Sacha Baron Cohen's Ali G sequel lasted one weekend in theaters, and the Hollywood Reporter is blaming pro-Palestine activists, and discussing "Hamas-affiliated operatives.” THR detailed a campaign by UK-based NewsCord, whose platform gave users AI-assisted templates to email cinemas; NewsCord says about 55,000 emails went out. THR then pointed to the group's support for Gaza aid flotilla participants, whose leaders the US Treasury designated "Hamas-affiliated operatives." NewsCord, which calls Ali G a form of blackface, accused THR of drawing "conspiratorial links." Amazon MGM opened the film on just 23 screens, withheld box office figures, and moved it to Prime Video five days later, per World of Reel.

I didn’t notice.

Brazilians have reportedly been spending 6.5% more on staple foods since sports betting was banned in the country. A month ago, Lula signed an order banning fixed-odds sports betting, a move he said was designed to tackle the problem of families falling into debt. Now the President of the Brazilian Supermarket Association says that since the ban, sales of essential foods such as rice, oil, coffee, and noodles have grown by 6.5%.

Ele passou de uma chance moderada de perder para uma chance extrema de perder

Como já falei, Flávio é golpista demais até pro Donald Fucking Trump! Isso diz muito!

Coisa triste. Como o bolsonarismo é uma seita de pirâmide financeira, você que não pode fugir em jatinho de traficante acabará sozinho e desgraçado por esse movimento autofágico. O muro está baixo. Pulem.

Freudian slip. In addition to everything else, these people are dumb-dumbs.

Brazilian politics are complicated. Here’s the only explainer you need.

As someone who has personally spent $500k / mo+ on Google Ads for years, I can tell you with certainty: This revenue growth in Search is artificial & extremely unhealthy for Google’s business long term Search volumes are declining as legacy search is being increasingly cannibalized by non-monetized LLM queries Google’s response? Manufacture revenue growth via short-sighted, highly extractive, customer-hostile tactics. I.e. charge advertisers more for lower quality clicks, including clicks they do not want and explicitly did not approve Google to charge them for A few examples to illustrate: For all of its history until recently, Google operated on a 2nd price auction model I.e. if you bid $5 CPC and the next highest bidder bids $1 CPC, Google charged you $1.01 for the click (one penny more than the 2nd highest bidder) rather than the $5 you bid This was a genius move by Google early on as it incentivizes advertisers to input their true maximum willingness to pay rather than trying to play the game of bidding low and constantly adjusting to try to stay just ahead of the next highest bidder while still not paying too much However recently, Google silently deprecated the 2nd price auction and began charging advertisers as much as their bid and budget caps allow, regardless of what anyone else is bidding It’s a short-sighted cash grab at the expense of the long term health of the advertiser ecosystem Making thing worse, Google also recently nerfed keyword targeting precision Google previously had precise keyword targeting settings that allowed advertisers pick individual search phrases to bid on, defined down to the character w/ exact match or phrase match targeting This was one of the core features that made search advertising magic, enabling advertisers to run extremely precise campaigns based on exactly what their target customer typed But now, even if you bid on a specific term or phrase using the strictest exact -match targeting settings, Google will show your ad across 1000’s of unrelated keywords, labeling them as as “exact match (close variant)” The definition of “close variant” means whatever they want it to and changes constantly. The result is advertisers get billed for clicks that are totally irrelevant to their business and that their targeting settings explicitly forbid Google from targeting. Google does it anyway and there’s no ability to turn this off So now exact match is broad match, and broad match is just meaningless spam This is all very bad for advertisers, but for Google, it allows them to show your ad and bill you for clicks across 1000x more searches that were previously going unmonetized (mainly because they’re garbage queries no one wants) This is how you grow revenue atop declining search volumes Lastly, and perhaps most egregiously, Google quietly stopped respecting budget caps by a factor of 2x. For example campaigns we’ve been running for years with $1000 daily budget caps suddenly began spending $2000+ per day And the extra spend is entirely on the garbage keywords Google arbitrarily throws in as “exact match (close variants)” which have no value to our business, but can’t be turned off Google offers no refunds nor any recourse for overspend or spend on keywords you explicitly did not target These are not the actions of a healthy business. These are the actions of company whose core business is in decline but desperately needs to pump quarterly earnings so Wall Street will continue to fund insane capex while hopefully looking through their rapidly deteriorating negative free cash flow Google operated a benevolent monopoly for the better part of 25 yrs Meaning the value Google captured from Search was but a small fraction of the value it created, and that spread produced a potential energy that justified expectations of high earnings growth far, far into the future This is now no longer the case At the alter of AI capex, Google is sacrificing the golden goose

Hi, I'm free. Beat up but fine. Police stole my phone. Settlers punched me in the face several times, likely broke @AdeleShoko's wrist and gave @the_andrey_x a concussion. They threatened to shoot us with an assault rifle over and over. Will tell the full story later, but for now, I just want to be clear about what happened. We witnessed two settlers locking a military gate in Umm al-Khair, blocking the only way to more than twenty Palestinian communities: trapping families inside, preventing students from reaching school and workers from their jobs, blocking delivery of food and access to ambulances, etc. It's a crime that the military has this ability at all--but last night, we discovered that random settler terrorists also have the key. We confronted them and began asking questions on camera, and they nearly murdered us for it. When the police finally arrived, they arrested Andrey and me and charged us with assault. The gate is still locked.

This 16-tweet thread does a good job of summarizing the main accusations against Flavio Bolsonaro. And Thiago actually left out a lot of other cases that Flavio could’ve/should’ve been in jail for already

I learned about this incident from our Boy in Brazil, Caio Almendra and was dumbstruck, but just hearing about it doesn't quite do it justice.

🔍 Periodismo de investigación, impacto real y rendición de cuentas: Andrew Fishman @AndrewDFish, cofundador y presidente de @TheInterceptBr, presenta su Keynote en la Gran Sala de la Media Party. 🏛️📢 🔍 Investigative journalism, real-world impact, and accountability: Andrew Fishman @AndrewDFish, co-founder and president of @TheInterceptBr, delivers his Keynote in the Main Hall at Media Party. 🏛️📢 @CCKonex #MediaParty #MPBA26

Já pararam pra pensar que — talvez — é que o círculo dos Bolsonaros tá cheio de picaretagem e golpes?

The @WSJ reports that Trump advisor Jason Miller helped secure the private charter flight for Flávio to take to the US. And about that plane ....

My dream is to hire an investigative reporter (or team) that exclusively covers this for @TheInterceptBr. This job DOES NOT EXIST in Brazil.