Good morning. Hello. How are you? #580
Dreams, Fort Bragg, stock markets, Facebook, Tesla, strong opinions about stevia please quote me as a stevia expert I am available for stevia interviews.
Good morning! Hello, how’s it shaking, how are you? Happy Friday. Just woke up from a dream where the Flaming Lips were doing a live version of “Hit Me Like You Did the First Time” inside of the Marche Movenpick in the Prudential Center (RIP) and the cello they had to do the orchestral parts was sort of assembled from scrap metal, a combination of a hand-made instrument from the Boston experimental band Neptune and the Anti-Tank Guitar that Matthew Shcultz used in Lab Report and on the Pigface tour in 1992 or so. I was trying to buy a 20 oz Diet Coke in a plastic bottle. Then I walked outside and in that neighborhood right behind the Prudential Center, whose name I can’t remember, because I’m not a real Bostonian anymore, is that part of the South End? Anyway, they had turned the entirety of St. Botolph into a lap pool and it was really awesome. I always kind of loved that little neighborhood bound by Huntington, Dartmouth, Columbus and Mass Ave. I would totally live there.
Then I woke up and came down here to my office and read this horrific story about a beheading at Fort Bragg, but not only that, there have been, like, 60 unexplained deaths at Fort Bragg in recent years. I mean, if this is not the most horrifying ending to any article you’ve ever read, ever, then…god don’t send me that article:
In total, a staggering 83 active-duty soldiers stationed at Fort Bragg died in the 18 months ending June 2021, according to data obtained by Rolling Stone. Only 11 of these deaths were from "natural causes." Many, perhaps a plurality, were suicides. But in no fewer than 33 cases, the Army has classified the cause of death as "undetermined."
In other words, the Army can't or won't say how a whole platoon's worth of soldiers died at its largest installation, home of the Special Forces, the Airborne Corps, and the Joint Special Operations Command. Over this same 18-month period, just three Fort Bragg soldiers died in overseas combat, meaning these elite troops are a dizzying 27 times more likely to die stateside than in war zones such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.
Jesus.
Anyway, had a great work day yesterday, really just chock-full of good news left and right, got me really amped, really jazzed, it was great. I like days like that. More days like that. Someday I will be able to explain all of this work stuff and it is going to make a great story, lemme tell you. Even if you are not particularly passionate about the world of mobile and CTV in-app ad auctions, you weirdo.
I suppose we should talk about Facebook, let’s talk about Facebook. Two days go, Facebook did its earnings report and it was just bad news all around. I mean, don’t get me wrong, they made insane, endless boatloads of money, but that was not enough for everyone because: a) Apple’s ATT actions, which we have written about plenty here, hurt Facebook to the tune of $10 billion which is insane. And yeah, I am not a fan of the specific method by which Apple implemented their dictoatorial rules, because they were obviously implemented specifically to hurt Facebook, not protect consumers, and in the process hurt plenty of small, honest companies like us, about whom they clearly did not care. But also at the same time, well-done on putting a giant dent in Facebook, Apple. But even more reason why it was bad news was self-inflicted, in that b) for the first time ever fewer people, worldwide, used Facebook than the quarter before. Now, mind you, this is not including WhatsApp and Instagram, but Facebook itself, it is shrinking. Hallelujah.
The result of all of this is that over the course of yesterday (this bad news was reported Wednesday after the markets closed), Facebook experienced what is one of, if not the, single largest stock drops in the history of the markets, and almost certainly the single largest one-day reduction in valuation, ever. Two hundred billion dollars of Facebook’s value disappeared over night. Mark Zuckerberg personally lost thirty billion dollars yesterday. That is insane. Mark Zuckerberg lost the GDP of Cambodia yesterday.
Man. The stock markets have been insane these last few weeks, just bonkers. The downturn, fine, whatever, we probably needed that, it sucks but okay. But this cycle’s of earnings reports for tech stocks has been brutal. I mean, a lot of them have come through unscathed, but if you give even one teeny, weeny bit of bad news, right now? Your stock is going to get hammered. Actual, good, decent tech companies stocks are just in the shitter. Poor Backblaze. The worst performing stock in my portfolio, though? Zevia. That makes me sad. I love Zevia, this house runs on Zevia, and I would absolutely hate to see that company get bought by the Coca-Cola corporation or something. Unless Zevia owns secret how-to-make-stevia-drinks-taste-good patents, and those patents could permeate through the Coca-Cola company and my lifelong dream of Stevia-only-sweetened Diet Coke could be fulfilled. And don’t give me any guff about that Coke Life green stuff. It still had sugar in it. See, Diet Coke is secretly the absolute best product to turn into stevia-based, because it already has a weird taste that takes getting used to, which you eventually forget about aside from feeling a strange addiction to, just like stevia. It is perfect.
Hrm that started out as a paragraph about the stock market and ended up a paragraph about stevia that could really use a paragraph break in there, but nope. Not today. Chaotic evil.
I have successfully migrated my entire iTunes local library to the Library Mac. Oh, ha, that’s fitting. The library will be in the library. Anyway, that’s done, so now the next step is to build a new iTunes library in the Library, then remove all those files form the iTunes on this main computer. And then, finally, we can begin the long process of rebuilding all of our playlists in Apple Music, again. Hopefully this weekend we will succeed in this endeavor. Still pissed at Spotify.
Larry if you’re reading this, were you in Still Pissed at Reagan? Was that you and Dan Shaw? The exact membership of the high school punk pands Still Pissed at Reagan and Slow Kids at Play are blurry in my old age. In any case, Still Pissed at Reagan was a great band name.
Hey good news, Emma has designed the GMHHAY cover, and I am going to show it to you now. We had to make a slight size tweak, so the press proof is going out this week, will be back next week, and then, barring any complications, we will be able to ship this thing the week after. Which means very soon I am going to set the page up in my derelict online store and start bugging you guys for orders. You’re gonna love that. Spam every day.
Just as I posted this, I blurred the back blurbs (Photoshop crystalize filter best blur fight me) since I just realized I hadn’t asked those people permission yet. Yeah, self-publishing is so fun. You gotta do everything. Except design the cover. Emma did that. Give her nice compliments. Thank you, kind wife.
The US NTSHA is forcing Tesla to take a feature out of the self-driving mode of Teslas where they perform rolling stops through stop signs if no one is around. I am against this. Long-time, attentive readers of GMHHAY will recall that I called this, around two years ago, that eventually there would be tension between drivers, the government, and self-driving cars in the sense that self-driving software either will drive a car the way humans do, or it will follow the law exactly, thus putting off the owners and drivers of cars. And in putting them off, will slow adoption of self-driving technologies which, look, I don’t like and will never personally want to use, but also acknowledge that their wide-spread adoption, the data seems to pretty conclusively indicate, will lead to a lot of saved lives. So in the long run, this decision feels short-sighted and, perhaps, lethal? It definitely seems precedent-setting. And it kind of points to Elon’s brilliance and blind spots, because I suspect he thought about all of this and decided that this was an instance of “better to seek forgiveness and ask permission” in the sense that the government was less likely to stop it ex post facto than give permission if he laid out the case. He was wrong. God knows how many years, or decaces, this decision might set the cause back, and keep certain people from adopting self-driving cars, and, thus, kill fewer people. Am I 100% confident in this analysis? No, but it does seem to be what the best science, albeit limited, thus far, would suggest, no?
Okay, gotta go. Today is Friday and Jane is at Grammy’s and I am going to leave the house after this GMHHAY (gasp) and go to the bank and Walmart and the pharmacist, because they have obtained additional Wegovy for me at the next dosage I need to continue this journey, 0.5mg. I’m only down about 22 pounds, things have slowed down, but it’s slowed down to a mostly normal diet rate, this always happens, we’re in the long march now, gotta do this for, like, four months. But it is still working.
All right, hopefully this is the last Spotify mix ever, really it can’t possibly be for anyone but me, I suppose, it really is all over the place. I was really into this band Lift To Experience like three years ago and completely forgot about them and have been listening to them again lately and they’re just really great, sort of Texas pop psych folk revivalist. Bunch a new stuff on here, been into the Dream Academy again lately, and Whitney and Lionel, the Tricky song is on here cuz of Chuck Klostermn’s playlist, and I had forgotten abou tit, and I don’t know why I put that random newer Bauhaus song on here but it just seemed work.
Have a lovely weekend. I hope you get some chores done and find time to relax and play with your kid, if you have one, and don’t get COVID and check your email Sunday night to get all stressed and get some time outdoors and get enough sleep. DO IT ALL OR ELSE.
OH ALSO, in a bit of good news, Substack redesigned the modal pop-up after you publish a post that asks you to share it. Looks nice. But even better, when you click the “copy link” button in that pop-up, it no longer appends a bunch of BS tracking parameters to the URL that you copied. I was manually deleting those, every day, when I cross-posted to Facebook. There’s two seconds of my day back. So, thank you. Now go kick some bigots off the platform.
i LOVE the GMHHAY cover—the photo (which was my pick, although i didn't officially "vote"), the font, looks a beaut! my schadenfreude over the FB stuff is epic. i hate it over there so much, and they did it to themselves through their ridiculous algorithm, which has had the opposite of its intended effect on me: i have so much disengaged. all the time i used to spend checking in and liking and commenting? now i dip in, half the posts i've seen before and didn't care about the first time, the other half of posts are ads or ridiculous videos that go on and on, and there are maybe, MAYBE three posts that actually warrant any attention. so fuck 'em. (i really should get all of my assets off there before they implode. but not being an archivist like you, the thought of it just inspires DREAD.)