Stephen Colbert
Stephen Colbert took aim at the outage that kept billions of people of Facebook’s suite of apps – Facebook, Messenger, Whatsapp and Instagram – for five hours on Monday. “So if you wanted to share photos, you had to go door to door with polaroids of your brunch,” the Late Show host joked.
The outage was one of the longest in the history of Facebook. “For hours, users were left in suspense over whether their second cousin thinks the vaccine gives your pancreas wifi,” Colbert quipped.
“It was so bad that the only way Facebook could let the world know what was going on, and this is true, was by posting a message on Twitter. That’s like Burger King running out of fries and having to announce it on a Big Mac.”
Facebook did not confirm, as of taping, what caused the outage. “Now, I’m no computer expert,” said Colbert, “but my theory is: a just God?”
The company later issued a statement confirming that the cause of the outage was a configuration change to the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between the company’s data centers.
It was more bad PR for the Silicon Valley-based company as it faces renewed scrutiny for its mental health effects. Internal documents recently leaked to the Wall Street Journal revealed that the company knew Instagram was toxic for teenage girls – “though you could also check insta for ways to flush out those toxins with an amazing matcha tea that gives you a Brazilian butt lift,” said Colbert – but ignored data in favor of user growth.
A whistleblower named Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product developer, revealed her identity on 60 Minutes on Sunday and testified that Facebook puts profits over safety. “Wait a minute! Did I hear that correctly? Are you telling me that a corporation chose money? Over the safety of consumers? I need to calm down … with an ice-cold Four Loko,” Colbert joked, popping open a can of the alcoholic drink that famously cut caffeine from its recipe in 2010 after numerous reports of hospitalizations and deaths from the “blackout in a can”.
Trevor Noah
All this time we were worried about Shakira's hips lying when we should have been focused on her accountant…
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) October 5, 2021
Here’s the latest on the Pandora Papers: pic.twitter.com/MCbw2qRisX
On the Daily Show, Trevor Noah addressed a massive collection of documents revealing the tax-dodging strategies of the ultra-rich. The so-called “Pandora papers” is the largest trove of leaked offshore data in history, containing more than 11.9m files from 14 offshore service providers.
“On one level, it isn’t surprising that rich people avoid paying taxes,” said Noah of the documents, which were reviewed by an international consortium of journalists, including the Guardian. “I mean, these are the world’s elites. For them, life is like Waffle House after 2am – there are no rules.”
“But it’s still eye-opening to see just what lengths they go to to hide their wealth,” he continued. “They’ve gotten offshore havens, they’ve got dummy corporations, they’ve got teams of accountants. I mean, call me old-fashioned, but whatever happened to just putting your money in a big treasure chest and burying it in the sand? Let’s get back to basics, people.”
Following on from the Panama papers in 2016 and the Paradise papers in 2017, the Pandora papers reveal the places and rules that allow the ultra-rich to shelter wealth and skirt taxes – including, surprisingly, South Dakota, whose trusts now hold $370bn in assets, up from $60bn a decade ago.
American billionaires aren’t among the wealthy sheltering their money in the state, however, since lax US tax codes make such effort unnecessary.
“Not having a tax haven problem because your tax laws are already so easy on wealthy people – that, my friends, is rock and roll,” Noah joked. “It almost makes me feel bad for American billionaires though, because hiding the money is part of the fun. It’s like trying to rob a bank but they just give you the cash when you walk in.”
Seth Meyers
And on Late Night, Seth Meyers discussed Republican opposition to the Biden administration’s $3.5tn budget reconciliation bill. “With the contents of the bill being popular, Republicans and Fox News have had to resort to increasingly ludicrous rhetoric to make it sound scary,” said Meyers, pointing to a tweet by Florida senator and former presidential candidate Marco Rubio, who wrote “the $3.5tn Biden plan isn’t socialism, it’s marxism.”
“The bill would restore marginal tax rates to early 2000s levels. Which, I guess, would make George W Bush a Marxist?” Meyers explained. “But sure, paid family leave and slightly higher marginal tax rates are Marxism now.”
“What happened is Republicans realized the term ‘socialism’ lost all meaning once they screamed it about everything they didn’t like,” he added. “So now they have to move on to something else. They’re like desperate parents whose kids figured out there’s no monster who will get them at night if they don’t brush their teeth.”
