Afternoon Tea - Mixed Nuts

You go to heaven with the sins you have, not the sins you want.

June 30, 2021

You get fired by email at Amazon, Queens is responsible for the election screw up, Fox was fined $1 million, Rumsfeld died, Cosby went free, boring news sucks for misinformation farms, and The Onion Remains Undefeated. It’s Wednesday, June 30th 2021, and this is your Tea.

Fired by Bot at Amazon: ‘It’s You Against the Machine’ (Bloomberg) First hiring, then warehouse work, now firing. Eventually, Amazon is just going to have 1 human employee, Bezos, surrounded by a dense nest of computers calculating profits and shipping orders. This dense monolithic, windowless ZonHQ would continue to capture the market until nothing else remained. Perhaps those who come after would worship it. Perhaps they’d attempt to destroy it.

BOE Woe: City Election Officials Have History of Mess-Ups (TheCity) & NYC Still Got It: Post-Primary Edition (Alex Yablon) In true NYC fashion, looks like many of the preliminary estimates of the totals have been thrown out. To the point that Garcia might actually win this one. If we avoid Black Giuliani and get Sassy Almost Latin Garbage Lady, there might still be hope for this city yet. For a full un-pack of the data, Alex Yablon is quickly becoming a must-read for me.

Now that new shit has come to light, here is how I would revise my thesis: “the contemporary left is a movement driven by young people who rent their homes at market rates, a class that is swelling in number. However, people who own property or live in older rental units insulated from market forces still dominate our politics.”

Fox News fined $1 million for sex harassment and retaliation (Associated Press) It’s been one tango of a news day. Rumsfeld dead, Fox News fined, and Cosby walks. & in case you forgot, a quick round up of his greatest hits. As to the Cosby case, Popehat has a frustrating & necessary thread on why Cosby is getting out. The short answer is, a DA did some outrageously shady shit, including lying to force waiving 5th Amendment rights, then hitting him with that. As said “how do you feel when the state violates the rights of awful people who would otherwise escape punishment?”

Somaliland: The Power of Democracy (RUSI) That random tiny dot on the African map that essentially none of the world recognizes? Somaliland is one of the only heavily impoverished, but partly free democracies, a rarity in Africa and the global south.

Boring news cycle deals blow to partisan media (Axios) Interesting enough of a piece, and I can definitely say that while I saw a minor dip in reads/opens after the Sacking of the Capitol, those numbers have pushed back up past all-time highs. It’s almost as if you don’t have to be an incendiary partisan to hold people’s attention. Also the fact that Fox gets away with being “Right Leaning” and not “Far Right” will never make sense to me. Equating Mother Jones with Newsmax is also kinda gross.

Nation Resolves Not To Forget Lessons Of Corpid-19 (The Onion) How does The Onion manage to produce this with such depressing consistency:

“If we don’t stop to reflect, to really reflect, on what we’ve all been through as a country, we’re never going to prevent the next Curvil-80 from happening,” said local man Ethan Bishop, echoing the sentiments of 330 million Americans, adding that learning from Coblimp-1990 was the only way to ensure that the dozens or maybe a million people who perished or maybe had accidents or allergic reactions to it hadn’t died in vain. 

NATO Has Outlived Its Usefulness (Foreign Exchanges) This is a provocative, but well thought out, and well-annotated retort to the need for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It is a conversation I’d recommend doing some history reading on before barreling into, but important for the nation to have nonetheless.

How Fortnite Became the Most Important Video Game on the Planet (Intelligencer) & Swooning, screaming, crying: how teenage girls have driven 60 years of pop music (Vox - 2016) Y’all need to get with the times. It’s been how many generations where the younglings discover the new things and the old people pretend they’re not the new things, missing out on billions in profit if they invested early. Listen to the kids that are piped in.

America Is Better Than This: These Chairless People Are Being Forced to Fight Over A Constantly Diminishing Supply Of Chairs (Clickhole) This is one of the best pieces of satirical writing I’ve ever encountered. In all of my years with my head into words, this manages to be genius, infuriatingly simple, and bonkers funny at the same time.

Song of the Tea: If you were in the know, you had access to a digital download pack related to the Discovery CD called Daft Club. This was the only licensed hip hop track to sample Aerodynamic officially. Daft Punk makes you wait until 2:40 into a 3:40 song to give you the money build up, but if you’re ok with not the most insightful rap lyrics, it’s a perfectly service-able track.

Editor’s Note: We’ve unchained the monkeys from their typewriters for the holiday weekend. We’ll be back on July 7th. Until then, keep your head up, and avoid any & all security patrols in your district.

Yours,