Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tom Perkins took a little time off from killing people with his sailboat and writing terrible romance fiction to complain that criticism of the one percent by the American left are basically the same thing as the holocaust. "Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent "progressive" radicalism unthinkable now?" asks Perkins in a less-than-convincing simulation of rational thought, even by Wall St. Journal standards. So congratulations to Perkins on finally busting through that last frontier and entering the pure white light of total rich-guy self-absorption. May you dwell in that place until your incorruptible earthly container is elevated whole unto the firmament. The VC firm that Perkins co-founded practically levitated in its haste to back away from the real-life Montgomery Burns, tweeting that "Perkins has not been involved in KPCB in years.""The P is just a letter now," they continued. "It doesn't stand for anything. It's like David O. Selznick's middle initial." And to make the tab complete, there's pretty good evidence that this whole snit is not about any substantive issue, but merely about SF Chronicle criticisms of his ex-wife Danielle Steel's bush (that is not a euphemism). And the circle of tabs continues. Also: Jamie Dimon just got a raise if you were wondering whose windows to break first.
On Friday, just as the Google site reliability team kicked off a Reddit AMA on /r/irony, Gmail went down for an hour or so. In an apparently unrelated bug, Google has sent millions of emails to one rando's Hotmail account. All of this, of course, was a tremendous black eye for Yahoo!, who managed to turn a competitor's major outage into a chance to remind everyone what a total clown-car Yahoo! is. After a purely informative tweet mentioning the Gmail outage, Marissa Mayer arrived at Yahoo HQ for an emergency meeting, and the tweet was promptly retracted and apologized for and the apology was subsequently apologized for and shortly thereafter the retraction was also retracted. All of this managed to make everyone totally forget Gmail's outage, or, as Yahoo! put it, "really captured mindshare for Yahoo!"
Ezra Klein announced that his new project will be with Vox Media, describing it to Charlie Warzel as some sort of explainer site where, presumably, Yglesias can really delve deep into exactly how much less a human life is worth in each third world country. David Carr wrote about the move and possibly also had a mild stroke in the seventh paragraph, where he described the internet as "a set of tin cans and a thin wire" in 2001, but "pipes" that are "very similar to the early 1980s, when big cities were finally wired for cable" now. The rest of Carr's column is the now-tedious "name-brand journo bravely takes to the internet" narrative and was probably written by a Word macro.
Enough of this nonsense, drop everything you're doing right now and read this incredibly great profile of botmaker Darius Kazemi. They'll write books about Darius and those guys, one day soon.
Longform backlash. Longform backlash backlash. Shortform troll Dash. Yet another Marlboro man dies of smoking-related lung disease. Thanks irony, we get it, you can stop now. Pope's doves of peace attacked by garbage-eating birds. True love detected. This story about meth in North Korea is almost certainly a hoax. You don't need a weatherdoge to know which way the wind blows. It's Monday. welcome to the internet.
Meet the Tabs: Join our conference call. Today's Song: Sweet Home Cannada. So I'm checking out...
~That's all we do, isn't it -- look at tabs and try new drinks?~
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