Topics

Mark Zuckerberg thinks he has more employees than he needs to copy whatever TikTok does next, and in a Q&A session that leaked to Reuters, he told Meta workers that the company would be “turning up the heat” on performance oversight in order to uncover the workers who just watch Netflix all day. “If I had to bet, I’d say that this might be one of the worst downturns that we’ve seen in recent history,” he said. https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-meta-girds-fierce-headwinds-slower-growth-second-half-memo-2022-06-30/

After their worst first half since 1970, stocks climbed to kick off the second half of the year, led by homebuilding companies. But it still wasn’t enough to notch a winning week

New York: If you’ve been thinking about booking a cruise to avoid airport headaches, make sure to renew your vows first. After a person was allegedly caught in an extramarital threesome on the Carnival Magic cruise ship outside New York, an estimated 60 passengers brawled for an hour, causing the Coast Guard to play marriage counselor and escort the ship to shore. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/alleged-threesome-60-person-brawl-carnival-cruise-viral-video_n_62bded6de4b0a21d84245a94?ks

Listeners speculated that it was a protest after two popular DJs were laid off—but instead it turned out to be a form of “stunting,” which is how a radio station communicates it’s changing its programming.

Seventeen people will receive the country’s highest civilian honor next Thursday. Among them: Former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who survived an assassination attempt in 2011 and became a gun control advocate, and actor Denzel Washington will receive honors. Athletes Simone Biles and Megan Rapinoe will each get another medal they can add to their already extensive trophy cases. They join the exclusive club of only four other women athletes and coaches to receive the award. A few other awardees: Posthumous medals will be given to former Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs, Republican Senator John McCain, and union leader Richard Trumka. Civil …

Drug cartels have taken over control of smuggling operations and increased their cut of the profits, squeezing smugglers’ take to a third of what migrants pay them. What doesn’t go to the cartel in charge of the smuggling is often doled out to local crime bosses and used to pay bribes to Mexican security forces. To keep profits up, Honduran smugglers say they charge more than triple what they used to per migrant ($13,500, up from $4,000), according to the WSJ. Still, what’s left over to pay for actual travel costs isn’t much, and conditions for migrants have deteriorated. While the San Antonio incident is the deadliest on record, it’s far from the only one: …

Klarna, the Swedish fintech company that wants to help you pay for your Abercrombie haul in four easy installments, is nearing a fundraising deal that would value it at just $6.5 billion, per the WSJ. We say “just” because it was worth $45.6 billion in June 2021. Fintech and e-commerce, the two sectors Klarna straddles, have taken some of the worst licks from the recent market downturn.

At least four SPAC mergers were called off in the 24 hours after market close on Thursday, including one that would have taken Panera Brands public, according to Bloomberg. You can understand their hesitancy—an index that tracks companies that went public via SPAC has plunged 67%. For the year to date, 30 proposed SPAC deals have been nixed.

Crypto brokerage Voyager Digital said it’s temporarily suspending all trades, deposits, and withdrawals on its platform due to current market conditions. In other words, crypto is hurting bad, and Voyager can’t maintain liquidity if its customers drain their accounts or fail to pay back loans. Voyager is the latest in a string of crypto asset-holding companies struggling to stay alive, which includes BlockFi, Celsius, and Three Arrows Capital.

IMG_0455.MOV

https://twitter.com/i/events/1534528112578334720

US Patent and Trademark Office The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has approved Ohio State’s application to trademark the word “THE,” which has become a popular rallying cry for sports fans of THE Ohio State University (shhh…no one tell them it’s the most common word in the English language). The process took years: As trademark attorney Josh Gerben explained on Twitter, Ohio State first filed the application in 2019. But that was held up for a couple of reasons, including a) a dispute with fashion label Marc Jacobs, which had tried to trademark the word a few months earlier and b) the USPTO’s claim that the trademark was “m…

Kraft is rebranding its iconic product from the buttoned-up “Kraft Macaroni and Cheese” to a chiller, shortened version in order to better “reflect the way fans organically talk about the brand.”

Stat: More than 40% of home sellers are cutting their prices in markets that boomed during Covid, including Salt Lake City, Sacramento, and Boise, according to Redfin. One Boise real estate agent said that the city grew so much during the pandemic that people who arrived there for peace and quiet are now leaving, because too many newcomers (like them) have ruined the rustic charm.

At least 1,000 people were killed and more than 1,500 were injured when an earthquake struck a rural part of eastern Afghanistan early Wednesday. The country has already been suffering through a humanitarian crisis since the Taliban took power almost 10 months ago, which prompted international organizations to withdraw financial support for Afghanistan.

Forget cups and cones – Krispy Kreme Japan is sandwiching its ice cream inside doughnuts! https://t.co/Vh5G0VQAsE — The Pirate Bay (@tpb) March 31, 2016

How many babies in the US were fed this way you think?

A diagram shows how an Amazon drone could land on a sloping surface while keeping its main frame level, thanks to telescoping landing legs. (Amazon Illustration via USPTO) Amazon’s inventors are taking a page from Inspector Gadget’s playbook to design drones with adjustable landing legs and reconfigurable propellers. Those two design tricks are the focus of patents issued today. It’s hard to say whether they’ll become features on Amazon’s delivery drones, still in development. But surely there’s a chance someone will make use of the innovations, right? The idea for the landing gear, credited to Nicholas Kristofer Gentry, adapts the sort of telescoping featu…

The country has earned almost $100 billion from selling oil and gas to other countries in the first 100 days of the war, according to a new study from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. That’s more than it’s spent on the war effort. Quick update on where things stand right now: Russian forces are focusing their efforts on taking the city of Severodonetsk, the last remaining Ukrainian stronghold in the Donbas’s Luhansk region.