Afternoon Tea 7.26.21 - Hype Train

Spy On Your Neighbors for Gig Economy Wages

Ben Porter @Ben13Porter

South Korea’s coverage of the Opening Ceremony was racist and borderline hilarious, China pivots the entire ed-tech industry, the Frito-Lay strike is over, if you live in LA or NYC, Citizen is paying people to spy on you, and an incel plot was foiled. It's Monday, July 26th 2021, and this is your Tea. Get you a hype person like that coach.

BE NOT AFRAID! (photo taken by DeLores Michelle Lucas in VA)

Police Foiled An Ohio Incel's Plot To Kill Women In A Mass Shooting, Prosecutors Say (NPR) How do I know the Earth is healing? Incels are at it again with the plans.

Pizza for Italy and Dracula for Romania. South Korean broadcaster apologizes for its Olympic 'inexcusable mistake' (CNN World) Ok, while the Chernobyl picture was actually bad, the Pizza & Dracula bits are kind of amazing. I fully assume Morocco’s was a picture of Humphrey Bogart.

Bill Power @BillPowerWSJ

Love this headline. (The opportunity to use it doesn't come along every day, but our editor jumped on it) wsj.com/articles/tokyo… via @WSJ

wsj.comThe Doctor Will Stab You NowLee Kiefer and Gerek Meinhardt had an unusual training strategy for Tokyo: going to medical school. She won gold on Sunday and now they’re both future doctors with Olympic medals.

China to Overhaul Education Sector ‘Hijacked by Capital’ (Bloomberg) Companies that teach school curriculums of any kind can no longer make profits, go public, or raise VC funding. This EdTech sector, $100 billion in value, was just effectively banned from making a single additional dollar of profit and can’t offer tutoring on weekends.

Union accepts Frito Lay contract offer, ending strike (WIBW) The strike is over! The working conditions agreed to are…Bleakly Victorian.

Steven Greenhouse @greenhousenyt

Crazy that Frito-Lay workers had to go on strike nearly 3 weeks just to win the right not to have to work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week Now they can "only" be forced to work 12 hours a day 6 days a week Going from 84 hrs a week to 72 hrs sounds like a 19th century labor victory

Steven Greenhouse @greenhousenyt

BREAKING—Frito-Lay workers in Topeka vote to ratify 2-year contract, ending their 3-week strike Union says the contract guarantees one day off a week & does away with requirement to work “suicide shifts,” 12-hour shifts with just 8 hours in between shifts https://t.co/qPv7O5CJVh

YouTube Avoids Facebook-Level Criticism From Biden (Bloomberg) Yea, about that…Facebook is definitely deserving of criticism, but is there a reason why we’re not yelling just as loudly at YouTube? Anyone? Bueller? (Editor’s Note: We’re going to find a replacement for this joke, as the movie is fast becoming wild old.)

Fraud on the Farm: How a baby-faced CEO turned a Farmville clone into a massive Ponzi scheme (RestOfWorld) & Apple’s IDFA changes are already changing game design and monetization (VentureBeat) The world is already shifting around Apple’s privacy shift around Facebook & attribution. Remember Farmville? What came after it was a nightmare jungle.

Citizen app is faking local residents in Los Angeles (Daily Dot) & Citizen pays New Yorkers $25 an hour to livestream crime scenes (NY Post) Gig economy for spying on your neighbors. We truly live in the darkest timeline.

Clubhouse Is The Big Stinker That Nobody Wants To Talk About (Ed Zitron) So many of y’all went full hypebeast on this app, trying to tell me it was the future of marketing. All this proved was that a16z has a damn good PR machine at this point, and they were super close to selling this lemon for billions. Clubhouse is iAM Radio. It’s live audio, a thing we mastered about 100 years ago now. Sure people were going to listen when they were stuck indoors, but TikTok was actually innovative, while Clubhouse was radio with rounded corners.

Cockatoos are figuring out how to open bins by copying each other (New Scientist) Birds are smart, and we need to keep them from organizing.

AI deepfakes of Anthony Bourdain’s voice are only a taste of what’s coming (LA Times) I am surprised so many people don’t understand why many are horrified at the deepfake of Bourdain’s voice in the recent documentary. The “well, he’s iconoclastic, and tech has always been” is both wrong-headed & entirely proof you know diddly about Bourdain. Bourdain craved & demanded authenticity, going where things were the best, whether it took him to a Michelin star place or a dusty street cart. The tech can’t be stopped, but don’t tell me a hologram of James Dean would’ve wanted me to buy a Ford F-150. Especially when the hologram also just happens to put voice actors out of work as well.

Song of the Tea: I’ll just quote the artist here: “The song is written about a pretty bleak moment of last year when I was drinking very heavily. My friends were pretty worried about me, but I didn’t want to talk about it. Foxgloves are a super beautiful, almost unreal-looking flower that also happens to be extremely poisonous, so it felt like a good nonsense word to use as a distraction from the actual issues I was facing at the time.” ~Former Hero

We talk about foxgloves, planted in a row
All the while i’ll ignore the problem
I’ll get so drunk I can barely make it home
I need your help but i can’t ask so,

Yours,