Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1440
APP takedowns, a buy nothing day, Bezos' Trump bribes, passport renewals, Gene Hackman and Michelle Trachtenberg
Good morning, hola, what is up. 1440 is a good edition number. I approve. Wikpedia tells me it was a leap year. Of the Julien Calendar. You know what I would like to see? A timeline of history with all the assorted calendars shown as horizontal bars across the eras in which they were used. I would enjoy that. Big plot point in Pynchon’s Mason and Dixon. Maybe I should re-read that. Eton College was founded in 1440. The Gilles De Rais got sentenced to death. I remember that guy from all my angsty porny French author reading when I was young and… well, I guess the word is “pretentious.” I looked good doing it, though.
RIP to Gene Hackman, that is some messed up shit. Carmon Monoxide, maybe? That is my friend Nick’s theory. Anyway, he was awesome in The Conversation, Enemy of the State, Superman, The Royal Tenenbaums.. you know what? Dude was awesome in a lot of shit. Ninety-five. Had a good run.
Unlike Michelle Trachtenberg, also RIP, 39, jesus, just a baby. Apparently she had a liver transplant?? In a different world, Georgina Sparks getting a liver transplant would be front page news. I care. I care very much about celebrity deaths. Of cool celebrities. Michelle Trachtenberg was cool. And I am sad she can now not appear in the Buffy reboot. Fuck.
Big takedown piece on Applovin’, our main competitor at my day job. They are like 100x bigger than us but we’re basically the only other game in town. Ad Fraud, unwanted downloads, COPPA violations, you name it. Sketchy company. I am not surprised, this whole industry is sketchy. The stock research firm who published the takedown yesterday is called Fuzzy Panda, which is just a great name. A great sentence in their 40-ish page report (I read it all, of course, this is my job) is: “Fuzzy Panda Research is an objectively terrible brand name (kind of like AppLovin’), but at least we admit our name is ridiculous.” Gonna have to agree with that one. What’s hilarious is that even though Fuzzy Panda published their takedown piece yesterday, they mentioned two other researchers also working on research about AppLovin: One of which had already published, and I had been reading. One of which has yet to publish.
Their stock has been on an absolutely insane, irrational, just bonkers run over the last year. Utterly divorced from reality. They were down as much as 20% yesterday, which doesn’t even begin to cover the rally, and it leveled out at down just 13%.
The thing about APP (that’s their stock ticker) is that there is plenty of blame to go around. They have a new hyped product that is basically ripping off Facebook? Well shit Facebook’s sure been asleep at the wheel letting them do that! They totally break Apple’s rules around fingerprinting? Well Apple has done absolutely nothing to enforce that rule, so all the scofflaws are getting away with it meanwhile ethical, well-meaning companies like ours suffer working in a competitive environment where rule-breakers are unchecked. Will Apple do anything about it now that this report is out? We’ll see! I am not optimistic.
APP has basically been allowed to become a monopoly as Biden’s FTC fought the last war, suing Google for their ad monopoly, while another company employs the exact same playbook as laid out by the FTC’s suit against Google and they do nothing. APP isn’t some amazing AI powerhouse: they are a monopoly extracting rent. And no one is going to do anything about it.
The US government prevented APP from selling to the Chinese a year or two back. For between 1 and 2 billion. Even today, after their plunge yesterday, they are worth $130+ billion. The irony is, if the US had let them sell to the Chinese, we would probably now be all over these privacy violations. But they’re American so whatever.
I rant enough about this during the day, though, so I will spare you. Unless you want to panic about your kids seeing violent and sexual ads, then you can go read the report. Because APP is also self-serve, long-tail. Any Joe Schmoe can sign up for an account and put ads in their “game” and commit fraud and COPPA violations and APP wipes their hands of it because hey they’re not doing anything. No, they’re not doing anything. Like they are not actually vetting their customers. NOPE.
I will now turn to a more positive topic, which is my new favorite YouTube channel, a former vet turned automotive YouTube mechanic named Sara N Tuned (there is probably some car pun in that name that I do not understand) who is just the best. She does old car restorations (currently working on a badass Celica) and reviews of new cars. Both types of content are just great. She is hilarious. She has good fashion sense. She has this hilarious yellow foam hand with a pointy finger, on a stick that she uses to point out things on cars. She cracks me up constantly. And she knows so much about cars, it is crazy. 90% of the time I have zero idea what she’s talking about: not just on the restorations, of course, but even on her reviews of new cars. She covers shit no one else does like strut diameters and whatnot. Just great. Sarah N Tuned. Rick Recommended™.
Tomorrow is some buy nothing protest. I will half-heartedly participate, avoiding the corporate behemoths, but I a going to go to the immigrant-owned Pizza place I go to every Friday, thank you very much, why would I ban them. And of course most of the things I won’t buy from the behemoths tomorrow I will buy today or Saturday, so I am not sure how effective that will be.
But you know, fuck Jeff Bezos seriously. You guys see his new thing where the editorial page of WaPo will only feature editorials by testostorone-addled bald guys who read too much Rand? I am only 50% kidding. Editor quit over it. Just craven. I really wish I could get them out of my life.
I suppose he is doing all of this as his form of bribery to Trump, I mean of course he is. The feds (I actually gotta double check whether it was the FTC or the DOJ I forget) filed anti-trust suit against him during the Biden administration. I read it, it’s a pretty solid suit. Bit finicky about “the market” which honestly it probably doesn’t need to be. But, so, now it is kind of.. in limbo? Like… will the Trump Administration prosecute the complaint in court? Because if they don’t, who will, and Amazon can escape its clutches. But if they do, then there is a (depressingly slim) chance that Amazon could be broken up. (The obvious breakup of Amazon would be AWS from retail but that won’t do the trick. The pro move would be to break marketplace off from direct sold that would rule. And break off AWS too for good measure. And A9 please k thanks). So he is buttering Trump up in hopes that they will drop the suit or just let it die on the vine. That’s it. That’s what’s happening.
I cannot fathom having hundreds of billions of dollars and giving a fuck whether AWS, Prime, A9 and Marketplace stay under the same corporate umbrella. Selling your soul for an org chart really is some depressing small-man shit. These people, they are nothing. Wisps of withering souls.
Today we are pulling Jane from school early and headed down to the Pittsboro post office to get Jane her passport. Children have to do passport applications in person, with both parents present, to avoid, like, child abduction. I expect this law (rule? no idea) eliminated or pronounced unenforced in the next eight to ten days. Elon can’t have the mothers of his 13 kids keeping the individual one or two he wants to keep around. They do make it kind of easy, though, there’s a tool on the state department site where you fill the whole form out and it validates, and then you just print it out and take it to the post office. They will still find something to complain about, though. I have no doubt.
Also finally renewed mine. It had been nearly five years. Expired during the pandemic seemed kinda pointless to worry about. I did not realize that if you wait more than five years, it’s a more complex process, though, so I’m glad I got it done just under the wire.
Passports for everyone let’s go to Benin. I like that country. Gives me a little smile every Monday morning when I do my country quiz. Oh I did that with Jane this week, by the way, since she was home sick. Girl knows a lot of countries! Terrible at the Balkans but who isn’t. She got Chad and Sudan and Laos though. Legit.
A playlist of live music for you today, cuz it’s the only one that was even remotely close to being done, god knows what I am going to do tomorrow. Lol this mix is all over the place who the heck is Procno or Wojciech Jachna no idea. Actually, lotta oldies on this mix maybe it’s not all over the place after all I take that back.
OK byeeeee.
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Thanks for reading.
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Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.