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In Hindsight, the Slurp Juice Was Probably a Mistake

What about everything that hasn't collapsed? (Yet.)

May 12th, 2022

[Oceanographer Reide Corbett] said the images of homes being swept to sea, while dramatic, should not trigger a “sky is falling” reaction. Many homes along the Outer Banks are at risk of a similar fate, but many more are not for now.

No, the sky isn’t falling, but the ocean is rising so it can be hard to tell the difference. Anyway, think of all the homes haven’t been swept out to sea! (Yet.)

And yes, unstablecoin Terra collapsed so completely that the blockchain it runs on was stopped to “prevent governance attacks,” but what about all the crypto beanies that haven’t been swept out to sea? In a story about the allegedly collateralized stablecoin Tether also losing its dollar peg, Reuters’s Elizabeth Howcroft and Samuel Indyk describe the state of the crypto market as a whole:

The sell-off has taken the combined market value of all cryptocurrencies to $1.2 trillion, less than half of where it was last November, based on data from CoinMarketCap.

Ah, well, nevertheless. It’s tempting to think that Thomas Stackpole’s Q&A with Molly “Going Just Great” White in Harvard Business Review is unusually well timed, but is there ever not an ongoing crypto disaster? Molly makes some very good points about the severe abuse potential inherent in putting everything on an immutable blockchain:

Imagine if you went on a first date, and when you paid them back for your half of the meal, they could now see every other transaction you’d ever made — not just the public transactions on some app you used to transfer the cash but any transactions: the split checks with all of your previous dates, that monthly transfer to your therapist, the debts you’re paying off (or not), the charities to which you’re donating (or not), the amount you’re putting in a retirement account (or not). What if they could see the location of the corner store by your apartment where you so frequently go to grab a pint of ice cream at 10 PM? And this would also be visible to your ex-partners, your estranged family members, your prospective employers, or any number of outside parties interested in collecting your data and using it for any purpose they like. If you had a stalker or had left an abusive relationship or were the target of harassment, the granular details of your life are right there.

Also Today in Whoopsies:

Building on the work of Gawker’s only reporter Tarpley Hitt, Anna Merlan tried to figure out why The Believer is owned by a sex toy company now. Former employees think it was sold by UNLV’s Black Mountain Institute out of pique, because the staff were so uncool about editor Joshua Wolf Shenk flashing his hog on Zoom, a thing that could happen to literally any normal boss on a work call with no pants. The new owners of Believer have posted their plans for the magazine on the publication’s highest-trafficked page: believermag.com/best-hookup-sites/. I can’t wait to read new articles on hot modern topics like “hacer preterite” and “were,” not to mention a personal favorite subject, “oxidation.”

“WordPress’ market share is shrinking” according to Joost de Valk. Justice Alito’s reputation is collapsing as he completely contradicts what he told Congress when they confirmed him, writes Southpaw. “Unity Software loses $5 billion in market cap after Apple’s changes lead to ‘self-inflicted wound’.” The pilot of a Cessna 208 in Florida collapsed mid-flight, but an air traffic controller (played by Robert Stack) successfully talked the passenger down to a safe landing. Twitch cooking stream goes very wrong. I think The Goop Diapér is a joke, although with Gwyneth are we ever really sure? And what is Twitter, according to Garbage Ryan, besides “constantly screaming?”

Speaking of “catnip for maniacs,” Twitter’s new privacy policy comes with a 2D platformer game where you and your dog collect bones. In Gizmodo Shoshana Wodinsky and Kevin Hurler tried to figure out what this has to do with privacy, and conclude that “nothing” would be an improvement because the actual purpose of this nonsense appears to be actively muddling any understanding of what “privacy” is or how you can control it on Twitter (which you can’t).

And Finally: If you have a body, you’ll find something to identify with in this story by Sam Anderson about gaining and then losing pandemic weight and discovering that inside every fat person there might be a skinny person, but inside that skinny person there is also still a fat person who “represents some of my best qualities: curiosity, cheerful appetite, a hunger for life, satisfaction in the moment,” like a turducken of human emotional complexity that can be made smaller but can’t be erased or simplified by “cutesy app-babble.”

Today’s Song: Soul Coughing, “Collapse”

~ I start at my own shadow, and am full of all sorts of horrible tabs ~

Tweets @fka_tabs and @TodayinTabs as per usual. This week was like a whole flock of Tuesdays but we made it to Gentlemen’s Friday at last. If you’re in the Discord meet me in #tabs-happy-hour,1 and if you’re not in the Discord yet, subscribe and get in there, what are you waiting for.

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