Waymo is launching a membership scheme. For $29.99 per month, the perks look a little... light:

Premier members will be able to skip the virtual line and earn 10% cash back on every trip (and “even more during busy times,” according to Waymo). They’ll also get five free ride cancellations every month, and Waymo says Premier members will even be able to hail a robotaxi in cities where the service still has a waitlist.

But it's all groundwork. I still wonder if the prospect of buying Lyft is on the table for Alphabet. Maybe they feel they don't need it -- you can't help but be impressed by the growth of Waymo across the US (and now London, too). Certainly more impressive than the mere 59 cars currently active on Tesla's Robotaxi network.

Poland is set to introduce an anti-"trash streaming" law that would prohibit broadcasting abhorrent content. It includes "violence aimed at humiliating people."

Bezos tells the FT: "The people who are jumping to the conclusion that the jobs are all going to go away . . . I think these people are just wrong."

Derek Guy for Mr Porter:

The internet teems with a veritable cottage industry of corrective dressing, offering guides on how to dress for every shape imaginable. Large men, we’re told, shouldn’t wear horizontal stripes because they make you look wider. Short men shouldn’t wear cuffed trousers because they truncate the leg line. These rules are dressed up as practical advice, but they rest on shaky logic and accept the fashion industry’s standards as law.

Follow these too closely and you’ll enter a state of perpetual self-surveillance, forever asking whether a garment diminishes or exaggerates some defect that you see in yourself. The result is self-consciousness and anxiety, pushing you toward clothes that conceal rather than express, ultimately producing the opposite of style.

Instead of leading with body type, start with the cultural language of dress. We no longer live in a world where a single class sets the terms for how men should appear. This has made the task of dressing more complicated, but also more pleasurable.

A really peculiar story in the New Yorker, meticulously reported:

“When the police entered the mansion, they were surprised to find that it had an institutional feel. There were CCTV cameras everywhere, bedrooms filled with cribs, and, in classrooms downstairs, more than a dozen children seated at desks in front of whiteboards. It was impossible to tell the girls and boys apart, since all of them had shaved heads.”

Matt Levine is a genius. On GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen's whacko bid to acquire eBay:

[S]ometimes a potential buyer will lob in a bid without the money, and the target will say “okay do you have the money,” and the buyer will say “yes I have a quadrillion dollars in my account at the Vatican Bank,” or “yes I have plenty of money in ancient Mesopotamian bearer bonds,” or “no but I know where Yamashita’s gold is buried and if you finance my expedition I can dig it up,” or “I can turn lead into gold with my mind,” or “money isn’t real man,” or “what? I can’t hear you, I’m going through a tunnel,” or — and I cannot stress this enough — “I’m going to sell my socks on eBay to finance the takeover.”

(Cohen was "selling" his socks in eBay to finance the takeover -- until his account was suspended.)

Author Alan Moore speaking in February 2025 to fan site ALANMOOREWORLD (and what a rich world that is):

Q: What do you think of the current political situation in the world? Can we reasonably have hope, or is the scenario inevitably gloomy for Humanity?

Alan Moore: My answer is both. Hope is always the only rational position, in that to give up hope of success is to guarantee failure and, in the event that the worst happens, it is surely better to go out knowing that you resisted it and struggled your very best to prevent it from happening. So, yes, there is always hope. But, yes, I fear that the world is inevitably in for a gloomy period, and the hope is that we can survive it and build something better from it.

If we wish to have an inhabitable future for us and our children and their children, then might I quietly suggest we stop electing and tolerating obvious fascist buffoons because we think they’re entertaining characters, as if they were housemates on Big Brother. This isn’t reality TV. This is reality, or what’s left of it. Let us instead protest and rail at these dribbling Nazi idiots to our last breath, rather than beam stupidly as Elon Musk ‘sends his heart out to us’ Nuremberg style. Let us point out that they are suicidal cretins when they insist that climate change is a Chinese hoax. Let us not give these witless fuckers an inch.

And, more important than condemning the forces driving this multi-faceted disaster, let us take responsibility for ourselves and our communities. Let us for God’s sake stop relying on these leaders and their self-serving social structures that lead us nowhere save into the abyss. If we want things to exist – things like proper education, health and welfare services – then let us give our energies, our time, our money, our art, to the numerous community projects that are springing up of necessity and attempting to counteract these privations of the state or the toxic world it has created. Support environmental movements and protests, stand up for the rights of minorities and women at a moment when those rights are being clawed away from them by the horror story/laughing stock currently in the White House, form Arts Labs or start fanzines in recognition of the fact that we should probably think about providing our own art and entertainment too, and do something, some little or big thing to make the world around you more like the world you want to live in.

Good luck.

(h/t Tony Wolf on Bluesky.)

Delightful:

(from the NYT's Metropolitan Diary) (h/t Eric Roston)

Speaking on Bloomberg TV on Anthropic's tussle with the Pentagon over use of its AI models for war.