Only the most delusional person would ever think they could play alongside seven-footers
Seven things to read this weekend.
1️⃣ On Losing Everything to the Climate Crisis, except for Hope
“Yesterday my home burnt down to ashes. It couldn’t be saved from the forest fires currently raging across California. I’m of course still in shock and deeply sad about losing my house and everything material I owned. But I’m still able to be calm, keep perspective, and even hope. I wanted to share this note with some immediate reflections from my side with everyone who has been sending me some much support and love.”
2️⃣ The Wildest Insurance Fraud Scheme Texas Has Ever Seen
“There’s a guy smoking a cigarette,” said T. R. of the purchase overseas, “and he comes in real shady. You hand him your briefcase full of cash and you hope to God that six weeks later your containers and MiG parts arrive in California—which they did. So now I have, by my math, two hundred years’ worth of [parts] for my L-39. Well, what am I going to do with that? I’m going to do the same thing that I did with my junkyard business in 2005: I start putting them online.”
“When Sternberg says “global fashion system,” he’s referring to the ecosystem of designers, fashion media and stores that puts us all in clothes. Fashion week is where those entities meet. The reason spring collections are shown in the fall (and vice versa) is so they can be ordered, reviewed and produced in time for the actual season. As with most things, this system was upended by the internet. Once normal people could view collections online — which, confusingly, they couldn’t buy until six months later — everything began to accelerate.”
4️⃣ How MSCHF managed to dominate the internet — with fun!
“Their first drop, in May 2019, was a 2008 Windows laptop running six pieces of malware, which have collectively caused $95 billion in financial damage. It eventually sold for $1.34 million. After that, MSCHF put out “Man Eating Food,” a YouTube channel that had videos of a guy eating any food viewers requested; it obviously went viral. Then there was a version of Times New Roman that was slightly wider than the original font (“Times Newer Roman”), a Slack-based guessing game (“Word of the Day”), a Google Chrome extension that let you watch Netflix at work by making it look like you were on a conference call (“Netflix Hangouts”), and a website that converted any article on Wikipedia into academic prose (“M-Journal”).
The feeling of stumbling across a MSCHF product in the wild is a little like discovering a TV show you love and then realizing you still have four perfect seasons left to watch.”
5️⃣ Homesteading the Twittersphere
“Gift cultures work fine when the value of gifts being exchanged are well understood, but they work even better when the value of those gifts are hard to know exactly. The optimal return for you is to give something away that’s highly, but imprecisely valuable; and new, but not completely new.
If no one knows what you’re talking about at all, your gift is valueless - but if you’ve recontributed something that’s already in the public domain, that isn’t valuable - it’s like duplicating an existing open source project for no reason. The group will actually assign you negative social capital for doing so - it’s bad form. It’s the same template for getting in the door and earning your first bit of social capital in Silicon Valley: “Can I join your group? I’m like you; almost.””
6️⃣ The Conscience of Silicon Valley
“Tech oracle Jaron Lanier warned us all about the evils of social media. Too few of us listened. Now, in the most chaotic of moments, his fears—and his bighearted solutions—are more urgent than ever.”
7️⃣ Ball Don’t Lie
“Basketball has always generated a different set of metaphors than football and baseball. Part of the distinction comes from the sport itself, which, like boxing, presents the athlete as both ordinary person and superhuman. Because it is played without caps or helmets and in a relatively small space, basketball allows us to see not only the emotions a player experiences during the game but also the beauty and extraordinary skill that goes into every minute of action. It’s possible that you or I might close our eyes and picture ourselves playing second base for the Mets, but only the most delusional person would ever think they could play alongside seven-footers with forty-inch vertical leaps.”