Downed Bears and Amped Up Wolverines
Five items of interest
- Dismal science: The field of economics is so ineffectual its practitioners can’t even decide whether “corruption” and “crony capitalism” are good or bad for markets.
- Bear down: The hapless Chicago Bears fired their coach with the same zeal and gusto they use to draft and destroy franchise quarterbacks. On the plus side, Hard Knocks: Training Camp with the Chicago Bears is officially the funniest sports documentary of all time.
- Bad planning meets wishful thinking: The Australian government intends to ban all social media usage for children under sixteen years old. Of course, they’re leaving enforcement to the same social media platforms they’re supposed to be regulating, arbitrarily designing policy (e.g., TikTok bad, YouTube good), and relying on the dumbest possible approach to managing teenagers: telling them they can’t do something and expecting them to comply.
- Meme coin madness: Cryptocurrencies based on popular internet memes are surging in value because enthusiasts expect the U.S. regulatory environment to become friendlier under POTUS-45/47-elect. For example, MOO DENG, PNUT, CHILLGUY, BONK, and PEPE — which are coins based upon viral memes featuring a Thai pigmy hippopotamus, an orphaned then euthanized squirrel, a cartoon dog, a different cartoon dog, and a eugenics-curious frog — sport a combined market capitalization of more than $10 billion. The trend is so hot Hawk Tuah Girl launched her own cryptocurrency — with disastrous results, obvs. Here’s hoping the next viral meme will be inspired by a massive meteor hurtling toward earth.
- Michigan Man: Larry Ellison, the eighty-year-old co-founder of Oracle and one of the world’s richest men, has become a Michigan football superfan and used his considerable resources to convince the nation’s top high school recruit to play his college ball at The Big House. Considering Ellison has zero ties to my beloved alma mater, the question everyone wanted to know was: Why, exactly, did the former college dropout do this? It seems his fifth wife, a thirty-three-year-old woman formerly known as Keren Zhu, is an alum. I guess there are upsides to our techno-oligarchic kleptocracy after all. #GoBlue
