The Weekly Whatever: Happy Mothra's Day
Law and order
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UK police arrest anti-monarchist demonstrators.
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Man in mental health crisis is shot at 47 times by police. Somehow he survives, so now there’s a lawsuit.
$8chan
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Twitter 2023: Come for the Nazis, stay for the cat and dog torture videos.
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Twitter blocks content in Turkey right before an election, at the government’s request.
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More than half of Twitter Blue’s early subscribers have since canceled.
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Elon’s policy changes have given Russian and Chinese state media a massive boost.
Vacations
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Tourists in Hawaii follow the GPS’s instructions and drive right into the harbor.
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Guest at the Nashville Hilton says he woke up to find the hotel manager licking his toes.
Business
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Arby’s manager found dead in the walk-in freezer.
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Some Americans are tired of stupidly large American pickups, and are importing more reasonably sized Japanese trucks — in spite of a 25% import tariff originally enacted as part of a battle over chicken exports.
Crapto
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Sam Bankman-Fried argues that “dishonesty and unfair dealing” don’t count as fraud, and asks to have charges against him dismissed.
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The Metaverse is dead; the $1.5 billion crapto-centered “Decentraland” only had an average of 38 daily users.
Environment
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Governments spent a record amount of money last year subsidizing fossil fuel consumption.
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Turkmenistan faced criticism for burning off excess methane, so now they’re just venting it into the atmosphere.
Politics
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New Jersey Republicans call for a moratorium on wind farm construction, saying they’re concerned that the wind turbines are killing whales.
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Florida rejects Holocaust education textbooks for being too ‘woke’.
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Texas Republican who worked as a youth minister and proposed banning drag shows to protect kids from being “groomed”, resigns after it’s found that he got a teenage intern drunk and had sex with her.
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For the 2024 elections, expect CNN to be the new Fox News.
Technology
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Parrots learn to make video calls to chat to other parrots.
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Artist uses AI photo generation software to create an IKEA catalog for nuclear bomb shelter furnishings.
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There are already dozens of AI-generated fake news content farms online ready for 2024.
Suggested reading
- Ted Chiang on how the real danger of AI is that it will make capitalism even worse.