Whatever: Copout28 Special
What could possibly go wrong?
- In 2021 Stanford student King Vanga drove his car at high speed into the back of another car, killing the occupants. He's now suing the family of the couple he killed over emails about his actions that they sent to Stanford.
- Nearly half of men surveyed think they could land a passenger plane. Killjoy experts disagree.
Politics
- The Republican pastor who is coordinator of Philadelphia's chapter of "Moms for Liberty" turns out to be a man — and also a registered sex offender who was found to have abused a 14 year old boy while part of the Lyndon LaRouche organization. But at least he's not a member of the "Proud Boys". Probably.
Texas
- Texas Republicans reject a ban on party members associating with Nazis and Holocaust deniers.
- If there's another winter cold snap, the Texas grid has a 25% chance of going down again.
Education
- Problem: Teacher shortages and budget issues mean school districts can't find enough teachers. Solution: have eleventh grade students teach the younger students.
Business
- A Florida restaurant chain facing a staffing shortage tries offering higher pay and better benefits. Somehow that works.
- Venture Capital firm Andreessen Horowitz invests in a company that makes money from non-consensual "AI" generated porn.
- Rehab for the elderly and disabled? UnitedHealth computer says no.
- The CEO of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange pleads guilty to money laundering and violating sanctions, and the company faces a $4.3 billion fine.
Artificial stupidity
- A Turing Test experiment finds that ELIZA is more convincing than ChatGPT.
- Researchers find a way to get ChatGPT to spit out its raw training data.
- Google's automated snippets feature highlights the health benefits of eating broken glass, which it learned about from text generated by ChatGPT.
- People who paid to chat to an "AI" girlfriend bot find that she no longer works because the company's CEO is in jail for trying to set his own apartment on fire.
- OpenAI relies on underpaid human moderators in Kenya who are traumatized by the material they have to review.
Technology
- Microsoft's new Outlook client quietly siphons all your non-Microsoft email onto Microsoft's servers.
- A startup claims that it can enable programmers to work while asleep.
- As the 2024 election cycle approaches, Facebook and Instagram will allow ads saying the 2020 election was rigged.
$8chan
- Elon endorses a claim that Jews push hatred against white people, endorses the antisemitic great replacement theory, and boosts the "Pizzagate" conspiracy theory.
- When advertisers leave Xitter because of the antisemitism, Elon tells them to go fuck themselves. For some reason this does not encourage them to return.
- Also Elon: “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”
Copout28
- Four years ago, Jeff Bezos pledged to lead the way on carbon reduction. Let's see how that's going.
- Rishi Sunak, David Cameron and King Charles demonstrate their commitment to acting on global warming by taking three separate private jets to Cop28. Hundreds of other attendees do the same.
- President of Cop28 Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, who is also the CEO of the United Arab Emirates' state oil company, says that "I’m not in any way signing up to any discussion that is alarmist. There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5C."
- Al Jaber promotes carbon capture technology, which would take 343 years to remove the emissions produced by his company. (Also, most carbon capture plants are being used to extract more fossil fuels.)
- The IAEA Directory General tells Cop28 attendees that Small Modular Reactors are a practical clean energy solution. They're not.
- The richest 1% emit as much planet-heating pollution as two thirds of humanity.
- 58% of corporations are still quietly lobbying against action on climate change, including some that have publicly announced net zero as a target.
Old memes never die, Xzibit A
- Yo dawg, I heard you like jigsaw puzzles.
- Yo dawg, I heard you like Minnesota.
And finally…
- New York City will deal with its rat problem by drowning them in booze.
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