Dirty diaper ruined a family business

July 24, 2024

Paul and Rachelle Baron own Beau & Belle Littles, a once thriving swim diaper business. But when Amazon resold a returned diaper as “new,” a one-star review flagged by more than 100 buyers left them $600,000 in debt. Plus, CrowdStrike trouble continues, web searches are changing, and a remote worker turned out to be a North Korean spy.

Tags: Amazon, business, buyers, debt, download, family, open, Plus, remote, review, searches, spy, trouble, Web

🚀 Streaming for science! A crew spent 378 days in a simulated Mars base, cut off from outside contact. How’d they pass the time? By watching a lot of TV. Turns out there’s a lot of downtime between experiments and farming your own food. They were probably binging “Friends” just to stay sane!

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2 beats per minute

Slowdown in song speeds per decade as musicians age. It’s not just you; even rock stars get slower with age (paywall link). Scientists studied musicians from Eddie Vedder to Dolly Parton and found after their 30s, the songs they wrote got sleepier (read: slower). My fave Dolly quote? “I’m not offended by dumb blonde jokes. I’m not dumb and I’m not blonde.”

Your website is dead: Some 58.8% of U.S. Google searches never leave Google now. Worse? Nearly 30% of clicks go to Google’s own products, like YouTube, News and Images. I told you this would happen in November 2022. Btw, the guy who owns Milk.com wants $10 million for the domain. Good luck with that.

🚬 Let’s not vape around the bush: Swype is a disposable e-cig, fitness tracker and “dumbphone.” In other words, you can vape with it, but you can’t make calls. It syncs to your smartphone via Bluetooth and shows you notifications on a touchscreen. Hard pass.

💸 Amazon is losing billions on Echo devices: They sold ‘em way below cost, hoping users would shop more via Alexa. Plot twist: They didn’t. Folks like it for free apps and alarms instead. A paid Alexa tier (paywall link) is in the works to recoup costs. I doubt folks will bite. I won’t.

🚨 $400K MIA: A Silicon Valley woman nearly lost her down payment when a scammer infiltrated the email thread between her and her real estate broker. They convinced her to wire the money to a new account. It took banks five months to get it back. If you’re buying, talk through the wire instructions upfront with your broker, and when it’s time to send, call to confirm the details.

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2 pounds

The weight of a hairball pulled from a woman’s stomach. By the time doctors got to it, the hairball was so big that it could be felt from the outside. She was probably suffering from a hair-eating disorder called trichophagia. If you’re feeling brave, take a peek. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

🍗 This week in deadly social media trends: “Mukbangs,” aka when an influencer livestreams themselves eating an obscene amount of food. A 24-year-old woman just died in front of her fans after eating 22 pounds of food in a 10-hour binge. The autopsy found a deformed stomach full of undigested food. Awful.