The Weekly Whatever: Blue bird of crappiness
Very normal people
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Man who lived in Paris' Charles-de-Gaulle airport for 20 years dies, appropriately enough, in the terminal.
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Homeless man roams Austin TX with a chainsaw, saying "Satan is in the trees".
$8chan
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Following Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, use of the N word jumps 500%.
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As promised, Musk allows anyone to buy a blue checkmark on Twitter for $8. An account pretending to be Nintendo flips off Twitter for nearly two hours.
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A "verified" Tesla parody account trolls Elon. In spite of following Musk's stated rules that parody accounts must clearly state that they are parody, the account gets permanently banned.
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A few days later, a fake "verified" account pretending to be pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly announces that insulin will now be free, causing the company's stock to tank. The real Eli Lilly halts advertising on Twitter, joining other brands including General Mills, General Motors and Audi.
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Twitter's Head of Moderation and Safety quits, along with the Chief Information Security Officer, the Chief Privacy Officer, the Chief Compliance Officer, and a bunch of other senior staff.
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Twitter tries to rehire a bunch of the people laid off en masse. The company's Senior Director of Engineering is caught saying that the people being rehired are "lazy, unmotivated", and were "cut for a reason".
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"Part of today will be turning off the ‘microservices’ bloatware", Musk announces. The microservice handling SMS-based login verification stops sending codes, leaving people unable to log in.
Crapto crashtacular
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FTX, the second-largest cryptocurrency exchange, suffers a $6b bank run before deciding to block further withdrawals and then declare bankruptcy. Founder Sam Bankman-Fried explains that he thought he had enough funds to pay out 24× a normal day's withdrawals, but that due to "poor internal labelling of bank-related accounts" he didn't actually have enough to pay out one day's withdrawals. Investors Sequoia Capital decide the company, once worth $25b, is now worth $0. "It could be worse," says Bankman-Fried.
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BlockFi, a digital currency lender, responds to the FTX crash by pausing its own clients' ability to withdraw their money.
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Crypto.com joins in, freezing transactions involving two "stable" coins.
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After FTX declares bankruptcy, millions of dollars are mysteriously drained from its accounts by hackers. Yeah, hackers. Sure.
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Meanwhile, Sam Bankman-Fried is revealed to have transferred around $10b out of FTX, and $1-2 billion of that has mysteriously gone missing.
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Visa decides that maybe now is not the time to launch an FTX Visa credit card.
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Maybe, just maybe, people shouldn't have given billions of dollars to a bunch of horny 20somethings living in the Bahamas and pretending to be a bank.
Other bad behavior
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An inmate was accused of impersonating a billionaire and stealing $11m while locked up inside a maximum security prison.
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Police arrest a blind man after (they say) mistaking his cane for a gun.
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KFC in Germany apologizes for inviting people to commemorate Kristallnacht with fried chicken.
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A large number of oil and gas industry lobbyists are attending the COP27 environmental conference for some reason.
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Louisiana Republicans erode voting rights further by redefining who counts as black.
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Four states vote to abolish slavery, but Louisiana decides to keep it legal for a while yet.
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Russia's busy, so it's up to China to sow division in the US using fake social media accounts.