in search of the minimum viable grift

December 21, 2020

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that has chosen to take at face value the information it keeps seeing that indicates dark chocolate to be low on the glycemic index (and, unrelatedly, will accept any leads on chocolate oranges from Trader Joe's) 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayStill on hiatus through the end of the year, but here's a question for you: have you started keeping an idea file of your own? Do you want to be on the podcast? Drop me a line, 'cause I'm curious.Help me close out the year at more than 33 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ratings in Apple Podcasts, and I promise you will receive entry into the afterlife of your choice when the Great Beyond comes calling. This goes double if you leave a nice review. I don't make the rules.Instant Band Night 15: Gone Til NovemberIt seems laughable to try to throw Instant Band Night without a proven vaccine in place. Let's see what's up in November 2021.Facebook event's still there in case you (like me) can't yet escape the vortex of Facebook* * s t a y   h o m e   / /   s t a y   h e a l t h y * * 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.Is there a mathematical formula for MAGA grifts? Surely this is something that's discoverable. For instance: the lowest-effort MAGA grift I can currently imagine is one where

  1. I put up a page raising funds to "stop the steal"

  2. I take people's money

  3. I spend 10 minutes photoshopping a legal filing from one of the other billion failed Trump lawsuits and append it as an update to the fundraiser: "Well, I tried, deep state, QAnon, blah blah 4D chess" and disappear

  4. I blow the money on a post-pandemic beach vacation

The question is: what combination of keywords (a, b, c, d, etc) combined with Facebook ad spend ($n) would result in the maximum amount raised ($x)? Would the name "MAGA Trump Stop The Steal Reelection America 2020" work better or worse than "Heritage MAGA Trump Stop The Steal Reelection America 2020", given the same ad buy? What happens if I call it "Heritage MAGA King Trump For America Stop The Steal 2020 Blue Lives Matter"? Does the body text of the fundraiser page factor into the final amount collected? If I take an existing one of these and run it through a Google Translate chain and paste the result in there, does it affect the total? By how much? What if we just lightly reword a 419 scam email and use that as the body text instead? I want a formula that will give me the absolute minimum amount of effort needed for the highest possible yield. Theoretical yield, of course. Theoretical. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.I'm just gonna put this out there right now: because he doesn't really need a whole ton of things, we tried not to get a whole big bunch of presents for Quentin. In this we succeeded. However: out of the ones we did get, a significant number came in boxes that I'm going to call ............. large (for the record, they are: an easel, a toddler-appropriate basketball hoop, and a toy crane truck that (in my defense) I thought was nowhere near as big as it turned out to be in actual real life). I can only hope this doesn't set an unreasonable expectation for future Xmases. 

Fascination Corner

I read a lot of newsletters; here are some links that caught my eye.

  • Ed Yong strikes again: the rona's impact on the world of science (good and bad) is going to be with us for a while, folks. (~$Atlantic) So, too, is the fact that we got a vaccine developed in a year, which is shockingly quickly, but also makes sense given how much it relies on science that got done already. (Nature) 

  • Mackenzie Scott makes all other billionaires look like fucking chumps with their "oh it's so haaaard to give away all this money" bullshit: she's given away $4 billion in 4 months while the rest of them stood around with their dicks in their hands. (NPR) 

  • Sometimes kids coming to grips with the reality of mortality is hilarious. (Thread from @AlixEHarrow on Twitter) 

  • "Facebook is a Doomsday Machine." Unmoderated hellsites like 8kun are reeking cesspits, but Facebook has reach that does far more damage. If you've got an Atlantic click left, burn it now. (~$Atlantic) 

  • Harsher ecosystems might actually produce new species of animals faster, on account of being rougher places to live. (Smithsonian) Which might be good, considering that nature is not actually healing from our comparative absence this year. (The Verge) 

  • Epicurious posts their 57 most popular recipes from this year; there's at least a few winners in there for everyone, probably. (Epicurious) 

  • Privacy concerns hobbled the rollout of contact tracing apps, which makes it hard to assess what (if any) impact they're having on viral transmission here in the US. (The Verge) Pair that with this five-year-old talk I've never read before from Maciej Ceglowski, he of the ancient but still good fictional burrito tunnel piece. (Haunted By Data) 

  • If you've got NYT access and you missed this back in April like I did, remedy the situation now: it's a longform profile of Weird Al, and it's fucking great. ($NYT) 

  • It might not be a bad idea to add our extra compost to landfills, weirdly. (NC State) 

  • Paul Alexander has suddenly shot into my top five Trump adminstration hate list, a surprisingly late boost here at the end of 2020. (Politico) 

  • Research seems to indicate that irrelevant information contributes to bad decisionmaking. (RPI) 

  • "The 16 facial expressions most common to emotional situations worldwide" (UC Berkeley) 

  • Increasing diversity and education together are what's turning the suburbs blue. (538) 

  • Even though they're not domesticated, kangaroos apparently still know how to communicate with humans. (U of Roehampton) 

  • Somewhat unsurprisingly, influencers are going to be an inevitable part of the vaccine deployment. (Recode) 

  • "We need to learn how to talk to (and about) accidental conspiracists" (Nieman Lab) 

  • Octopuses have been observed ........ punching fish. It's likely to motivate coordinated hunting, but some of it could also be ......... spite?? (Science Alert) 

  • I don't know what to make of this op-ed from a career Justice Department lawyer who worked for the Trump regime for two years and tried to mitigate its damage from within; she acknowledges up front that it was a bad idea, it did active harm, and she's sorry. But on the other hand: Jesus fucking Christ. I don't know, people. ($NYT) 

  • The spread of the internet has had an interesting effect on people's willingness to change countries. (McGill U) 

  • Scientists have discovered a bacteria that can help make plastics out of sewer sludge. Say it with me now: "Is it scalable? When will it be deployed commercially?" (Texas A&M) 

  • Public transit is in big trouble thanks to the pandemic. Will we make the obvious fix? Probably the fuck not, because this is America, but still. (Vox) 

  • Taking a small sample of seawater and figuring out whose DNA is in it can be a surprisingly accurate way to measure fish populations. (Anthropocene) 

  • Did you know there used to be a thing called the Office of Economic Opportunity in America, and Reagan got rid of it? When I become President, I'm going to have a fucking toilet installed above that shithead's grave. (Brookings Institute) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.Some bandsHot Chili RubdownRAPSTYLEProblematic Orchard 

Thanks

If you've read this far, I thank you. Feel free to forward this to someone you like, or inflict upon someone you don't.