Things are getting bad in San Francisco. Deadlocked benefit disputes between the city's BART train employees and municipals authorities have left hundreds of thousands of people who can't afford private cars or helicopters with no choice but to unmoor their yachts.

If I didn't live on an island I would have a Tesla! - @richardbranson

Domain suffixes—like .ca or .uk—are usually reserved for actual nations, or at the very least, the US military. But thanks to Mayor Bloomberg, New Yorkers will be able to register a name online that makes them feel just as important as they've always suspected. That crusty ol' dotcom is so, like, early/mid 2013.

Lucas Duplan, age 22, just banked $25 million for an app no one really knows much about. Well, a few do: his investors, and a tipster who leaked us some very interesting details about the clandestine wallet app. Does the world need a new way for Yale kids to buy things?

If you make a public company that bombs so hard you're tossed out, like former Groupon CEO Andrew Mason, you can always pivot into making a soft rock album called Hardly Workin'. Oh, Andrew. Andrew.

At least when it comes to HR at Facebook, Path, Squarespace, and Etsy. The following composite was pieced together by Branch co-founder Cemre Güngör, and shows just how unimaginative the Idea Economy can be.

Bebo was supposed to be a very, very big social network—so big, AOL paid $850 million for it back in 2005. Ha, ha, ha. That never happened. It's dead. But today, the site's founder says he's buying it back for 1/850th of the sale price, just for "fun." Fun! This is what's fun, now.

This is the idea behind a startup named Outbox: a private company of strangers will take your (mostly junk) mail, open it, scan it, and then email it to you. This is questionable for a few dozen reasons, but investors disagree—it just nabbed a $5 million check.

Here's how thinking about the world works in Silicon Valley: when public transportation is disrupted (in the old sense) due to labor disputes, that's not an inconvenience! It's an opportunity to plug your app and offer helicopter rides—literally fly over society's problems.

Matt Sanchez works as a personal trainer at San Francisco's World Gym. Matt Sanchez also got kicked off Instagram. Luckily, Matt Sanchez trains Kevin Rose—Digg founder and paper millions poster boy—and it was easy to call in a favor to have the whole thing wiped away.

Zuck hit the streets of San Francisco over the weekend—along with hundreds of Facebook employees—as part of the city's gay pride parade. [Facebook]

Being rich only makes you rich. It doesn't make you beautiful, smart, nice to be around, happy, young, healthy, wise, etc.

PR executive and PandoDaily founder Sarah Lacy has much more to say beyond Sean Parker's decency—for instance, did you know "Southern culture" is having a "big cultural moment" right now? Time for some free advertising, slathered in gravy.

Not content to simply invest money in tech companies, First Round Capital—which backs big names like Warby Parker and StumbleUpon—is going to write about them, too. The next step here is just have company execs writing their own articles—oh, wait.

The main reason it took so long for Sean Parker to put a lance through "the media," "that silent, invisible dragon," is that TechCrunch painstakingly translated it to English. No longer—read Parker's thoughts as they were meant to be.

PayPal is used by almost 130 million people, generates a lot of revenue, and made its backers very, very wealthy. It's a model company. But, that's apparently not enough, and PayPal just announced it will create a way for astronauts to buy things, in space. OK.

Hundreds of eager people are lining up outside AOL right now, hoping to be picked for a $700-per-day internet news anchor gig. First they have to audition on a live camera. Nerve-racking. What's more nerve-racking is that the whole thing is streaming for us to watch. Oy.

TechCrunch just changed industry apologetics forever, permitting (inviting?) Facebook billionaire Sean Parker to post a nearly 10,000-word self-serving, unintentionally hilarious screed in defense of his tacky forest-nymph-themed wedding. He says he's been media-lynched and libeled by "inaccurate, derivative stories" without "fact checking or sourcing."

Congratulations, Zuck & Co. The Senate just approved a massive immigration bill 68-32. That will help tech companies hire more highly-skilled labor at cheaper wages. And all FWD.us had to do was praise oil drilling in the Arctic and grease GOP wheels to get it passed.

We've already touched on the moral cost of spamming your users to rattle up hype—but what about actual cash dollars? According to an insider, Dave Morin's tiny social network is spending huge money to pester your friends to join.