The Whatever: Maintenant dans L'Étoile du Nord
Business
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At last Pizza Hut offers snake pizza.
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Why so many boarded-up empty stores? Because banks make more money if they force leaseholders to pay rent on the abandoned space, rather than allowing the price to be lowered to something the market will sustain.
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23andMe are selling customers' genetic data to GlaxoSmithKline.
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Never download anything from a Google ad — Google is hosting "Google verified" ads that lead to malware downloads.
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Authorities search a Colorado funeral home whose director has taxidermy as a hobby, and find 115 improperly stored bodies.
Stochastic parrots
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Andreessen Horowitz say that enforcing copyright on data used to train "AI" models would disrupt their business viability, and apparently disruption's bad when it's done to them.
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Adobe sells "AI" generated fake images of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
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After Microsoft switches to "AI" to curate the MSN news pages, they end up publishing a story claiming that Democrats are orchestrating a surge of COVID-19 cases to get elected; and a news item about a woman found dead is accompanied by an automatic poll asking readers if they think she died by murder, accident, or suicide.
Technology
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The CEO of "Cyber Ninjas" tried to redact a PDF document by drawing black rectangles on it then resaving it.
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Elon admits Xitter is now worth less than half what he paid for it. Business genius!
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New York now has apps that will tell you the best places to meet subway rats.
Politics
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Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani and Mike Lindell have no lawyers to represent them, having failed to pay their legal bills.
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RFK Jr promises that if elected, he'll tell the National Institutes of Health to stop studying infectious diseases.
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Boris Johnson felt that COVID-19 was "nature’s way of dealing with old people" who should accept their fate, and complained that "we are destroying the economy for people who will die anyway soon".
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Banned books become more popular.
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A Tennessee mayoral candidate who posed with a neo-Nazi loses the election in a landslide, and naturally claims that there was electoral fraud.
Florida
- Florida officials wish to make it clear that the truck labeled "BOOTY PATROL" is not an official government vehicle.
Texas
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An eleven year old Honor Roll student in Texas annoys the school Principal with requests for counseling and clarification about dress codes. The Principal calls police and has him arrested and placed in solitary confinement for three days.
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Texas installs concertina wire along the border with New Mexico. Yes, New Mexico.
Other news
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A $6m solid gold toilet called "America" was stolen from Winston Churchill's birthplace.
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A pilot taking psilocybin to try to treat his depression said "I'm not OK" before trying to cut the power to the plane's engines.
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A woman in England sees paragliders, and naturally concludes that Hamas are invading Yorkshire.
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A German couple decide they want the ultimate "United States" wedding, so they get married at a McDonalds in Michigan.