However it could have even uglier consequences.

If you don’t know already, reddit is currently owned by Conde Nast, a $5 billion dollar magazine empire which itself is a subsidiary of Advanced Publications, the 46th largest privately owned company in the world.

The admins at the site are great but Conde Nast’s execs however are a different story. They’re basically stringing reddit along with an undersized budget while their magazine counter-parts burn cash, struggling to stay afloat in a drowning industry.

Over the past year Conde Nast has slashed their budget by 25% and closed five of their major magazine publications. So naturally when it comes to realizing the potential of reddit these people are fucking idiots.

But that’s a good thing.

Reddit is Conde Nast’s most read website. It’s 288th most used site in the world and 144th in the US. In fact Reddit is miles ahead of other more notable Conde Nasts sites like Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Wired. Real people with real money use reddit. Some of us with bucketloads of disposable income and some of us without.

But Conde Nast hasn’t put two and two together. To them reddit is their neglected orange-headed step child that they keep alive on a shoe-string budget.

What they haven’t figured out yet is that Reddit is the perfect marketing and distribution tool for their publication empire. Conde Nast makes content and reddit directs users to content.

Reddit is part of a multi-billion dollar conglomerate, the minute the site starts making significant amounts money the party’s over. The site, which somehow has magically flown under the radar, will be noticed by Conde Nast execs and things will change.

It will get ugly real fast.

Conde Nast will start infiltrating the reddit staff and making choices based on how to get more profit and not how to make the users happy. In fact current reddit users will probably be last on their list of people to impress, because the real target will be new users. Reddit will get a make over (it will become form over function), there’ll be MySpace-esque user profiles, any risque content will be filtered, control of subreddits will be slowly taken away… reddit will pretty much become a shittier version of digg.

So how do we stop this?

Don’t give reddit a dime, don’t subscribe to anything, keep reddit as the barebones haphazard mess it is. Because the moment there’s a drop of blood in the water and this site starts making real cash the sharks will start circling. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that’s a good thing.

After calling my shot on reddit I recruited an accomplice photographer and headed down the road to Burbank.

12 Grade A large eggs.

Approaching the studio… Leno puts his name in giant typeface so the old people who watch his show can find the building.

3:30 PM in Burbank, all is calm.

I dropped about half of the eggs jumping out of the car. I guess egging in broad daylight is a little more risky.

My first few eggs landed in the staff parking lot. One guy thought I was aiming at him until the eggs started connecting with the building.

My photographer friend (who may or may not work for NBC/Universal) stayed in the car. I don’t blame him.

The people waiting outside started fleeing to the far side of the building.

Mission accomplished: Time for a victory burrito.

Pseudoscientists, religious nuts and fear-mongering journalists have speculated that the colliding particles will create a black hole that would swallow the earth, or whatever other crappy idea their elementary school level understanding of particle physics puts in their heads.

Kid’s author Dan Brown in his “book” Angels and Demons wrote the LHC was producing weaponized antimatter and even Time magazine aimlessly speculated that damage last month to the LHC was due to a time-traveling bird attempting to stop the future apocalypse (I wish I was making that up).

So why would anybody be scared of the LHC? That would be a ridiculous conclusion to arrive at now wouldn’t it… Dave.

Special thanks to redditor d3aj for the comparison.

They may have only spent a league leading $209 million team salary this year, but that figure doesn’t include the past eight seasons where they’ve blown a total of $1.4 billion failing to win the World Series (what do you expect when your general manager’s name is Brian Cashman). Chip in another $10-12 million a year on an overpaid coaching staff and you start to see where this is headed.

So that’s 1.7 billion, where’s the rest?

Struggling the past few years the Yankees decided to build a new stadium… Errr well it’s not quite a new stadium, it’s a bandbox. 20 games into this season they had already hit 75 homeruns providing the Yankees with one of the most egregious home field advantages in baseball. How bad is it? Well when ESPN’s Peter Gammons calls the new Yankee Stadium “the biggest joke in baseball” you know there’s a problem.

And the price tag on the new digs $1.5 billion. But don’t leave out the $320 million on the parking garage and another $50 million on the demolition of the old stadium.

So enjoy it while it last Yankee fans, you’ve earned it… and uh definitely paid for it.

Enter Facebook.

On October 29th CBN (Christian Broadcasting Network) posted an article titled The Danger of Celebrating Halloween detailing how “Halloween is a counterfeit holy day that is dedicated to celebrating the demonic trinity of : the Luciferian Spirit…” The article has since been deleted from the CBN website although a Google cache still exists.

But don’t try showing your friends on Facebook. Any attempt to post it will result in an error message saying the content is blocked due to the fact it has been reported as “abusive” by Facebook users.

Well that’s really broad… Is it “abusive” because of its religious context? Did CBN ask for it to be blocked after they took down the article? Who decides what is “abusive” and how many Facebook users does it take to report it?

Unfortunately Facebook hasn’t disclosed any of this. As of right now what you share with your friends on Facebook is restricted by a random minority of users deeming something “abusive”.

I believe the word they’re really looking for is “offensive”. Most likely a small fraction of Facebook users were offended by the article (perhaps embarrassed) and reported it as “abusive”.

Facebook’s disjointed policy on abusive links can be found here. It contains 336 “answers”, most of them irrelevant, but has no explanation of how or why their system determines what to censor.

I’m sure the same users who voted it on to front page are the same users who won’t understand the data is a year old and no longer relevant. Chalk another one up for digg.

“I’ll give you my gun when you take it from my cold, dead hands!” Or so goes the popularized slogan once muttered by NRA President Charlton Heston (conservatives love electing them thar Hollywood stars). Sadly that phrase may ring true for gun owners after a recent study released by the American Journal of Public Health shows someone carrying a gun is more likely to be shot in an assault.

It’s not just a small difference, people carrying firearms were more than four times more likely to get shot. So just carrying a gun around increases your odds of getting capped.

But what if you pull your gun out?

Those instances where the victim had a chance to resist and attempt to defend themselves with their gun had even higher odds of getting shot. A whopping 5.45 ratio. Yes, according to this study, if you attempt to protect yourself with a gun you are over five times more likely to get shot.

The University of Pennsylvania study was conducted in Philadelphia, an urban area, which most likely skewed the results. Their conclusion however is solid:

“On average, guns did not protect those who possessed them from being shot in an assault. Although successful defensive gun uses occur each year, the probability of success may be low for civilian gun users in urban areas.”

If you happened to catch today’s latest news rest assured our legal system works fast when it comes to arresting criminals. Criminals like John Davies who admitted to duct tapping a cat and leaving it in a plastic bag in a neighbor’s yard last week. Davies is now under arrest and facing two years in prison.

But if you’re a cop caught on video beating a 15 year old girl who is already handcuffed and in a holding cell, like King County Deputy Paul Schene, don’t worry the law is a little slower to react. Still not under arrest, Schene was finally fired nearly 10 months after the incident took place.

The King County Sheriff’s office let Schene go for “Excessive or Unnecessary Use of Force, Making False or Fraudulent Statement or Inducing Others to Do So and Conduct that is Criminal in Nature”. Funny I guess one person’s “Excessive or Unnecessary Use of Force” is another’s assault.

Why the hell does Megatron now have a giant penis?

No… seriously why? He’s a fucking robot. Answers… I want fucking answers.

Via Slog… Via Towleroad.