Wednesday Open Thread: Chefs Are Blowing Up, Netflix Is In Your DMs, Harambe, Widowmakers Part 1

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surely you wear lacoste shirts on track, as i do

Is it drug-seeking behavior when the drug in question is an antibiotic? Your humble author has been green-snot sick twice in the past month. The first time, I was tele-connected to a zaftig young blonde doctor who prescribed me Doxycycline, a drug that sounds like it should be part of a William Gibson novel. I think another run of the same thing would do the trick. God knows no tele-doc in her right mind would give me Oxy twice in a row. Will the same be true for an antibiotic? Only time will tell.

Drivin’ For Harambe starts this week

Long-time readers will remember our “Ridin’ For Harambe” series, which started eight years ago and continues to amuse us. The ACF star chamber has chided me for making it motorcycle-exclusive, so starting on Friday we will have Drivin’ For Harambe. Part 1 will feature a local Mopar that is not my 300C. Just for privacy concerns, these will be paid-subscriber-only, both with regards to readability and featured members. Want to be featured? Comment and I’ll email you.

A note on monarchy

Tuesday’s piece on The Gentlemen has taken an odd turn in the comments where I find myself defending the concepts of aristocracy and monarchy against the raging republican (small-r) ACF horde. Just for the sake of clarity: I would prefer that the United States be governed in moral and decent fashion by a representative government, and that every citizen have the chance to live some variant of the American Dream. Since that outcome has been largely swallowed whole by a de facto state media, out-of-control PACs, open borders, and a ruling class that has made rent-seeking an art — I’m now openly willing to suggest that other ideas see the light of day.

At the risk of being facile, I’ll also suggest that the younger generations’ fascination with Communism has less to do with the merits of Lenin and Trotsky and more to do with their inability to own a home. You can’t expect people to defend a system when they can clearly see it will always be stacked against them. Even the College Republican crowd nowadays knows they are proper fucked economically — their membership is largely based on distaste for progressive sexual-social programming. In any event, if today’s ruling class can’t figure out a way to free up some opportunity for young citizens, someone like Trump will be the best outcome they can expect. They might get Robespierre.

Today, in global hypocrisy

The United States has registered its outrage regarding the death of seven World Central Kitchen employees in the Gaza Strip. WCK has served more than 42 million meals in Gaza since the end of last year. CNN has declared that it was a “targeted” attack and that several munitions were expended, one of which put a tidy hole though the roof of a WCK vehicle.

This is dangerously close to parody; President Biden has smirked at the deaths of over 13,000 children, but striking the side project of Jose Andres is going too far! Your humble author, on the other hand, favors a reduction in the number of kids getting clipped, in exchange for a broad expansion of IDF powers to strike any celebrity chef, anywhere, at any time.

“Hello, I’m Gordon Ramsay and this is Hell’s— WHOOOSH”

If they can hit the Iranian Embassy in Syria, why not Wolfgang Puck at home? The only exception to this policy is, obviously, Guy Fieri. Any action taken against the frosted-tip superstar should result in the atomic erasure of Tel Aviv.

In all seriousness, however, how many times did the United States drone-strike that many people, or more, into eternity? How often did we kill that many children in a single hit? Didn’t we burn a whole church to the ground in Texas, with kids inside? This whole thing smacks of Some Souls Are Smaller Than Others. It’s also been pointed out that “aid caravans” in Palestine are notorious for facilitating the opposition, and that the IDF might have had information that justified the strike.

Nobody asked me, but I have the following proposition: Egypt should resettle the Palestinians at the mutual expense of Israel, which wants the land “to the sea”, and Saudi Arabia, which has funded most of the world’s terror activity. There is literally a piece of Egypt between Rafah and Arish that looks identical to Gaza and is all but unoccupied. Have China do the work, build the new homes, and so on. Forcibly resettling 600,000 people is a week’s effort for them.

Let’s handle this situation so the United States can get back to the important work of proxy-warring a nuclear power and entrapping 14-year-olds into hate speech online.

They swear they didn’t read ‘em, though

A class action lawsuit against Meta alleges that The Zuck Factory allowed Netflix to read the contents of Facebook Instant Messages in exchange for some targeted data on media consumption.

Well, it’s not really an “allegation” — because there’s explicit corporate and technical documentation proving exactly that. Netflix had, and likely still has, full access to every message you sent on FB, via a dedicated interface provided to them. Netflix could read your messages, and write messages on your behalf.

Here’s where it gets tricky. Those of us who grew up as Unix Dorks know that permissions are a slippery slope, and they are never as granular as the normies want to believe. The supposed intent of the Netflix/FB tie-up was so that you could recommend movies to your Facebook friends via Netflix, and vice versa. If you apply a technical mind to this, you’ll realize that in order to perform those actions, Netflix must be able to read your DMs (to see recommendations sent by friends) and write them (to send a notification).

I can easily see a scenario where Netflix limited its actions to doing exactly that, and there are some people arguing on yCombinator that Netflix did nothing more. Knowing the lizard people as I do, however, I doubt it. Why wouldn’t Netflix harvest everything, if only to read the DMs for mentions of a particular movie? That’s valuable data to Netflix, which has to decide where it spends its licensing money. If a lot of people start talking about a particular movie, that’s worth investigating.

Also, I cannot emphasize enough just how horny the lizards are for your data and your attention. I once worked at a bagel-making tool factory that wanted to debut an app, and the conversations were insane. Most people only think about bagel-making tools twice a year, which is when their tool-delivery contracts come up for renewal, but the executives wanted to do

Daily.

Push.

Notifications.

“Still thinking about that bagel fork? We’re here for you!”

“We’re getting into the bagel-fork auction business! Here are some listings we think you’d like, based on information that we’ve purchased about you without your knowledge or explicit consent!”

“It’s Tuesday, which means we need to TALK BAGEL FORKS!”

When there was a lull in the conversation, I asked the SVP of Bagel Forks if he would want to receive daily push notifications on his iPhone from a company that he thought about twice a year.

“ABSOLUTELY!” he chirped. “I LOVE THE VALUE THAT PROVIDES!” And everybody around the table just nodded like he hadn’t just said the most insane thing possible. Later that night, I was riding my BMX bike down the sidewalk to dinner when he stepped in front of me.

“Get the fuck out of my way!” I snapped, and he looked very upset. Unhappily for me, but happily for my continued employment, he didn’t confront me about it, at which point I would have compared my intrusion on his personal space to an app that BONGS at you every single day of your life, just so you can provide proof of bagel fork ownership in case the cops pull you over.

I mean, the app didn’t do that, it was the #1 most requested feature, but we didn’t provide that, it was more important to do push notifications and marketing.

The end. But I’m pretty sure that someone at Netflix can read your DMs, and does.

It wasn’t really that bad

I got a request from a reader to periodically talk about “widowmaker” cars that I’ve driven. Happy to oblige — but there haven’t been that many. A bad setup can make a race car deadly, and of course any vehicle with a swing axle can really surprise you in certain circumstances, but most of the “widowmakers” I’ve driven have just been cars that demanded some care and respect.

Example: the modified 997 GT2 seen above. It made about 705hp at the rear wheels on pump gas, which is how Tym Switzer and I ran it around Nelson Ledges. The stock 997 GT2 already had a bit of a reputation for being dangerous, since it made more power than a 997 Turbo could muster and sent it exclusively to the rear wheels. Adding half again as much thrust didn’t sound promising, especially since we were on the dead-stock N-rated Michelin Pilot Sport Cup tires, which had been heat-cycled to infinity and had about as much grip as you’d get from a Pirelli Scorpion SUV tire in 2024. Also, we had to disable the traction and stability control to get the computer to allow full boost.

The car’s primary red flag, as the kids say now, was that it would randomly spin the rear wheels when the boost came on, and it didn’t matter if you were doing 50mph or 150. So the key was to manage power with a smooth right foot, always thinking a second or two ahead. If you didn’t have a plan to have the steering wheel straight in the next 1.5 seconds, you didn’t apply full power, period. Even leaving the Carousel at the back of Nelson Ledges, which doesn’t require a lot of steering degree at the exit, you had to be careful, lest you exit the carousel backwards.

It was a profoundly more worrisome device than the 800-horsepower Switzer Nissan GT-Rs, which I also tested for the company. Those were only as fussy as, say, a C6 Z06. This pumped-up GT2 on urethane desk-chair wheels was a different matter. I was told that one customer had tried to “40 roll” his example and had ended up driving down the other side of a divided highway.

Everything else about the car was plain-Jane GT2, which is to say: likes to grind the nose in steady-state cornering, not a lot of front tire, brakes were phenomenal even with street pads, generally felt like it was assembled by people who gave a damn. Back in 2009, I didn’t have the breadth of racing experience I have now, but I did have thousands of miles’ worth of tail-hanging-out track time in my Boxster S. The 997 GT2 wasn’t really that different, as long as you respected it.

It would cost you about $275,000 now to buy a car like the one I drove, and another $50k to get it up to this spec. Given that kind of cash, I’d buy a used Rolls-Royce Wraith and a brand-new Stohr WF1 with the baddest-ass engine George Dean could imagine. But I wouldn’t judge you if you decided a 997 GT2 was right for you. It has almost all the virtues of an air-cooled 911, all the pace of a Corvette ZR1, all wrapped up in a package that unlike its modern counterparts doesn’t feel wider than a supertanker. Recommended.