elon musk is like if you distilled the essence of 2010 “you, sir, win the most epic of upvotes” reddit and put it into the body of a wealthy peanut factory owner from 1835 london who exclusively employed 5 year old orphans

hey americans there is a recall on testosterone gel because they found benzene in it! please check the lot numbers on your batches, benzene is really not something you want to be rubbing into your skin, also you might be eligible for compensation because this is just insane what the fuck

more on this page:

Even if you aren't on T gel and think this recall doesn't apply to you, it includes way more than just testosterone, including a bunch of very common medications, so please please please still check this list. Every medication I am currently prescribed was on this list except one.

Many common medications are being recalled. If you take any medications, check the list.

Mark Zuckerberg personally lost the Facebook antitrust case

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me at NEW ZEALAND'S UNITY BOOKS in AUCKLAND on May 2, and in WELLINGTON on May 3. More tour dates (Pittsburgh, PDX, London, Manchester) here.

It's damned hard to prove an antitrust case: so often, the prosecution has to prove that the company intended to crush competition, and/or that they raised prices or reduced quality because they knew they didn't have to fear competitors.

It's a lot easier to prove what a corporation did than it is to prove why they did it. What am I, a mind-reader? But imagine for a second that the corporation in the dock is a global multinational. Now, imagine that the majority of the voting shares in that company are held by one man, who has served as the company's CEO since the day he founded it, personally calling every important shot in the company's history.

Now imagine that this founder/CEO, this accused monopolist, was an incorrigible blabbermouth, who communicated with his underlings almost exclusively in writing, and thus did he commit to immortal digital storage a stream – a torrent – of memos in which he explicitly confessed his guilt.

Ladies and gentlepersons, I give you Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta (nee Facebook), an accused monopolist who cannot keep his big dumb fucking mouth shut.

At long, long last, the FTC's antitrust trial against Meta is underway, and this week, Zuck himself took the stand, in agonizing sessions during which FTC lawyers brandished printouts of Zuck's own words before him, asking him to explain away his naked confessions of guilt. It did not go well for Zuck.

In a breakdown of the case for The American Prospect, editor-in-chief David Dayen opines that "The Government Has Already Won the Meta Case," having hanged Zuck on his own words:

https://prospect.org/power/2025-04-16-government-already-won-meta-case-tiktok-ftc-zuckerberg/

The government is attempting to prove that Zuck bought Instagram and Whatsapp in order to extinguish competitors (and not, for example, because he thought they were good businesses that complimented Facebook's core product offerings).

This case starts by proving how Zuck felt about Insta and WA before the acquisitions. On Insta, Zuck circulated memos warning about Insta's growth trajectory:

and how that could turn them into a future competitor:

These are not the words of a CEO who thinks another company is making a business that compliments his own – they're confessions that he is worried that they will compete with Facebook. Facebook tried to clone Insta (Remember Facebook Camera? Don't feel bad – neither does anyone else). When that failed, Zuck emailed Facebook execs, writing:

At this point, Zuck's CFO – one of the adults in the room, attempting to keep the boy king from tripping over his own dick – wrote to Zuck warning him that it was illegal to buy Insta in order to "neutralize a potential competitor."

Zuck replied that he was, indeed, solely contemplating buying Insta in order to neutralize a potential competitor. It's like this guy kept picking up his dictaphone, hitting "record," and barking, "Hey Bob, I am in receipt of your memo of the 25th, regarding the potential killing of Fred. You raise some interesting points, but I wanted to reiterate that this killing is to be a murder, and it must be as premeditated as possible. Yours very truly, Zuck."

Did Zuck buy Insta to neutralize a competitor? Sure seems like it! For one thing, Zuck cancelled all work on Facebook Camera "since we're acquiring Instagram."

But what about after the purchase. Did Zuck reduce quality and/or raise costs? Well, according to the company, it enacted an "explicit policy of not prioritizing Instagram’s growth" (a tactic called "buy or bury"). At this juncture, Zuckerberg once again put fingers to keyboard in order to create an immortal record of his intentions:

And if someone did enter the market with a cool new gimmick (like, say, Snapchat with its disappearing messages)?

Remember, the Insta acquisition is only illegal if Zuck bought them to prevent competition in the marketplace (rather than, say, to make a better product). It's hard to prove why a company does anything, unless its CEO, founder, and holder of the majority of its voting stock explicitly states that his strategy is to create a system to ensure that innovating new products "won't get much traction" because he'll be able to quickly copy them.

LET THE CROSS STITCH HIT THE FLOOR

Have a pattern link I guess if you want

let the cross stitch be decor

Tumblr is odd because you’ll see a mutual post something really profound like “the birds still sing for those who listen” and you see them 5 minutes later saying something like “need to be pegged.grilled cheese style”

it's funny because my job involves a lot of using a box cutter, so you'd think that's the thing I'd accidentally hurt myself with the most

but nooo no no no. the box cutter is my colleague, my ally, my friend. you know what is truly bloodthirsty in a print & signage shop? literally Anything Else that's able to cut but not supposed to. cardboard, sheets of plastic, the humble paper of course, corrugated polypropylene, aluminum composite sheets - i nicked myself on a sheet of magnetic material today?? it bled. kinda profusely.

basically:

thank you. the people need to know about the real menace

Put baby in pelican mouth poster. For you

i….i always assumed it was just a weird name

Can they make dildos like that?

i was about to bully you for this comment but then i read your url and i’m just too tired

Yes . They did .

Lucky you .

It’s a boner

hey fuck yourself

no wait

How is this not OSHA compliant @biggest-gaudiest-patronuses? I bet it comes with a solid railing.

Starting a collection

by Valeriy Peshkov

so when straight people ask me why I say I’m “queer” or “gay” instead of sharing my actual identity as a panromantic demisexual non-binary sapphic queer I just tell them “ok look, when you’re talking to someone who isn’t local and they ask you where you’re from and you either say the name of the largest city nearby or ‘town name, suburb of large nearby city’ so they can get some geographical context of where you’re located right, bc they’re probably not going to know the name of the little town you actually live in.”

but if you’re talking to a local you can say the name of your actual town bc they have a greater chance of knowing where/what that is.

ok well when I’m talking to a straight person I start with queer bc chances are they aren’t as familiar with the context of all the little towns in that big queer city and need gps (gay positioning system) to find me.

if I’m talking to another queer person and I say I live in a suburb of gay city in a town called panromantic on the demisexual side of the tracks which is in the county of queer and I live off the intersection of non-binary and sapphic, they’d probably be able to find me with little to no problems, make sense?

Also because my exact address in Queertown is usually nobody's business.

In either case, you only need all the details if you're coming back to my place.

the cool thing about being intellectually curious and hungry to understand the world around you is that if you just do some research you can actually understand things instead of looking like a dumbass for speculating

you text to ask how i’m doing and i say “hard at work”. you respond with “haha locked in! good for u”. i stare at your message in confusion for several long, arduous minutes, trying to figure out what that has to do with my peanus

Love how bilingual brain sometimes crosses wires and you look at sth you see every day but you're still stuck in wrong language mode so you're also seeing it for the first time.

Case in point: I just realised my bathroom is evil.

Literally me when I was on a concert and they had a sign on the bathroom door that was "DIVERS". So I started wondering what drivers were doing at a concert, like with their oxygen tanks and equipment was that their changing room?? Maybe the venue was a diving club outside of that? Something about stage diving? Still didn't make any sense.

Two hours later it occurred to me, it's just meant this is a gender neutral toilet.