FRIDAY WRAP: 2023 YEAR IN REVIEW... bigger a$$hole, Musk or investors? More exhausting, climate change or discrimination? Happier, labor strikes or royal family clauses? Plus, the winner of the year

Introduction

Live from It’s Almost 2024 Studios,  IT’S the FRIDAY show, featuring Ari the Data Queen, AnalystHole Matt Moscardi, Jessie the Money Whisperer, and me, Hazelnut Rallis. On today’s weekly wrap up: something even better: our yearly wrapup, 2023 in review: featuring AI and Taylor Swift

Exhausting-est of the Year (JS):

1. Moms get fed last

1. More moms are leaving the workforce, but it’s not because they want to

2. Working women spend $15.4 billion more than men in out-of-pocket health costs, study finds

3. September 5th was Equal Housework Day: It’s Time for Women to Quit Housework (Again)

2. Profits > our planet that’s literally on fire…arguable already to the point of no return MM DR

1. BP, Shell, and Exxon suddenly backing off their climate promises MM

2. Mammoth retailer (Target) encourages overconsumption by allowing drive up returns

3. Fast Fashion’s Curious Comeback

4. Fast fashion has spawned a mountain of leftover clothes in the Chilean desert that's so massive it can now be seen clearly from space

5. Excessive online shopping IS KILLING OUR WHALES

6. 63 cruise ships owned by Carnival Corporation released more toxic sulfur gasses than all the cars in Europe, study says

3. Workplace discrimination AB

1. An airline was fined for imposing strict rules about high heels and makeup on female cabin crew, report says

2. Wisconsin’s Dairy Industry Relies on Undocumented Immigrants, but the State Won’t Let Them Legally Drive

3. Women Could Fill Truck Driver Jobs. Companies Won’t Let Them

4. Women soccer players were promised at least $30,000 to play in this year’s World Cup. Now FIFA is backtracking on its pledge

5. Men make twice as much money as women under the NCAA’s new rules that allow college basketball players to cash in

6. Stark Gender Imbalance at U.S. Opera Companies Extends Beyond Podiums

7. Failing to accommodate worker menopause costs the U.S. economy more than $25 billion a year

4. CEO Misconduct

1. CS Disco CEO Kiwi Camara gives up $110M pay package after ‘groping female employee,’ shoving meat in her face

2. Crypto CEO (Sam Joel) steps down after ‘misogynistic’ rant

5. AI Oopsies

1. Levi's says its AI-generated diverse models that caused huge backlash are not a substitute for action on diversity

2. A potential deepfake precedent

3. I tried a site where AI matched me with someone based on my 'hotness' rating. It's really messed up.

4. Gen Z dating app Snack lets your AI-trained avatar go on dates so you don’t have to

5. Snapchat’s AI could be the creepiest chatbot yet

Assholiest of the Year (MM):

Stats:

41 weeks to choose from (3 removed for not having any specific asshole, 2 removed for vacation)

Hating women, gays, and Jews were top category: 11

Top protagonist: Idiot GOP

Second protagonist: Idiot investors

Obvious individuals: Musk

Theme of the year: money wins versus everything

1. Marc Andreessen and the Techno Optimists

1. Marc Andreessen agrees we should be TECHNO OPTIMISTS about this.. And that “ESG” and “ethics” are the enemy of our hard coded terminator jobless future?

2. Spending money on losers: Marc Andreessen spent $350m on this: Adam Neumann talked about Flow for a full hour, and we still don’t know what it is

1. Optimist investments by AH this year:

1. Castelion - unmanned defense drones

2. Blue Force Technologies - killer AI drones, acquired by Anduril

3. Anduril - Palmer Luckey + Palantir people, AI drones and border monitoring

1. Palmer once built a VR headset that actually killed the wearer if they died in the video game

4. OpenAI

5. Flow - by Adam Neuman

1. Optimism means giving a guy who took 1bn to fail a second chance!

2. Altman, Zuck, Musk - the AI tech bros/tech bro enablers DR

1. Mark Zuckerberg says people spent 24% more time on Instagram after Meta launched AI-powered Reels

2. OpenAI has quietly changed its ‘core values’

3. AI chatbot will replace human helpline workers at National Eating Disorder Association

4. Twitter Runs Ads for Disney, Microsoft, and the NBA Next to Neo-Nazi Propaganda

3. ISS, Glass Lewis, and the Investor Industrial Complex that provides a 96% average vote FOR directors at public boards AB MM

1. Norfolk Southern board of directors

2. “Appointing directors”

3. State Street adds option to fully back corporate boards

4. Tesla’s board of directors

5. Southwest board of directors

4. The anti woke hating women, gays, and Jews JS

1. Everyone at Anheuser Busch

2. Musk Says ‘Cisgender’ And ‘Cis’ Are Now ‘Slurs’ On Twitter

3. Republican Attorneys General Warn Top U.S. Businesses Over ‘Discrimination’

4. Ed Blum: Conservative activist behind US affirmative action cases sues venture capital fund

5. Adidas CEO says Kanye West didn’t mean antisemitic remarks, isn’t a bad person

Goodliest of the Year (AB):

1. Year of Worker’s Rights Part 2 JS DR

1. UAW Goes on Strike Against GM, Ford and Stellantis

2. The WGA is calling its new deal "exceptional."

3. US healthcare workers walk off the job: 27 strikes in 2023

4. Tesla/Nordic solidarity Danish union joins strike action against Tesla by Swedish workers and Norway union joins Tesla blockade in support for Swedish workers

5. UPS workers approve massive new labor deal

6. Companies can't enforce silence for severance pay, Labor Board rules

2. David vs Oily Goliath

1. OnlyFans billboards in London replaced with ‘OilyFans’ raising awareness of BP CEO’s pay doubling

2. New California Laws Mandate Climate Disclosures For Both Private and Public Companies

3. Youth environmentalists bring Montana climate case to trial after 12 years, seeking to set precedent

4. CalSTRS escalates efforts to hold global companies accountable for not adequately disclosing climate change risks; votes against 2,035 boards of directors in proxy season 2023

3. Absurdity MM

1. ‘Sushi terrorism' is spreading as pranksters lick food, utensils in Japan's conveyor belt restaurants

2. Disney blocks Ron DeSantis' Florida power play with a royal family clause

3. This airline wants you to travel across the world without clothes

4. ‘AI Jesus’ shows a fascinating refashioning of the biblical prophet for the modern era

4. The Glass Defense

1. Nikola founder, Trevor Milton, may be a convicted fraudster but he wasn't 'greedy or mean-spirited' and not as bad as Elizabeth Holmes, lawyers say

5. JUSTICE

1. FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is found guilty of all charges including fraud

2. Tucker Carlson ousted at Fox News following network's $787 million settlement

Story of the Year (DR):

1. Category of the year

1. Exhaustingest: Profits > our planet that’s literally on fire…arguable already to the point of no return

2. Assholiest: ISS, Glass Lewis, and the Investor Industrial Complex that provides a 96% average vote FOR directors at public boards JS MM DR

3. Year of Worker’s Rights

1. Headlines they left out?

1. SVB’s disgraced ex-CEO spotted holidaying in Hawaii days after presiding over second biggest bank collapse in U.S. history

2. FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried found guilty of all charges in ‘one of the biggest financial frauds in American history’

3. Greedflation: corporate profiteering ‘significantly’ boosted global prices, study shows

4. Target CEO: DEI has ‘fueled much of our growth over the last 9 years’

5. Carrefour puts ‘shrinkflation’ price warnings on food to shame brand

6. COP 28 run by an Oil CEO

7. Former BlackRock exec Tariq Fancy: Many ESG experts are ‘underqualified’ - Financial News

8. Ultimate Glass Cliff hire: CEO Linda Yaccarino

9. The 100 largest low-wage employers have spent $341 billion on stock buybacks since 2020

10. Comcast complains to FCC that listing all of its monthly fees is too hard

1. Platform launch: Know the people who run your companies AB DR

1. Verizon's CEO Hans Vestberg has been tracking his mood out of 10 in a spreadsheet every day since 2009, and if he gives himself less than 3, he works alone for the day

2. O’Reilly Automotive: 6 of 10 directors (all the white dudes) are wearing identical orange dress shirts in proxy pictures

3. Vince McMahon Listed As Risk Factor In New SEC Filing

4. Glass Cliff: Every major U.S. news organization is now officially helmed by a woman

5. Walgreens CEO Roz Brewer steps down after more than 2 years in the role

6. Ongoing train derailment disaster-Norfolk Southern

7. Southwest CEO vows last year's Christmas meltdown ‘will never happen again’

8. Charlie Munger, right-hand man of Warren Buffett, dies

Who Won the Year?

1. DR: UAW/Shawn Fain

2. AB: Sam Alt

3. MM: Boards of directors - imagine having a functional board at Meta?  Tesla?  Norfolk Southern? Anheuser Busch?  If you’re ON a board, YOU DON’T HAVE TO!  Tesla board members voted out: ZERO.  Norfolk Southern board members voted out: ZERO.  Meta board members voted out: ZERO BECAUSE YOU CAN’T.  After all the anti-semitism, overt sexism and racism, settlements for sexual harassment or misconduct, the lesson learned from OpenAI’s board is DON’T DO YOUR JOB OR YOU WILL GET FIRED - there is no better job security than a director who does not do or say anything.  Just collect the checks and go golfing people.

1. A board seat lasts for seven years on average, and cumulative board seats for 14 years

2. Given the average board member starts around age 60, that means you have an excellent shot of being on boards into your late 70s

3. At 200k per year for 12 meetings, if you can get 3-4 boards in that time frame, that’s a board-time earnings of around $6.4 MILLION or 17k PER MEETING.  

4. The average American at age 60 has around $400k in retirement savings.  

5. The average board member has no one EXCEPT FREE FLOAT measuring their performance and conflicts of interest.

6. The average American has yearly performance reviews and 40% of Americans are laid off at least once.

4. JS: TAYLOR SWIFT…obviously