Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/15/allbirds-bird-stock-shoes-ai.html
I had such a hard time coming up with an original joke for this, until i realized the reason why is that allbirds is stealing jokes from the dotcom bubble in the first place.
Oh. so, bit of a misleading headline there CNBC. This wasn’t a real publicly traded company, it was a company on life support that got pivoted by a greedy founder looking to cash in. Cynical move or the delusions of a true believer? does it matter?
Regardless, the stupidity is too much, the resemblance too striking. good luck to Allbirds in the totally normal footwear-to-high tech pivot that is happening in this totally normal economy.
What the fuck happened here. How did a shoe company get so high and how on earth did it lose 98% of its value? Were shoes really big during covid and then the demand disappeared, wtf
@V0ldek @sansruse
The shoes are/were good. I wear them daily now. Every librarian I know in New Zealand wears them to work, a quick poll in my wider development team at work had 80% of the people wearing them that day and 90% owned at least one pair.
My guess is someone convinced the founders they could break into the US market and become billionaires, so they took on debt and VC funding and were crushed under the repayments when it didn’t work out.
If they’d been happy making good shoes, taking home a million bucks a year and staying a profitable business in NZ, I think they’d still be doing that.
Greed mucks everything up…
@V0ldek @techtakes
Bro we all run on tank tracks these days, we’re all absolutely crushing it in the workplace Bro shoes are so pre-AI, you can’t grow forever all the way to upload heaven on a sole
(Pops another Special K)
@cstross @V0ldek @techtakes I don’t know what “Special K” means in the context of “Pops another Special K”, but I choose to visualize opening one of those snack sized boxes of Special K cereal and chugging it down in one go.
@isaackuo
yes, though it’s the extra-ketamine flavour box :D
@cstross @V0ldek @techtakes
@Landa @cstross @V0ldek @techtakes Oh wow. The BOX is flavoured? You don’t even have to open the box. You just chomp it down along with the contents.
This is brilliant! Quick I need to Shark Tank pitch this and get rich quick. And then when the product tanks I’ll pivot to AI and get even richer quicker!
@isaackuo Movers and shakers ain’t got time to unpack, just chomp down on the whole box.
It will make you instantly look like the alphaest of ~~Alpha^WSigmas~~
Lots of fibre too!
@cstross @V0ldek @techtakes
@isaackuo @Landa @V0ldek @techtakes AI is so 2026, Bro, to get ahead of the game for 2027 you need to pivot to Quantum Computing, ideally on the blockchain in an orbital data centre.
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@V0ldek @sansruse
Didn’t you read the 4th or 5th volumes of the Hitchhikers trilogy? Where the Golgafrinchan’s (?) economy went through the “Shoe Event Horizon” after the B-ark left, and the survivors took flight, very literally. Built a 5km tall statue of DentArthurDent throwing a teacup, and nested in the teacup.
All predicted. Techbrodudes making reality match (published) history.
The Golgafrinchans shipped off the B Ark and then died of a plague (book 2). The Shoe Event Horizon happened on Brontitall (radio series) or Frogstar World B (book 2).
@V0ldek @sansruse
There was a big consumer migration from brick and mortar to online. All of the people who thought themselves the smartest people in the room just knew that would last forever And that the trend in growth would never stop. “Line go up forever!”
The line did not got up forever, and in 22-23 when there was a return to brick and motor many online businesses were hurt from Amazon to online shoe retail.
@V0ldek @sansruse I’m sure a lot of people thought what with the mRNA vaccines people would grow at least one extra leg.
When that didn’t happen, well…
@V0ldek @sansruse another Meme stock, like Tesla and OpenAI? Where the valuation bears no relation to actual sales or profitability.
And now it seems they are trying again.
@V0ldek @sansruse @cstross The serious answer is that, like many smaller high street retailers, its business - and its business model - got entirely destroyed by the pandemic.
@V0ldek @sansruse
Shoes were *huge* during Covid, do you not remember when all our feet swelled up?
Sorry