Afternoon Tea 3.13.24 - Obelisks & Monoliths
Football amputations, effigy beatings, and new sub-viral life
Another week, another Wednesday, another Afternoon Tea. We’ve only gotten a handful of responses to this year’s survey thing, so if you’d like to make sure this keeps being what you want it to be, hit it up!
$500K Sand Dune Designed to Protect Coastal Homes Washes Away in Just 3 Days (Daily Beast) 500k in 3 days. It’s like the plot to the worst Vegas bender you’ve ever heard of, or it’s a portend of things to come. Certain areas will be climate change resistant. Others, like this one, will be the first to be abandoned, or we’ll waste millions “shoring up” areas that will be destroyed the second the money stops propping them up.
Viral video of Biden effigy beating prompts calls for top Kansas Republican leaders to resign (AP) So, we’re just ignoring the stochastic terrorism to the point where it’s turned into effigy violence. Great.
Anti-Putin paramilitaries claim incursion into Russia from Ukraine (AJZ) If this isn’t astroturfed by Ukraine, and there are legit Anti-Russian partisans fighting within Russia, watch this space. Wagner was sent to Africa to drum up support/strong arm Sudan & other countries into supporting Russia, so the country is only lightly defended. Who knows, the road to Moscow might be shorter than the West realizes.
India announces steps to implement a citizenship law that excludes Muslims (AP) Modi’s crusade against Muslims took another step forward this week, with rules for implementing the “Citizenship Amendment Act.” The rules essentially fast track naturalization for Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Christians, and other non-Muslims who fled India, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, or Pakistan before 2014. This was actually passed in 2019, but the protests to it & violent responses to those protests forced the Modi gov’t to table the Act. This…could get bad.
China's food delivery market explodes to $208bn as workers scrape by (Nikkei) If you think Uber Eats is wild in the USA, imagine if food delivery became a cottage industry larger than the entire video game sector.
Nigerian businesses increasingly skip traditional banks and turn to Moniepoint (Rest of World) There’s a really great dystopian cyberpunk novel to be written about the traditional banking system losing control over the global south. The SWIFT network is powerful, but not invincible.
A New Obelisk ‘Lifeform’ Is Hiding Inside Humans (Popular Mechanics) Not entirely sure I understand this one, but self-organized into an “obelisk,” they are smaller than viruses, and can still communicate with cells.
How Hackers Dox Doctors to Order Mountains of Oxy and Adderall (404 Media) Medical professionals are being hacked, their prescribing tools being used to fake legitimate scripts and cash in. Your doctor probably shouldn’t have his password on a post-it note on his desk, but that’s neither here nor there.
The big design freak-out: A generation of design leaders grapple with their future (Fast Company) & The Demise of the VP of SEO Role (Adam Audette) These two write-ups are a bit niche for most, but if you’re working in tech or digital marketing, they hit very close to home. A lot of newer fields within digital/tech looked like they could be big enough own career path back in the mid-2010s. Now? Even if you make it to the top, you might find the top to be completely gone.
Some fans at frigid Chiefs playoff game underwent amputations (AP) 12. Twelve People. That’s how many people lost fingers or toes during the Chiefs game where temps hit -4 (-27 wind chill). If you lost a digit because sportsball, I truly feel sorry for you, and hope you at least won your FanDuel bets that day.
A ‘Perfect Monolith’ Appears in Wales (NY Times) This is going to be a marketing gimmick for some crappy AI company. I hope I’m wrong, but I can’t get up hope for weird art or alien contact through confusing metal anymore.
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