A decade ago, a hedge fund had an improbable viral comedy hit: a 294-page slide deck explaining why Olive Garden was going out of business, blaming the failure on too many breadsticks and insufficiently salted pasta-water:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Some of ya'll struggle with romance. Here are some tips. When you meet her she will probably be curled up. Like you, her response to most new things is to curl up in a ball and wait for it to stop or go away. You are a "new thing." What you need to do is sing her a little song so she knows you are also a pill millipede just like her. Then she'll uncurl.
The sounds are called stridulations made by rubbing parts of the exoskeleton together. "cricricricricri"
This handsome fellow visited my porch this weekend (Milwaukee WI USA)--the likes of which I haven't seen before. iNaturalist couldn't pinpoint the species but similar beetles looked possibly unfriendly to trees (borers). Anyone have tips on what it is? #Milwaukee#Wisconsin#beetle#invertebrates#B&W #iNaturalist
Red velvet ant (Dasymutilla occidentalis)
Day 22 of #invertober#invertober2023
They are actually a species of parasitic wasps. They use their bright colors as a signal to warn predators that they can sting (with a needle-like stinger hidden at the end of their abdomen) and so they should stay away. They display their coloration to indicate that they are not worth attacking. #cowkillerant#velvetants#wasps#wasp#insects#insect#hymenoptera#invertebrates
Today, on cool critters which share our planet, but which we seldom notice, let's meet the Pagoda ant (Crematogaster sp.).
These tree-dwelling ants are amongst those bugs which have pioneered the making of cardboard (much like the 'paper' wasps which build papery nests from chewed-up plant fiber).
Hey, bug/insect folks on Mastodon? This post has been going around Tumblr and it's unclear whether this is legit or not. Do any of y'all have any info on this organization?
For the #SciArtSeptember prompt glowing, it’s my linocut of the #bioluminescent firefly squid! The firefly squid (Watasenia scintillans), also called sparkling enope squid or hotaru-ika in Japan, live at depth (200 to 400 m) and are bioluminescent and emit blue light from photophores. 🧵1/2
Red Lobster was killed by private equity, not Endless Shrimp
A decade ago, a hedge fund had an improbable viral comedy hit: a 294-page slide deck explaining why Olive Garden was going out of business,
blaming the failure on too many breadsticks and insufficiently salted pasta-water!
But – as David Dayen wrote at the time – the hedge fund that produced that slide deck, #StarboardValue, was not motivated by dissatisfaction with bread-sticks.
They were "activist investors" (finspeak for "rapacious assholes") 🔸with a giant stake in Darden Restaurants, Olive Garden's parent company.
They wanted Darden to liquidate all of Olive Garden's real-estate holdings
and declare a one-off dividend that would net investors a billion dollars,
while literally yanking the floor out from beneath Olive Garden,
converting it from owner to tenant, subject to rent-shocks and other nasty surprises.
In other words they wanted to asset-strip the company
("asset strip" is what they call it in hedge-fund land; the mafia calls it a "bust-out," famous to anyone who watched the twenty-third episode of The Sopranos) @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/23/spineless/#invertebrates
When I grew up in Southeast Asia, my first experience with snails involved seeing the Lissachatina Fulica, the giant African land snail. As the name suggests, the species was not native to the area, but an invasive species from East Africa. For most of my childhood, this gigantic snail was what “snails” looked like in my mind, because they were the only ones I encountered.
Image source and credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Snail_in_Ubud,_Bali,_2010_(1).jpg
I like this crab’s style. It’s a porcelain crab, Neopetrolisthes maculatus. Porcelain crabs are decapod crustaceans in the family Porcellanidae, which resemble true crabs but are in fact closer related to squat lobsters. 🧵1/2