Tag: When Did Cracked Magazine Become Cool?

Your Daily Schadenfreude

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It turns out that the bible museum founded by the Hobby Lobby family and largely populated with looted Iraqi artifact, was taken to the cleaners by someone who sold it phony fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

I am amused.

Have you ever been to the Museum of the Bible in Washington D.C.? The museum is funded by the Green family, the very Christian founders of Hobby Lobby, who wished to dedicate an entire building to the Holy Bible. (Though I’m positive I’ve seen a bunch of pointy ones already serving that purpose). Over the past decade, the family has spent $400 million, money they’ve easily saved up by denying their female employees healthcare, on housing the greatest private collection of holy texts this side of Vatican City.

But like any money spent involving Hobby Lobby, that has mostly been netting them low-quality knockoffs. One of the Museum of the Bible’s most coveted collections has been its fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, that draft of the Hebrew Bible so ancient it crumbled into thousands of pieces and is now scattered all over the world like an inappropriate Easter egg hunt. But from 2009 to 2014, the Greens managed to obtain sixteen bits of Dead Sea Scrolls, fragments that experts soon after deigned to be fake as hell. In response, the Greens employed the Art Fraud Insight group to put the nasty rumors to bed and confirm that, yup, those are less likely to be a hallowed scripture of the teachings of God and more likely just a bit of old shoe.

………

Confronted with the idea they’ve spent millions on some ancient Huarache’s with doodling on them, the CEO of the museum decried: “We’re victims of misrepresentation, we’re victims of fraud.” But nobody should ever feel bad for the Greens or their vanity museum. The family has had a long history of deliberately not looking too closely at where their artifacts originate, something that cost the Greens $3 million in fines and most of their collection when the government uncovered that they had been using shell companies to smuggle looted Iraqi artifacts into the U.S., knowing full well they might be indirectly funding ISIS in their holy quest to build a shrine to Christianity’s fiction section.

In a just world, they should probably have gone to jail for their looting, but being sold sandals as holy texts is nice.

Scooters Break Down and Wear Out? Hoocoodanode?

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It turns out that, much like the Gypsy cab companies Uber and Lyft, e-scooters have no path to profitability.

Scooters break, and they break after only a few months, which makes the plague of rental scooters unsustainable:

E-scooters really are the vaping of public transportation. They’re a safe alternative that’s somehow even more dangerous, and they’re incredibly popular despite being despised by every human being on the planet. They also make you look like a spoiled 15-year-old douche. But that’s not what’s hurting the e-scooter brand, which claims it’s close to becoming a billion-dollar industry … if only they could stop burning through scooters at breakneck speed.

I just love the phrase, “E-scooters really are the vaping of public transportation.”

It nails the situation in a nutshell:

………

So what’s causing Lime to leak money faster than the fluid out of one of their scooter’s cut brakes? According to them, it’s a matter of scooter “depreciation” — a shareholder-friendly way of saying that their product gets treated like crap. Rideshare companies have to spend a fortune picking up their scooters from whatever random patch of sidewalk their scootees ditched them like so much spent chewing gum. And then there are the constant repairs. According to Lime, their scooters only survive the mean city streets for five months (which is about four months longer than some other reports), thanks to a corrosive combination of elemental wear and tear, heavy/irresponsible usage, and people getting so mad at douches dropping them in front of their homes that they’ve started sabotaging them.

I’ve increasingly come to believe that Silicon Valley venture capitalists have no interest in the viability of a business, they just want to just hype the company until sufficiently stupid people purchase shares at the IPO.

As strange as it seem, it appears that they have actually begun to start run out of stupid people.

I do not see how this does not meet the legal definition of fraud.