🍑 The future of Amazon coders is the present of Amazon warehouse workers /// Pluralistic

Google laid off 12,000 workers just weeks after staging a stock buyback that would have funded their salaries for 27 years. Meta just announced a 5% across-the-board headcount cut and that it was doubling its executive bonuses.

If you’re looking for another reason to give up Amazon and other big tech companies, look no further.

🖥️ Everything’s Computer!

I feel like this is the exact goal Elon had in mind when he took over Tesla, “what if car, but everything was computer?”

🏀 Warriors’ Stephen Curry reaches 4,000 career 3-pointers /// ESPN

Was doing the math in my head to see if he had a chance at 5,000, but I didn’t realize he was 37 so it’s a tad out of reach. He’d need three more healthy seasons at the rate he’s shooting now, but that rate is all but guaranteed to slow down and last year was the first time he notched 70 games since 2017.

📊 Musk Watch Doge Tracker

A nice dashboard to show the lies coming out of DOGE from Judd Legum of Popular Information.

🤪 Keep it Weird. /// Westenberg

Here, here.

👾 Saudi Arabia Buys Pokémon Go, and Probably All of Your Location Data /// 404

What is happening here, then, is that an already very complicated and vast location data ecosystem that was previously controlled by only one American company (Niantic) has now become a far more complicated location data ecosystem controlled by an “American” company that is wholly owned by a Saudi Arabian conglomerate whose largest shareholder is the Saudi Arabian government.

I’m not smart enough to know how they can use and abuse the location data, but if I lived in or had any plans to visit Saudi Arabia I’d be nervous, given their lack of respect for human rights.

🐺 Introducing the Willy-Nilly System of Governance /// McSweeney’s

We’re just doing whatever we feel like with no foresight, illustrating one of the Willy-Nilly System’s central tenets: There are no wrong answers because we should not assess any of our decisions before implementing them.

It’s satire. But it’s also basically true. Firing people without knowing what they actually do is the opposite of a strategy.

🚓 First They Came for the Student Activists /// The Index

Every time American citizens accept that sacrificing freedom is the cost of safety, they move further into a future where safety is an illusion, reserved only for those who never dared to speak.

Going to be following this story closely as I think it’s the most critical thing happening in the US right now as it hits on so many things—immigration and dissent, to name a few—that this government is attempting to shut down.

📹 20 Trump Supporters Take on 1 Progressive /// Jubilee

Not sure I can actually recommend watching this as it was painful at times, but it was interesting and I thought Seder did as good a job as anyone could’ve. Something like this needs a live fact-checker for the times someone would claim something that was just plain false.

🗓️ PoetiCal

A publication in your calendar. Love this idea and the experimentation with form here.

🦖 what’s a meta for /// Dinosaur Comics!

Really enjoyed today’s strip from Ryan North.

🤖 OpenAI says it has trained an AI that’s ‘really good’ at creative writing /// TechCrunch

Fuck. These. People. You don’t care about art is you are more than happy to remove the humanity from it. Who wants to read something a robot with no life experience wrote, anyways? Just imagine if we put all of these billions of dollars into education and the arts?

🤡 Trump’s Threat to Take Over Canada Is a Scandal /// Rolling Stone

“Donald Trump should not accept Canada as the 51st state; it should obviously be a territory,” says one Trump administration official, who notes that making Canada a state would likely add “so many liberal voters” that it would risk tipping the Electoral College in the Democratic Party’s direction.

The whole situation is a moronic clown show. This quote does a good job at showing how short-sighted Trump is—or how brazen he is to not worry about a next election. While the piece does touch on Ukraine, I’m surprised they didn’t go deeper into Trump’s admiration for Putin and the obvious comparison of Russia invading Ukraine.

✉️ March 11, 2025 /// Letters From an American

Trump and Musk appear to have taken the downturn in their fortunes by becoming more aggressive.

Again, none of this is surprising. Someone who can never admit their wrong, ever take the blame, or even be able to take a joke about themselves is a terrible person and a narcissist—we’ve got two of ’em running the country now.

🐔 368 Chickens

An addicting little game introduced to me this evening by friend of The Variable, veronique.

🤕 Jack Quaid Does Hilarious Novocaine Promo at NBA Game /// The Wrap

This is actually pretty clever and the kind of marketing I can get behind. I wonder what their deal was with the Clippers to make this happen. Feels like a super low cost way to get the word out.

🤡 Trump Says Recession Unfortunate But Necessary Step To Get To Depression /// The Onion

At press time, many of Trump’s most vocal defenders stressed that they trusted the president to usher in the greatest depression the nation had ever seen.

The things this man actually says in real life that people go along with just baffles me to no end. It shouldn’t anymore, but it still does—every time.

📱 It is as if you were on your phone

I feel like I do this already, it’s called cycling through the same three apps over and over while nothing changes.

🌐 The creators of the Las Vegas Sphere want to open smaller mini-Spheres /// The Verge

Sphere Entertainment is currently working on a design for mini-Spheres with a capacity of about 5,000 people.

As terrible as James Dolan is, the Sphere is truly a cool experience. If they are able to get a few of these up around the world that are more sustainable and where artists can actually bring the video they produce for it to more than one place, its good for everyone.

🚘 Steal My Tesla

I love the internet.

📰 Another Dark Day at the Bezos Post: Ruth Marcus Resigns After Censorship /// TPA

Here’s the hopeful part: journalists like Marcus and Telnaes refuse to play along. By quitting rather than compromising their principles, they’re exposing the heavy-handed censorship happening behind the scenes. They’re showing us that the Post’s new “free markets and personal liberties” focus isn’t about expanding the range of permissible opinion—it’s about restricting it to views that align with Jeff Bezos’s worldview.

I’m sure there are some people still doing good work for WaPo, but I’m just trying to figure out how they have any subscribers left.

📉 The Dow plunges as recession fears mount. S&P 500, Nasdaq bleed worse /// QZ

And now an AL senator tried to say the market was doing too good before and this is actually a positive?!?! God forbid someone dissent by stating facts to our ruler.

💩 Donald Trump’s ‘The Apprentice’ to Stream on Amazon Prime Video /// Variety

Nothing fishy about this (and the timing) at all. Completely normal. Just keep funneling money to our one and only true King.

🪧 Protest time /// Indignity

Someone in my own neighborhood went to bed Friday night in Ivy League housing, as a green card holder, and now his American fate was getting the same cadence as that of the people who had been living as refugees for seven decades.

How anyone can defend criminalizing political speech is beyond me. Mahmoud Khalil still hasn’t been charged with a crime nor has any evidence of a crime been shown, but “this is the first arrest of many to come.”

👟 Bill Burr Goes Sneaker Shopping /// Complex

Man, I love Bill Burr. He’s the perfect type of person to talk some sense into those idiots and I’m stoked about his new special.