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Wednesday, 20 October 2021

Of low-rise jeans and really bad bosses

SIGN OF THE TIMES- The most-read story in the Wall Street Journal right now? Word that low-rise jeans are back. We hate high-waisted jeans, tbh, but really, having lived through the low-rise craze nearly two decades ago, we can only offer this advice: Kids, just say no to crack.

Speaking of the wonton display of, uhm, ostensibly private parts of one’s anatomy: Seekoseeko in the City author Candace Bushnell is inexplicably all over our social media after an interview with Hollywood Reporter about the show’s reboot as And just like that (teaser). The series that debuts in December and will revisit three of the main characters in a story about life in your 50s. (Not that any of us here can relate to that…) Bushnell is getting ink for claiming that “The reality is, finding a guy is maybe not your best economic choice in the long term.

From the Dept. of Not The Onion: Some managers are just [redacted]holes. Don’t be a [redacted]hole. From Allison Greene’s eminently readable Ask a Manager column / website, we offer the two following gems:

^^ Unbelievably, neither letter is satire.


Look for laughs aplenty as Facebook gets set to rebrand itself to “reflect its focus on the metaverse,” the Verge reports. Expect the announcement to come at the company’s annual Connect conference next Thursday. It comes after Zuck unveiled a plan to reportedly hire some 10k people in the European Union over the next five years to build the metaverse. The Verge says the Facebook app will become just one of a number of apps (alongside Instagram and WhatsApp) owned by whatever El Face rebrands itself as.

Wait, haven’t I heard this before? Kind of. The last time a tech company did this was Google, which created Alphabet as a holding company for Google and then, separately, the company’s other ventures.

No, dummy. This metaverse thing. You mean it smacks of “Second Life”? As in “the OG Second Life from the early 2000s?” Yes, indeed it does. “Set up by developer Linden Lab in 2003, it was the faithful replication of our modern world where whoring, drinking, and fighting were acceptable. It was the place where big brands moved in as neighbors and hawked you their wares online. For many, it was the future — our lives were going to be lived online, as avatars represented us in nightclubs, bedrooms, and banks made of pixels and code.”

Yeah, that. You’re right. Zuck and his merry band want to use emerging technologies including virtual and augmented reality to create a “sense of ‘virtual presence’” that it thinks can “mimic the experience of interacting in person.” The concept, believe it or not, was conceived 30 years ago in dystopian fiction. (That’s literary-speak for “a [redacted] up world in which we all live through hell.” Life imitates art, and truth is indeed stranger than fiction.)

LEARN MORE- We had an explainer on the subject earlier this month.


Surprise, surprise: Blockhain is going to disproportionately benefit wealthy nations. China and the United States will together reap nearly 50% of the economic growth benefits of the widespread adoption of blockchain tech through 2030, according to a report by PwC. The advisory firm thinks blockchain will add nearly USD 1.8 tn to the global economy by then (it’s admittedly a late-2020 report that we just discovered this morning, but the gist still holds). Tracking and tracing of products and services will account for some USD 960 bn of that benefit. The sectors that PwC thinks will benefit the most? Healthcare, education and government.

Much less likely to be intact in 2030: Africa’s glaciers, which a new UN report says could disappear within two decades given they’re receding faster than a Gen Xer’s hairline. “The rapid shrinking of the last remaining glaciers in eastern Africa, which are expected to melt entirely in the near future, signals the threat of imminent and irreversible change to the Earth system,” the report’s introduction said. Read the report here or catch coverage in the New York Times.

Today in amazing (and slightly terrifying) scientific advancements: Surgeons at NYU Langone Health successfully transplanted a pig kidney into a human “without triggering immediate rejection by the recipient's immune system,” in a groundbreaking experiment that could partially address a “dire shortage” of human organs, Reuters reports. The transplanted kidney had been genetically altered prior to the procedure to delete a molecule that typically results in pig kidneys being rejected almost instantly after being transplanted.

Byzantine-era amphoras discovered in Luxor: An Egyptian archaeological mission discovered amphoras and lamps from the Byzantine era at the now-demolished site of Andraos Palace (also Tawfik Pasha Andrew’s Palace) alongside the Luxor Temple, the Antiquities Ministry said.

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