Eggflation is just more price-gouging. Cory Doctorow: One company controls the US egg industry, Cal-Maine Food, and it’s making record profits—up 65% net year-over-year.
In its communications to investors, Cal-Maine’s eminently guillotineable CFO Max Bowman attributed the monopolist’s good fortune to “significantly higher selling prices” and “our ability to adapt to inflationary market pressures.”
Dumb and shameful until it’s not
Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day says Web 3.0 is here. It’s not “the blockchain-backed cyberlibertarian free-for-all, where internet access is predicated on using crypto wallets to buy and sell digital assets” or the metaverse. It’s AI.
Now, you might say, “Ryan, A.I. is completely overhyped. Generative-A.I. art tools can’t even figure out how many fingers people have. There are all kinds of legal and ethical problems around this technology. It’s exploitative. It’s wildly insecure. We don’t even fully understand what it will do to our brains, yet. And there is a new dumb company every day hawking worthless A.I. fixes to problems no one actually needs to solve.” Well, fun fact: That was true of Web 2.0 too! In 2013, I used an app called Foursquare to check-in to a dive bar in Greenpoint every weekend via the geotargeting on my phone so I could get free tater tots. Everything on the internet is dumb and shameful until it’s not.
Also: " … the internet is giant machine that turns harassment against women into advertising revenue."
And Mutekimaru, a Japanese YouTuber, “created a system that lets his fish play Pokémon.”
Well, last week, the fish were playing the newest Pokémon release Pokémon Scarlet. The problem is the game is very buggy and during the playthrough it glitched out and the game crashed, but the fish continued controlling the Nintendo Switch’s buttons. The fish opened up the Nintendo Store, bought a game, and, for a brief moment, flashed their owner’s credit card number on the screen. Whoops!
The Reality of Being a Parent With a Controversial Past
Lily Burana wrote a bestselling memoir about her life as a stripper. Now she’s the mother of a four-year-old.
Our cultural fondness for outlaws is context-specific: Everyone loves a badass, but no one loves a bad parent.
…
we Parents with Pasts plead for the clemency of kindness, for assumptions of our inherent normalcy. After all, we wrestle our kids’ pants on one leg at a time, just like everybody else.
The Last Days of Hollywood’s Most Reviled Reporter (NYTimes). A profile of the late Nikki Finke, the most hated and feared reporter in Hollywood. She was an internet journalist in the tradition of Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper.
Julie and I went for a walk and saw this house around the corner. It looks nice.
This Guy Noticed Jigsaw Puzzle Companies Use The Same Patterns, So He Made Some Mashups.
“Jigsaw puzzle companies tend to use the same cut patterns for multiple puzzles. This makes the pieces interchangeable. As a result, I sometimes find that I can combine portions from two or more puzzles to make a surreal picture that the publisher never imagined.”
Jacobin: A Marxist View of Tolkien’s Middle Earth
J. R. R. Tolkien’s fantasy world is a medieval utopia with poverty and oppression airbrushed out of the picture. But Tolkien’s work also contains a romantic critique of industrial capitalism that is an important part of its vast popular appeal.
Also: race, gender, and sex in Middle Earth.
