The Weekly Whatever: Welcome to The Jungle, kids
$8chan
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With all the experienced ops engineers laid off, Twitter is having trouble deploying code updates.
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Elon calls in an engineering team to explain something much more important — why nobody is seeing his Tweets. Engineers point out that based on searches, his popularity rating has gone from 100 to 9, so maybe people just aren’t interested in him any more. A firing ensues.
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Twitter runs corporate ads next to the thoughts of Holocaust deniers.
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For some reason Twitter’s market for web ads is collapsing and it has lost 9% of its users.
Business
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Ask ChatGPT to write performance reviews and you get a pile of racism and sexism.
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There are jobs that just can’t be filled, so we let immigrant laborers do the work… No, just kidding, Iowa wants to let 14 year old children work in meatpacking plants instead.
Brexit dividends
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The UK can’t recruit foreign nurses, and a raise for current nurses to match inflation is unaffordable, according to the Tories and the other Tories. Don’t worry, though, the health service is a cash cow for consultancy firms, with last year’s budget quadrupled.
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Britain was supposed to work out how to do its own border inspections post-EU, but it didn’t, so enjoy African Swine Fever in your imported pork.
Crapto
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Pedophile pays $20,000 in Bitcoin to have a 14 year old victim killed before he can testify in court; discovers Bitcoin doesn’t solve that.
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Crypto.com introduces 50% withdrawal fees for people smart enough to have freed themselves from conventional banking.
Education
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Ohio Department of Education says there’s nothing wrong with neo-Nazis homeschooling their children to be good Aryans. Ohio Republicans propose more school vouchers to give parents more control over their children’s education.
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New York middle school apologizes for the cafeteria offering chicken and waffles with watermelon for dessert on the first day of Black History Month.
Politics
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Vermin Supreme says he regrets getting involved with the US Libertarian Party, and says “It has become a terrible dumpsterfire of a shitshow” since it swerved hard right.
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Ron DeSantis wanted to ban guns at his election night party, but really didn’t want anyone to know that he wanted it to be a gun-free event.
Law and order
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Brazilian lawyer sneaks his gun into a hospital MRI room, and discovers the warnings about metal objects are for a good reason after all.
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UK climate activist is put on trial for blocking traffic, and told he’s not allowed to tell the court why he did it. He tells them anyway, and is found in contempt of court.
Science
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When is a cat guacamole? When AI vision software is looking at it.
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Johns Hopkins University of Medicine will cease reporting on COVID-19 data in March, because as you can see everything is fine, and the graph of deaths is a nice straight line with only about 500 people dying from COVID every day.
Actual good news
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Heard the talking point that we should build more fossil fuel plants because wind turbine blades aren’t recyclable? Well, they’re recyclable now.
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Up to 75% of books published before 1964 might be in the public domain.