Good morning hello hi howdy how are you? All well? Ça va? Oui? Ça va bien? Moi? Comme ci comme ça.

Bit of a round-up issue today.

The failing New York Times chose not to include my daughter in their photo essay of Daisy Chain Fields. Many people are saying it is because she was too f’n cute. Now we are going to need to track down Amanda (whose last name has turned out to be Hakan) and get a copy of the photo. I have found her Instagram. She is a very good photographer. I’m sure none of this is her fault.

Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and a bunch of finance ministers are in my town today. I am not happy about this. I love my town but if fate is going to sick some sort of catastrophe upon it, today’s the day.

Seth Moulton lost his Senatorial bid against Ed Markey and good riddance. Yes Ed Markey is too old and kinda boring but at least he is not a pandering transphobe. Massachusetts knows whats up, thank you peeps.

Apple has a new CEO. One of the people most responsible for the current capitalistic global order and China’s rise as a for to American manufacturing and dude-who-gave-Trump-a-golden-trophy-seriously-yes-seriously Tim Cook, has left the building. Except he hasn’t. They have decided to make him some sort global ambassador chairman so he can keep doing the part of his job he was the absolute worst at.

I think somewhere, deep down, Tim Cook has a heart and wanted to be known as a kinder, better CEO, and he legit tried to get their carbon footprint down to zero and he fought and killed NC’s old bathroom bill back when people actually did things about bathroom bills, now they’re everywhere. So maybe in some ways, this new job is Tim Cook’s hell: he has to keep being evil, so the new CEO can look less evil.

Except the new CEO is off to a garbage start, caving on Lake Ontario’s fake new name literally on the first fucking day of his job. Super cool.

But I am still going to buy the Apple foldable next week and I hate myself for it.

I’m going to leave Apple Music, though.

I forgot two articles from my articles round-up. They’re both super cheery:

Here is an article about how much Reggie Watts sucks and how he basically killed his girlfriend by constantly pressuring her to do tons of drugs and party all the time. Super fun. Reggie and I had a lot of mutual, erm, we’ll call ‘em acquaintances back in my “global partier” days before I ultimately realized that spending your time partying with the same 1,000 people on different continents every week for fun was an absolutely stupid way to live your life. Apparently he is pretty committed to it, though. I always got this sense because… he was very sweaty. And never really got going till, like, midnight or one.

But still. God. That article was shockingly appalling.

And here is an article about how our twenty-ish year experiment in trying to teach kids things from screens has been an abject failure and we should probably go back to paper and physical books asap. It’s all very depressing. And even if you don’t have kids, there is an interesting aside in there about memory palaces and our ability to look up information in books at speed and how Kindles etc can mimic part of this with the page-turning, but not with the page flipping, which is 100% true and I miss being able to go to a book and physically open it to within 5-10 pages of the thing I am looking up. Nowadays I have to use the search function on the Kindle and it does not always yield the result I am looking for because you need an exact phrase. It makes me want to go back to physical books. I am sad about that. But I think it’s the truth. I just wish they didn’t have bindings. Wouldn’t be cool if all books were GBC-bound?

(That edtech article is on Substack I am sorry. The world is imperfect. People keep fucking using Substack.)

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Listening to the new Chat Pile today, Who Loves the Sun, one of metal’s most anticipated records for this year, out this Friday. But I got it early because I am cool I am a trainspotter and paid their label a fortune to be a “member.” They are a great label, though, The Flenser. So much music I love. Anyway this record is pretty good. Pretty straight ahead sludge so far on record one, nothing as genre-breaking as “Why,” the breakout hit of Democrat Socialist punk rockers everywhere. But we’re only on side one here. There is still time.

GMHHAY reader Mike asked about my habit of buying Old Spice on eBay and here is the situation. I have been using Old Spice my entire life. I was a “classic scent” user back in the 90’s when there was no scent other than Classic. It was just Old Spice. Then the world changed thanks to Axe Body Spray and Old Spice started branching out. ACTUALLY, scratch that, their first innovation, prior to Axe, was to offer a “high endurance” variety, solely in Original scent (Old Spice seems to use “Classic” and “Original” somewhat interchangeably it is confusing), and then eventually other scents as well. High Endurance Original was the same thing as Classic, more or less, but lasted longer. It wasn’t exactly the Classic scent but it was close enough. I switched from Classic to “High Endurance Original Scent” in the mid 90’s and have never switched since. This is my goto. My rock. My Jesus. My ride or die.

Then came the explosion of flavors and variants, until we reach today where they have, I shit you not, seventy-three different scents.

And for that entire time, they still offered “Classic” and “High Endurance Classic.”

But this year, they killed High Endurance Original. They killed most of the High Endurance line, actually. There are now only two High Endurance scents in their lineup.

They still have the pure, original “Classic,” but I am too far gone into this High Endurance world to switch back. Maybe. Probably. In any case, it’s impossible to find at retail.

And hence, we turn to eBay. MY BRAND is currently selling, when you stock up, for about $7 a stick, which is about 100% more than original retail. And YOU KNOW it’s going to get worse.

So, I have gone ahead and done the math and purchased what I am fairly sure is enough to get me through the rest of my life. I figure I use a stick a year, and have purchased enough to get me to 78, past my expected life span. Eh, you know what? Live optimistically, Rick. Let’s go buy a few more. Okay done. Now I have enough to live to 94. Or, you know, go crazy and use it a little quicker. Or, you know, account for certain other members of the household who shall remain nameless stealing some.

It sits in my closet next to my lifetime supply of Advil.

Does Old Spice go bad? If so, how long does it take? Stay subscribed to GMHHAY for the rest of your life and be the first to know.

I mentioned yesterday that the States Attorneys General sued Amazon for unfair advertising auction prices. I was pretty rah rah about it cuz Fuck Amazon. And adtech what did I say that I don’t know what you’re talking about.

BUT I gotta say: I think the Benevolent Sainty Organization of Lefty States Attorneys General are going to lose this one. Matt Levine, everyone’s favorite business newsletter writer, has a pretty detailed description of the complaint in his newsletter yesterday. And after reading it? Yeah, Amazon’s gonna win. The whole suit revolves around how much bidders pay for ads. Amazon uses a “second price” auction where the winner of an auction pays $0.01 more than the second place winner of the auction. This is a pretty standard mechanic in online auctions. But in some auctions, Amazon “cheats” and inserts a bid of their own so that the second auction is higher. I am greatly simplifying. So, if there were bids of $10 and $5, and the winner paid $5.01, amazon would go in and place a fake bid at $7, so the winner would pay $7.01.

Which sounds shifty and is not the way that adtech generally does this. Generally we control this by flooring: starting the auction at a price below which we do not want to go. So in the case above, you’d start the auction at $7 so no bid at $5 was even valid. They did not do it this way, but the end result is the same. Ish.

But I mean. Go ahead and tell me that you’re going to be able to convince a jury that people are getting ripped off when they bid $10 in an auction and, omg, oh no, now they have to pay $7 when they win. The whole point of a bid in an auction is that’s how much you are willing to pay. And yeah, Adtech has perverted and complicated this whole thing, and so has eBay to some extent, but so what: the price you bid is the price you’re willing to pay. That is what an auction is. And so long as you’re not paying more than that price, where is the crime?

I suppose there’s a chance they settle, or they get a very sophisticated jury of eBay power sellers or something, but… the odds to not seem very good to me.

This morning I taught Jane about grunge and Nirvana and she was shockingly interested. My angle in was the whole Kathleen Hannah, whom she saw live this weekend, naming Smells Like Teen Spirit, so thank you Olivia Rodrigo for that. She liked Nirvana that was sort of surprising. After she got out of the car a Mother Love Bone song came on. Sad she could not hear that one.

She was very talkative about school yesterday at dinner, that was nice. Told us all about school. Offered detail. Answered questions. All very mysterious. What’s changed.

I am suspicious.

No playlist but I watched a lot of music Youtube last night. Mostly Reading Festival videos, but also this Tiny Desk concert from a dude I’ve been listening to a lot lately: Monrovia. He is a very talented guy. Enjoy.

I am going to New York tomorrow for work and Underworld and I do not know if I will manage to write. Or Friday. I will try. Actually tomorrow seems more plausible than Friday. Because I have work meetings in the morning Friday. BUT I WILL TRY. Because I love you. So much.

So much.