, the same time it took to build SF’s Central Subway line.

    Tens of thousands of weasels were liberated from a fur farm in Ohio.

    Researchers at the University of Tokyo discovered that when you play Lady Gaga, lab rats will bop their heads to the beat with an “innate ability to groove.”

    Meta mothballed its large-scale AI model after just three days in the wild as it had trouble distinguishing between fact and fiction. Galactica was trained on 48 million scientific papers and was supposed to “summarize academic papers, solve math problems, generate Wiki articles, write scientific code, annotate molecules and proteins, and more.” Instead it was used to write convincingly about Space Bears and other “hallucinations.”

    Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of The Play which put the UC Berkeley Bears over their rival Stanford in what was “The most amazing, sensational, dramatic, heartrending, exciting, thrilling finish in the history of college football.” More on the backstory of Joe Starkey’s famous narration and, yes, Cal beat Stanford yesterday as well in the 125th playing of The Big Game.

  • The week that was

    The week that was

    George Booth, who contributed cartoons to The New Yorker for more than five decades, died last week at age 96.

    Democrat Anthony “Tony” DeLuca was re-elected to another term as Pennsylvania state representative. He passed away on October 9th.

    The 114-year old Japanese candy company that made サクマドロップス went out of business.

    Things got really confusing on Twitter when Elon Musk allowed anyone with $8 to purchase a blue checkmark that historically verified an account as authentic. Hundreds of users immediately verified themselves as Elon Musk to which the actual @elonmusk responded “This is actually me.”

    AMC is pivoting to enterprise sales and partnering with Zoom to host large corporate zoom calls in their mostly empty movie theaters. Popcorn for your next company all hands will be available for an additional charge.

    Somebody behind the KFC Germany mobile app confused the holiday list with memorial day list and accidentally sent out a promotion to commemorate Kristallnacht.

    Philadelphia’s baseball team lost the World Series to Houston (perhaps averting economic doom) and their soccer team lost the MLS Cup to Los Angeles. The city took consolation and rallied behind Alexander Tominsky’s record breaking consumption of an entire rotisserie chicken for the 40th consecutive day.

    The Tyson Foods’ CFO was arrested after being found asleep in a stranger’s bed. Officers found Tyson asleep in the bedroom and his clothes on the floor.

  • On Mastodon

    On Mastodon

    The change of ownership at Twitter and the drastic changes to the platform have caused many to think seriously about abandoning the social network for an alternative.

    I too have started the journey (xoxo.zone/@iankennedy) and have been collecting links that I was going to use to write a primer on how to get started. But things are moving so quickly with so many people hopping the fence to the Fediverse that it’s more useful, at this point, to post a collection of useful links and let folks read up on their own.

    How to Leave Dying Social Media Platforms (without ditching your friends) – Cory Doctorow’s post resonated with me. I’ve been on Twitter since 2006 so leaving behind a community curated over the past sixteen years is hard, but important.

    Before you do anything, ask Twitter to send you an archive of your history. The folks that built this tool did a great job. What they’ll send you is a zip file of all your tweets in html.

    An Increasingly Less-Brief Guide to Mastodon by @Noelle@elekk.xyz is the perfect place to start learning about Mastodon. Everything you’ve ever wanted to know, told simply, clearly and in a charmingly non-condescending way. And it’s written on GitHub.

    How to Join Mastodon, the Ad-Free Social Network Billionaires Can’t Buy – another “everything-you-were-afraid-to-ask” post, this Gizmodo article is a quick read that covers all the basics.

    I’ve been following Jon Henshaw for years. His writing about technology from the marketer’s perspective has always been insightful. His post, How to leave Twitter and switch to Mastodon, is a step-by-step guide that will help you make the jump but also how to leave pointers so you can redirect your followers.

    Mastodon – here’s where to start. You can download a client app and find a server. For posterity, here are some screenshots of what the site looks like today.

    joinmastodon.org homepage, Nov. 2022
    Getting Started
    20 third party client apps
    Resources

    https://twitodon.com – this site will download your twitter users and give you a csv of those of them that have listed their Mastodon accounts so you can begin to relocate your tribe.

    Everything I know about Mastodon – another guide, specifically written for data science folks trying to navigate the fediverse. Danielle Navarro goes into details the web app’s advanced mode, this importance of hashtags, some points on etiquette and other norms on the platform.

    How to host your own Fediverse – the cool thing about Mastodon is that you can host your own server. This page will get you started if you want to dive in and host your own interest group and make your own rules.

    Other Writing

    Old soul Ethan Zuckerman has some wise words on why we should not give up totally on Twitter and resign the platform to the trolls.

    At face value, every move Musk made at Twitter has seemed childish, willful, heartless, and destructive, and seemed to reveal how little he grasps the difference between running a media organization and running an electric-car or rocket-ship firm. It’s like a rich football fan buying an NFL team and imagining that he can name draft-picks and call plays.

    Twitter is our Future – James Fallows

  • The week that was

    The week that was

    The Stanford University mascot, The Tree, was suspended for the rest of the season for unfurling a “Stanford hates fun” banner at a recent football game halftime show.

    In other Stanford news, a man was caught impersonating a Stanford student and living in a dorm basement for weeks.

    Shanghai Disney went into lockdown when ten visitors tested positive for Covid. Due to China’s zero tolerance policy, everyone was required to stay inside the “Happiest Place on Earth” until they could provide three negative tests. Luckily, all the rides remain open.

    Rolex announced a new watch made out of titanium that is rated to 11,000 meters (36,090 feet).

    U.S. officials say that the KC-135’s aircrew did not mean to fly in a pattern that resembled the male anatomy in the skies off the coast near a Russian base in Syria. 🙄

  • Credit Rating System Baffles Japanese Influencer

    Kemio is a Japanese social media influencer trying to make his way in New York and is now in between apartments. The hilarity of this bit might be lost on you if you don’t understand Japanese but even if you don’t, you’ll get a sense of his breathless exasperation.

    Sooo Confused

    The set up is that he has 30 minutes to pack his things into boxes because he has a trip back to Japan and he doesn’t want prospective future tenants of his apartment to root through his things while he is away. The fact that landlords will let strangers tromp through your apartment while you’re still living there is bizarre to Japanese. Apartments are always shown empty and cleaned up.

    At the 4:10 mark he starts talking about how something called a “credit history” is necessary to rent an apartment and that he has no credit history because he’s essentially been paying for everything with either cash or a debit card since he moved here. He then got a credit card just so he could build up his credit score but is sooo confused by all the rules and guidance on how to build up your score. You can’t spend up to your cap, but don’t spend too little, don’t pay off your entire bill each month, etc. Soooo confusing!

    Kemio also gets into trouble because, as you can see, he’s quite anxious so he checks his credit score all the time to see if it’s going up but is surprised because, due to all his checking, the score actually goes down!

    He then gets in further trouble because he starts looking at new apartments and puts in applications all over town because he’s running out of time to find a new place. This spray-and-pray application tactic backfires because it generates even more credit checks so his score goes down even more!

    So here we are now – he’s packing his boxes and heading off on his trip from which he will return with no place to live. Mon dieu!

    Subscribe to Kimio’s channel to stay up-to-date.

  • The week that was

    The week that was

    A giant rubber duck, with the words “Greater Joy” printed on its breast, broke free from its moorings in high winds and escaped down the river in Maine. “We actually went out and grabbed it with the boat, but the lines all broke on it,” the harbor official said. “It was just way too windy. We couldn’t pull it back in.”

    Maserati launched a collaboration with Mattel’s Barbie to offer their new 500 horsepower Grecale SUV in Barbie’s trademark iridescent hot pink.

    Just a few years ago the cruise ship industry was on its last legs, overcoming their reputation as floating petri dishes for Covid. Now they are back, bigger than ever. Royal Caribbean announced a new ship, the biggest of them all. The 20-deck, 1,198 feet long behemoth, the Icon of the Seas, will carry more than 10,000 souls, featuring seven pools, six water slides, rock climbing wall, ice skating rink, FlowRider surf simulator, miniature golf course and, a bar that serves “mommy and me” matching mocktails.

    Amazon’s Alexa not only knows how to fart, she has a deep library of fart noises that can be delivered on demand and (she’s a businesswoman after all) will offer to sell you a Extreme Fart Extension pack which kids are buying without their parent’s knowledge.

    Adidas cut ties with Kanye West following antisemitic statements that have also gotten him bounced from Instagram and Twitter. After being escorted unceremoniously out of Jewish-owned Skechers HQ, it was reported that Ye is no longer a billionaire. It’s not clear if he still going ahead with plans announced last week to buy the right-wing social network Parler.

    Bono is on tour to promote his memoirs but the headline is that he’s very sorry for putting the “Songs of Innocence” album on everyone’s iPhone back in 2014.

    A museum in Germany discovered that the Mondrian painting they’ve had for on display for the past 40 years has been hanging upside down.