Afternoon Tea - Airpocalypse

The Great Resignation, Snake Geiger Counters, & Cocaine Cake!

The Great Resignation accelerates, Facebook teaches a class on data blurring, the USA bombed Somalia, and the word to explain the Northern Hemisphere’s recent marinating is “Airpocalypse.” It’s Thursday, July 22nd 2021, and this is your Resignation Tea.

Covid-19 Takes Dramatic Toll on U.S. Life Expectancy (Bloomberg) & Lies, damn lies, and Facebook’s statistics (Popular Info) So…we’re dying a bit younger now, semi the opposite direction of the natural order of things. This Pop Info deep dive is a fantastic breakdown of a press release, showing exactly how re-framing and fun data tricks can do some seriously heavy lifting. A perfect brief example:

“The data shows that 85% of Facebook users in the US have been or want to be vaccinated against COVID-19. President Biden’s goal was for 70% of Americans to be vaccinated by July 4. Facebook is not the reason this goal was missed.”

This is a classic case of comparing apples and oranges. Facebook is comparing Biden's goal of actually vaccinating 70% of American adults by July 4 with the number of people on Facebook who, in a survey, say they want to be vaccinated

Pentagon carries out first air strike in Somalia under Biden (The Hill) In the Obama/Trump tradition, Biden bombed the snot out of some part of Somalia this week. It’s like a rite of passage or hazing ritual every president has to go through now: ordering their first baby drone strike on al-Shabaab, America’s favorite terrorist group/punching bag in Africa after we stopped caring about Kony (bet you didn’t remember that guy until I mentioned him)

The Northern Hemisphere has a punishing heat wave infestation (Washington Post) & ‘Airpocalypse’ hits Siberian city as heatwave sparks forest fires (Guardian) Five simultaneous heatwaves, and this is before the Airpocalypse hit Siberia. For the record, we should get a straw poll going on whether summer climate change insanity like Airpocalypse & Heatwave Infestation is scarier sounding than winter climate change insanity like Polar Vortex and Bombogenesis.

Companies that make people return to the office will lose employees (Recode) & London Staff Want Pay Rises to Return to Office, Survey Says (Bloomberg) Most of the articles related to “return to the office” and the “Great Resignation” miss the mark. The easiest way to understand it is, skilled workers used to be able to play companies off of each other in a city, region, or maybe a nation. Lots of people can be convinced to go back to the office if the price is right, but firms don’t get that they’re competing with other companies who will pay just as much, but for a fully remote gig. Given the world has lost millions of workers, with the skills of hundreds of millions more becoming outdated, high skill/in demand workers can now have little bum fights between companies globally.

The Absurd Ben & Jerry's Panic Is No Laughing Matter (Eunomia) The blurred lines between “outrage at not selling ice cream in Israeli settlements that are illegal under international law & the UN” and “outrage at not selling ice cream in Israel” is a very powerful form of messaging, designed to obfuscate the illegality of the settlements, and reframe the action as flatly anti-Semitic/worse-than-BDS. Given Ben & Jerry’s is also taking flak from the Hard Left for not withdrawing from the Israeli market entirely, this is less of a BDS win than some say. I feel like B&J kinda stepped in it on this one, as both sides are yelling at them. I’m not sure they’ll recoup the market share for this virtue signaling to be worth it, especially if it doesn’t start a precedent.

Cocaine disguised as cake seized from vehicle in Maine (Associated Press) Cocaine Cake! Do you have any idea how annoyingly loud the group singing Happy Birthday would be? Also, not sure giving one of them a knife that large is a good idea.

A Defunct Video Hosting Site Is Flooding Normal Websites With Hardcore Porn (Motherboard) The internet’s hottest club is 5 Star. Built on an abandoned cybershell called vid.me, this story has everything. Porn, liberal news outlets, horrified normies, NSFW cybersecurity logging, that thing where you’re doing research on Malaysia but then your boss looks over and the banner ad between paragraphs is humping itself.

Using snakes to monitor Fukushima radiation (Univ. of Georgia) They put GPS trackers on rat snakes. Apparently rat snakes are to nuclear plants as canaries are coal mines. Their movements will be studied to learn how contaminated ground is negotiated by animals who are sensitive to radiation but not exactly Geiger counters.

Are 7 French Fries too many? (Medium - 2018) As regular readers know, we’re loathe to both cite Medium AND to source old work, but this causal inference explainer related to that stupid story about “7 McDonald’s french fries are a serving” is long, confusing, and kind of scary. It’s also the best explanation of why casual statistics are meaningless, and deep statistics are an infinite harrowing maw of depth and complexity that you know way less about than you think. (Editor’s Note: Which why Facebook is able to trick people using bad statistics and disingenuous framing of anti-vaxx info on their network in the link above.)

‘Racism kills’: Chris Hayes on Biz Markie and the life expectancy gap (MSNBC) This might be the first time a mainstream news video segment was included in a newsletter. Chris Hayes, in under four minutes, masterfully connects the recent (non-gangland related) deaths of a few luminary hip hop artists, to structural racism and its effects on the life expectancy of black men. For any fan of rap, Biz Markie, or anyone tired of someone klansplaining Critical Race Theory to you, this is your moment of zen.

Social Security tax. You don't get the money until you're 65. Meanwhile, the average black man dies at 54. Shit, we should get Social Security at 29! What the fuck, man? We don't live that long. Hypertension, high blood pressure, NYPD--something will get you.~Chris Rock, Bigger and Blacker (1999)  

For getting through the week, here are baby Capybaras:

Song of the Tea: And now for something completely different. I thought I’d seen it all with SimpsonWave, but someone took it kept innovating. This is way catchier than it has any business being. And if you liked the Dr. Zaius episode, I love this for you.

Walk out with your head held high. Some will only learn to appreciate you by your absence.

Yours,